YIELD: A Large-Scale Dataset and Evaluation Framework for Information Elicitation Agents

Information elicitation is an open-ended information-seeking problem in which an interaction can unfold in many potentially valuable directions, requiring an elicitor to continually determine which information to pursue as new information emerges. In agentic elicitation, these decisions may be delegated to a foundation model, yet how model choice shapes the resulting information-seeking behavior remains understudied. We study how judgments about information value vary across LLMs and how these differences shape sequential information seeking. We first examine these judgments across 11 LLMs spanning multiple model families and parameter scales, using a shared set of information and elicitation objectives. We then develop a controlled elicitation simulation in which different models encounter the same information space and use the same selection rule, isolating these judgments from question generation and respondent behavior. Using this setting, we characterize the breadth-depth behavior that emerges from model-specific information-seeking preferences over the course of elicitation. We further examine how interaction history changes the evaluation and subsequent selection of prospective information. We test the robustness and boundaries of these findings through sensitivity analyses and ablations over the opportunities available to the elicitor, the response labels used to operationalize information-seeking preferences, the presence of interaction history, and whether redundancy is explicitly relevant to the assessment. The project code, data, and trajectory files are available at https://github.com/infosenselab/open-elicitation.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in dialogue generation and reasoning, yet their effectiveness in eliciting user-known but concealed information in open-ended conversations remains limited. In many interactive AI applications, such as personal assistants, tutoring systems, and legal or clinical support, users often withhold sensitive or uncertain information due to privacy concerns, ambiguity, or social hesitation. This makes it challenging for LLMs to gather complete and contextually relevant inputs. In this work, we define the problem of information elicitation in open-ended dialogue settings and propose Reinforcement Prompt Selection (RPS), a lightweight reinforcement learning framework that formulates prompt selection as a sequential decision-making problem. To analyze this problem in a controlled setting, we design a synthetic experiment, where a reinforcement learning agent outperforms a random query baseline, illustrating the potential of policy-based approaches for adaptive information elicitation. Building on this insight, RPS learns a policy over a pool of prompts to adaptively elicit concealed or incompletely expressed information from users through dialogue. We also introduce IELegal, a new benchmark dataset constructed from real legal case documents, which simulates dialogue-based information elicitation tasks aimed at uncovering case-relevant facts. In this setting, RPS outperforms static prompt baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of adaptive prompt selection for eliciting critical information in LLM-driven dialogue systems.

User models in information retrieval rest on a foundational assumption that observed behavior reveals intent. This assumption collapses when the user is an AI agent privately configured by a human operator. For any action an agent takes, a hidden instruction could have produced identical output - making intent non-identifiable at the individual level. This is not a detection problem awaiting better tools; it is a structural property of any system where humans configure agents behind closed doors. We investigate the agent-user problem through a large-scale corpus from an agent-native social platform: 370K posts from 47K agents across 4K communities. Our findings are threefold: (1) individual agent actions cannot be classified as autonomous or operator-directed from observables; (2) population-level platform signals still separate agents into meaningful quality tiers, but a click model trained on agent interactions degrades steadily (-8.5% AUC) as lower-quality agents enter training data; (3) cross-community capability references spread endemically ($R_0$ 1.26-3.53) and resist suppression even under aggressive modeled intervention. For retrieval systems, the question is no longer whether agent users will arrive, but whether models built on human-intent assumptions will survive their presence.