{"ID":2847404,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.27126","arxiv_id":"2510.27126","title":"AURA: A Reinforcement Learning Framework for AI-Driven Adaptive Conversational Surveys","abstract":"Conventional online surveys provide limited personalization, often resulting in low engagement and superficial responses. Although AI survey chatbots improve convenience, most are still reactive: they rely on fixed dialogue trees or static prompt templates and therefore cannot adapt within a session to fit individual users, which leads to generic follow-ups and weak response quality. We address these limitations with AURA (Adaptive Understanding through Reinforcement Learning for Assessment), a reinforcement learning framework for AI-driven adaptive conversational surveys. AURA quantifies response quality using a four-dimensional LSDE metric (Length, Self-disclosure, Emotion, and Specificity) and selects follow-up question types via an epsilon-greedy policy that updates the expected quality gain within each session. Initialized with priors extracted from 96 prior campus-climate conversations (467 total chatbot-user exchanges), the system balances exploration and exploitation across 10-15 dialogue exchanges, dynamically adapting to individual participants in real time. In controlled evaluations, AURA achieved a +0.076 mean gain in response quality and a statistically significant improvement over non-adaptive baselines (p=0.044, d=0.66), driven by a 63% reduction in specification prompts and a 10x increase in validation behavior. These results demonstrate that reinforcement learning can give survey chatbots improved adaptivity, transforming static questionnaires into interactive, self-improving assessment systems.","short_abstract":"Conventional online surveys provide limited personalization, often resulting in low engagement and superficial responses. Although AI survey chatbots improve convenience, most are still reactive: they rely on fixed dialogue trees or static prompt templates and therefore cannot adapt within a session to fit individual u...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.27126","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.27126v2","authors":"[\"Jinwen Tang\",\"Yi Shang\"]","published":"2025-10-31T03:03:55Z","proceeding":"cs.HC","tasks":"[\"cs.HC\",\"cs.AI\",\"cs.LG\"]","methods":"[\"Reinforcement Learning\",\"LoRA\"]","has_code":false}