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

TL;DR

This paper introduces MA$^{2}$P, a multi-agent framework that enhances complex persuasion by interpreting internal states, selecting strategies, and maintaining meta-cognitive control, leading to improved success rates.

Contribution

It presents a novel autonomous multi-agent architecture with a meta-cognitive configurator to improve domain adaptability and effectiveness in persuasive dialogue generation.

Findings

Higher persuasion success rate compared to baselines.

Effective interpretation of latent mental states.

Improved cross-domain performance through meta-strategy selection.

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$^{2}$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.