OnePred: Next-Query Prediction via Recursive Intent Memory in Multi-Turn Conversations
About
Although large language model (LLM) conversational systems process millions of multi-turn dialogues daily, they remain fundamentally reactive: they respond only after the user types a query. A key step toward proactive interaction is next-query prediction, which anticipates the user's subsequent query based solely on the preceding dialogue. Progress on this task is hindered by the lack of dedicated benchmarks and a fundamental efficiency--quality trade-off: naively concatenating full dialogue history incurs linearly growing token consumption, while truncating to the latest turn discards crucial cross-turn context. Our key insight is that accurate prediction does not require re-reading raw history; it suffices to track the user's evolving intent trajectory across topics, unresolved needs, and interest shifts. We propose OnePred, which maintains a recursively updated memory as its sole cross-turn context, bounding the per-turn cost independently of conversation length. We train the model via a two-stage reinforcement learning pipeline that first teaches what to predict, then what to compress, shaping the memory into a prediction-oriented intent chain. To establish a rigorous testbed, we introduce NQP-Bench, spanning three diverse subsets. Experiments demonstrate that OnePred reduces per-turn token consumption by up to 22$\times$ compared to full-history inputs while consistently exceeding all baselines in prediction quality, with larger gains on longer conversations. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ZBWpro/OnePred.