CollabLLM: From Passive Responders to Active Collaborators (Extended Abstract)

CollabLLM: From Passive Responders to Active Collaborators (Extended Abstract)

Shirley Wu, Michel Galley, Baolin Peng, Hao Cheng, Gavin Li, Yao Dou, Weixin Cai, James Zou, Jure Leskovec, Jianfeng Gao

Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Sister Conferences Best Papers. Pages 8289-8294. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2026/928

Large Language Models are typically trained with next-turn rewards, limiting their ability to optimize for long-term interaction. As a result, they often respond passively to ambiguous or open-ended user requests, failing to help users reach their ultimate intents and leading to inefficient conversations. To address these limitations, we introduce CollabLLM, a novel and general training framework that enhances multiturn human-LLM collaboration. Its key innovation is a collaborative simulation that estimates the long-term contribution of responses using Multiturn-aware Rewards. By reinforcement fine-tuning these rewards, CollabLLM goes beyond responding to user requests and actively uncovers user intent and offers insightful suggestions--a key step toward more human-centered AI. We also devise a multiturn interaction benchmark with three challenging tasks such as document creation. COLLABLLM significantly outperforms our baselines with averages of 18.5% higher task performance and 44.3% improved interactivity by LLM judges. Finally, we conduct a large user study with 201 judges, where CollabLLM increases user satisfaction by 17.6% and reduces user spent time by 10.4%.
Keywords:
Humans and AI: Human-AI collaboration
Machine Learning: Deep learning architectures
Natural Language Processing: Dialogue and interactive systems