English

Reinforcing Real-world Service Agents: Balancing Utility and Cost in Task-oriented Dialogue

Computation and Language 2026-02-27 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

The rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) has accelerated the transition from conversational chatbots to general agents. However, effectively balancing empathetic communication with budget-aware decision-making remains an open challenge. Since existing methods fail to capture these complex strategic trade-offs, we propose InteractCS-RL, a framework that reframes task-oriented dialogue as a multi-granularity reinforcement learning process. Specifically, we first establish a User-centric Interaction Framework to provide a high-fidelity training gym, enabling agents to dynamically explore diverse strategies with persona-driven users. Then, we introduce Cost-aware Multi-turn Policy Optimization (CMPO) with a hybrid advantage estimation strategy. By integrating generative process credits and employing a PID-Lagrangian cost controller, CMPO effectively guides the policy to explore Pareto boundary between user reward and global cost constraints. Extensive experiments on customized real business scenarios demonstrate that InteractCS-RL significantly outperform other baselines across three evaluation dimensions. Further evaluation on tool-agent-user interaction benchmarks verify InteractCS-RL robustness across diverse domains.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.22697,
  title  = {Reinforcing Real-world Service Agents: Balancing Utility and Cost in Task-oriented Dialogue},
  author = {Ning Gao and Wei Zhang and Yuqin Dai and Ling Shi and Ziyin Wang and Yujie Wang and Wei He and Jinpeng Wang and Chaozheng Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.22697},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

35 pages, 8 tables, 3 figures