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Dialogue systems are designed to offer human users social support or functional services through natural language interactions. Traditional conversation research has put significant emphasis on a system’s response-ability, including its capacity to understand dialogue context and generate appropriate responses. However, the key element of proactive behavior—a crucial aspect of intelligent conversations—is often overlooked in these studies. Proactivity empowers conversational agents to lead conversations towards achieving pre-defined targets or fulfilling specific goals on the system side. Proactive dialogue systems are equipped with advanced techniques to handle complex tasks, requiring strategic and motivational interactions, thus representing a significant step towards artificial general intelligence. Motivated by the necessity and challenges of building proactive dialogue systems, we provide a comprehensive review of various prominent problems and advanced designs for implementing proactivity into different types of dialogue systems, including open-domain dialogues, task-oriented dialogues, and information-seeking dialogues. We also discuss real-world challenges that require further research attention to meet application needs in the future, such as proactivity in dialogue systems that are based on large language models, proactivity in hybrid dialogues, evaluation protocols and ethical considerations for proactive dialogue systems. By providing a quick access and overall picture of the proactive dialogue systems domain, we aim to inspire new research directions and stimulate further advancements towards achieving the next level of conversational AI capabilities, paving the way for more dynamic and intelligent interactions within various application domains. 

Abstract Using optical characterization, it is evident that the spin state of the spin crossover molecular complex [Fe{H₂B(pz)₂}₂(bipy)] (pz = tris(pyrazol-1-1y)-borohydride, bipy = 2,2ʹ-bipyridine) depends on the electric polarization of the adjacent polymer ferroelectric polyvinylidene fluoride-hexafluoropropylene (PVDF-HFP) thin film. The role of the PVDF-HFP thin film is significant but complex. The UV–Vis spectroscopy measurements reveals that room temperature switching of the electronic structure of [Fe{H₂B(pz)₂}₂(bipy)] molecules in bilayers of PVDF-HFP/[Fe{H₂B(pz)₂}₂(bipy)] occurs as a function of ferroelectric polarization. The retention of voltage-controlled nonvolatile changes to the electronic structure in bilayers of PVDF-HFP/[Fe{H₂B(pz)₂}₂(bipy)] strongly depends on the thickness of the PVDF-HFP layer. The PVDF-HFP/[Fe{H₂B(pz)₂}₂(bipy)] interface may affect PVDF-HFP ferroelectric polarization retention in the thin film limit.