MA$^{2}$P: A Meta-Cognitive Autonomous Intelligent Agents Framework for Complex Persuasion

ACL ARR 2026 January Submission8685 Authors

Keywords: Persuasive dialogue, Persuasion, Meta-cognition, Autonomous agents, Multi-agent systems, Theory of mind, Mental-state inference, Strategy planning, Knowledge base, Cross-domain generalization

Abstract:

Persuasive dialogue generation plays a vital role in decision-making, negotiation, counseling, and behavior change, yet it remains a challenging problem.
In complex persuasion where the persuadee's internal states are not expressed clearly, the persuader must interpret responses, infer the persuadee's latent mental states (e.g., beliefs and desires), and translate them into targeted, strategy-consistent actions; however, current approaches often produce generic or weakly grounded responses even when such cues are identified.
Moreover, although large language models (LLMs) can generate persuasive content, their performance varies substantially across domains due to uneven knowledge coverage and limited reasoning generalization.
To address these challenges, we propose MA\textsuperscript{2}P, a meta-cognitive autonomous intelligent agent framework for complex persuasion. Specifically, we develop an autonomous multi-agent architecture that coordinates perception management, mental-state inference, strategy execution, memory maintenance, and performance evaluation.
To mitigate cross-domain performance variation, we further design a meta-cognitive configurator that selects an appropriate meta-strategy from a structured knowledge base at the outset, thereby guiding subsequent reasoning and planning.
Experimental results show that our approach achieves a higher persuasion success rate than baselines.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Dialogue and Interactive Systems

Research Area Keywords: evaluation and metrics; task-oriented; knowledge augmented; commonsense reasoning; applications; grounded dialog; dialogue state tracking; conversational modeling

Contribution Types: NLP engineering experiment, Publicly available software and/or pre-trained models

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 8685