Persuasion, as one of the crucial abilities in human communication, has garnered extensive attention from researchers within the field of intelligent dialogue systems. We humans tend to persuade others to change their viewpoints, attitudes or behaviors through conversations in various scenarios (e.g., persuasion for social good, arguing in online platforms). Developing dialogue agents that can persuade others to accept certain standpoints is essential to achieving truly intelligent and anthropomorphic dialogue system. Benefiting from the substantial progress of Large Language Models (LLMs), dialogue agents have acquired an exceptional capability in context understanding and response generation. However, as a typical and complicated cognitive psychological system, persuasive dialogue agents also require knowledge from the domain of cognitive psychology to attain a level of human-like persuasion. Consequently, the cognitive strategy-enhanced persuasive dialogue agent (defined as CogAgent), which incorporates cognitive strategies to achieve persuasive targets through conversation, has become a predominant research paradigm. To depict the research trends of CogAgent, in this paper, we first present several fundamental cognitive psychology theories and give the formalized definition of three typical cognitive strategies, including the persuasion strategy, the topic path planning strategy, and the argument structure prediction strategy. Then we propose a new system architecture by incorporating the formalized definition to lay the foundation of CogAgent. Representative works are detailed and investigated according to the combined cognitive strategy, followed by the summary of authoritative benchmarks and evaluation metrics. Finally, we summarize our insights on open issues and future directions of CogAgent for upcoming researchers.

翻译：劝说作为人类交流中的关键能力之一，已引起智能对话系统领域研究者的广泛关注。人类往往通过对话在各种场景中（如社会公益劝说、在线平台辩论）试图改变他人的观点、态度或行为。开发能劝说他人接受特定立场的对话代理，是实现真正智能化和拟人化对话系统的核心。得益于大语言模型的显著进展，对话代理在上下文理解和回复生成方面获得了卓越能力。然而，作为一种典型且复杂的认知心理系统，劝说式对话代理还需要认知心理学领域的知识以达到类人化的劝说水平。因此，融入认知策略以实现对话劝说目标的认知策略增强型劝说式对话代理（定义为CogAgent）已成为主流研究范式。为描绘CogAgent的研究趋势，本文首先介绍若干基础认知心理学理论，并给出三种典型认知策略的形式化定义，包括劝说策略、主题路径规划策略和论点结构预测策略。随后，我们结合形式化定义提出新的系统架构，为CogAgent奠定基础。根据组合的认知策略对代表性工作进行详述与探究，继而总结权威基准与评估指标。最后，针对CogAgent的开放问题与未来方向，我们为后续研究者归纳了相关见解。