Training Proactive and Personalized LLM Agents

arXiv:2511.02208v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Despite rapid progress, current AI agents are primarily optimized for isolated task completion. We argue for a paradigm shift toward training agents as collaborators that communicate and adapt to people. To facilitate this shift in real-world complex applications, we first formalize three dimensions of collaborative AI agents: Productivity, Proactivity, and Personalization (PPP). We introduce UserVille, an interactive environment with configurable LLM-based user simulators and user-centric feedback to evaluate these dimensions, and propose a multi-objective reinforcement learning framework that optimizes them using rewards from task outcomes, question effort, and preference adherence. On two real-world agentic tasks (SWE-Bench and BrowseComp-Plus), PPP-trained agents outperform strong LLM baselines (including GPT-5) by an average of 16.7 points, ask more targeted questions, and generalize to unseen preferences and tasks. A follow-up user study further highlights the importance of user-centric feedback for training collaborative agents that are both more effective and easier to supervise.

Source: arXiv cs.AI | 2026-08-25