Can Large Language Models Extend Their Agentic Capabilities to Goal Pursuit in Open-Ended Multi-Turn Interaction?

Title:Can Large Language Models Extend Their Agentic Capabilities to Goal Pursuit in Open-Ended Multi-Turn Interaction?

Abstract:Goal pursuit in open-ended dialogue requires agents to adapt their actions to interaction feedback across successive exchanges. We investigate whether agentic capabilities developed for multi-step tool use carry over to dialogue organized through the model's native tool interface, and how this changes interaction behavior. We define Tool-Mediated Interaction (TMI) as a training-free protocol that represents dialogue actions as tool calls and counterpart responses as tool results, maintaining a continuous reasoning-action-observation loop with retained reasoning and interaction history. We evaluate TMI across social interaction, emotional support, persuasion, and price negotiation using two models and 15,678 main-experiment episodes. Across both models, TMI improves social goal attainment, emotional-support preference, donation amounts, and buyer negotiation margins over conversational baselines with and without thinking. A Qwen ablation further shows that TMI outperforms ordinary conversation with retained reasoning on all four primary outcomes. Behavioral analyses associate the improvements with task-specific patterns in initial proposals and responses to interaction feedback. Alongside these gains, TMI reduces mean reasoning tokens per decision by 42.0-81.5% relative to the thinking baseline and lowers mean cross-turn phrase reuse across all eight model-environment pairs. These findings show that interaction organization shapes both goal attainment and reasoning across dialogue turns.

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2611.01552 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2611.01552v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2611.01552 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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