Daily Papers

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adept at following instructions containing task descriptions to solve complex problems, such as mathematical reasoning and automatic evaluation (LLM-as-a-Judge). However, as prompts grow more complex, models often struggle to adhere to all instructions. This difficulty is especially common when instructive prompts intertwine reasoning directives -- specifying what the model should solve -- with rigid formatting requirements that dictate how the solution must be presented. The entanglement creates competing goals for the model, suggesting that more explicit separation of these two aspects could lead to improved performance. To this front, we introduce Deco-G, a decoding framework that explicitly decouples format adherence from task solving. Deco-G handles format compliance with a separate tractable probabilistic model (TPM), while prompts LLMs with only task instructions. At each decoding step, Deco-G combines next token probabilities from the LLM with the TPM calculated format compliance likelihood to form the output probability. To make this approach both practical and scalable for modern instruction-tuned LLMs, we introduce three key innovations: instruction-aware distillation, a flexible trie-building algorithm, and HMM state pruning for computational efficiency. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Deco-G across a wide range of tasks with diverse format requirements, including mathematical reasoning, LLM-as-a-judge, and event argument extraction. Overall, our approach yields 1.0% to 6.0% relative gain over regular prompting practice with guaranteed format compliance.

It is a notable trend to use Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle complex tasks, e.g., tasks that require a sequence of actions and dynamic interaction with tools and external environments. In this paper, we propose StateFlow, a novel LLM-based task-solving paradigm that conceptualizes complex task-solving processes as state machines. In StateFlow, we distinguish between "process grounding" (via state and state transitions) and "sub-task solving" (through actions within a state), enhancing control and interpretability of the task-solving procedure. A state represents the status of a running process. The transitions between states are controlled by heuristic rules or decisions made by the LLM, allowing for a dynamic and adaptive progression. Upon entering a state, a series of actions is executed, involving not only calling LLMs guided by different prompts, but also the utilization of external tools as needed. Our results show that StateFlow significantly enhances LLMs' efficiency. For instance, StateFlow achieves 13% and 28% higher success rates compared to ReAct in InterCode SQL and ALFWorld benchmark, with 5x and 3x less cost respectively. We also show that StateFlow can be combined with iterative refining methods like Reflexion to further improve performance.

In an era where single large language models have dominated the landscape of artificial intelligence for years, multi-agent systems arise as new protagonists in conversational task-solving. While previous studies have showcased their potential in reasoning tasks and creative endeavors, an analysis of their limitations concerning the conversational paradigms and the impact of individual agents is missing. It remains unascertained how multi-agent discussions perform across tasks of varying complexity and how the structure of these conversations influences the process. To fill that gap, this work systematically evaluates multi-agent systems across various discussion paradigms, assessing their strengths and weaknesses in both generative tasks and question-answering tasks. Alongside the experiments, I propose a taxonomy of 20 multi-agent research studies from 2022 to 2024, followed by the introduction of a framework for deploying multi-agent LLMs in conversational task-solving. I demonstrate that while multi-agent systems excel in complex reasoning tasks, outperforming a single model by leveraging expert personas, they fail on basic tasks. Concretely, I identify three challenges that arise: 1) While longer discussions enhance reasoning, agents fail to maintain conformity to strict task requirements, which leads to problem drift, making shorter conversations more effective for basic tasks. 2) Prolonged discussions risk alignment collapse, raising new safety concerns for these systems. 3) I showcase discussion monopolization through long generations, posing the problem of fairness in decision-making for tasks like summarization. This work uncovers both the potential and challenges that arise with multi-agent interaction and varying conversational paradigms, providing insights into how future research could improve the efficiency, performance, and safety of multi-agent LLMs.

Multi-step planning has been widely employed to enhance the performance of large language models (LLMs) on downstream natural language processing (NLP) tasks, which decomposes the original task into multiple subtasks and guide LLMs to solve them sequentially without additional training. When addressing task instances, existing methods either preset the order of steps or attempt multiple paths at each step. However, these methods overlook instances' linguistic features and rely on the intrinsic planning capabilities of LLMs to evaluate intermediate feedback and then select subtasks, resulting in suboptimal outcomes. To better solve multi-step NLP tasks with LLMs, in this paper we propose a Reinforcement Learning enhanced Adaptive Planning framework (RLAP). In our framework, we model an NLP task as a Markov decision process (MDP) and employ an LLM directly into the environment. In particular, a lightweight Actor model is trained to estimate Q-values for natural language sequences consisting of states and actions through reinforcement learning. Therefore, during sequential planning, the linguistic features of each sequence in the MDP can be taken into account, and the Actor model interacts with the LLM to determine the optimal order of subtasks for each task instance. We apply RLAP on three different types of NLP tasks and conduct extensive experiments on multiple datasets to verify RLAP's effectiveness and robustness.

Human intelligence thrives on the concept of cognitive synergy, where collaboration and information integration among different cognitive processes yield superior outcomes compared to individual cognitive processes in isolation. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising performance as general task-solving agents, they still struggle with tasks that require intensive domain knowledge and complex reasoning. In this work, we propose Solo Performance Prompting (SPP), which transforms a single LLM into a cognitive synergist by engaging in multi-turn self-collaboration with multiple personas. A cognitive synergist refers to an intelligent agent that collaborates with multiple minds, combining their individual strengths and knowledge, to enhance problem-solving and overall performance in complex tasks. By dynamically identifying and simulating different personas based on task inputs, SPP unleashes the potential of cognitive synergy in LLMs. We have discovered that assigning multiple, fine-grained personas in LLMs elicits better problem-solving abilities compared to using a single or fixed number of personas. We evaluate SPP on three challenging tasks: Trivia Creative Writing, Codenames Collaborative, and Logic Grid Puzzle, encompassing both knowledge-intensive and reasoning-intensive types. Unlike previous works, such as Chain-of-Thought, that solely enhance the reasoning abilities in LLMs, SPP effectively elicits internal knowledge acquisition abilities, reduces hallucination, and maintains strong reasoning capabilities. Code, data, and prompts can be found at: https://github.com/MikeWangWZHL/Solo-Performance-Prompting.git.

This paper introduces CognitiveDrone, a novel Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model tailored for complex Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) tasks that demand advanced cognitive abilities. Trained on a dataset comprising over 8,000 simulated flight trajectories across three key categories-Human Recognition, Symbol Understanding, and Reasoning-the model generates real-time 4D action commands based on first-person visual inputs and textual instructions. To further enhance performance in intricate scenarios, we propose CognitiveDrone-R1, which integrates an additional Vision-Language Model (VLM) reasoning module to simplify task directives prior to high-frequency control. Experimental evaluations using our open-source benchmark, CognitiveDroneBench, reveal that while a racing-oriented model (RaceVLA) achieves an overall success rate of 31.3%, the base CognitiveDrone model reaches 59.6%, and CognitiveDrone-R1 attains a success rate of 77.2%. These results demonstrate improvements of up to 30% in critical cognitive tasks, underscoring the effectiveness of incorporating advanced reasoning capabilities into UAV control systems. Our contributions include the development of a state-of-the-art VLA model for UAV control and the introduction of the first dedicated benchmark for assessing cognitive tasks in drone operations. The complete repository is available at cognitivedrone.github.io

The ultimate goal of code agents is to solve complex tasks autonomously. Although large language models (LLMs) have made substantial progress in code generation, real-world tasks typically demand full-fledged code repositories rather than simple scripts. Building such repositories from scratch remains a major challenge. Fortunately, GitHub hosts a vast, evolving collection of open-source repositories, which developers frequently reuse as modular components for complex tasks. Yet, existing frameworks like OpenHands and SWE-Agent still struggle to effectively leverage these valuable resources. Relying solely on README files provides insufficient guidance, and deeper exploration reveals two core obstacles: overwhelming information and tangled dependencies of repositories, both constrained by the limited context windows of current LLMs. To tackle these issues, we propose RepoMaster, an autonomous agent framework designed to explore and reuse GitHub repositories for solving complex tasks. For efficient understanding, RepoMaster constructs function-call graphs, module-dependency graphs, and hierarchical code trees to identify essential components, providing only identified core elements to the LLMs rather than the entire repository. During autonomous execution, it progressively explores related components using our exploration tools and prunes information to optimize context usage. Evaluated on the adjusted MLE-bench, RepoMaster achieves a 110% relative boost in valid submissions over the strongest baseline OpenHands. On our newly released GitTaskBench, RepoMaster lifts the task-pass rate from 40.7% to 62.9% while reducing token usage by 95%. Our code and demonstration materials are publicly available at https://github.com/QuantaAlpha/RepoMaster.

Recent advances in agent systems have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving both general-purpose and highly complex tasks. However, most current models lack mechanisms for coordinating specialized agents and have limited ability to generalize to new or diverse domains. To this end, we introduce AgentOrchestra, a hierarchical multi-agent framework for general-purpose task solving that integrates high-level planning with modular agent collaboration. Drawing inspiration from a conductor orchestrating a symphony, and grounded in the principles of extensibility, multimodality, modularity, and coordination, it features a central planning agent that decomposes complex objectives and delegates sub-tasks to a team of specialized agents. Each sub-agent is equipped with general programming tools, as well as abilities to tackle a wide range of real-world specific tasks, including data analysis, file operations, web navigation, and interactive reasoning in dynamic multimodal environments. Notably, AgentOrchestra introduces an MCP Manager Agent that enables intelligent evolution through dynamic tool creation, retrieval, and reuse mechanisms, significantly enhancing the system's adaptability and scalability. AgentOrchestra supports flexible orchestration through explicit sub-goal formulation, inter-agent communication, and adaptive role allocation. We evaluate the framework on three widely used benchmarks for assessing LLM-based agent systems. Experimental results show that AgentOrchestra consistently outperforms flat-agent and monolithic baselines in terms of task success rate and adaptability. On the GAIA benchmark testing dataset, AgentOrchestra achieves an average score of 83.39\%, ranking among the top general-purpose agents. These results highlight the effectiveness of hierarchical organization and role specialization in building scalable and general-purpose LLM-based agent systems.

In recent developments within the research community, the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) in creating fully autonomous agents has garnered significant interest. Despite this, LLM-based agents frequently demonstrate notable shortcomings in adjusting to dynamic environments and fully grasping human needs. In this work, we introduce the problem of LLM-based human-agent collaboration for complex task-solving, exploring their synergistic potential. In addition, we propose a Reinforcement Learning-based Human-Agent Collaboration method, ReHAC. This approach includes a policy model designed to determine the most opportune stages for human intervention within the task-solving process. We construct a human-agent collaboration dataset to train this policy model in an offline reinforcement learning environment. Our validation tests confirm the model's effectiveness. The results demonstrate that the synergistic efforts of humans and LLM-based agents significantly improve performance in complex tasks, primarily through well-planned, limited human intervention. Datasets and code are available at: https://github.com/XueyangFeng/ReHAC.

Seamless interaction between AI agents and humans using natural language remains a key goal in AI research. This paper addresses the challenges of developing interactive agents capable of understanding and executing grounded natural language instructions through the IGLU competition at NeurIPS. Despite advancements, challenges such as a scarcity of appropriate datasets and the need for effective evaluation platforms persist. We introduce a scalable data collection tool for gathering interactive grounded language instructions within a Minecraft-like environment, resulting in a Multi-Modal dataset with around 9,000 utterances and over 1,000 clarification questions. Additionally, we present a Human-in-the-Loop interactive evaluation platform for qualitative analysis and comparison of agent performance through multi-turn communication with human annotators. We offer to the community these assets referred to as IDAT (IGLU Dataset And Toolkit) which aim to advance the development of intelligent, interactive AI agents and provide essential resources for further research.

Task-oriented dialogue systems are broadly used in virtual assistants and other automated services, providing interfaces between users and machines to facilitate specific tasks. Nowadays, task-oriented dialogue systems have greatly benefited from pre-trained language models (PLMs). However, their task-solving performance is constrained by the inherent capacities of PLMs, and scaling these models is expensive and complex as the model size becomes larger. To address these challenges, we propose Soft Mixture-of-Expert Task-Oriented Dialogue system (SMETOD) which leverages an ensemble of Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) to excel at subproblems and generate specialized outputs for task-oriented dialogues. SMETOD also scales up a task-oriented dialogue system with simplicity and flexibility while maintaining inference efficiency. We extensively evaluate our model on three benchmark functionalities: intent prediction, dialogue state tracking, and dialogue response generation. Experimental results demonstrate that SMETOD achieves state-of-the-art performance on most evaluated metrics. Moreover, comparisons against existing strong baselines show that SMETOD has a great advantage in the cost of inference and correctness in problem-solving.

Beyond scratch coding, exploiting large-scale code repositories (e.g., GitHub) for practical tasks is vital in real-world software development, yet current benchmarks rarely evaluate code agents in such authentic, workflow-driven scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce GitTaskBench, a benchmark designed to systematically assess this capability via 54 realistic tasks across 7 modalities and 7 domains. Each task pairs a relevant repository with an automated, human-curated evaluation harness specifying practical success criteria. Beyond measuring execution and task success, we also propose the alpha-value metric to quantify the economic benefit of agent performance, which integrates task success rates, token cost, and average developer salaries. Experiments across three state-of-the-art agent frameworks with multiple advanced LLMs show that leveraging code repositories for complex task solving remains challenging: even the best-performing system, OpenHands+Claude 3.7, solves only 48.15% of tasks. Error analysis attributes over half of failures to seemingly mundane yet critical steps like environment setup and dependency resolution, highlighting the need for more robust workflow management and increased timeout preparedness. By releasing GitTaskBench, we aim to drive progress and attention toward repository-aware code reasoning, execution, and deployment -- moving agents closer to solving complex, end-to-end real-world tasks. The benchmark and code are open-sourced at https://github.com/QuantaAlpha/GitTaskBench.

Large Language Model Multi-Agent Systems (LLM-MAS) have achieved great progress in solving complex tasks. It performs communication among agents within the system to collaboratively solve tasks, under the premise of shared information. However, when agents' communication is leveraged to enhance human cooperation, a new challenge arises due to information asymmetry, since each agent can only access the information of its human user. Previous MAS struggle to complete tasks under this condition. To address this, we propose a new MAS paradigm termed iAgents, which denotes Informative Multi-Agent Systems. In iAgents, the human social network is mirrored in the agent network, where agents proactively exchange human information necessary for task resolution, thereby overcoming information asymmetry. iAgents employs a novel agent reasoning mechanism, InfoNav, to navigate agents' communication towards effective information exchange. Together with InfoNav, iAgents organizes human information in a mixed memory to provide agents with accurate and comprehensive information for exchange. Additionally, we introduce InformativeBench, the first benchmark tailored for evaluating LLM agents' task-solving ability under information asymmetry. Experimental results show that iAgents can collaborate within a social network of 140 individuals and 588 relationships, autonomously communicate over 30 turns, and retrieve information from nearly 70,000 messages to complete tasks within 3 minutes.

Agentic task-solving with Large Language Models (LLMs) requires multi-turn, multi-step interactions, often involving complex function calls and dynamic user-agent exchanges. Existing simulation-based data generation methods for such scenarios rely heavily on costly autoregressive interactions between multiple LLM agents, thereby limiting real-world performance of agentic tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel Non-Autoregressive Iterative Generation framework, called ToolACE-MT, for constructing high-quality multi-turn agentic dialogues. ToolACE-MT generates full conversational trajectories through three stages: coarse-grained initialization, iterative refinement, and offline verification. The initialization phase builds a structurally complete yet semantically coarse dialogue skeleton; the iterative refinement phase introduces realistic complexities and continued refinement via mask-and-fill operations; and the offline verification phase ensures correctness and coherence via rule- and model-based checks. Experiments demonstrate that ToolACE-MT enables efficient, effective and generalizable agentic data generation, offering a new paradigm for high-quality data construction in tool-augmented LLM scenarios.

Ensuring safety in reinforcement learning (RL)-based robotic systems is a critical challenge, especially in contact-rich tasks within unstructured environments. While the state-of-the-art safe RL approaches mitigate risks through safe exploration or high-level recovery mechanisms, they often overlook low-level execution safety, where reflexive responses to potential hazards are crucial. Similarly, variable impedance control (VIC) enhances safety by adjusting the robot's mechanical response, yet lacks a systematic way to adapt parameters, such as stiffness and damping throughout the task. In this paper, we propose Bresa, a Bio-inspired Reflexive Hierarchical Safe RL method inspired by biological reflexes. Our method decouples task learning from safety learning, incorporating a safety critic network that evaluates action risks and operates at a higher frequency than the task solver. Unlike existing recovery-based methods, our safety critic functions at a low-level control layer, allowing real-time intervention when unsafe conditions arise. The task-solving RL policy, running at a lower frequency, focuses on high-level planning (decision-making), while the safety critic ensures instantaneous safety corrections. We validate Bresa on multiple tasks including a contact-rich robotic task, demonstrating its reflexive ability to enhance safety, and adaptability in unforeseen dynamic environments. Our results show that Bresa outperforms the baseline, providing a robust and reflexive safety mechanism that bridges the gap between high-level planning and low-level execution. Real-world experiments and supplementary material are available at project website https://jack-sherman01.github.io/Bresa.

Adapting large language models (LLMs) to new languages typically involves continual pre-training (CT) followed by supervised fine-tuning (SFT). However, this CT-then-SFT approach struggles with limited data in the context of low-resource languages, failing to balance language modeling and task-solving capabilities. We thus propose model merging as an alternative for low-resource languages, combining models with distinct capabilities into a single model without additional training. We use model merging to develop task-solving LLMs for low-resource languages without SFT data in the target languages. Our experiments based on Llama-2-7B demonstrate that model merging effectively endows LLMs for low-resource languages with task-solving abilities, outperforming CT-then-SFT in scenarios with extremely scarce data. Observing performance saturation in model merging with more training tokens, we further analyze the merging process and introduce a slack variable to the model merging algorithm to mitigate the loss of important parameters, thereby enhancing performance. We hope that model merging can benefit more human languages suffering from data scarcity with its higher data efficiency.

Long context capability is a crucial competency for large language models (LLMs) as it mitigates the human struggle to digest long-form texts. This capability enables complex task-solving scenarios such as book summarization, code assistance, and many more tasks that are traditionally manpower-intensive. However, transformer-based LLMs face significant challenges with long context input due to the growing size of the KV cache and the intrinsic complexity of attending to extended inputs; where multiple schools of efficiency-driven approaches -- such as KV cache quantization, token dropping, prompt compression, linear-time sequence models, and hybrid architectures -- have been proposed to produce efficient yet long context-capable models. Despite these advancements, no existing work has comprehensively benchmarked these methods in a reasonably aligned environment. In this work, we fill this gap by providing a taxonomy of current methods and evaluating 10+ state-of-the-art approaches across seven categories of long context tasks. Our work reveals numerous previously unknown phenomena and offers insights -- as well as a friendly workbench -- for the future development of long context-capable LLMs. The source code will be available at https://github.com/henryzhongsc/longctx_bench

Current large language model (LLM) development treats task-solving and preference alignment as separate challenges, optimizing first for objective correctness, then for alignment to aggregated human preferences. This paradigm fails in human-facing applications where solving a problem correctly is insufficient if the response mismatches the user's needs. This challenge intensifies in just-in-time scenarios where no prior user interaction history exists due to cold-start conditions or privacy constraints. LLMs need to identify what they don't know about user preferences, strategically elicit preference values through questioning, then adapt their reasoning processes and responses accordingly -- a complicated chain of cognitive processes which we term personalized reasoning. We introduce PREFDISCO, an evaluation methodology that transforms static benchmarks into interactive personalization tasks using psychologically-grounded personas with sparse preferences. Our framework creates scenarios where identical questions require different reasoning chains depending on user context, as optimal explanation approaches vary by individual expertise and preferences while maintaining factual accuracy. Evaluation of 21 frontier models across 10 tasks reveals 29.0% of naive personalization attempts produce worse preference alignment than generic responses, yet generic responses also fail to serve individual user needs effectively. These findings suggest personalized reasoning requires dedicated development rather than emerging naturally. PREFDISCO establishes personalized reasoning as a measurable research frontier and reveals fundamental limitations in current LLMs' interactive capabilities, providing a foundation for developing systems that can adapt to individual users in education, healthcare, and technical domains where personalization is critical.

Large language models(LLMs) with powerful language generation and reasoning capabilities have already achieved success in many domains, e.g., math and code generation. However, due to the lacking of physical world's corpus and knowledge during training, they usually fail to solve many real-life tasks in the urban space. In this paper, we propose CityGPT, a systematic framework for enhancing the capability of LLMs on understanding urban space and solving the related urban tasks by building a city-scale world model in the model. First, we construct a diverse instruction tuning dataset CityInstruction for injecting urban knowledge and enhancing spatial reasoning capability effectively. By using a mixture of CityInstruction and general instruction data, we fine-tune various LLMs (e.g., ChatGLM3-6B, Qwen1.5 and LLama3 series) to enhance their capability without sacrificing general abilities. To further validate the effectiveness of proposed methods, we construct a comprehensive benchmark CityEval to evaluate the capability of LLMs on diverse urban scenarios and problems. Extensive evaluation results demonstrate that small LLMs trained with CityInstruction can achieve competitive performance with commercial LLMs in the comprehensive evaluation of CityEval. The source codes are openly accessible to the research community via https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/CityGPT.

Instruction-tuning plays a vital role in enhancing the task-solving abilities of large language models (LLMs), improving their usability in generating helpful responses on various tasks. However, previous work has demonstrated that they are sensitive to minor variations in instruction phrasing. In this paper, we explore whether introducing perturbations in instruction-tuning data can enhance LLMs' resistance against noisy instructions. We focus on how instruction-tuning with perturbations, such as removing stop words or shuffling words, affects LLMs' performance on the original and perturbed versions of widely-used benchmarks (MMLU, BBH, GSM8K). We further assess learning dynamics and potential shifts in model behavior. Surprisingly, our results suggest that instruction-tuning on perturbed instructions can, in some cases, improve downstream performance. These findings highlight the importance of including perturbed instructions in instruction-tuning, which can make LLMs more resilient to noisy user inputs.

Large language models (LLMs) have enabled remarkable advances in automated task-solving with multi-agent systems. However, most existing LLM-based multi-agent approaches rely on predefined agents to handle simple tasks, limiting the adaptability of multi-agent collaboration to different scenarios. Therefore, we introduce AutoAgents, an innovative framework that adaptively generates and coordinates multiple specialized agents to build an AI team according to different tasks. Specifically, AutoAgents couples the relationship between tasks and roles by dynamically generating multiple required agents based on task content and planning solutions for the current task based on the generated expert agents. Multiple specialized agents collaborate with each other to efficiently accomplish tasks. Concurrently, an observer role is incorporated into the framework to reflect on the designated plans and agents' responses and improve upon them. Our experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate that AutoAgents generates more coherent and accurate solutions than the existing multi-agent methods. This underscores the significance of assigning different roles to different tasks and of team cooperation, offering new perspectives for tackling complex tasks. The repository of this project is available at https://github.com/Link-AGI/AutoAgents.

The rapid advancements of AI agents have ignited the long-held ambition of leveraging them to accelerate scientific discovery. Achieving this goal requires a deep understanding of the frontiers of human knowledge. As such, Humanity's Last Exam (HLE) provides an exceptionally challenging touchstone for evaluating scientific AI agents. In this work, we aim to construct the foundational architecture for general-purpose agents and validate the capabilities through leading performance on HLE. To achieve this, we introduce X-Master, a tool-augmented reasoning agent designed to emulate human researchers by interacting flexibly with external tools during its reasoning process. This agent, guided by the conceptualization of code as an interaction language, can flexibly leverage built-in Python libraries and our customized tools to augment the reasoning. We further scale its capabilities through X-Masters, a scattered-and-stacked agentic workflow that systematically enhances breadth and depth of reasoning. Our open-source solution, X-Masters, sets a new state-of-the-art record on HLE with a score of 32.1%, surpassing OpenAI's and Google's Deep Research (26.6% and 26.9%) and becoming the first to exceed the 30% threshold. This work allows us to gain a deeper understanding of complex task-solving and accumulates valuable experience that can inform future advancements, guiding subsequent model training.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become integral components in various autonomous agent systems. In this study, we present an exploration-based trajectory optimization approach, referred to as ETO. This learning method is designed to enhance the performance of open LLM agents. Contrary to previous studies that exclusively train on successful expert trajectories, our method allows agents to learn from their exploration failures. This leads to improved performance through an iterative optimization framework. During the exploration phase, the agent interacts with the environment while completing given tasks, gathering failure trajectories to create contrastive trajectory pairs. In the subsequent training phase, the agent utilizes these trajectory preference pairs to update its policy using contrastive learning methods like DPO. This iterative cycle of exploration and training fosters continued improvement in the agents. Our experiments on three complex tasks demonstrate that ETO consistently surpasses baseline performance by a large margin. Furthermore, an examination of task-solving efficiency and potential in scenarios lacking expert trajectory underscores the effectiveness of our approach.

Aligned large language models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional capabilities in task-solving, following instructions, and ensuring safety. However, the continual learning aspect of these aligned LLMs has been largely overlooked. Existing continual learning benchmarks lack sufficient challenge for leading aligned LLMs, owing to both their simplicity and the models' potential exposure during instruction tuning. In this paper, we introduce TRACE, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate continual learning in LLMs. TRACE consists of 8 distinct datasets spanning challenging tasks including domain-specific tasks, multilingual capabilities, code generation, and mathematical reasoning. All datasets are standardized into a unified format, allowing for effortless automatic evaluation of LLMs. Our experiments show that after training on TRACE, aligned LLMs exhibit significant declines in both general ability and instruction-following capabilities. For example, the accuracy of llama2-chat 13B on gsm8k dataset declined precipitously from 28.8\% to 2\% after training on our datasets. This highlights the challenge of finding a suitable tradeoff between achieving performance on specific tasks while preserving the original prowess of LLMs. Empirical findings suggest that tasks inherently equipped with reasoning paths contribute significantly to preserving certain capabilities of LLMs against potential declines. Motivated by this, we introduce the Reasoning-augmented Continual Learning (RCL) approach. RCL integrates task-specific cues with meta-rationales, effectively reducing catastrophic forgetting in LLMs while expediting convergence on novel tasks.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents can automate cybersecurity tasks and can adapt to the evolving cybersecurity landscape without re-engineering. While LLM agents have demonstrated cybersecurity capabilities on Capture-The-Flag (CTF) competitions, they have two key limitations: accessing latest cybersecurity expertise beyond training data, and integrating new knowledge into complex task planning. Knowledge-based approaches that incorporate technical understanding into the task-solving automation can tackle these limitations. We present CRAKEN, a knowledge-based LLM agent framework that improves cybersecurity capability through three core mechanisms: contextual decomposition of task-critical information, iterative self-reflected knowledge retrieval, and knowledge-hint injection that transforms insights into adaptive attack strategies. Comprehensive evaluations with different configurations show CRAKEN's effectiveness in multi-stage vulnerability detection and exploitation compared to previous approaches. Our extensible architecture establishes new methodologies for embedding new security knowledge into LLM-driven cybersecurity agentic systems. With a knowledge database of CTF writeups, CRAKEN obtained an accuracy of 22% on NYU CTF Bench, outperforming prior works by 3% and achieving state-of-the-art results. On evaluation of MITRE ATT&CK techniques, CRAKEN solves 25-30% more techniques than prior work, demonstrating improved cybersecurity capabilities via knowledge-based execution. We make our framework open source to public https://github.com/NYU-LLM-CTF/nyuctf_agents_craken.

Chat models (i.e. language models trained to follow instructions through conversation with humans) outperform base models (i.e. trained solely on unlabeled data) in both conversation and general task-solving abilities. These models are generally English-centric and require further adaptation for languages that are underrepresented in or absent from their training data. A common technique for adapting base models is to extend the model's vocabulary with target language tokens, i.e. vocabulary expansion (VE), and then continually pre-train it on language-specific data. Using chat data is ideal for chat model adaptation, but often, either this does not exist or is costly to construct. Alternatively, adapting chat models with unlabeled data is a possible solution, but it could result in catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we investigate the impact of using unlabeled target language data for VE on chat models for the first time. We first show that off-the-shelf VE generally performs well across target language tasks and models in 71% of cases, though it underperforms in scenarios where source chat models are already strong. To further improve adapted models, we propose post-hoc techniques that inject information from the source model without requiring any further training. Experiments reveal the effectiveness of our methods, helping the adapted models to achieve performance improvements in 87% of cases.

Leveraging multiple large language model (LLM) agents has shown to be a promising approach for tackling complex tasks, while the effective design of multiple agents for a particular application remains an art. It is thus intriguing to answer a critical question: Given a task, how can we build a team of LLM agents to solve it effectively? Our new adaptive team-building paradigm offers a flexible solution, realized through a novel agent design named Captain Agent. It dynamically forms and manages teams for each step of a task-solving process, utilizing nested group conversations and reflection to ensure diverse expertise and prevent stereotypical outputs. It allows for a flexible yet structured approach to problem-solving and can help reduce redundancy and enhance output diversity. A comprehensive evaluation across six real-world scenarios demonstrates that Captain Agent significantly outperforms existing multi-agent methods with 21.94% improvement in average accuracy, providing outstanding performance without requiring task-specific prompt engineering.

The impressive performance of recent language models across a wide range of tasks suggests that they possess a degree of abstract reasoning skills. Are these skills general and transferable, or specialized to specific tasks seen during pretraining? To disentangle these effects, we propose an evaluation framework based on "counterfactual" task variants that deviate from the default assumptions underlying standard tasks. Across a suite of 11 tasks, we observe nontrivial performance on the counterfactual variants, but nevertheless find that performance substantially and consistently degrades compared to the default conditions. This suggests that while current LMs may possess abstract task-solving skills to a degree, they often also rely on narrow, non-transferable procedures for task-solving. These results motivate a more careful interpretation of language model performance that teases apart these aspects of behavior.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have brought significant changes to various domains, especially through LLM-driven autonomous agents. These agents are now capable of collaborating seamlessly, splitting tasks and enhancing accuracy, thus minimizing the need for human involvement. However, these agents often approach a diverse range of tasks in isolation, without benefiting from past experiences. This isolation can lead to repeated mistakes and inefficient trials in task solving. To this end, this paper introduces Experiential Co-Learning, a novel framework in which instructor and assistant agents gather shortcut-oriented experiences from their historical trajectories and use these past experiences for mutual reasoning. This paradigm, enriched with previous experiences, equips agents to more effectively address unseen tasks.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in understanding common visual elements, largely due to their large-scale datasets and advanced training strategies. However, their effectiveness in medical applications remains limited due to the inherent discrepancies between data and tasks in medical scenarios and those in the general domain. Concretely, existing medical MLLMs face the following critical limitations: (1) limited coverage of medical knowledge beyond imaging, (2) heightened susceptibility to hallucinations due to suboptimal data curation processes, (3) lack of reasoning capabilities tailored for complex medical scenarios. To address these challenges, we first propose a comprehensive data curation procedure that (1) efficiently acquires rich medical knowledge data not only from medical imaging but also from extensive medical texts and general-domain data; and (2) synthesizes accurate medical captions, visual question answering (VQA), and reasoning samples. As a result, we build a multimodal dataset enriched with extensive medical knowledge. Building on the curated data, we introduce our medical-specialized MLLM: Lingshu. Lingshu undergoes multi-stage training to embed medical expertise and enhance its task-solving capabilities progressively. Besides, we preliminarily explore the potential of applying reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards paradigm to enhance Lingshu's medical reasoning ability. Additionally, we develop MedEvalKit, a unified evaluation framework that consolidates leading multimodal and textual medical benchmarks for standardized, fair, and efficient model assessment. We evaluate the performance of Lingshu on three fundamental medical tasks, multimodal QA, text-based QA, and medical report generation. The results show that Lingshu consistently outperforms the existing open-source multimodal models on most tasks ...

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in language understanding and generation. However, such impressive capability typically comes with a substantial model size, which presents significant challenges in both the deployment, inference, and training stages. With LLM being a general-purpose task solver, we explore its compression in a task-agnostic manner, which aims to preserve the multi-task solving and language generation ability of the original LLM. One challenge to achieving this is the enormous size of the training corpus of LLM, which makes both data transfer and model post-training over-burdensome. Thus, we tackle the compression of LLMs within the bound of two constraints: being task-agnostic and minimizing the reliance on the original training dataset. Our method, named LLM-Pruner, adopts structural pruning that selectively removes non-critical coupled structures based on gradient information, maximally preserving the majority of the LLM's functionality. To this end, the performance of pruned models can be efficiently recovered through tuning techniques, LoRA, in merely 3 hours, requiring only 50K data. We validate the LLM-Pruner on three LLMs, including LLaMA, Vicuna, and ChatGLM, and demonstrate that the compressed models still exhibit satisfactory capabilities in zero-shot classification and generation. The code is available at: https://github.com/horseee/LLM-Pruner

Large language model (LLM)-based agents have been increasingly used to interact with external environments (e.g., games, APIs, etc.) and solve tasks. However, current frameworks do not enable these agents to work with users and interact with them to align on the details of their tasks and reach user-defined goals; instead, in ambiguous situations, these agents may make decisions based on assumptions. This work introduces ReSpAct (Reason, Speak, and Act), a novel framework that synergistically combines the essential skills for building task-oriented "conversational" agents. ReSpAct addresses this need for agents, expanding on the ReAct approach. The ReSpAct framework enables agents to interpret user instructions, reason about complex tasks, execute appropriate actions, and engage in dynamic dialogue to seek guidance, clarify ambiguities, understand user preferences, resolve problems, and use the intermediate feedback and responses of users to update their plans. We evaluated ReSpAct in environments supporting user interaction, such as task-oriented dialogue (MultiWOZ) and interactive decision-making (AlfWorld, WebShop). ReSpAct is flexible enough to incorporate dynamic user feedback and addresses prevalent issues like error propagation and agents getting stuck in reasoning loops. This results in more interpretable, human-like task-solving trajectories than relying solely on reasoning traces. In two interactive decision-making benchmarks, AlfWorld and WebShop, ReSpAct outperform the strong reasoning-only method ReAct by an absolute success rate of 6% and 4%, respectively. In the task-oriented dialogue benchmark MultiWOZ, ReSpAct improved Inform and Success scores by 5.5% and 3%, respectively.

Visual instruction tuning has become the predominant technology in eliciting the multimodal task-solving capabilities of large vision-language models (LVLMs). Despite the success, as visual instructions require images as the input, it would leave the gap in inheriting the task-solving capabilities from the backbone LLMs, and make it costly to collect a large-scale dataset. To address it, we propose ViFT, a visual instruction-free fine-tuning framework for LVLMs. In ViFT, we only require the text-only instructions and image caption data during training, to separately learn the task-solving and visual perception abilities. During inference, we extract and combine the representations of the text and image inputs, for fusing the two abilities to fulfill multimodal tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that ViFT can achieve state-of-the-art performance on several visual reasoning and visual instruction following benchmarks, with rather less training data. Our code and data will be publicly released.

The rise of powerful large language models (LLMs) has spurred a new trend in building LLM-based autonomous agents for solving complex tasks, especially multi-agent systems. Despite the remarkable progress, we notice that existing works are heavily dependent on human-designed frameworks, which greatly limits the functional scope and scalability of agent systems. How to automatically extend the specialized agent to multi-agent systems to improve task-solving capability still remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we introduce EvoAgent, a generic method to automatically extend expert agents to multi-agent systems via the evolutionary algorithm, thereby improving the effectiveness of LLM-based agents in solving tasks. Specifically, we consider the existing agent frameworks as the initial individual and then apply a series of evolutionary operators (e.g., mutation, crossover, selection, etc.) to generate multiple agents with diverse agent settings. EvoAgent can be generalized to any LLM-based agent framework, and can automatically extend the existing agent framework to multi-agent systems without any extra human designs. Experimental results across various tasks have shown that EvoAgent can automatically generate multiple expert agents and significantly enhance the task-solving capabilities of LLM-based agents.

Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism is popular among current blockchain systems, which leads to an increasing concern about the tremendous waste of energy due to massive meaningless computation. To address this issue, we propose a novel and energy-efficient blockchain system, CrowdMine, which exploits useful crowdsourcing computation to achieve decentralized consensus. CrowdMine solves user-proposed computing tasks and utilizes the computation committed to the task solving process to secure decentralized on-chain storage. With our designed ``Proof of Crowdsourcing Work'' (PoCW) protocol, our system provides an efficient paradigm for computation and storage in a trustless and decentralized environment. We further show that the system can defend against potential attacks on blockchain, including the short-term 51\% attack, the problem-constructing attack, and the solution-stealing attack. We also implement the system with 40 distributed nodes to demonstrate its performance and robustness. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first system that enables decentralized Proof of Useful Work (PoUW) with general user-proposed tasks posted in a permissionless and trustless network.

One of the fundamental problems in digital agents is their lack of understanding of their environment. For instance, a web browsing agent may get lost in unfamiliar websites, uncertain what pages must be visited to achieve its goals. To address this, we propose Go-Browse, a method for automatically collecting diverse and realistic web agent data at scale through structured exploration of web environments. Go-Browse achieves efficient exploration by framing data collection as a graph search, enabling reuse of information across exploration episodes. We instantiate our method on the WebArena benchmark, collecting a dataset of 10K successful task-solving trajectories and 40K interaction steps across 100 URLs. Fine-tuning a 7B parameter language model on this dataset achieves a success rate of 21.7% on the WebArena benchmark, beating GPT-4o mini by 2.4% and exceeding current state-of-the-art results for sub-10B parameter models by 2.9%.

The development and evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has primarily focused on their task-solving capabilities, with recent models even surpassing human performance in some areas. However, this focus often neglects whether machine-generated language matches the human level of diversity, in terms of vocabulary choice, syntactic construction, and expression of meaning, raising questions about whether the fundamentals of language generation have been fully addressed. This paper emphasizes the importance of examining the preservation of human linguistic richness by language models, given the concerning surge in online content produced or aided by LLMs. We propose a comprehensive framework for evaluating LLMs from various linguistic diversity perspectives including lexical, syntactic, and semantic dimensions. Using this framework, we benchmark several state-of-the-art LLMs across all diversity dimensions, and conduct an in-depth case study for syntactic diversity. Finally, we analyze how different development and deployment choices impact the linguistic diversity of LLM outputs.

Adapting general large language models (LLMs) to specialized domains presents great challenges due to varied data distributions. This adaptation typically requires continual pre-training on massive domain-specific corpora to facilitate knowledge memorization, followed by training to apply this knowledge following human instructions and preferences. However, this method may result in inefficient knowledge memorization due to a lack of awareness of knowledge utilization and imposes substantial demands on LLMs to simultaneously learn knowledge utilization and format alignment with limited training samples. To facilitate the domain adaptation of LLM, we revise this process and propose a new domain adaptation framework including domain knowledge learning and general format alignment, called Mix-CPT. Specifically, we first conduct a knowledge mixture continual pre-training that concurrently focuses on knowledge memorization and utilization, allowing for mutual reinforcement. To avoid catastrophic forgetting during the continual pre-training process, we further incorporate a logit swap self-distillation constraint. Subsequently, leveraging the knowledge and capabilities acquired during continual pre-training, we efficiently perform instruction tuning and alignment with a few general training samples to achieve format alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed Mix-CPT framework can simultaneously improve the task-solving capabilities of LLMs on the target and general domains compared to the traditional adaptation methods.

Equipped with Chain-of-Thought (CoT), Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive reasoning ability in various downstream tasks. Even so, suffering from hallucinations and the inability to access external knowledge, LLMs often come with incorrect or unfaithful intermediate reasoning steps, especially in the context of answering knowledge-intensive tasks such as KBQA. To alleviate this issue, we propose a framework called Knowledge-Driven Chain-of-Thought (KD-CoT) to verify and modify reasoning traces in CoT via interaction with external knowledge, and thus overcome the hallucinations and error propagation. Concretely, we formulate the CoT rationale process of LLMs into a structured multi-round QA format. In each round, LLMs interact with a QA system that retrieves external knowledge and produce faithful reasoning traces based on retrieved precise answers. The structured CoT reasoning of LLMs is facilitated by our developed KBQA CoT collection, which serves as in-context learning demonstrations and can also be utilized as feedback augmentation to train a robust retriever. Extensive experiments on WebQSP and ComplexWebQuestion datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed KD-CoT in task-solving reasoning generation, which outperforms the vanilla CoT ICL with an absolute success rate of 8.0% and 5.1%. Furthermore, our proposed feedback-augmented retriever outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines for retrieving knowledge, achieving significant improvement in Hit performance.

Recently, remarkable progress has been made in automated task-solving through the use of multi-agent driven by large language models (LLMs). However, existing LLM-based multi-agent works primarily focus on solving simple dialogue tasks, and complex tasks are rarely studied, mainly due to the LLM hallucination problem. This type of hallucination becomes cascading when naively chaining multiple intelligent agents, resulting in a failure to effectively address complex problems. Therefore, we introduce MetaGPT, an innovative framework that incorporates efficient human workflows as a meta programming approach into LLM-based multi-agent collaboration. Specifically, MetaGPT encodes Standardized Operating Procedures (SOPs) into prompts to enhance structured coordination. Subsequently, it mandates modular outputs, empowering agents with domain expertise comparable to human professionals, to validate outputs and minimize compounded errors. In this way, MetaGPT leverages the assembly line paradigm to assign diverse roles to various agents, thereby establishing a framework that can effectively and cohesively deconstruct complex multi-agent collaborative problems. Our experiments on collaborative software engineering benchmarks demonstrate that MetaGPT generates more coherent and correct solutions compared to existing chat-based multi-agent systems. This highlights the potential of integrating human domain knowledge into multi-agent systems, thereby creating new opportunities to tackle complex real-world challenges. The GitHub repository of this project is publicly available on:https://github.com/geekan/MetaGPT.

Recent studies have shown that carefully designed workflows coordinating large language models(LLMs) significantly enhance task-solving capabilities compared to using a single model. While an increasing number of works focus on autonomous workflow construction, most existing approaches rely solely on historical experience, leading to limitations in efficiency and adaptability. We argue that while historical experience is valuable, workflow construction should also flexibly respond to the unique characteristics of each task. To this end, we propose an a priori dynamic framework for automated workflow construction. Our framework first leverages Q-table learning to optimize the decision space, guiding agent decisions and enabling effective use of historical experience. At the same time, agents evaluate the current task progress and make a priori decisions regarding the next executing agent, allowing the system to proactively select the more suitable workflow structure for each given task. Additionally, we incorporate mechanisms such as cold-start initialization, early stopping, and pruning to further improve system efficiency. Experimental evaluations on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach. Compared to state-of-the-art baselines, our method achieves an average improvement of 4.05%, while reducing workflow construction and inference costs to only 30.68%-48.31% of those required by existing methods.

The convergence of generative large language models (LLMs), edge networks, and multi-agent systems represents a groundbreaking synergy that holds immense promise for future wireless generations, harnessing the power of collective intelligence and paving the way for self-governed networks where intelligent decision-making happens right at the edge. This article puts the stepping-stone for incorporating multi-agent generative artificial intelligence (AI) in wireless networks, and sets the scene for realizing on-device LLMs, where multi-agent LLMs are collaboratively planning and solving tasks to achieve a number of network goals. We further investigate the profound limitations of cloud-based LLMs, and explore multi-agent LLMs from a game theoretic perspective, where agents collaboratively solve tasks in competitive environments. Moreover, we establish the underpinnings for the architecture design of wireless multi-agent generative AI systems at the network level and the agent level, and we identify the wireless technologies that are envisioned to play a key role in enabling on-device LLM. To demonstrate the promising potentials of wireless multi-agent generative AI networks, we highlight the benefits that can be achieved when implementing wireless generative agents in intent-based networking, and we provide a case study to showcase how on-device LLMs can contribute to solving network intents in a collaborative fashion. We finally shed lights on potential challenges and sketch a research roadmap towards realizing the vision of wireless collective intelligence.

Large-scale reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has demonstrated its effectiveness in harnessing the potential of large language models (LLMs) for single-turn reasoning tasks. In realistic reasoning scenarios, LLMs can often utilize external tools to assist in task-solving processes. However, current RL algorithms inadequately balance the models' intrinsic long-horizon reasoning capabilities and their proficiency in multi-turn tool interactions. To bridge this gap, we propose Agentic Reinforced Policy Optimization (ARPO), a novel agentic RL algorithm tailored for training multi-turn LLM-based agents. Through preliminary experiments, we observe that LLMs tend to exhibit highly uncertain behavior, characterized by an increase in the entropy distribution of generated tokens, immediately following interactions with external tools. Motivated by this observation, ARPO incorporates an entropy-based adaptive rollout mechanism, dynamically balancing global trajectory sampling and step-level sampling, thereby promoting exploration at steps with high uncertainty after tool usage. By integrating an advantage attribution estimation, ARPO enables LLMs to internalize advantage differences in stepwise tool-use interactions. Our experiments across 13 challenging benchmarks in computational reasoning, knowledge reasoning, and deep search domains demonstrate ARPO's superiority over trajectory-level RL algorithms. Remarkably, ARPO achieves improved performance using only half of the tool-use budget required by existing methods, offering a scalable solution for aligning LLM-based agents with real-time dynamic environments. Our code and datasets are released at https://github.com/dongguanting/ARPO

Multilingual generation with large language models (LLMs) is often of poor quality for mid- to low-resource languages. Building on insights from interpretability, we demonstrate the existence of an implicit task-solving-->translation pipeline for generation, whereby the model first solves the required task in a largely target-language-agnostic manner, and subsequently translates answer concepts into the intended target language. We hypothesize that the failure of the translation stage is an important culprit for the observed low quality of final outputs, and formalize this as the translation barrier hypothesis. We test this hypothesis for a word translation task across 108 language pairs, using logit lens to observe model processing in intermediate layers. We find that a significant portion of overall failures indeed stems from translation failure, or the model's inability to translate correctly solved intermediate concepts into the target language. This is especially true for low-resource target languages. Our results highlight an important hurdle for end-to-end multilingual generation, and lend guiding insights for future work seeking to improve multilinguality in LLMs.

The need to analyze graphs is ubiquitous across various fields, from social networks to biological research and recommendation systems. Therefore, enabling the ability of large language models (LLMs) to process graphs is an important step toward more advanced general intelligence. However, current LLM benchmarks on graph analysis require models to directly reason over the prompts describing graph topology, and are thus limited to small graphs with only a few dozens of nodes. In contrast, human experts typically write programs based on popular libraries for task solving, and can thus handle graphs with different scales. To this end, a question naturally arises: can LLMs analyze graphs like professionals? In this paper, we introduce ProGraph, a manually crafted benchmark containing 3 categories of graph tasks. The benchmark expects solutions based on programming instead of directly reasoning over raw inputs. Our findings reveal that the performance of current LLMs is unsatisfactory, with the best model achieving only 36% accuracy. To bridge this gap, we propose LLM4Graph datasets, which include crawled documents and auto-generated codes based on 6 widely used graph libraries. By augmenting closed-source LLMs with document retrieval and fine-tuning open-source ones on the codes, we show 11-32% absolute improvements in their accuracies. Our results underscore that the capabilities of LLMs in handling structured data are still under-explored, and show the effectiveness of LLM4Graph in enhancing LLMs' proficiency of graph analysis. The benchmark, datasets and enhanced open-source models are available at https://github.com/BUPT-GAMMA/ProGraph.

The DreamerV3 agent recently demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in diverse domains, learning powerful world models in latent space using a pixel reconstruction loss. However, while the reconstruction loss is essential to Dreamer's performance, it also necessitates modeling unnecessary information. Consequently, Dreamer sometimes fails to perceive crucial elements which are necessary for task-solving when visual distractions are present in the observation, significantly limiting its potential. In this paper, we present MuDreamer, a robust reinforcement learning agent that builds upon the DreamerV3 algorithm by learning a predictive world model without the need for reconstructing input signals. Rather than relying on pixel reconstruction, hidden representations are instead learned by predicting the environment value function and previously selected actions. Similar to predictive self-supervised methods for images, we find that the use of batch normalization is crucial to prevent learning collapse. We also study the effect of KL balancing between model posterior and prior losses on convergence speed and learning stability. We evaluate MuDreamer on the commonly used DeepMind Visual Control Suite and demonstrate stronger robustness to visual distractions compared to DreamerV3 and other reconstruction-free approaches, replacing the environment background with task-irrelevant real-world videos. Our method also achieves comparable performance on the Atari100k benchmark while benefiting from faster training.

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) and knowledge graphs (KGs) has achieved remarkable success in various natural language processing tasks. However, existing methodologies that integrate LLMs and KGs often navigate the task-solving process solely based on the LLM's analysis of the question, overlooking the rich cognitive potential inherent in the vast knowledge encapsulated in KGs. To address this, we introduce Observation-Driven Agent (ODA), a novel AI agent framework tailored for tasks involving KGs. ODA incorporates KG reasoning abilities via global observation that enhances reasoning capabilities through a cyclical paradigm of observation, action, and reflection. Confronting the exponential explosion of knowledge during observation, we innovatively design a recursive observation mechanism. Subsequently, we integrate the observed knowledge into the action and reflection modules. Through extensive experiments, ODA demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on several datasets, notably achieving accuracy improvements of 12.87% and 8.9%.

Large reasoning language models such as OpenAI-o1 and Deepseek-R1 have recently attracted widespread attention due to their impressive task-solving abilities. However, the enormous model size and the generation of lengthy thought chains introduce significant reasoning costs and response latency. Existing methods for efficient reasoning mainly focus on reducing the number of model parameters or shortening the chain-of-thought length. In this paper, we introduce Speculative Chain-of-Thought (SCoT), which reduces reasoning latency from another perspective by accelerated average reasoning speed through large and small model collaboration. SCoT conducts thought-level drafting using a lightweight draft model. Then it selects the best CoT draft and corrects the error cases with the target model. The proposed thinking behavior alignment improves the efficiency of drafting and the draft selection strategy maintains the prediction accuracy for complex problems. Experimental results on GSM8K, MATH, GaoKao, CollegeMath and Olympiad datasets show that SCoT reduces reasoning latency by 48\%sim66\% for Deepseek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B while achieving near-target-model-level performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/Jikai0Wang/Speculative_CoT.

Multilingual proficiency presents a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs). English-centric models are usually suboptimal in other languages, particularly those that are linguistically distant from English. This performance discrepancy mainly stems from the imbalanced distribution of training data across languages during pre-training and instruction tuning stages. To address this problem, we propose a novel approach called CrossIn, which utilizes a mixed composition of cross-lingual instruction tuning data. Our method leverages the compressed representation shared by various languages to efficiently enhance the model's task-solving capabilities and multilingual proficiency within a single process. In addition, we introduce a multi-task and multi-faceted benchmark to evaluate the effectiveness of CrossIn. Experimental results demonstrate that our method substantially improves performance across tasks and languages, and we provide extensive insights into the impact of cross-lingual data volume and the integration of translation data on enhancing multilingual consistency and accuracy.

The rapid advancement of conversational and chat-based language models has led to remarkable progress in complex task-solving. However, their success heavily relies on human input to guide the conversation, which can be challenging and time-consuming. This paper explores the potential of building scalable techniques to facilitate autonomous cooperation among communicative agents and provide insight into their "cognitive" processes. To address the challenges of achieving autonomous cooperation, we propose a novel communicative agent framework named role-playing. Our approach involves using inception prompting to guide chat agents toward task completion while maintaining consistency with human intentions. We showcase how role-playing can be used to generate conversational data for studying the behaviors and capabilities of chat agents, providing a valuable resource for investigating conversational language models. Our contributions include introducing a novel communicative agent framework, offering a scalable approach for studying the cooperative behaviors and capabilities of multi-agent systems, and open-sourcing our library to support research on communicative agents and beyond. The GitHub repository of this project is made publicly available on: https://github.com/lightaime/camel.

The proliferation of LLM-based agents has led to increasing deployment of inter-agent collaboration for tasks like scheduling, negotiation, resource allocation etc. In such systems, privacy is critical, as agents often access proprietary tools and domain-specific databases requiring strict confidentiality. This paper examines whether LLM-based agents demonstrate an understanding of contextual privacy. And, if instructed, do these systems preserve inference time user privacy in non-adversarial multi-turn conversation. Existing benchmarks to evaluate contextual privacy in LLM-agents primarily assess single-turn, low-complexity tasks where private information can be easily excluded. We first present a benchmark - MAGPIE comprising 158 real-life high-stakes scenarios across 15 domains. These scenarios are designed such that complete exclusion of private data impedes task completion yet unrestricted information sharing could lead to substantial losses. We then evaluate the current state-of-the-art LLMs on (a) their understanding of contextually private data and (b) their ability to collaborate without violating user privacy. Empirical experiments demonstrate that current models, including GPT-4o and Claude-2.7-Sonnet, lack robust understanding of contextual privacy, misclassifying private data as shareable 25.2\% and 43.6\% of the time. In multi-turn conversations, these models disclose private information in 59.9\% and 50.5\% of cases even under explicit privacy instructions. Furthermore, multi-agent systems fail to complete tasks in 71\% of scenarios. These results underscore that current models are not aligned towards both contextual privacy preservation and collaborative task-solving.

The reasoning capabilities of LLM (Large Language Model) are widely acknowledged in recent research, inspiring studies on tool learning and autonomous agents. LLM serves as the "brain" of the agent, orchestrating multiple tools for collaborative multi-step task solving. Unlike methods invoking tools like calculators or weather APIs for straightforward tasks, multi-modal agents excel by integrating diverse AI models for complex challenges. However, current multi-modal agents neglect the significance of model selection: they primarily focus on the planning and execution phases, and will only invoke predefined task-specific models for each subtask, making the execution fragile. Meanwhile, other traditional model selection methods are either incompatible with or suboptimal for the multi-modal agent scenarios, due to ignorance of dependencies among subtasks arising by multi-step reasoning. To this end, we identify the key challenges therein and propose the M^3 framework as a plug-in with negligible runtime overhead at test-time. This framework improves model selection and bolsters the robustness of multi-modal agents in multi-step reasoning. In the absence of suitable benchmarks, we create MS-GQA, a new dataset specifically designed to investigate the model selection challenge in multi-modal agents. Our experiments reveal that our framework enables dynamic model selection, considering both user inputs and subtask dependencies, thereby robustifying the overall reasoning process. Our code and benchmark: https://github.com/LINs-lab/M3.

Self-critic has become an important mechanism for enhancing the reasoning performance of LLMs. However, current approaches mainly involve basic prompts without further training, which tend to be over-simplified, leading to limited accuracy.Moreover, there is a lack of in-depth investigation of the relationship between LLM's ability to criticism and its task-solving performance.To address these issues, we propose Critic-CoT, a novel framework that pushes LLMs toward System-2-like critic capability, via step-wise CoT reasoning format and distant-supervision data construction, without the need for human annotation. Experiments on GSM8K and MATH show that via filtering out invalid solutions or iterative refinement, our enhanced model boosts task-solving performance, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our method. Further, we find that training on critique and refinement alone improves the generation. We hope our work could shed light on future research on improving the reasoning and critic ability of LLMs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable proficiency across a wide array of NLP tasks. However, the escalation in model size also engenders substantial deployment costs. While few efforts have explored model pruning techniques to reduce the size of LLMs, they mainly center on general or task-specific weights. This leads to suboptimal performance due to lacking specificity on the target domain or generality on different tasks when applied to domain-specific challenges. This work introduces an innovative unstructured dual-pruning methodology, D-Pruner, for domain-specific compression on LLM. It extracts a compressed, domain-specific, and task-agnostic LLM by identifying LLM weights that are pivotal for general capabilities, like linguistic capability and multi-task solving, and domain-specific knowledge. More specifically, we first assess general weight importance by quantifying the error incurred upon their removal with the help of an open-domain calibration dataset. Then, we utilize this general weight importance to refine the training loss, so that it preserves generality when fitting into a specific domain. Moreover, by efficiently approximating weight importance with the refined training loss on a domain-specific calibration dataset, we obtain a pruned model emphasizing generality and specificity. Our comprehensive experiments across various tasks in healthcare and legal domains show the effectiveness of D-Pruner in domain-specific compression. Our code is available at https://github.com/psunlpgroup/D-Pruner.

To improve the performance of large language models (LLMs), researchers have explored providing LLMs with textual task-solving experience via prompts. However, they rely on manual efforts to acquire and apply such experience for each task, which is not feasible for the growing demand for LLMs and the variety of user questions. To address this issue, we design a lifelong autonomous experiential learning framework based on LLMs to explore whether LLMs can imitate human ability for learning and utilizing experience. It autonomously learns and accumulates experience through experience transfer and induction, categorizing the types of input questions to select which accumulated experience to employ for them. Experimental results on six widely used NLP datasets show that our framework performs reliably in each intermediate step and effectively improves the performance of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. This validates the feasibility of using LLMs to mimic human experiential learning and application capabilities. Additionally, we provide a detailed analysis of the behavior of our framework at each step.

We relax the constraint of a shared language between agents in a semantic and goal-oriented communication system to explore the effect of language mismatch in distributed task solving. We propose a mathematical framework, which provides a modelling and a measure of the semantic distortion introduced in the communication when agents use distinct languages. We then propose a new approach to semantic channel equalization with proven effectiveness through numerical evaluations.

Large language models (LLMs) excel at complex reasoning tasks but remain computationally expensive, limiting their practical deployment. To address this, recent works have focused on distilling reasoning capabilities into smaller language models (sLMs) using chain-of-thought (CoT) traces from teacher LLMs. However, this approach struggles in scenarios requiring rare factual knowledge or precise computation, where sLMs often hallucinate due to limited capability. In this work, we propose Agent Distillation, a framework for transferring not only reasoning capability but full task-solving behavior from LLM-based agents into sLMs with retrieval and code tools. We improve agent distillation along two complementary axes: (1) we introduce a prompting method called first-thought prefix to enhance the quality of teacher-generated trajectories; and (2) we propose a self-consistent action generation for improving test-time robustness of small agents. We evaluate our method on eight reasoning tasks across factual and mathematical domains, covering both in-domain and out-of-domain generalization. Our results show that sLMs as small as 0.5B, 1.5B, 3B parameters can achieve performance competitive with next-tier larger 1.5B, 3B, 7B models fine-tuned using CoT distillation, demonstrating the potential of agent distillation for building practical, tool-using small agents. Our code is available at https://github.com/Nardien/agent-distillation.

While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across tasks in language understanding and interactive decision making, their abilities for reasoning (e.g. chain-of-thought prompting) and acting (e.g. action plan generation) have primarily been studied as separate topics. In this paper, we explore the use of LLMs to generate both reasoning traces and task-specific actions in an interleaved manner, allowing for greater synergy between the two: reasoning traces help the model induce, track, and update action plans as well as handle exceptions, while actions allow it to interface with external sources, such as knowledge bases or environments, to gather additional information. We apply our approach, named ReAct, to a diverse set of language and decision making tasks and demonstrate its effectiveness over state-of-the-art baselines, as well as improved human interpretability and trustworthiness over methods without reasoning or acting components. Concretely, on question answering (HotpotQA) and fact verification (Fever), ReAct overcomes issues of hallucination and error propagation prevalent in chain-of-thought reasoning by interacting with a simple Wikipedia API, and generates human-like task-solving trajectories that are more interpretable than baselines without reasoning traces. On two interactive decision making benchmarks (ALFWorld and WebShop), ReAct outperforms imitation and reinforcement learning methods by an absolute success rate of 34% and 10% respectively, while being prompted with only one or two in-context examples. Project site with code: https://react-lm.github.io

Large language models (LLMs), such as o1 from OpenAI, have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities. o1 generates a long chain-of-thought (LongCoT) before answering a question. LongCoT allows LLMs to analyze problems, devise plans, reflect, and backtrack effectively. These actions empower LLM to solve complex problems. After the release of o1, many teams have attempted to replicate its LongCoT and reasoning capabilities. In terms of methods, they primarily rely on knowledge distillation with data from existing models with LongCoT capacities (e.g., OpenAI-o1, Qwen-QwQ, DeepSeek-R1-Preview), leaving significant uncertainties on systematically developing such reasoning abilities. In terms of data domains, these works focus narrowly on math while a few others include coding, limiting their generalizability. This paper introduces a novel approach to enable LLM's LongCoT capacity without distillation from o1-like models or expensive human annotations, where we bootstrap LongCoT (BOLT) from a standard instruct model. BOLT involves three stages: 1) LongCoT data bootstrapping with in-context learning on a standard instruct model; 2) LongCoT supervised finetuning; 3) online training to further refine LongCoT capacities. In BOLT, only a few in-context examples need to be constructed during the bootstrapping stage; in our experiments, we created 10 examples, demonstrating the feasibility of this approach. We use Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct to bootstrap LongCoT and apply our method to various model scales (7B, 8B, 70B). We achieve impressive performance on a variety of benchmarks, Arena-Hard, MT-Bench, WildBench, ZebraLogic, MATH500, which evaluate diverse task-solving and reasoning capabilities.

Contemporary evaluation techniques are inadequate for agentic systems. These approaches either focus exclusively on final outcomes -- ignoring the step-by-step nature of agentic systems, or require excessive manual labour. To address this, we introduce the Agent-as-a-Judge framework, wherein agentic systems are used to evaluate agentic systems. This is an organic extension of the LLM-as-a-Judge framework, incorporating agentic features that enable intermediate feedback for the entire task-solving process. We apply the Agent-as-a-Judge to the task of code generation. To overcome issues with existing benchmarks and provide a proof-of-concept testbed for Agent-as-a-Judge, we present DevAI, a new benchmark of 55 realistic automated AI development tasks. It includes rich manual annotations, like a total of 365 hierarchical user requirements. We benchmark three of the popular agentic systems using Agent-as-a-Judge and find it dramatically outperforms LLM-as-a-Judge and is as reliable as our human evaluation baseline. Altogether, we believe that Agent-as-a-Judge marks a concrete step forward for modern agentic systems -- by providing rich and reliable reward signals necessary for dynamic and scalable self-improvement.

Rapid advancements of large language model (LLM) technologies led to the introduction of powerful open-source instruction-tuned LLMs that have the same text generation quality as the state-of-the-art counterparts such as GPT-4. While the emergence of such models accelerates the adoption of LLM technologies in sensitive-information environments the authors of such models don not disclose the training data necessary for replication of the results thus making the achievements model-exclusive. Since those open-source models are also multilingual this in turn reduces the benefits of training a language specific LLMs as improved inference computation efficiency becomes the only guaranteed advantage of such costly procedure. More cost-efficient options such as vocabulary extension and subsequent continued pre-training are also inhibited by the lack of access to high-quality instruction-tuning data since it is the major factor behind the resulting LLM task-solving capabilities. To address the limitations and cut the costs of the language adaptation pipeline we propose Learned Embedding Propagation (LEP). Unlike existing approaches our method has lower training data size requirements due to minimal impact on existing LLM knowledge which we reinforce using novel ad-hoc embedding propagation procedure that allows to skip the instruction-tuning step and instead implant the new language knowledge directly into any existing instruct-tuned variant. We evaluated four Russian vocabulary adaptations for LLaMa-3-8B and Mistral-7B, showing that LEP is competitive with traditional instruction-tuning methods, achieving performance comparable to OpenChat 3.5 and LLaMa-3-8B-Instruct, with further improvements via self-calibration and continued tuning enhancing task-solving capabilities.

Enhancing the capability of large language models (LLMs) in reasoning has gained significant attention in recent years. Previous studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of various prompting strategies in aiding LLMs in reasoning (called "reasoning actions"), such as step-by-step thinking, reflecting before answering, solving with programs, and their combinations. However, these approaches often applied static, predefined reasoning actions uniformly to all questions, without considering the specific characteristics of each question or the capability of the task-solving LLM. In this paper, we propose DOTS, an approach enabling LLMs to reason dynamically via optimal reasoning trajectory search, tailored to the specific characteristics of each question and the inherent capability of the task-solving LLM. Our approach involves three key steps: i) defining atomic reasoning action modules that can be composed into various reasoning action trajectories; ii) searching for the optimal action trajectory for each training question through iterative exploration and evaluation for the specific task-solving LLM; and iii) using the collected optimal trajectories to train an LLM to plan for the reasoning trajectories of unseen questions. In particular, we propose two learning paradigms, i.e., fine-tuning an external LLM as a planner to guide the task-solving LLM, or directly fine-tuning the task-solving LLM with an internalized capability for reasoning actions planning. Our experiments across eight reasoning tasks show that our method consistently outperforms static reasoning techniques and the vanilla instruction tuning approach. Further analysis reveals that our method enables LLMs to adjust their computation based on problem complexity, allocating deeper thinking and reasoning to harder problems.

We introduce Voyager, the first LLM-powered embodied lifelong learning agent in Minecraft that continuously explores the world, acquires diverse skills, and makes novel discoveries without human intervention. Voyager consists of three key components: 1) an automatic curriculum that maximizes exploration, 2) an ever-growing skill library of executable code for storing and retrieving complex behaviors, and 3) a new iterative prompting mechanism that incorporates environment feedback, execution errors, and self-verification for program improvement. Voyager interacts with GPT-4 via blackbox queries, which bypasses the need for model parameter fine-tuning. The skills developed by Voyager are temporally extended, interpretable, and compositional, which compounds the agent's abilities rapidly and alleviates catastrophic forgetting. Empirically, Voyager shows strong in-context lifelong learning capability and exhibits exceptional proficiency in playing Minecraft. It obtains 3.3x more unique items, travels 2.3x longer distances, and unlocks key tech tree milestones up to 15.3x faster than prior SOTA. Voyager is able to utilize the learned skill library in a new Minecraft world to solve novel tasks from scratch, while other techniques struggle to generalize. We open-source our full codebase and prompts at https://voyager.minedojo.org/.

Leveraging massive knowledge and learning schemes from large language models (LLMs), recent machine learning models show notable successes in building generalist agents that exhibit the capability of general-purpose task solving in diverse domains, including natural language processing, computer vision, and robotics. However, a significant challenge remains as these models exhibit limited ability in understanding and interacting with the 3D world. We argue this limitation significantly hinders the current models from performing real-world tasks and further achieving general intelligence. To this end, we introduce an embodied multi-modal and multi-task generalist agent that excels in perceiving, grounding, reasoning, planning, and acting in the 3D world. Our proposed agent, referred to as LEO, is trained with shared LLM-based model architectures, objectives, and weights in two stages: (i) 3D vision-language alignment and (ii) 3D vision-language-action instruction tuning. To facilitate the training, we meticulously curate and generate an extensive dataset comprising object-level and scene-level multi-modal tasks with exceeding scale and complexity, necessitating a deep understanding of and interaction with the 3D world. Through rigorous experiments, we demonstrate LEO's remarkable proficiency across a wide spectrum of tasks, including 3D captioning, question answering, embodied reasoning, embodied navigation, and robotic manipulation. Our ablation results further provide valuable insights for the development of future embodied generalist agents.

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to mimic human-like intelligence has led to a surge in LLM-based autonomous agents. Though recent LLMs seem capable of planning and reasoning given user instructions, their effectiveness in applying these capabilities for autonomous task solving remains underexplored. This is especially true in enterprise settings, where automated agents hold the promise of a high impact. To fill this gap, we propose WorkArena++, a novel benchmark consisting of 682 tasks corresponding to realistic workflows routinely performed by knowledge workers. WorkArena++ is designed to evaluate the planning, problem-solving, logical/arithmetic reasoning, retrieval, and contextual understanding abilities of web agents. Our empirical studies across state-of-the-art LLMs and vision-language models (VLMs), as well as human workers, reveal several challenges for such models to serve as useful assistants in the workplace. In addition to the benchmark, we provide a mechanism to effortlessly generate thousands of ground-truth observation/action traces, which can be used for fine-tuning existing models. Overall, we expect this work to serve as a useful resource to help the community progress toward capable autonomous agents. The benchmark can be found at https://github.com/ServiceNow/WorkArena/tree/workarena-plus-plus.

Recently, various studies have leveraged Large Language Models (LLMs) to help decision-making and planning in environments, and try to align the LLMs' knowledge with the world conditions. Nonetheless, the capacity of LLMs to continuously acquire environmental knowledge and adapt in an open world remains uncertain. In this paper, we propose an approach to spur LLMs to explore the open world, gather experiences, and learn to improve their task-solving capabilities. In this approach, a multi-round feedback-revision mechanism is utilized to encourage LLMs to actively select appropriate revision actions guided by feedback information from the environment. This facilitates exploration and enhances the model's performance. Besides, we integrate sub-task relabeling to assist LLMs in maintaining consistency in sub-task planning and help the model learn the combinatorial nature between tasks, enabling it to complete a wider range of tasks through training based on the acquired exploration experiences. By evaluation in Minecraft, an open-ended sandbox world, we demonstrate that our approach LLaMA-Rider enhances the efficiency of the LLM in exploring the environment, and effectively improves the LLM's ability to accomplish more tasks through fine-tuning with merely 1.3k instances of collected data, showing minimal training costs compared to the baseline using reinforcement learning.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated great potential in complex reasoning tasks, yet they fall short when tackling more sophisticated challenges, especially when interacting with environments through generating executable actions. This inadequacy primarily stems from the lack of built-in action knowledge in language agents, which fails to effectively guide the planning trajectories during task solving and results in planning hallucination. To address this issue, we introduce KnowAgent, a novel approach designed to enhance the planning capabilities of LLMs by incorporating explicit action knowledge. Specifically, KnowAgent employs an action knowledge base and a knowledgeable self-learning strategy to constrain the action path during planning, enabling more reasonable trajectory synthesis, and thereby enhancing the planning performance of language agents. Experimental results on HotpotQA and ALFWorld based on various backbone models demonstrate that KnowAgent can achieve comparable or superior performance to existing baselines. Further analysis indicates the effectiveness of KnowAgent in terms of planning hallucinations mitigation. Code is available in https://github.com/zjunlp/KnowAgent.

Planning is a fundamental property of human intelligence. Reasoning about asynchronous plans is challenging since it requires sequential and parallel planning to optimize time costs. Can large language models (LLMs) succeed at this task? Here, we present the first large-scale study investigating this question. We find that a representative set of closed and open-source LLMs, including GPT-4 and LLaMA-2, behave poorly when not supplied with illustrations about the task-solving process in our benchmark AsyncHow. We propose a novel technique called Plan Like a Graph (PLaG) that combines graphs with natural language prompts and achieves state-of-the-art results. We show that although PLaG can boost model performance, LLMs still suffer from drastic degradation when task complexity increases, highlighting the limits of utilizing LLMs for simulating digital devices. We see our study as an exciting step towards using LLMs as efficient autonomous agents. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/fangru-lin/graph-llm-asynchow-plan.

The recent trend of using Large Language Models (LLMs) as intelligent agents in real-world applications underscores the necessity for comprehensive evaluations of their capabilities, particularly in complex scenarios involving planning, creating, and using tools. However, existing benchmarks typically focus on simple synthesized queries that do not reflect real-world complexity, thereby offering limited perspectives in evaluating tool utilization. To address this issue, we present UltraTool, a novel benchmark designed to improve and evaluate LLMs' ability in tool utilization within real-world scenarios. UltraTool focuses on the entire process of using tools - from planning and creating to applying them in complex tasks. It emphasizes real-world complexities, demanding accurate, multi-step planning for effective problem-solving. A key feature of UltraTool is its independent evaluation of planning with natural language, which happens before tool usage and simplifies the task solving by mapping out the intermediate steps. Thus, unlike previous work, it eliminates the restriction of pre-defined toolset during planning. Through extensive experiments on various LLMs, we offer novel insights into the evaluation of capabilities of LLMs in tool utilization, thereby contributing a fresh perspective to this rapidly evolving field. The benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/JoeYing1019/UltraTool.

Human intelligence excels at combining basic skills to solve complex tasks. This capability is vital for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and should be embedded in comprehensive intelligent models, enabling them to harness expert models for complex task-solving towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Large Language Models (LLMs) show promising learning and reasoning abilities, and can effectively use external models, tools or APIs to tackle complex problems. In this work, we introduce OpenAGI, an open-source AGI research platform designed for multi-step, real-world tasks. Specifically, OpenAGI uses a dual strategy, integrating standard benchmark tasks for benchmarking and evaluation, and open-ended tasks including more expandable models, tools or APIs for creative problem-solving. Tasks are presented as natural language queries to the LLM, which then selects and executes appropriate models. We also propose a Reinforcement Learning from Task Feedback (RLTF) mechanism that uses task results to improve the LLM's ability, which creates a self-improving AI feedback loop. While we acknowledge that AGI is a broad and multifaceted research challenge with no singularly defined solution path, the integration of LLMs with domain-specific expert models, inspired by mirroring the blend of general and specialized intelligence in humans, offers a promising approach towards AGI. We are open-sourcing the OpenAGI project's code, dataset, benchmarks, evaluation methods, and demo to foster community involvement in AGI advancement: https://github.com/agiresearch/OpenAGI.

Transferring latent structure from one environment or problem to another is a mechanism by which humans and animals generalize with very little data. Inspired by cognitive and neurobiological insights, we propose graph schemas as a mechanism of abstraction for transfer learning. Graph schemas start with latent graph learning where perceptually aliased observations are disambiguated in the latent space using contextual information. Latent graph learning is also emerging as a new computational model of the hippocampus to explain map learning and transitive inference. Our insight is that a latent graph can be treated as a flexible template -- a schema -- that models concepts and behaviors, with slots that bind groups of latent nodes to the specific observations or groundings. By treating learned latent graphs (schemas) as prior knowledge, new environments can be quickly learned as compositions of schemas and their newly learned bindings. We evaluate graph schemas on two previously published challenging tasks: the memory & planning game and one-shot StreetLearn, which are designed to test rapid task solving in novel environments. Graph schemas can be learned in far fewer episodes than previous baselines, and can model and plan in a few steps in novel variations of these tasks. We also demonstrate learning, matching, and reusing graph schemas in more challenging 2D and 3D environments with extensive perceptual aliasing and size variations, and show how different schemas can be composed to model larger and more complex environments. To summarize, our main contribution is a unified system, inspired and grounded in cognitive science, that facilitates rapid transfer learning of new environments using schemas via map-induction and composition that handles perceptual aliasing.

Do LLMs genuinely incorporate external definitions, or do they primarily rely on their parametric knowledge? To address these questions, we conduct controlled experiments across multiple explanation benchmark datasets (general and domain-specific) and label definition conditions, including expert-curated, LLM-generated, perturbed, and swapped definitions. Our results reveal that while explicit label definitions can enhance accuracy and explainability, their integration into an LLM's task-solving processes is neither guaranteed nor consistent, suggesting reliance on internalized representations in many cases. Models often default to their internal representations, particularly in general tasks, whereas domain-specific tasks benefit more from explicit definitions. These findings underscore the need for a deeper understanding of how LLMs process external knowledge alongside their pre-existing capabilities.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents powered by Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have emerged as a revolutionary approach to automating human-machine interactions, capable of autonomously operating personal devices (e.g., mobile phones) or applications within the device to perform complex real-world tasks in a human-like manner. However, their close integration with personal devices raises significant security concerns, with many threats, including backdoor attacks, remaining largely unexplored. This work reveals that the visual grounding of GUI agent-mapping textual plans to GUI elements-can introduce vulnerabilities, enabling new types of backdoor attacks. With backdoor attack targeting visual grounding, the agent's behavior can be compromised even when given correct task-solving plans. To validate this vulnerability, we propose VisualTrap, a method that can hijack the grounding by misleading the agent to locate textual plans to trigger locations instead of the intended targets. VisualTrap uses the common method of injecting poisoned data for attacks, and does so during the pre-training of visual grounding to ensure practical feasibility of attacking. Empirical results show that VisualTrap can effectively hijack visual grounding with as little as 5% poisoned data and highly stealthy visual triggers (invisible to the human eye); and the attack can be generalized to downstream tasks, even after clean fine-tuning. Moreover, the injected trigger can remain effective across different GUI environments, e.g., being trained on mobile/web and generalizing to desktop environments. These findings underscore the urgent need for further research on backdoor attack risks in GUI agents.

While knowledge distillation has become a mature field for compressing large language models (LLMs) into smaller ones by aligning their outputs or internal representations, the distillation of LLM-based agents, which involve planning, memory, and tool use, remains relatively underexplored. Existing agent distillation methods typically replay full teacher trajectories or imitate step-by-step teacher tool usage, but they often struggle to train student agents to dynamically plan and act in novel environments. We propose AgentDistill, a novel, training-free agent distillation framework that enables efficient and scalable knowledge transfer via direct reuse of Model-Context-Protocols (MCPs), which are structured and reusable task-solving modules autonomously generated by teacher agents. The reuse of these distilled MCPs enables student agents to generalize their capabilities across domains and solve new problems with minimal supervision or human intervention. Experiments on biomedical and mathematical benchmarks demonstrate that our distilled student agents, built on small language models, can achieve performance comparable to advanced systems using large LLMs such as OctoTools (GPT-4o), highlighting the effectiveness of our framework in building scalable and cost-efficient intelligent agents.

Tool learning, which enables large language models (LLMs) to utilize external tools effectively, has garnered increasing attention for its potential to revolutionize productivity across industries. Despite rapid development in tool learning, key challenges and opportunities remain understudied, limiting deeper insights and future advancements. In this paper, we investigate the tool learning ability of 41 prevalent LLMs by reproducing 33 benchmarks and enabling one-click evaluation for seven of them, forming a Tool Learning Platform named ToLeaP. We also collect 21 out of 33 potential training datasets to facilitate future exploration. After analyzing over 3,000 bad cases of 41 LLMs based on ToLeaP, we identify four main critical challenges: (1) benchmark limitations induce both the neglect and lack of (2) autonomous learning, (3) generalization, and (4) long-horizon task-solving capabilities of LLMs. To aid future advancements, we take a step further toward exploring potential directions, namely (1) real-world benchmark construction, (2) compatibility-aware autonomous learning, (3) rationale learning by thinking, and (4) identifying and recalling key clues. The preliminary experiments demonstrate their effectiveness, highlighting the need for further research and exploration.

Large Language Models (LLMs), trained on extensive web-scale corpora, have demonstrated remarkable abilities across diverse tasks, especially as they are scaled up. Nevertheless, even state-of-the-art models struggle in certain cases, sometimes failing at problems solvable by young children, indicating that traditional notions of task complexity are insufficient for explaining LLM capabilities. However, exploring LLM capabilities is complicated by the fact that most widely-used models are also "instruction-tuned" to respond appropriately to prompts. With the goal of disentangling the factors influencing LLM performance, we investigate whether instruction-tuned models possess fundamentally different capabilities from base models that are prompted using in-context examples. Through extensive experiments across various model families, scales and task types, which included instruction tuning 90 different LLMs, we demonstrate that the performance of instruction-tuned models is significantly correlated with the in-context performance of their base counterparts. By clarifying what instruction-tuning contributes, we extend prior research into in-context learning, which suggests that base models use priors from pretraining data to solve tasks. Specifically, we extend this understanding to instruction-tuned models, suggesting that their pretraining data similarly sets a limiting boundary on the tasks they can solve, with the added influence of the instruction-tuning dataset.

Specializing LLMs in various domain-specific tasks has emerged as a critical step towards achieving high performance. However, the construction and annotation of datasets in specific domains are always very costly. Apart from using superior and expensive closed-source LLM APIs to construct datasets, some open-source models have become strong enough to handle dataset construction in many scenarios. Thus, we present a family of data augmentation models designed to significantly improve the efficiency for model fine-tuning. These models, trained based on sufficiently small LLMs, support key functionalities with low inference costs: instruction expansion, instruction refinement, and instruction-response pair expansion. To fulfill this goal, we first construct an automatic data collection system with seed datasets generated from both public repositories and our in-house datasets. This system leverages powerful LLMs to expand, refine and re-write the instructions and responses, incorporating quality assessment techniques. Following this, we introduce the training process of our models, which effectively distills task-solving and text synthesis abilities from teacher LLMs. Finally, we demonstrate how we integrate these functionalities into a machine learning platform to support low-cost LLM fine-tuning from both dataset preparation and training perspectives for users. Experiments and an application study prove the effectiveness of our approach.

Language agents have shown promising adaptability in dynamic environments to perform complex tasks. However, despite the versatile knowledge embedded in large language models, these agents still fall short when it comes to tasks that require planning. We introduce STEP, a novel framework designed to efficiently learn from previous experiences to enhance the planning capabilities of language agents in future steps. Concretely, STEP functions through four interconnected components. First, the Planner takes on the task, breaks it down into subtasks and provides relevant insights. Then the Executor generates action candidates, while the Evaluator ensures the actions align with learned rules from previous experiences. Lastly, Memory stores experiences to inform future decisions. In the ScienceWorld benchmark, our results show that STEP consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models, achieving an overall score of 67.4 and successfully completing 12 out of 18 tasks. These findings highlight STEP's potential as a framework for enhancing planning capabilities in language agents, paving the way for more sophisticated task-solving in dynamic environments.

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable performance across a spectrum of languages. In this work, we delve into the question: How do LLMs handle multilingualism? We introduce a framework that depicts LLMs' processing of multilingual inputs: In the first several layers, LLMs understand the question, converting multilingual inputs into English to facilitate the task-solving phase. In the intermediate layers, LLMs engage in problem-solving by thinking in English and incorporating multilingual knowledge to obtain factual content, leveraging the self-attention and feed-forward structures, respectively. In the last several layers, LLMs generate responses that align with the original language of the query. In addition, we investigate the existence of language-specific neurons when processing a certain language. To detect neurons activated by the input language, even without labels, we innovatively design a Parallel Language specific Neuron Detection (PLND) method that effectively measures the significance of neurons when handling multilingual inputs. By comprehensive ablation analysis through deactivating neurons of different layers and structures, we verify the framework that we propose. Additionally, we demonstrate that we can utilize such a framework to effectively enhance the multilingual ability with much less training effort.

Understanding the world in terms of objects and the possible interplays with them is an important cognition ability, especially in robotics manipulation, where many tasks require robot-object interactions. However, learning such a structured world model, which specifically captures entities and relationships, remains a challenging and underexplored problem. To address this, we propose FOCUS, a model-based agent that learns an object-centric world model. Thanks to a novel exploration bonus that stems from the object-centric representation, FOCUS can be deployed on robotics manipulation tasks to explore object interactions more easily. Evaluating our approach on manipulation tasks across different settings, we show that object-centric world models allow the agent to solve tasks more efficiently and enable consistent exploration of robot-object interactions. Using a Franka Emika robot arm, we also showcase how FOCUS could be adopted in real-world settings.

Aiming to produce reinforcement learning (RL) policies that are human-interpretable and can generalize better to novel scenarios, Trivedi et al. (2021) present a method (LEAPS) that first learns a program embedding space to continuously parameterize diverse programs from a pre-generated program dataset, and then searches for a task-solving program in the learned program embedding space when given a task. Despite the encouraging results, the program policies that LEAPS can produce are limited by the distribution of the program dataset. Furthermore, during searching, LEAPS evaluates each candidate program solely based on its return, failing to precisely reward correct parts of programs and penalize incorrect parts. To address these issues, we propose to learn a meta-policy that composes a series of programs sampled from the learned program embedding space. By learning to compose programs, our proposed hierarchical programmatic reinforcement learning (HPRL) framework can produce program policies that describe out-of-distributionally complex behaviors and directly assign credits to programs that induce desired behaviors. The experimental results in the Karel domain show that our proposed framework outperforms baselines. The ablation studies confirm the limitations of LEAPS and justify our design choices.

Compared to image-text pair data, interleaved corpora enable Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to understand the world more naturally like humans. However, such existing datasets are crawled from webpage, facing challenges like low knowledge density, loose image-text relations, and poor logical coherence between images. On the other hand, the internet hosts vast instructional videos (e.g., online geometry courses) that are widely used by humans to learn foundational subjects, yet these valuable resources remain underexplored in VLM training. In this paper, we introduce a high-quality multimodal textbook corpus with richer foundational knowledge for VLM pretraining. It collects over 2.5 years of instructional videos, totaling 22,000 class hours. We first use an LLM-proposed taxonomy to systematically gather instructional videos. Then we progressively extract and refine visual (keyframes), audio (ASR), and textual knowledge (OCR) from the videos, and organize as an image-text interleaved corpus based on temporal order. Compared to its counterparts, our video-centric textbook offers more coherent context, richer knowledge, and better image-text alignment. Experiments demonstrate its superb pretraining performance, particularly in knowledge- and reasoning-intensive tasks like ScienceQA and MathVista. Moreover, VLMs pre-trained on our textbook exhibit outstanding interleaved context awareness, leveraging visual and textual cues in their few-shot context for task solving~Our code are available at \url{https://github.com/DAMO-NLP-SG/multimodal_textbook}.

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) significantly improve the reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) by learning to reason, exhibiting promising performance in complex task-solving. However, their deliberative reasoning process leads to inefficiencies in token usage, memory consumption, and inference time. Thus, this survey provides a review of efficient inference methods designed specifically for LRMs, focusing on mitigating token inefficiency while preserving the reasoning quality. First, we introduce a taxonomy to group the recent methods into two main categories: (a) explicit compact Chain-of-Thought (CoT), which reduces tokens while keeping the explicit reasoning structure, and (b) implicit latent CoT, which encodes reasoning steps within hidden representations instead of explicit tokens. Meanwhile, we discuss their strengths and weaknesses. Then, we conduct empirical analyses on existing methods from performance and efficiency aspects. Besides, we present open challenges in this field, including human-centric controllable reasoning, trade-off between interpretability and efficiency of reasoning, ensuring safety of efficient reasoning, and broader applications of efficient reasoning. In addition, we highlight key insights for enhancing LRMs' inference efficiency via techniques such as model merging, new architectures, and agent routers. We hope this work serves as a valuable guide, helping researchers overcome challenges in this vibrant fieldhttps://github.com/yueliu1999/Awesome-Efficient-Inference-for-LRMs.

With generative AI advances, the exciting potential for autonomous agents to manage daily tasks via natural language commands has emerged. However, cur rent agents are primarily created and tested in simplified synthetic environments, substantially limiting real-world scenario representation. In this paper, we build an environment for agent command and control that is highly realistic and reproducible. Specifically, we focus on agents that perform tasks on websites, and we create an environment with fully functional websites from four common domains: e-commerce, social forum discussions, collaborative software development, and content management. Our environment is enriched with tools (e.g., a map) and external knowledge bases (e.g., user manuals) to encourage human-like task-solving. Building upon our environment, we release a set of benchmark tasks focusing on evaluating the functional correctness of task completions. The tasks in our benchmark are diverse, long-horizon, and are designed to emulate tasks that humans routinely perform on the internet. We design and implement several autonomous agents, integrating recent techniques such as reasoning before acting. The results demonstrate that solving complex tasks is challenging: our best GPT-4-based agent only achieves an end-to-end task success rate of 10.59%. These results highlight the need for further development of robust agents, that current state-of-the-art LMs are far from perfect performance in these real-life tasks, and that WebArena can be used to measure such progress. Our code, data, environment reproduction resources, and video demonstrations are publicly available at https://webarena.dev/.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are evolving at an unprecedented pace and have exhibited considerable capability in the realm of natural language processing (NLP) with world knowledge. Benefiting from ultra-large-scale training corpora, a single LLM can manage typical NLP tasks competently. However, its performance in executing reasoning tasks is still confined by the limitations of its internal representations. To push this boundary further, we introduce Corex in this paper, a suite of novel general-purpose strategies that transform LLMs into autonomous agents pioneering multi-model collaborations for complex task-solving. Inspired by human behaviors, Corex is constituted by diverse collaboration paradigms including Debate, Review, and Retrieve modes, which collectively work towards enhancing the factuality, faithfulness, and reliability of the reasoning process. These paradigms foster task-agnostic approaches that enable LLMs to ''think outside the box,'' thereby overcoming hallucinations and providing better solutions. Through extensive experiments across four different types of reasoning tasks, we demonstrate that orchestrating multiple LLMs to work in concert yields substantially better performance compared to existing methods. Further results and in-depth analysis demonstrate the cost-effectiveness of our method, facilitating collaboration among different LLMs and promoting annotation efficiency.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant progress in understanding complex natural language. One important application of LLM is LLM-based AI Agent, which leverages the ability of LLM as well as external tools for complex-task solving. To make sure LLM Agents follow an effective and reliable procedure to solve the given task, manually designed workflows are usually used to guide the working mechanism of agents. However, manually designing the workflows requires considerable efforts and domain knowledge, making it difficult to develop and deploy agents on massive scales. To address these issues, we propose AutoFlow, a framework designed to automatically generate workflows for agents to solve complex tasks. AutoFlow takes natural language program as the format of agent workflow and employs a workflow optimization procedure to iteratively optimize the workflow quality. Besides, this work offers two workflow generation methods: fine-tuning-based and in-context-based methods, making the AutoFlow framework applicable to both open-source and closed-source LLMs. Experimental results show that our framework can produce robust and reliable agent workflows. We believe that the automatic generation and interpretation of workflows in natural language represent a promising paradigm for solving complex tasks, particularly with the rapid development of LLMs. The source code of this work is available at https://github.com/agiresearch/AutoFlow.

Both Minsky's "society of mind" and Schmidhuber's "learning to think" inspire diverse societies of large multimodal neural networks (NNs) that solve problems by interviewing each other in a "mindstorm." Recent implementations of NN-based societies of minds consist of large language models (LLMs) and other NN-based experts communicating through a natural language interface. In doing so, they overcome the limitations of single LLMs, improving multimodal zero-shot reasoning. In these natural language-based societies of mind (NLSOMs), new agents -- all communicating through the same universal symbolic language -- are easily added in a modular fashion. To demonstrate the power of NLSOMs, we assemble and experiment with several of them (having up to 129 members), leveraging mindstorms in them to solve some practical AI tasks: visual question answering, image captioning, text-to-image synthesis, 3D generation, egocentric retrieval, embodied AI, and general language-based task solving. We view this as a starting point towards much larger NLSOMs with billions of agents-some of which may be humans. And with this emergence of great societies of heterogeneous minds, many new research questions have suddenly become paramount to the future of artificial intelligence. What should be the social structure of an NLSOM? What would be the (dis)advantages of having a monarchical rather than a democratic structure? How can principles of NN economies be used to maximize the total reward of a reinforcement learning NLSOM? In this work, we identify, discuss, and try to answer some of these questions.

The Explainable Detection of Online Sexism task presents the problem of explainable sexism detection through fine-grained categorisation of sexist cases with three subtasks. Our team experimented with different ways to combat class imbalance throughout the tasks using data augmentation and loss alteration techniques. We tackled the challenge by utilising ensembles of Transformer models trained on different datasets, which are tested to find the balance between performance and interpretability. This solution ranked us in the top 40\% of teams for each of the tracks.

The art of mathematical reasoning stands as a fundamental pillar of intellectual progress and is a central catalyst in cultivating human ingenuity. Researchers have recently published a plethora of works centered around the task of solving Math Word Problems (MWP) - a crucial stride towards general AI. These existing models are susceptible to dependency on shallow heuristics and spurious correlations to derive the solution expressions. In order to ameliorate this issue, in this paper, we propose a framework for MWP solvers based on the generation of linguistic variants of the problem text. The approach involves solving each of the variant problems and electing the predicted expression with the majority of the votes. We use DeBERTa (Decoding-enhanced BERT with disentangled attention) as the encoder to leverage its rich textual representations and enhanced mask decoder to construct the solution expressions. Furthermore, we introduce a challenging dataset, Psmall{ARAMAWPS}, consisting of paraphrased, adversarial, and inverse variants of selectively sampled MWPs from the benchmark Msmall{AWPS} dataset. We extensively experiment on this dataset along with other benchmark datasets using some baseline MWP solver models. We show that training on linguistic variants of problem statements and voting on candidate predictions improve the mathematical reasoning and robustness of the model. We make our code and data publicly available.

Visual reasoning refers to the task of solving questions about visual information. Current visual reasoning methods typically employ pre-trained vision-language model (VLM) strategies or deep neural network approaches. However, existing efforts are constrained by limited reasoning interpretability, while hindering by the phenomenon of underspecification in the question text. Additionally, the absence of fine-grained visual knowledge limits the precise understanding of subject behavior in visual reasoning tasks. To address these issues, we propose VIKSER (Visual Knowledge-Driven Self-Reinforcing Reasoning Framework). Specifically, VIKSER, trained using knowledge distilled from large language models, extracts fine-grained visual knowledge with the assistance of visual relationship detection techniques. Subsequently, VIKSER utilizes fine-grained visual knowledge to paraphrase the question with underspecification. Additionally, we design a novel prompting method called Chain-of-Evidence (CoE), which leverages the power of ``evidence for reasoning'' to endow VIKSER with interpretable reasoning capabilities. Meanwhile, the integration of self-reflection technology empowers VIKSER with the ability to learn and improve from its mistakes. Experiments conducted on widely used datasets demonstrate that VIKSER achieves new state-of-the-art (SOTA) results in relevant tasks.

The discipline of physics stands as a cornerstone of human intellect, driving the evolution of technology and deepening our understanding of the fundamental principles of the cosmos. Contemporary literature includes some works centered on the task of solving physics problems - a crucial domain of natural language reasoning. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of frontier LLMs in solving physics problems, both mathematical and descriptive. We also employ a plethora of inference-time techniques and agentic frameworks to improve the performance of the models. This includes the verification of proposed solutions in a cumulative fashion by other, smaller LLM agents, and we perform a comparative analysis of the performance that the techniques entail. There are significant improvements when the multi-agent framework is applied to problems that the models initially perform poorly on. Furthermore, we introduce a new evaluation benchmark for physics problems, {rm P{small HYSICS}E{small VAL}}, consisting of 19,609 problems sourced from various physics textbooks and their corresponding correct solutions scraped from physics forums and educational websites. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/areebuzair/PhysicsEval.

Visual reasoning is dominated by end-to-end neural networks scaled to billions of model parameters and training examples. However, even the largest models struggle with compositional reasoning, generalization, fine-grained spatial and temporal reasoning, and counting. Visual reasoning with large language models (LLMs) as controllers can, in principle, address these limitations by decomposing the task and solving subtasks by orchestrating a set of (visual) tools. Recently, these models achieved great performance on tasks such as compositional visual question answering, visual grounding, and video temporal reasoning. Nevertheless, in their current form, these models heavily rely on human engineering of in-context examples in the prompt, which are often dataset- and task-specific and require significant labor by highly skilled programmers. In this work, we present a framework that mitigates these issues by introducing spatially and temporally abstract routines and by leveraging a small number of labeled examples to automatically generate in-context examples, thereby avoiding human-created in-context examples. On a number of visual reasoning tasks, we show that our framework leads to consistent gains in performance, makes LLMs as controllers setup more robust, and removes the need for human engineering of in-context examples.

A digital twin is a virtual replica of a real-world physical phenomena that uses mathematical modeling to characterize and simulate its defining features. By constructing digital twins for disease processes, we can perform in-silico simulations that mimic patients' health conditions and counterfactual outcomes under hypothetical interventions in a virtual setting. This eliminates the need for invasive procedures or uncertain treatment decisions. In this paper, we propose a method to identify digital twin model parameters using only noninvasive patient health data. We approach the digital twin modeling as a composite inverse problem, and observe that its structure resembles pretraining and finetuning in self-supervised learning (SSL). Leveraging this, we introduce a physics-informed SSL algorithm that initially pretrains a neural network on the pretext task of solving the physical model equations. Subsequently, the model is trained to reconstruct low-dimensional health measurements from noninvasive modalities while being constrained by the physical equations learned in pretraining. We apply our method to identify digital twins of cardiac hemodynamics using noninvasive echocardiogram videos, and demonstrate its utility in unsupervised disease detection and in-silico clinical trials.

Although pre-trained language models~(PLMs) have recently advanced the research progress in mathematical reasoning, they are not specially designed as a capable multi-task solver, suffering from high cost for multi-task deployment (\eg a model copy for a task) and inferior performance on complex mathematical problems in practical applications. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose JiuZhang~2.0, a unified Chinese PLM specially for multi-task mathematical problem solving. Our idea is to maintain a moderate-sized model and employ the cross-task knowledge sharing to improve the model capacity in a multi-task setting. Specially, we construct a Mixture-of-Experts~(MoE) architecture for modeling mathematical text, so as to capture the common mathematical knowledge across tasks. For optimizing the MoE architecture, we design multi-task continual pre-training and multi-task fine-tuning strategies for multi-task adaptation. These training strategies can effectively decompose the knowledge from the task data and establish the cross-task sharing via expert networks. In order to further improve the general capacity of solving different complex tasks, we leverage large language models~(LLMs) as complementary models to iteratively refine the generated solution by our PLM, via in-context learning. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of our model.

This paper presents our submission to the SemEval 2024 Task 5: The Legal Argument Reasoning Task in Civil Procedure. We present two approaches to solving the task of legal answer validation, given an introduction to the case, a question and an answer candidate. Firstly, we fine-tuned pre-trained BERT-based models and found that models trained on domain knowledge perform better. Secondly, we performed few-shot prompting on GPT models and found that reformulating the answer validation task to be a multiple-choice QA task remarkably improves the performance of the model. Our best submission is a BERT-based model that achieved the 7th place out of 20.

Many practical applications, such as recommender systems and learning to rank, involve solving multiple similar tasks. One example is learning of recommendation policies for users with similar movie preferences, where the users may still rank the individual movies slightly differently. Such tasks can be organized in a hierarchy, where similar tasks are related through a shared structure. In this work, we formulate this problem as a contextual off-policy optimization in a hierarchical graphical model from logged bandit feedback. To solve the problem, we propose a hierarchical off-policy optimization algorithm (HierOPO), which estimates the parameters of the hierarchical model and then acts pessimistically with respect to them. We instantiate HierOPO in linear Gaussian models, for which we also provide an efficient implementation and analysis. We prove per-task bounds on the suboptimality of the learned policies, which show a clear improvement over not using the hierarchical model. We also evaluate the policies empirically. Our theoretical and empirical results show a clear advantage of using the hierarchy over solving each task independently.

Reinforcement learning (RL) problems can be challenging without well-shaped rewards. Prior work on provably efficient RL methods generally proposes to address this issue with dedicated exploration strategies. However, another way to tackle this challenge is to reformulate it as a multi-task RL problem, where the task space contains not only the challenging task of interest but also easier tasks that implicitly function as a curriculum. Such a reformulation opens up the possibility of running existing multi-task RL methods as a more efficient alternative to solving a single challenging task from scratch. In this work, we provide a theoretical framework that reformulates a single-task RL problem as a multi-task RL problem defined by a curriculum. Under mild regularity conditions on the curriculum, we show that sequentially solving each task in the multi-task RL problem is more computationally efficient than solving the original single-task problem, without any explicit exploration bonuses or other exploration strategies. We also show that our theoretical insights can be translated into an effective practical learning algorithm that can accelerate curriculum learning on simulated robotic tasks.

Even when massively overparameterized, deep neural networks show a remarkable ability to generalize. Research on this phenomenon has focused on generalization within distribution, via smooth interpolation. Yet in some settings neural networks also learn to extrapolate to data far beyond the bounds of the original training set, sometimes even allowing for infinite generalization, implying that an algorithm capable of solving the task has been learned. Here we undertake a case study of the learning dynamics of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) trained on the streaming parity task in order to develop an effective theory of algorithm development. The streaming parity task is a simple but nonlinear task defined on sequences up to arbitrary length. We show that, with sufficient finite training experience, RNNs exhibit a phase transition to perfect infinite generalization. Using an effective theory for the representational dynamics, we find an implicit representational merger effect which can be interpreted as the construction of a finite automaton that reproduces the task. Overall, our results disclose one mechanism by which neural networks can generalize infinitely from finite training experience.

While large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 have recently demonstrated astonishing zero-shot capabilities in general domain tasks, they often generate content with hallucinations in specific domains such as Chinese law, hindering their application in these areas. This is typically due to the absence of training data that encompasses such a specific domain, preventing GPT-4 from acquiring in-domain knowledge. A pressing challenge is that it's not plausible to continue training LLMs of such scale on in-domain data. This paper introduces a simple and effective domain adaptation framework for GPT-4 by reformulating generation as an adapt-retrieve-revise process. The initial step is to adapt an affordable 7B LLM to the target domain by continuing learning on in-domain data. When solving a task, we leverage the adapted LLM to generate a draft answer given a task query. Then, the draft answer will be used to retrieve supporting evidence candidates from an external in-domain knowledge base. Finally, the draft answer and retrieved evidence are concatenated into a whole prompt to let GPT-4 assess the evidence and revise the draft answer to generate the final answer. Our proposal combines the advantages of the efficiency of adapting a smaller 7B model with the evidence-assessing capability of GPT-4 and effectively prevents GPT-4 from generating hallucinatory content. In the zero-shot setting of four Chinese legal tasks, our method improves accuracy by 33.3\% compared to the direct generation by GPT-4. When compared to two stronger retrieval-based baselines, our method outperforms them by 15.4\% and 23.9\%. Our code will be released

Varying dynamics parameters in simulation is a popular Domain Randomization (DR) approach for overcoming the reality gap in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Nevertheless, DR heavily hinges on the choice of the sampling distribution of the dynamics parameters, since high variability is crucial to regularize the agent's behavior but notoriously leads to overly conservative policies when randomizing excessively. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to address sim-to-real transfer, which automatically shapes dynamics distributions during training in simulation without requiring real-world data. We introduce DOmain RAndomization via Entropy MaximizatiON (DORAEMON), a constrained optimization problem that directly maximizes the entropy of the training distribution while retaining generalization capabilities. In achieving this, DORAEMON gradually increases the diversity of sampled dynamics parameters as long as the probability of success of the current policy is sufficiently high. We empirically validate the consistent benefits of DORAEMON in obtaining highly adaptive and generalizable policies, i.e. solving the task at hand across the widest range of dynamics parameters, as opposed to representative baselines from the DR literature. Notably, we also demonstrate the Sim2Real applicability of DORAEMON through its successful zero-shot transfer in a robotic manipulation setup under unknown real-world parameters.

Images are a convenient way to specify which particular object instance an embodied agent should navigate to. Solving this task requires semantic visual reasoning and exploration of unknown environments. We present a system that can perform this task in both simulation and the real world. Our modular method solves sub-tasks of exploration, goal instance re-identification, goal localization, and local navigation. We re-identify the goal instance in egocentric vision using feature-matching and localize the goal instance by projecting matched features to a map. Each sub-task is solved using off-the-shelf components requiring zero fine-tuning. On the HM3D InstanceImageNav benchmark, this system outperforms a baseline end-to-end RL policy 7x and a state-of-the-art ImageNav model 2.3x (56% vs 25% success). We deploy this system to a mobile robot platform and demonstrate effective real-world performance, achieving an 88% success rate across a home and an office environment.

We introduce a new in-context learning paradigm to measure Large Language Models' (LLMs) ability to learn novel words during inference. In particular, we rewrite Winograd-style co-reference resolution problems by replacing the key concept word with a synthetic but plausible word that the model must understand to complete the task. Solving this task requires the model to make use of the dictionary definition of the new word given in the prompt. This benchmark addresses word acquisition, one important aspect of the diachronic degradation known to afflict LLMs. As LLMs are frozen in time at the moment they are trained, they are normally unable to reflect the way language changes over time. We show that the accuracy of LLMs compared to the original Winograd tasks decreases radically in our benchmark, thus identifying a limitation of current models and providing a benchmark to measure future improvements in LLMs ability to do in-context learning.

We present a joint audio-visual model for isolating a single speech signal from a mixture of sounds such as other speakers and background noise. Solving this task using only audio as input is extremely challenging and does not provide an association of the separated speech signals with speakers in the video. In this paper, we present a deep network-based model that incorporates both visual and auditory signals to solve this task. The visual features are used to "focus" the audio on desired speakers in a scene and to improve the speech separation quality. To train our joint audio-visual model, we introduce AVSpeech, a new dataset comprised of thousands of hours of video segments from the Web. We demonstrate the applicability of our method to classic speech separation tasks, as well as real-world scenarios involving heated interviews, noisy bars, and screaming children, only requiring the user to specify the face of the person in the video whose speech they want to isolate. Our method shows clear advantage over state-of-the-art audio-only speech separation in cases of mixed speech. In addition, our model, which is speaker-independent (trained once, applicable to any speaker), produces better results than recent audio-visual speech separation methods that are speaker-dependent (require training a separate model for each speaker of interest).

We study building a multi-task agent in Minecraft. Without human demonstrations, solving long-horizon tasks in this open-ended environment with reinforcement learning (RL) is extremely sample inefficient. To tackle the challenge, we decompose solving Minecraft tasks into learning basic skills and planning over the skills. We propose three types of fine-grained basic skills in Minecraft, and use RL with intrinsic rewards to accomplish basic skills with high success rates. For skill planning, we use Large Language Models to find the relationships between skills and build a skill graph in advance. When the agent is solving a task, our skill search algorithm walks on the skill graph and generates the proper skill plans for the agent. In experiments, our method accomplishes 24 diverse Minecraft tasks, where many tasks require sequentially executing for more than 10 skills. Our method outperforms baselines in most tasks by a large margin. The project's website and code can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/plan4mc.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capability in reasoning and planning when integrated with tree-search-based prompting methods. However, since these methods ignore the previous search experiences, they often make the same mistakes in the search process. To address this issue, we introduce Reflection on search Trees (RoT), an LLM reflection framework designed to improve the performance of tree-search-based prompting methods. It uses a strong LLM to summarize guidelines from previous tree search experiences to enhance the ability of a weak LLM. The guidelines are instructions about solving this task through tree search which can prevent the weak LLMs from making similar mistakes in the past search process. In addition, we proposed a novel state selection method, which identifies the critical information from historical search processes to help RoT generate more specific and meaningful guidelines. In our extensive experiments, we find that RoT significantly improves the performance of LLMs in reasoning or planning tasks with various tree-search-based prompting methods (e.g., BFS and MCTS). Non-tree-search-based prompting methods such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) can also benefit from RoT guidelines since RoT can provide task-specific knowledge collected from the search experience.

Open-domain question answering aims at solving the task of locating the answers to user-generated questions in massive collections of documents. There are two families of solutions available: retriever-readers, and knowledge-graph-based approaches. A retriever-reader usually first uses information retrieval methods like TF-IDF to locate some documents or paragraphs that are likely to be relevant to the question, and then feeds the retrieved text to a neural network reader to extract the answer. Alternatively, knowledge graphs can be constructed from the corpus and be queried against to answer user questions. We propose a novel algorithm with a reader-retriever structure that differs from both families. Our reader-retriever first uses an offline reader to read the corpus and generate collections of all answerable questions associated with their answers, and then uses an online retriever to respond to user queries by searching the pre-constructed question spaces for answers that are most likely to be asked in the given way. We further combine retriever-reader and reader-retriever results into one single answer by examining the consistency between the two components. We claim that our algorithm solves some bottlenecks in existing work, and demonstrate that it achieves superior accuracy on real-world datasets.

Video anomaly detection (VAD) without human monitoring is a complex computer vision task that can have a positive impact on society if implemented successfully. While recent advances have made significant progress in solving this task, most existing approaches overlook a critical real-world concern: privacy. With the increasing popularity of artificial intelligence technologies, it becomes crucial to implement proper AI ethics into their development. Privacy leakage in VAD allows models to pick up and amplify unnecessary biases related to people's personal information, which may lead to undesirable decision making. In this paper, we propose TeD-SPAD, a privacy-aware video anomaly detection framework that destroys visual private information in a self-supervised manner. In particular, we propose the use of a temporally-distinct triplet loss to promote temporally discriminative features, which complements current weakly-supervised VAD methods. Using TeD-SPAD, we achieve a positive trade-off between privacy protection and utility anomaly detection performance on three popular weakly supervised VAD datasets: UCF-Crime, XD-Violence, and ShanghaiTech. Our proposed anonymization model reduces private attribute prediction by 32.25% while only reducing frame-level ROC AUC on the UCF-Crime anomaly detection dataset by 3.69%. Project Page: https://joefioresi718.github.io/TeD-SPAD_webpage/

Answer sentence selection is the task of identifying sentences that contain the answer to a given question. This is an important problem in its own right as well as in the larger context of open domain question answering. We propose a novel approach to solving this task via means of distributed representations, and learn to match questions with answers by considering their semantic encoding. This contrasts prior work on this task, which typically relies on classifiers with large numbers of hand-crafted syntactic and semantic features and various external resources. Our approach does not require any feature engineering nor does it involve specialist linguistic data, making this model easily applicable to a wide range of domains and languages. Experimental results on a standard benchmark dataset from TREC demonstrate that---despite its simplicity---our model matches state of the art performance on the answer sentence selection task.

When artificial agents are jointly trained to perform collaborative tasks using a communication channel, they develop opaque goal-oriented communication protocols. Good task performance is often considered sufficient evidence that meaningful communication is taking place, but existing empirical results show that communication strategies induced by common objectives can be counterintuitive whilst solving the task nearly perfectly. In this work, we identify a goal-agnostic prerequisite to meaningful communication, which we term semantic consistency, based on the idea that messages should have similar meanings across instances. We provide a formal definition for this idea, and use it to compare the two most common objectives in the field of emergent communication: discrimination and reconstruction. We prove, under mild assumptions, that semantically inconsistent communication protocols can be optimal solutions to the discrimination task, but not to reconstruction. We further show that the reconstruction objective encourages a stricter property, spatial meaningfulness, which also accounts for the distance between messages. Experiments with emergent communication games validate our theoretical results. These findings demonstrate an inherent advantage of distance-based communication goals, and contextualize previous empirical discoveries.

The goal of self-supervised learning from images is to construct image representations that are semantically meaningful via pretext tasks that do not require semantic annotations for a large training set of images. Many pretext tasks lead to representations that are covariant with image transformations. We argue that, instead, semantic representations ought to be invariant under such transformations. Specifically, we develop Pretext-Invariant Representation Learning (PIRL, pronounced as "pearl") that learns invariant representations based on pretext tasks. We use PIRL with a commonly used pretext task that involves solving jigsaw puzzles. We find that PIRL substantially improves the semantic quality of the learned image representations. Our approach sets a new state-of-the-art in self-supervised learning from images on several popular benchmarks for self-supervised learning. Despite being unsupervised, PIRL outperforms supervised pre-training in learning image representations for object detection. Altogether, our results demonstrate the potential of self-supervised learning of image representations with good invariance properties.

Deep Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) show promising performance on a range of graph tasks, yet at present are costly to run and lack many of the optimisations applied to DNNs. We show, for the first time, how to systematically quantise GNNs with minimal or no loss in performance using Network Architecture Search (NAS). We define the possible quantisation search space of GNNs. The proposed novel NAS mechanism, named Low Precision Graph NAS (LPGNAS), constrains both architecture and quantisation choices to be differentiable. LPGNAS learns the optimal architecture coupled with the best quantisation strategy for different components in the GNN automatically using back-propagation in a single search round. On eight different datasets, solving the task of classifying unseen nodes in a graph, LPGNAS generates quantised models with significant reductions in both model and buffer sizes but with similar accuracy to manually designed networks and other NAS results. In particular, on the Pubmed dataset, LPGNAS shows a better size-accuracy Pareto frontier compared to seven other manual and searched baselines, offering a 2.3 times reduction in model size but a 0.4% increase in accuracy when compared to the best NAS competitor. Finally, from our collected quantisation statistics on a wide range of datasets, we suggest a W4A8 (4-bit weights, 8-bit activations) quantisation strategy might be the bottleneck for naive GNN quantisations.

Many commonsense reasoning NLP tasks involve choosing between one or more possible answers to a question or prompt based on knowledge that is often implicit. Large pretrained language models (PLMs) can achieve near-human performance on such tasks, while providing little human-interpretable evidence of the underlying reasoning they use. In this work, we show how to use these same models to generate such evidence: inspired by the contrastive nature of human explanations, we use PLMs to complete explanation prompts which contrast alternatives according to the key attribute(s) required to justify the correct answer (for example, peanuts are usually salty while raisins are sweet). Conditioning model decisions on these explanations improves performance on two commonsense reasoning benchmarks, as compared to previous non-contrastive alternatives. These explanations are also judged by humans to be more relevant for solving the task, and facilitate a novel method to evaluate explanation faithfulfness.

Pretraining general-purpose visual features has become a crucial part of tackling many computer vision tasks. While one can learn such features on the extensively-annotated ImageNet dataset, recent approaches have looked at ways to allow for noisy, fewer, or even no annotations to perform such pretraining. Starting from the observation that captioned images are easily crawlable, we argue that this overlooked source of information can be exploited to supervise the training of visual representations. To do so, motivated by the recent progresses in language models, we introduce {\em image-conditioned masked language modeling} (ICMLM) -- a proxy task to learn visual representations over image-caption pairs. ICMLM consists in predicting masked words in captions by relying on visual cues. To tackle this task, we propose hybrid models, with dedicated visual and textual encoders, and we show that the visual representations learned as a by-product of solving this task transfer well to a variety of target tasks. Our experiments confirm that image captions can be leveraged to inject global and localized semantic information into visual representations. Project website: https://europe.naverlabs.com/icmlm.

Large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs) are well-known for being capable of solving a task simply by conditioning a few input-label pairs dubbed demonstrations on a prompt without being explicitly tuned for the desired downstream task. Such a process (i.e., in-context learning), however, naturally leads to high reliance on the demonstrations which are usually selected from external datasets. In this paper, we propose self-generated in-context learning (SG-ICL), which generates demonstrations for in-context learning from PLM itself to minimize the reliance on the external demonstration. We conduct experiments on four different text classification tasks and show SG-ICL significantly outperforms zero-shot learning and is generally worth approximately 0.6 gold training samples. Moreover, our generated demonstrations show more consistent performance with low variance compared to randomly selected demonstrations from the training dataset.

Causal language modeling using the Transformer architecture has yielded remarkable capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) over the last few years. However, the extent to which fundamental search and reasoning capabilities emerged within LLMs remains a topic of ongoing debate. In this work, we study if causal language modeling can learn a complex task such as solving Sudoku puzzles. To solve a Sudoku, the model is first required to search over all empty cells of the puzzle to decide on a cell to fill and then apply an appropriate strategy to fill the decided cell. Sometimes, the application of a strategy only results in thinning down the possible values in a cell rather than concluding the exact value of the cell. In such cases, multiple strategies are applied one after the other to fill a single cell. We observe that Transformer models trained on this synthetic task can indeed learn to solve Sudokus (our model solves 94.21% of the puzzles fully correctly) when trained on a logical sequence of steps taken by a solver. We find that training Transformers with the logical sequence of steps is necessary and without such training, they fail to learn Sudoku. We also extend our analysis to Zebra puzzles (known as Einstein puzzles) and show that the model solves 92.04 % of the puzzles fully correctly. In addition, we study the internal representations of the trained Transformer and find that through linear probing, we can decode information about the set of possible values in any given cell from them, pointing to the presence of a strong reasoning engine implicit in the Transformer weights.

With the growing popularity of LLM agents and RAG, it has become increasingly important to retrieve documents that are essential for solving a task, even when their connection to the task is indirect or implicit. Addressing this problem requires fine-grained reasoning to accurately assess the relevance between the task and each candidate document. This capability, however, poses a significant challenge for existing IR techniques. Despite recent progress in reasoning-enhanced IR, existing approaches still face significant challenges in applicability, scalability, and efficiency. In this work, we propose Retro*, a novel approach for reasoning-intensive document retrieval. Our method introduces a rubric-based relevance scoring mechanism, enabling the model to reason about the relationship between a task and a document based on explicitly defined criteria, whereby producing a fine-grained, interpretable relevance score. Retro* also supports test-time scaling by combining multiple reasoning trajectories via score integration, which produces more reliable relevance estimates. To optimize Retro*'s reasoning capabilities, we introduce a novel reinforcement learning algorithm tailored for its relevance scoring mechanism, which employs two composite rewards to fully exploit the trajectories of each training sample. Our experiments show that Retro* outperforms existing document retrieval methods with notable advantages, leading to state-of-the-art performance on the BRIGHT benchmark.

Large Language Models (LLMs) can interact with the real world by connecting with versatile external APIs, resulting in better problem-solving and task automation capabilities. Previous research primarily focuses on APIs with limited arguments from a single source or overlooks the complex dependency relationship between different APIs. However, it is essential to utilize multiple APIs collaboratively from various sources (e.g., different Apps in the iPhone), especially for complex user instructions. In this paper, we introduce AppBench, the first benchmark to evaluate LLMs' ability to plan and execute multiple APIs from various sources in order to complete the user's task. Specifically, we consider two significant challenges in multiple APIs: 1) graph structures: some APIs can be executed independently while others need to be executed one by one, resulting in graph-like execution order; and 2) permission constraints: which source is authorized to execute the API call. We have experimental results on 9 distinct LLMs; e.g., GPT-4o achieves only a 2.0\% success rate at the most complex instruction, revealing that the existing state-of-the-art LLMs still cannot perform well in this situation even with the help of in-context learning and finetuning. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/ruleGreen/AppBench.

Reward specification is a notoriously difficult problem in reinforcement learning, requiring extensive expert supervision to design robust reward functions. Imitation learning (IL) methods attempt to circumvent these problems by utilizing expert demonstrations but typically require a large number of in-domain expert demonstrations. Inspired by advances in the field of Video-and-Language Models (VLMs), we present RoboCLIP, an online imitation learning method that uses a single demonstration (overcoming the large data requirement) in the form of a video demonstration or a textual description of the task to generate rewards without manual reward function design. Additionally, RoboCLIP can also utilize out-of-domain demonstrations, like videos of humans solving the task for reward generation, circumventing the need to have the same demonstration and deployment domains. RoboCLIP utilizes pretrained VLMs without any finetuning for reward generation. Reinforcement learning agents trained with RoboCLIP rewards demonstrate 2-3 times higher zero-shot performance than competing imitation learning methods on downstream robot manipulation tasks, doing so using only one video/text demonstration.

With the recent advances in natural language processing (NLP), a vast number of applications have emerged across various use cases. Among the plethora of NLP applications, many academic researchers are motivated to do work that has a positive social impact, in line with the recent initiatives of NLP for Social Good (NLP4SG). However, it is not always obvious to researchers how their research efforts are tackling today's big social problems. Thus, in this paper, we introduce NLP4SGPAPERS, a scientific dataset with three associated tasks that can help identify NLP4SG papers and characterize the NLP4SG landscape by: (1) identifying the papers that address a social problem, (2) mapping them to the corresponding UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and (3) identifying the task they are solving and the methods they are using. Using state-of-the-art NLP models, we address each of these tasks and use them on the entire ACL Anthology, resulting in a visualization workspace that gives researchers a comprehensive overview of the field of NLP4SG. Our website is available at https://nlp4sg.vercel.app . We released our data at https://huggingface.co/datasets/feradauto/NLP4SGPapers and code at https://github.com/feradauto/nlp4sg .

Multi-task learning (MTL) is an inductive transfer mechanism designed to leverage useful information from multiple tasks to improve generalization performance compared to single-task learning. It has been extensively explored in traditional machine learning to address issues such as data sparsity and overfitting in neural networks. In this work, we apply MTL to problems in science and engineering governed by partial differential equations (PDEs). However, implementing MTL in this context is complex, as it requires task-specific modifications to accommodate various scenarios representing different physical processes. To this end, we present a multi-task deep operator network (MT-DeepONet) to learn solutions across various functional forms of source terms in a PDE and multiple geometries in a single concurrent training session. We introduce modifications in the branch network of the vanilla DeepONet to account for various functional forms of a parameterized coefficient in a PDE. Additionally, we handle parameterized geometries by introducing a binary mask in the branch network and incorporating it into the loss term to improve convergence and generalization to new geometry tasks. Our approach is demonstrated on three benchmark problems: (1) learning different functional forms of the source term in the Fisher equation; (2) learning multiple geometries in a 2D Darcy Flow problem and showcasing better transfer learning capabilities to new geometries; and (3) learning 3D parameterized geometries for a heat transfer problem and demonstrate the ability to predict on new but similar geometries. Our MT-DeepONet framework offers a novel approach to solving PDE problems in engineering and science under a unified umbrella based on synergistic learning that reduces the overall training cost for neural operators.

We present the Process Engineering Operations Assistant (PEOA), an AI-driven framework designed to solve complex problems in the chemical and process industries. The framework employs a modular architecture orchestrated by a meta-agent, which serves as the central coordinator, managing an action generator and instruction-tuned small-scale language models (expert models). The action generator decomposes complex problems into sub-tasks and identifies suitable expert models to execute each, delivering precise solutions for multi-step problem-solving. Key techniques include advanced knowledge modeling using property graphs for improved information retrieval, facilitating more accurate and contextually relevant solutions. Additionally, the framework utilizes a teacher-student transfer-learning approach with GPT-4 (Omni) to fine-tune the action generator and expert models for domain adaptation, alongside an iterative problem-solving mechanism with sophisticated error handling. Custom datasets were developed to evaluate the framework against leading proprietary language models on various engineering tasks. The results demonstrate the framework effectiveness in automating calculations, accelerating prototyping, and providing AI-augmented decision support for industrial processes, marking a significant advancement in process engineering capabilities.

Retouching is an essential task in post-manipulation of raw photographs. Generative editing, guided by text or strokes, provides a new tool accessible to users but can easily change the identity of the original objects in unacceptable and unpredictable ways. In contrast, although traditional procedural edits, as commonly supported by photoediting tools (e.g., Gimp, Lightroom), are conservative, they are still preferred by professionals. Unfortunately, professional quality retouching involves many individual procedural editing operations that is challenging to plan for most novices. In this paper, we ask if a multimodal large language model (MLLM) can be taught to critique raw photographs, suggest suitable remedies, and finally realize them with a given set of pre-authored procedural image operations. We demonstrate that MLLMs can be first made aware of the underlying image processing operations, by training them to solve specially designed visual puzzles. Subsequently, such an operation-aware MLLM can both plan and propose edit sequences. To facilitate training, given a set of expert-edited photos, we synthesize a reasoning dataset by procedurally manipulating the expert edits and then grounding a pretrained LLM on the visual adjustments, to synthesize reasoning for finetuning. The proposed retouching operations are, by construction, understandable by the users, preserve object details and resolution, and can be optionally overridden. We evaluate our setup on a variety of test examples and show advantages, in terms of explainability and identity preservation, over existing generative and other procedural alternatives. Code, data, models, and supplementary results can be found via our project website at https://monetgpt.github.io.

The task of predicting time and location from images is challenging and requires complex human-like puzzle-solving ability over different clues. In this work, we formalize this ability into core skills and implement them using different modules in an expert pipeline called PuzzleGPT. PuzzleGPT consists of a perceiver to identify visual clues, a reasoner to deduce prediction candidates, a combiner to combinatorially combine information from different clues, a web retriever to get external knowledge if the task can't be solved locally, and a noise filter for robustness. This results in a zero-shot, interpretable, and robust approach that records state-of-the-art performance on two datasets -- TARA and WikiTilo. PuzzleGPT outperforms large VLMs such as BLIP-2, InstructBLIP, LLaVA, and even GPT-4V, as well as automatically generated reasoning pipelines like VisProg, by at least 32% and 38%, respectively. It even rivals or surpasses finetuned models.

Dialogue systems need to deal with the unpredictability of user intents to track dialogue state and the heterogeneity of slots to understand user preferences. In this paper we investigate the hypothesis that solving these challenges as one unified model will allow the transfer of parameter support data across the different tasks. The proposed principled model is based on a Transformer encoder, trained on multiple tasks, and leveraged by a rich input that conditions the model on the target inferences. Conditioning the Transformer encoder on multiple target inferences over the same corpus, i.e., intent and multiple slot types, allows learning richer language interactions than a single-task model would be able to. In fact, experimental results demonstrate that conditioning the model on an increasing number of dialogue inference tasks leads to improved results: on the MultiWOZ dataset, the joint intent and slot detection can be improved by 3.2\% by conditioning on intent, 10.8\% by conditioning on slot and 14.4\% by conditioning on both intent and slots. Moreover, on real conversations with Farfetch costumers, the proposed conditioned BERT can achieve high joint-goal and intent detection performance throughout a dialogue.

Geometry problem solving has attracted much attention in the NLP community recently. The task is challenging as it requires abstract problem understanding and symbolic reasoning with axiomatic knowledge. However, current datasets are either small in scale or not publicly available. Thus, we construct a new large-scale benchmark, Geometry3K, consisting of 3,002 geometry problems with dense annotation in formal language. We further propose a novel geometry solving approach with formal language and symbolic reasoning, called Interpretable Geometry Problem Solver (Inter-GPS). Inter-GPS first parses the problem text and diagram into formal language automatically via rule-based text parsing and neural object detecting, respectively. Unlike implicit learning in existing methods, Inter-GPS incorporates theorem knowledge as conditional rules and performs symbolic reasoning step by step. Also, a theorem predictor is designed to infer the theorem application sequence fed to the symbolic solver for the more efficient and reasonable searching path. Extensive experiments on the Geometry3K and GEOS datasets demonstrate that Inter-GPS achieves significant improvements over existing methods. The project with code and data is available at https://lupantech.github.io/inter-gps.

Modern AI agents, driven by advances in large foundation models, promise to enhance our productivity and transform our lives by augmenting our knowledge and capabilities. To achieve this vision, AI agents must effectively plan, perform multi-step reasoning and actions, respond to novel observations, and recover from errors, to successfully complete complex tasks across a wide range of scenarios. In this work, we introduce Magentic-One, a high-performing open-source agentic system for solving such tasks. Magentic-One uses a multi-agent architecture where a lead agent, the Orchestrator, plans, tracks progress, and re-plans to recover from errors. Throughout task execution, the Orchestrator directs other specialized agents to perform tasks as needed, such as operating a web browser, navigating local files, or writing and executing Python code. We show that Magentic-One achieves statistically competitive performance to the state-of-the-art on three diverse and challenging agentic benchmarks: GAIA, AssistantBench, and WebArena. Magentic-One achieves these results without modification to core agent capabilities or to how they collaborate, demonstrating progress towards generalist agentic systems. Moreover, Magentic-One's modular design allows agents to be added or removed from the team without additional prompt tuning or training, easing development and making it extensible to future scenarios. We provide an open-source implementation of Magentic-One, and we include AutoGenBench, a standalone tool for agentic evaluation. AutoGenBench provides built-in controls for repetition and isolation to run agentic benchmarks in a rigorous and contained manner -- which is important when agents' actions have side-effects. Magentic-One, AutoGenBench and detailed empirical performance evaluations of Magentic-One, including ablations and error analysis are available at https://aka.ms/magentic-one

With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), applying large language models (LLMs) to Operations Research (OR) problem-solving has attracted increasing attention. Most existing approaches attempt to improve OR problem-solving through prompt engineering or fine-tuning strategies for LLMs. However, these methods are fundamentally constrained by the limited capabilities of non-reasoning LLMs. To overcome these limitations, we propose OR-LLM-Agent, an AI agent built on reasoning LLMs for automated OR problem solving. The agent decomposes the task into three sequential stages: mathematical modeling, code generation, and debugging. Each task is handled by a dedicated sub-agent, which enables more targeted reasoning. We also construct BWOR, a high-quality dataset for evaluating LLM performance on OR tasks. Our analysis shows that existing benchmarks such as NL4OPT, MAMO, and IndustryOR suffer from certain issues, making them less suitable for reliably evaluating LLM performance. In contrast, BWOR provides a more consistent and discriminative assessment of model capabilities. Experimental results demonstrate that OR-LLM-Agent outperforms advanced methods, including GPT-o3, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and ORLM, by at least 7% in accuracy. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of task decomposition for OR problem solving.

We explore the ability of large language models to solve and generate puzzles from the NPR Sunday Puzzle game show using PUZZLEQA, a dataset comprising 15 years of on-air puzzles. We evaluate four large language models using PUZZLEQA, in both multiple choice and free response formats, and explore two prompt engineering techniques to improve free response performance: chain-of-thought reasoning and prompt summarization. We find that state-of-the-art large language models can solve many PUZZLEQA puzzles: the best model, GPT-3.5, achieves 50.2% loose accuracy. However, in our few-shot puzzle generation experiment, we find no evidence that models can generate puzzles: GPT-3.5 generates puzzles with answers that do not conform to the generated rules. Puzzle generation remains a challenging task for future work.

Solving multiple visual tasks using individual models can be resource-intensive, while multi-task learning can conserve resources by sharing knowledge across different tasks. Despite the benefits of multi-task learning, such techniques can struggle with balancing the loss for each task, leading to potential performance degradation. We present a novel computation- and parameter-sharing framework that balances efficiency and accuracy to perform multiple visual tasks utilizing individually-trained single-task transformers. Our method is motivated by transfer learning schemes to reduce computational and parameter storage costs while maintaining the desired performance. Our approach involves splitting the tasks into a base task and the other sub-tasks, and sharing a significant portion of activations and parameters/weights between the base and sub-tasks to decrease inter-task redundancies and enhance knowledge sharing. The evaluation conducted on NYUD-v2 and PASCAL-context datasets shows that our method is superior to the state-of-the-art transformer-based multi-task learning techniques with higher accuracy and reduced computational resources. Moreover, our method is extended to video stream inputs, further reducing computational costs by efficiently sharing information across the temporal domain as well as the task domain. Our codes and models will be publicly available.

Single-task models have proven pivotal in solving specific tasks; however, they have limitations in real-world applications where multi-tasking is necessary and domain shifts are exhibited. Recently, instructional prompts have shown significant improvement towards multi-task generalization; however, the effect of instructional prompts and Multi-Task Learning (MTL) has not been systematically studied in the biomedical domain. Motivated by this, this paper explores the impact of instructional prompts for biomedical MTL. We introduce the BoX, a collection of 32 instruction tasks for Biomedical NLP across (X) various categories. Using this meta-dataset, we propose a unified model termed In-BoXBART, that can jointly learn all tasks of the BoX without any task-specific modules. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to propose a unified model in the biomedical domain and use instructions to achieve generalization across several biomedical tasks. Experimental results indicate that the proposed model: 1) outperforms the single-task baseline by ~3% and multi-task (without instruction) baseline by ~18% on an average, and 2) shows ~23% improvement compared to the single-task baseline in few-shot learning (i.e., 32 instances per task) on an average. Our analysis indicates that there is significant room for improvement across tasks in the BoX, implying the scope for future research direction.

Inequality proving, crucial across diverse scientific and mathematical fields, tests advanced reasoning skills such as discovering tight bounds and strategic theorem application. This makes it a distinct, demanding frontier for large language models (LLMs), offering insights beyond general mathematical problem-solving. Progress in this area is hampered by existing datasets that are often scarce, synthetic, or rigidly formal. We address this by proposing an informal yet verifiable task formulation, recasting inequality proving into two automatically checkable subtasks: bound estimation and relation prediction. Building on this, we release IneqMath, an expert-curated dataset of Olympiad-level inequalities, including a test set and training corpus enriched with step-wise solutions and theorem annotations. We also develop a novel LLM-as-judge evaluation framework, combining a final-answer judge with four step-wise judges designed to detect common reasoning flaws. A systematic evaluation of 29 leading LLMs on IneqMath reveals a surprising reality: even top models like o1 achieve less than 10% overall accuracy under step-wise scrutiny; this is a drop of up to 65.5% from their accuracy considering only final answer equivalence. This discrepancy exposes fragile deductive chains and a critical gap for current LLMs between merely finding an answer and constructing a rigorous proof. Scaling model size and increasing test-time computation yield limited gains in overall proof correctness. Instead, our findings highlight promising research directions such as theorem-guided reasoning and self-refinement. Code and data are available at https://ineqmath.github.io/.

Solving complicated AI tasks with different domains and modalities is a key step toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). While there are abundant AI models available for different domains and modalities, they cannot handle complicated AI tasks. Considering large language models (LLMs) have exhibited exceptional ability in language understanding, generation, interaction, and reasoning, we advocate that LLMs could act as a controller to manage existing AI models to solve complicated AI tasks and language could be a generic interface to empower this. Based on this philosophy, we present HuggingGPT, a system that leverages LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT) to connect various AI models in machine learning communities (e.g., HuggingFace) to solve AI tasks. Specifically, we use ChatGPT to conduct task planning when receiving a user request, select models according to their function descriptions available in HuggingFace, execute each subtask with the selected AI model, and summarize the response according to the execution results. By leveraging the strong language capability of ChatGPT and abundant AI models in HuggingFace, HuggingGPT is able to cover numerous sophisticated AI tasks in different modalities and domains and achieve impressive results in language, vision, speech, and other challenging tasks, which paves a new way towards AGI.

Foundation models have revolutionized general-purpose problem-solving, offering rapid task adaptation through pretraining, meta-training, and finetuning. Recent crucial advances in these paradigms reveal the importance of challenging task prioritized sampling to enhance adaptation robustness under distribution shifts. However, ranking task difficulties over iteration as a preliminary step typically requires exhaustive task evaluation, which is practically unaffordable in computation and data-annotation. This study provides a novel perspective to illuminate the possibility of leveraging the dual importance of adaptation robustness and learning efficiency, particularly in scenarios where task evaluation is risky or costly, such as iterative agent-environment interactions for robotic policy evaluation or computationally intensive inference steps for finetuning foundation models. Firstly, we introduce Model Predictive Task Sampling (MPTS), a framework that bridges the task space and adaptation risk landscape, providing a theoretical foundation for robust active task sampling. MPTS employs a generative model to characterize the episodic optimization process and predicts task-specific adaptation risk via posterior inference. The resulting risk learner amortizes the costly evaluation of task adaptation performance and provably approximates task difficulty rankings. MPTS seamlessly integrates into zero-shot, few-shot, and supervised finetuning settings. Empirically, we conduct extensive experiments in pattern recognition using foundation models and sequential decision-making. Our results demonstrate that MPTS significantly enhances adaptation robustness for tail or out-of-distribution (OOD) tasks and improves learning efficiency compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. The code is available at the project site https://github.com/thu-rllab/MPTS.

AI-driven geometric problem solving is a complex vision-language task that requires accurate diagram interpretation, mathematical reasoning, and robust cross-modal grounding. A foundational yet underexplored capability for this task is the ability to identify and interpret geometric elements based on natural language queries. To address this, we introduce the task of Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) for geometric problems, which evaluates whether models can localize points, shapes, and spatial relations in diagrams in response to textual prompts. We present GeoRef, a benchmark dataset constructed from existing geometric problem corpora, featuring diverse, high-quality annotations and queries. Due to the lack of annotated data for this task, we generate a large-scale synthetic training dataset using a structured geometric formal language, enabling broad coverage of geometric concepts and facilitating model adaptation. We explore two fine-tuning approaches: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Our results show that GRPO significantly outperforms SFT by better aligning model behavior with task-specific rewards. Furthermore, we propose a verify-and-regenerate mechanism that detects incorrect predictions and re-infers answers using contextual reasoning history, further boosting accuracy. Notably, even state-of-the-art Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) struggle with this task, underscoring the necessity of explicitly evaluating and strengthening geometric grounding as a prerequisite for robust geometric problem solving. Moreover, models trained on GeoRef demonstrate measurable improvements on downstream geometric reasoning tasks, highlighting the broader value of REC as a foundation for multimodal mathematical understanding.

The Chain-of-Thought (CoT) paradigm has become a pivotal method for solving complex problems with large language models (LLMs). However, its application to domain-specific tasks remains challenging, as LLMs often fail to decompose tasks accurately or execute subtasks effectively. This paper introduces the Re-TASK framework, a novel theoretical model that revisits LLM tasks from capability, skill, and knowledge perspectives, drawing on the principles of Bloom's Taxonomy and Knowledge Space Theory. While CoT provides a workflow-centric perspective on tasks, Re-TASK introduces a Chain-of-Learning (CoL) paradigm that highlights task dependencies on specific capability items, further broken down into their constituent knowledge and skill components. To address CoT failures, we propose a Re-TASK prompting strategy, which strengthens task-relevant capabilities through targeted knowledge injection and skill adaptation. Experiments across diverse domains demonstrate the effectiveness of Re-TASK. In particular, we achieve improvements of 45.00% on Yi-1.5-9B and 24.50% on Llama3-Chinese-8B for legal tasks. These results highlight the potential of Re-TASK to significantly enhance LLM performance and its applicability in specialized domains. We release our code and data at https://github.com/Uylee/Re-TASK.

Large language models (LLMs) hold the promise of solving diverse tasks when provided with appropriate natural language prompts. However, prompting often leads models to make predictions with lower accuracy compared to finetuning a model with ample training data. On the other hand, while finetuning LLMs on task-specific data generally improves their performance, abundant annotated datasets are not available for all tasks. Previous work has explored generating task-specific data from state-of-the-art LLMs and using this data to finetune smaller models, but this approach requires access to a language model other than the one being trained, which introduces cost, scalability challenges, and legal hurdles associated with continuously relying on more powerful LLMs. In response to these, we propose SELF-GUIDE, a multi-stage mechanism in which we synthesize task-specific input-output pairs from the student LLM, then use these input-output pairs to finetune the student LLM itself. In our empirical evaluation of the Natural Instructions V2 benchmark, we find that SELF-GUIDE improves the performance of LLM by a substantial margin. Specifically, we report an absolute improvement of approximately 15% for classification tasks and 18% for generation tasks in the benchmark's metrics. This sheds light on the promise of self-synthesized data guiding LLMs towards becoming task-specific experts without any external learning signals.

Named Entity Recognition(NER) is a task of recognizing entities at a token level in a sentence. This paper focuses on solving NER tasks in a multilingual setting for complex named entities. Our team, LLM-RM participated in the recently organized SemEval 2023 task, Task 2: MultiCoNER II,Multilingual Complex Named Entity Recognition. We approach the problem by leveraging cross-lingual representation provided by fine-tuning XLM-Roberta base model on datasets of all of the 12 languages provided -- Bangla, Chinese, English, Farsi, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish and Ukrainian

Communications satellite network (CSN), as an integral component of the next generation of communication systems, has the capability to offer services globally. Data transmission in this network primarily relies on two modes: inter-satellite communication and satellite-to-ground station communication. The latter directly impacts the successful reception of data by users. However, due to resource and task limitations, finding a satisfactory solution poses a significant challenge. The communication satellite-ground station network scheduling problem (CS-GSNSP) aims to optimize CSN effectiveness by devising a plan that maximizes link construction time while considering constraints associated with satellite operation modes. The large number of tasks and numerous constraints in the problem result in a time-consuming evaluation of fitness function values. To address this issue, we propose a fuzzy fitness evaluation method (FFEM) that employs fuzzy or real evaluation methods based on individual similarity degrees. Additionally, we introduce an evolutionary algorithm based on FFEM, called evolutionary algorithm based on FFEM (FFEEA), for iteratively searching high-quality network construction schemes. In FFEEA, an adaptive crossover approach is used for efficient population search. Finally, extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate that our proposed fuzzy fitness evaluation method and other improvement strategies significantly enhance satellite network service time. The study introduces a novel approach to enhance the efficiency of solving combinatorial optimization problems, such as CS-GSNSP, by mitigating the complexity associated with fitness evaluation.

Recent studies in interpretability have explored the inner workings of transformer models trained on tasks across various domains, often discovering that these networks naturally develop highly structured representations. When such representations comprehensively reflect the task domain's structure, they are commonly referred to as "World Models" (WMs). In this work, we identify WMs in transformers trained on maze-solving tasks. By using Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) and analyzing attention patterns, we examine the construction of WMs and demonstrate consistency between SAE feature-based and circuit-based analyses. By subsequently intervening on isolated features to confirm their causal role, we find that it is easier to activate features than to suppress them. Furthermore, we find that models can reason about mazes involving more simultaneously active features than they encountered during training; however, when these same mazes (with greater numbers of connections) are provided to models via input tokens instead, the models fail. Finally, we demonstrate that positional encoding schemes appear to influence how World Models are structured within the model's residual stream.

Tensor network (TN) is a powerful framework in machine learning, but selecting a good TN model, known as TN structure search (TN-SS), is a challenging and computationally intensive task. The recent approach TNLS~li2022permutation showed promising results for this task, however, its computational efficiency is still unaffordable, requiring too many evaluations of the objective function. We propose TnALE, a new algorithm that updates each structure-related variable alternately by local enumeration, greatly reducing the number of evaluations compared to TNLS. We theoretically investigate the descent steps for TNLS and TnALE, proving that both algorithms can achieve linear convergence up to a constant if a sufficient reduction of the objective is reached in each neighborhood. We also compare the evaluation efficiency of TNLS and TnALE, revealing that Omega(2^N) evaluations are typically required in TNLS for reaching the objective reduction in the neighborhood, while ideally O(N^2R) evaluations are sufficient in TnALE, where N denotes the tensor order and R reflects the ``low-rankness'' of the neighborhood. Experimental results verify that TnALE can find practically good TN-ranks and permutations with vastly fewer evaluations than the state-of-the-art algorithms.

This paper presents an end-to-end neural architecture based on Diffusion Models for spatial puzzle solving, particularly jigsaw puzzle and room arrangement tasks. In the latter task, for instance, the proposed system "PuzzleFusion" takes a set of room layouts as polygonal curves in the top-down view and aligns the room layout pieces by estimating their 2D translations and rotations, akin to solving the jigsaw puzzle of room layouts. A surprising discovery of the paper is that the simple use of a Diffusion Model effectively solves these challenging spatial puzzle tasks as a conditional generation process. To enable learning of an end-to-end neural system, the paper introduces new datasets with ground-truth arrangements: 1) 2D Voronoi jigsaw dataset, a synthetic one where pieces are generated by Voronoi diagram of 2D pointset; and 2) MagicPlan dataset, a real one offered by MagicPlan from its production pipeline, where pieces are room layouts constructed by augmented reality App by real-estate consumers. The qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that our approach outperforms the competing methods by significant margins in all the tasks.

This paper presents GPSM4K, a comprehensive geometry multimodal dataset tailored to augment the problem-solving capabilities of Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs). GPSM4K encompasses 2157 multimodal question-answer pairs manually extracted from mathematics textbooks spanning grades 7-12 and is further augmented to 5340 problems, consisting of both numerical and theorem-proving questions. In contrast to PGPS9k, Geometry3K, and Geo170K which feature only objective-type questions, GPSM4K offers detailed step-by-step solutions in a consistent format, facilitating a comprehensive evaluation of problem-solving approaches. This dataset serves as an excellent benchmark for assessing the geometric reasoning capabilities of LVLMs. Evaluation of our test set shows that there is scope for improvement needed in open-source language models in geometry problem-solving. Finetuning on our training set increases the geometry problem-solving capabilities of models. Further, We also evaluate the effectiveness of techniques such as image captioning and Retrieval Augmentation generation (RAG) on model performance. We leveraged LLM to automate the task of final answer evaluation by providing ground truth and predicted solutions. This research will help to assess and improve the geometric reasoning capabilities of LVLMs.

Perception systems in modern autonomous driving vehicles typically take inputs from complementary multi-modal sensors, e.g., LiDAR and cameras. However, in real-world applications, sensor corruptions and failures lead to inferior performances, thus compromising autonomous safety. In this paper, we propose a robust framework, called MetaBEV, to address extreme real-world environments involving overall six sensor corruptions and two extreme sensor-missing situations. In MetaBEV, signals from multiple sensors are first processed by modal-specific encoders. Subsequently, a set of dense BEV queries are initialized, termed meta-BEV. These queries are then processed iteratively by a BEV-Evolving decoder, which selectively aggregates deep features from either LiDAR, cameras, or both modalities. The updated BEV representations are further leveraged for multiple 3D prediction tasks. Additionally, we introduce a new M2oE structure to alleviate the performance drop on distinct tasks in multi-task joint learning. Finally, MetaBEV is evaluated on the nuScenes dataset with 3D object detection and BEV map segmentation tasks. Experiments show MetaBEV outperforms prior arts by a large margin on both full and corrupted modalities. For instance, when the LiDAR signal is missing, MetaBEV improves 35.5% detection NDS and 17.7% segmentation mIoU upon the vanilla BEVFusion model; and when the camera signal is absent, MetaBEV still achieves 69.2% NDS and 53.7% mIoU, which is even higher than previous works that perform on full-modalities. Moreover, MetaBEV performs fairly against previous methods in both canonical perception and multi-task learning settings, refreshing state-of-the-art nuScenes BEV map segmentation with 70.4% mIoU.

Humans (e.g., crowdworkers) have a remarkable ability in solving different tasks, by simply reading textual instructions that define them and looking at a few examples. Despite the success of the conventional supervised learning on individual datasets, such models often struggle with generalization across tasks (e.g., a question-answering system cannot solve classification tasks). A long-standing challenge in AI is to build a model that learns a new task by understanding the human-readable instructions that define it. To study this, we introduce NATURAL INSTRUCTIONS, a dataset of 61 distinct tasks, their human-authored instructions, and 193k task instances (input-output pairs). The instructions are obtained from crowdsourcing instructions used to create existing NLP datasets and mapped to a unified schema. Using this meta-dataset, we measure cross-task generalization by training models on seen tasks and measuring generalization to the remaining unseen ones. We adopt generative pre-trained language models to encode task-specific instructions along with input and generate task output. Our results indicate that models benefit from instructions when evaluated in terms of generalization to unseen tasks (19% better for models utilizing instructions). These models, however, are far behind an estimated performance upperbound indicating significant room for more progress in this direction.

Recent work has shown that asking language models to generate reasoning steps improves performance on many reasoning tasks. When moving beyond prompting, this raises the question of how we should supervise such models: outcome-based approaches which supervise the final result, or process-based approaches which supervise the reasoning process itself? Differences between these approaches might naturally be expected not just in final-answer errors but also in reasoning errors, which can be difficult to detect and are problematic in many real-world domains such as education. We run the first comprehensive comparison between process- and outcome-based approaches trained on a natural language task, GSM8K. We find that pure outcome-based supervision produces similar final-answer error rates with less label supervision. However, for correct reasoning steps we find it necessary to use process-based supervision or supervision from learned reward models that emulate process-based feedback. In total, we improve the previous best results from 16.8% to 12.7% final-answer error and 14.0% to 3.4% reasoning error among final-answer-correct solutions.

Despite their proficiency in general tasks, Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) struggle with automatic Geometry Problem Solving (GPS), which demands understanding diagrams, interpreting symbols, and performing complex reasoning. This limitation arises from their pre-training on natural images and texts, along with the lack of automated verification in the problem-solving process. Besides, current geometric specialists are limited by their task-specific designs, making them less effective for broader geometric problems. To this end, we present GeoX, a multi-modal large model focusing on geometric understanding and reasoning tasks. Given the significant differences between geometric diagram-symbol and natural image-text, we introduce unimodal pre-training to develop a diagram encoder and symbol decoder, enhancing the understanding of geometric images and corpora. Furthermore, we introduce geometry-language alignment, an effective pre-training paradigm that bridges the modality gap between unimodal geometric experts. We propose a Generator-And-Sampler Transformer (GS-Former) to generate discriminative queries and eliminate uninformative representations from unevenly distributed geometric signals. Finally, GeoX benefits from visual instruction tuning, empowering it to take geometric images and questions as input and generate verifiable solutions. Experiments show that GeoX outperforms both generalists and geometric specialists on publicly recognized benchmarks, such as GeoQA, UniGeo, Geometry3K, and PGPS9k.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have been reshaping Natural Language Processing (NLP) task in several domains. Their use in the field of Human Resources (HR) has still room for expansions and could be beneficial for several time consuming tasks. Examples such as time-off submissions, medical claims filing, and access requests are noteworthy, but they are by no means the sole instances. However, the aforementioned developments must grapple with the pivotal challenge of constructing a high-quality training dataset. On one hand, most conversation datasets are solving problems for customers not employees. On the other hand, gathering conversations with HR could raise privacy concerns. To solve it, we introduce HR-Multiwoz, a fully-labeled dataset of 550 conversations spanning 10 HR domains to evaluate LLM Agent. Our work has the following contributions: (1) It is the first labeled open-sourced conversation dataset in the HR domain for NLP research. (2) It provides a detailed recipe for the data generation procedure along with data analysis and human evaluations. The data generation pipeline is transferable and can be easily adapted for labeled conversation data generation in other domains. (3) The proposed data-collection pipeline is mostly based on LLMs with minimal human involvement for annotation, which is time and cost-efficient.

Islamic inheritance law (Ilm al-Mawarith) requires precise identification of heirs and calculation of shares, which poses a challenge for AI. In this paper, we present a lightweight framework for solving multiple-choice inheritance questions using a specialised Arabic text encoder and Attentive Relevance Scoring (ARS). The system ranks answer options according to semantic relevance, and enables fast, on-device inference without generative reasoning. We evaluate Arabic encoders (MARBERT, ArabicBERT, AraBERT) and compare them with API-based LLMs (Gemini, DeepSeek) on the QIAS 2025 dataset. While large models achieve an accuracy of up to 87.6%, they require more resources and are context-dependent. Our MARBERT-based approach achieves 69.87% accuracy, presenting a compelling case for efficiency, on-device deployability, and privacy. While this is lower than the 87.6% achieved by the best-performing LLM, our work quantifies a critical trade-off between the peak performance of large models and the practical advantages of smaller, specialized systems in high-stakes domains.

Natural Language to SQL (NL2SQL) has emerged as a critical task for enabling seamless interaction with databases. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in this domain. However, existing NL2SQL methods predominantly rely on closed-source LLMs leveraging prompt engineering, while open-source models typically require fine-tuning to acquire domain-specific knowledge. Despite these efforts, open-source LLMs struggle with complex NL2SQL tasks due to the indirect expression of user query objectives and the semantic gap between user queries and database schemas. Inspired by the application of reinforcement learning in mathematical problem-solving to encourage step-by-step reasoning in LLMs, we propose LearNAT (Learning NL2SQL with AST-guided Task Decomposition), a novel framework that improves the performance of open-source LLMs on complex NL2SQL tasks through task decomposition and reinforcement learning. LearNAT introduces three key components: (1) a Decomposition Synthesis Procedure that leverages Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs) to guide efficient search and pruning strategies for task decomposition, (2) Margin-aware Reinforcement Learning, which employs fine-grained step-level optimization via DPO with AST margins, and (3) Adaptive Demonstration Reasoning, a mechanism for dynamically selecting relevant examples to enhance decomposition capabilities. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, Spider and BIRD, demonstrate that LearNAT enables a 7B-parameter open-source LLM to achieve performance comparable to GPT-4, while offering improved efficiency and accessibility.

Solving parametric partial differential equations (PDEs) and associated PDE-based, inverse problems is a central task in engineering and physics, yet existing neural operator methods struggle with high-dimensional, discontinuous inputs and require large amounts of {\em labeled} training data. We propose the Deep Generative Neural Operator (DGNO), a physics-aware framework that addresses these challenges by leveraging a deep, generative, probabilistic model in combination with a set of lower-dimensional, latent variables that simultaneously encode PDE-inputs and PDE-outputs. This formulation can make use of unlabeled data and significantly improves inverse problem-solving, particularly for discontinuous or discrete-valued input functions. DGNO enforces physics constraints without labeled data by incorporating as virtual observables, weak-form residuals based on compactly supported radial basis functions (CSRBFs). These relax regularity constraints and eliminate higher-order derivatives from the objective function. We also introduce MultiONet, a novel neural operator architecture, which is a more expressive generalization of the popular DeepONet that significantly enhances the approximating power of the proposed model. These innovations make DGNO particularly effective for challenging forward and inverse, PDE-based problems, such as those involving multi-phase media. Numerical experiments demonstrate that DGNO achieves higher accuracy across multiple benchmarks while exhibiting robustness to noise and strong generalization to out-of-distribution cases. Its adaptability, and the ability to handle sparse, noisy data while providing probabilistic estimates, make DGNO a powerful tool for scientific and engineering applications.

Solving complex reasoning tasks is a key real-world application of agents. Thanks to the pretraining of Large Language Models (LLMs) on code data, recent approaches like CodeAct successfully use code as LLM agents' action, achieving good results. However, CodeAct greedily generates the next action's code block by relying on fragmented thoughts, resulting in inconsistency and instability. Moreover, CodeAct lacks action-related ground-truth (GT), making its supervision signals and termination conditions questionable in multi-turn interactions. To address these issues, we first introduce a simple yet effective end-to-end code generation paradigm, CodeProgram, which leverages code's systematic logic to align with global reasoning and enable cohesive problem-solving. Then, we propose Tree-of-Code (ToC), which self-grows CodeProgram nodes based on the executable nature of the code and enables self-supervision in a GT-free scenario. Experimental results on two datasets using ten popular zero-shot LLMs show ToC remarkably boosts accuracy by nearly 20% over CodeAct with less than 1/4 turns. Several LLMs even perform better on one-turn CodeProgram than on multi-turn CodeAct. To further investigate the trade-off between efficacy and efficiency, we test different ToC tree sizes and exploration mechanisms. We also highlight the potential of ToC's end-to-end data generation for supervised and reinforced fine-tuning.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently emerged as promising tools for solving challenging robotic tasks, even in the presence of action and observation uncertainties. Recent LLM-based decision-making methods (also referred to as LLM-based agents), when paired with appropriate critics, have demonstrated potential in solving complex, long-horizon tasks with relatively few interactions. However, most existing LLM-based agents lack the ability to retain and learn from past interactions - an essential trait of learning-based robotic systems. We propose RAG-Modulo, a framework that enhances LLM-based agents with a memory of past interactions and incorporates critics to evaluate the agents' decisions. The memory component allows the agent to automatically retrieve and incorporate relevant past experiences as in-context examples, providing context-aware feedback for more informed decision-making. Further by updating its memory, the agent improves its performance over time, thereby exhibiting learning. Through experiments in the challenging BabyAI and AlfWorld domains, we demonstrate significant improvements in task success rates and efficiency, showing that the proposed RAG-Modulo framework outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

We present the task description of the Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE) 2023 Challenge Task 2: ``First-shot unsupervised anomalous sound detection (ASD) for machine condition monitoring''. The main goal is to enable rapid deployment of ASD systems for new kinds of machines without the need for hyperparameter tuning. In the past ASD tasks, developed methods tuned hyperparameters for each machine type, as the development and evaluation datasets had the same machine types. However, collecting normal and anomalous data as the development dataset can be infeasible in practice. In 2023 Task 2, we focus on solving the first-shot problem, which is the challenge of training a model on a completely novel machine type. Specifically, (i) each machine type has only one section (a subset of machine type) and (ii) machine types in the development and evaluation datasets are completely different. Analysis of 86 submissions from 23 teams revealed that the keys to outperform baselines were: 1) sampling techniques for dealing with class imbalances across different domains and attributes, 2) generation of synthetic samples for robust detection, and 3) use of multiple large pre-trained models to extract meaningful embeddings for the anomaly detector.

Task incremental learning aims to enable a system to maintain its performance on previously learned tasks while learning new tasks, solving the problem of catastrophic forgetting. One promising approach is to build an individual network or sub-network for future tasks. However, this leads to an ever-growing memory due to saving extra weights for new tasks and how to address this issue has remained an open problem in task incremental learning. In this paper, we introduce a novel Neural Weight Search technique that designs a fixed search space where the optimal combinations of frozen weights can be searched to build new models for novel tasks in an end-to-end manner, resulting in scalable and controllable memory growth. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks, i.e., Split-CIFAR-100 and CUB-to-Sketches, show our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with respect to both average inference accuracy and total memory cost.

Solving the inverse problem is the key step in evaluating the capacity of a physical model to describe real phenomena. In medical image computing, it aligns with the classical theme of image-based model personalization. Traditionally, a solution to the problem is obtained by performing either sampling or variational inference based methods. Both approaches aim to identify a set of free physical model parameters that results in a simulation best matching an empirical observation. When applied to brain tumor modeling, one of the instances of image-based model personalization in medical image computing, the overarching drawback of the methods is the time complexity for finding such a set. In a clinical setting with limited time between imaging and diagnosis or even intervention, this time complexity may prove critical. As the history of quantitative science is the history of compression, we align in this paper with the historical tendency and propose a method compressing complex traditional strategies for solving an inverse problem into a simple database query task. We evaluated different ways of performing the database query task assessing the trade-off between accuracy and execution time. On the exemplary task of brain tumor growth modeling, we prove that the proposed method achieves one order speed-up compared to existing approaches for solving the inverse problem. The resulting compute time offers critical means for relying on more complex and, hence, realistic models, for integrating image preprocessing and inverse modeling even deeper, or for implementing the current model into a clinical workflow.

ImageNet serves as the primary dataset for evaluating the quality of computer-vision models. The common practice today is training each architecture with a tailor-made scheme, designed and tuned by an expert. In this paper, we present a unified scheme for training any backbone on ImageNet. The scheme, named USI (Unified Scheme for ImageNet), is based on knowledge distillation and modern tricks. It requires no adjustments or hyper-parameters tuning between different models, and is efficient in terms of training times. We test USI on a wide variety of architectures, including CNNs, Transformers, Mobile-oriented and MLP-only. On all models tested, USI outperforms previous state-of-the-art results. Hence, we are able to transform training on ImageNet from an expert-oriented task to an automatic seamless routine. Since USI accepts any backbone and trains it to top results, it also enables to perform methodical comparisons, and identify the most efficient backbones along the speed-accuracy Pareto curve. Implementation is available at:https://github.com/Alibaba-MIIL/Solving_ImageNet

Solving linear systems of equations is a common problem that arises both on its own and as a subroutine in more complex problems: given a matrix A and a vector b, find a vector x such that Ax=b. We consider the case where one doesn't need to know the solution x itself, but rather an approximation of the expectation value of some operator associated with x, e.g., x'Mx for some matrix M. In this case, when A is sparse, N by N and has condition number kappa, classical algorithms can find x and estimate x'Mx in O(N sqrt(kappa)) time. Here, we exhibit a quantum algorithm for this task that runs in poly(log N, kappa) time, an exponential improvement over the best classical algorithm.

The ability to comprehend audio--which includes speech, non-speech sounds, and music--is crucial for AI agents to interact effectively with the world. We present MMAU, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate multimodal audio understanding models on tasks requiring expert-level knowledge and complex reasoning. MMAU comprises 10k carefully curated audio clips paired with human-annotated natural language questions and answers spanning speech, environmental sounds, and music. It includes information extraction and reasoning questions, requiring models to demonstrate 27 distinct skills across unique and challenging tasks. Unlike existing benchmarks, MMAU emphasizes advanced perception and reasoning with domain-specific knowledge, challenging models to tackle tasks akin to those faced by experts. We assess 18 open-source and proprietary (Large) Audio-Language Models, demonstrating the significant challenges posed by MMAU. Notably, even the most advanced Gemini Pro v1.5 achieves only 52.97% accuracy, and the state-of-the-art open-source Qwen2-Audio achieves only 52.50%, highlighting considerable room for improvement. We believe MMAU will drive the audio and multimodal research community to develop more advanced audio understanding models capable of solving complex audio tasks.

As a seemingly self-explanatory task, problem-solving has been a significant component of science and engineering. However, a general yet concrete formulation of problem-solving itself is missing. With the recent development of AI-based problem-solving agents, the demand for process-level verifiability is rapidly increasing yet underexplored. To fill these gaps, we present a principled formulation of problem-solving as a deterministic Markov decision process; a novel framework, FPS (Formal Problem-Solving), which utilizes existing FTP (formal theorem proving) environments to perform process-verified problem-solving; and D-FPS (Deductive FPS), decoupling solving and answer verification for better human-alignment. The expressiveness, soundness and completeness of the frameworks are proven. We construct three benchmarks on problem-solving: FormalMath500, a formalization of a subset of the MATH500 benchmark; MiniF2F-Solving and PutnamBench-Solving, adaptations of FTP benchmarks MiniF2F and PutnamBench. For faithful, interpretable, and human-aligned evaluation, we propose RPE (Restricted Propositional Equivalence), a symbolic approach to determine the correctness of answers by formal verification. We evaluate four prevalent FTP models and two prompting methods as baselines, solving at most 23.77% of FormalMath500, 27.47% of MiniF2F-Solving, and 0.31% of PutnamBench-Solving.

Scientific problem solving poses unique challenges for LLMs, requiring both deep domain knowledge and the ability to apply such knowledge through complex reasoning. While automated scientific reasoners hold great promise for assisting human scientists, there is currently no widely adopted holistic benchmark for evaluating scientific reasoning, and few approaches systematically disentangle the distinct roles of knowledge and reasoning in these tasks. To address these gaps, we introduce SciReas, a diverse suite of existing benchmarks for scientific reasoning tasks, and SciReas-Pro, a selective subset that requires more complex reasoning. Our holistic evaluation surfaces insights about scientific reasoning performance that remain hidden when relying on individual benchmarks alone. We then propose KRUX, a probing framework for studying the distinct roles of reasoning and knowledge in scientific tasks. Combining the two, we conduct an in-depth analysis that yields several key findings: (1) Retrieving task-relevant knowledge from model parameters is a critical bottleneck for LLMs in scientific reasoning; (2) Reasoning models consistently benefit from external knowledge added in-context on top of the reasoning enhancement; (3) Enhancing verbalized reasoning improves LLMs' ability to surface task-relevant knowledge. Finally, we conduct a lightweight analysis, comparing our science-focused data composition with concurrent efforts on long CoT SFT, and release SciLit01, a strong 8B baseline for scientific reasoning.

The optimal training configurations of large language models (LLMs) with respect to model sizes and compute budgets have been extensively studied. But how to optimally configure LLMs during inference has not been explored in sufficient depth. We study compute-optimal inference: designing models and inference strategies that optimally trade off additional inference-time compute for improved performance. As a first step towards understanding and designing compute-optimal inference methods, we assessed the effectiveness and computational efficiency of multiple inference strategies such as Greedy Search, Majority Voting, Best-of-N, Weighted Voting, and their variants on two different Tree Search algorithms, involving different model sizes and computational budgets. We found that a smaller language model with a novel tree search algorithm typically achieves a Pareto-optimal trade-off. These results highlight the potential benefits of deploying smaller models equipped with more sophisticated decoding algorithms in budget-constrained scenarios, e.g., on end-devices, to enhance problem-solving accuracy. For instance, we show that the Llemma-7B model can achieve competitive accuracy to a Llemma-34B model on MATH500 while using 2times less FLOPs. Our findings could potentially apply to any generation task with a well-defined measure of success.

Autonomous agents driven by Large Language Models (LLMs) offer enormous potential for automation. Early proof of this technology can be found in various demonstrations of agents solving complex tasks, interacting with external systems to augment their knowledge, and triggering actions. In particular, workflows involving multiple agents solving complex tasks in a collaborative fashion exemplify their capacity to operate in less strict and less well-defined environments. Thus, a multi-agent approach has great potential for serving as a backbone in many industrial applications, ranging from complex knowledge retrieval systems to next generation robotic process automation. Given the reasoning abilities within the current generation of LLMs, complex processes require a multi-step approach that includes a plan of well-defined and modular tasks. Depending on the level of complexity, these tasks can be executed either by a single agent or a group of agents. In this work, we focus on designing a flexible agent engineering framework with careful attention to planning and execution, capable of handling complex use case applications across various domains. The proposed framework provides reliability in industrial applications and presents techniques to ensure a scalable, flexible, and collaborative workflow for multiple autonomous agents working together towards solving tasks.

Few-shot prompting is a surprisingly powerful way to use Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve various tasks. However, this approach struggles as the task complexity increases or when the individual reasoning steps of the task themselves are hard to learn, especially when embedded in more complex tasks. To address this, we propose Decomposed Prompting, a new approach to solve complex tasks by decomposing them (via prompting) into simpler sub-tasks that can be delegated to a library of prompting-based LLMs dedicated to these sub-tasks. This modular structure allows each prompt to be optimized for its specific sub-task, further decomposed if necessary, and even easily replaced with more effective prompts, trained models, or symbolic functions if desired. We show that the flexibility and modularity of Decomposed Prompting allows it to outperform prior work on few-shot prompting using GPT3. On symbolic reasoning tasks, we can further decompose sub-tasks that are hard for LLMs into even simpler solvable sub-tasks. When the complexity comes from the input length, we can recursively decompose the task into the same task but with smaller inputs. We also evaluate our approach on textual multi-step reasoning tasks: on long-context multi-hop QA task, we can more effectively teach the sub-tasks via our separate sub-tasks prompts; and on open-domain multi-hop QA, we can incorporate a symbolic information retrieval within our decomposition framework, leading to improved performance on both tasks. Datasets, Code and Prompts available at https://github.com/allenai/DecomP.

This paper addresses the challenges translating case law under Hong Kong's bilingual legal system. It highlights the initial success of translating all written statutes into Chinese before the 1997 handover, a task mandated by the Basic Law. The effort involved significant collaboration among legal, linguistic, and translation experts, resulting in a comprehensive and culturally appropriate bilingual legal system. However, translating case law remains a significant challenge due to the sheer volume and continuous growth of judicial decisions. The paper critiques the governments and judiciarys sporadic and uncoordinated efforts to translate case law, contrasting it with the thorough approach previously taken for statute translation. Although the government acknowledges the importance of legal bilingualism, it lacks a sustainable strategy for translating case law. The Judiciarys position that translating all judgments is unnecessary, unrealistic, and not cost-effectiveis analyzed and critiqued for its impact on legal transparency and public trust. A proposed solution involves leveraging machine translation technology through a human-machine interactive translation platform, which undergoes two major transitions. Initially based on a neural model, the platform transitions to using a large language model for improved translation accuracy. Furthermore, it evolves from a single-agent system to a multi-agent system, incorporating Translator, Annotator, and Proofreader agents. This multi-agent approach, supported by a grant, aims to facilitate efficient, high-quality translation of judicial judgments by integrating advanced artificial intelligence and continuous feedback mechanisms, thus better meeting the needs of a bilingual legal system.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable potential in various complex tasks requiring multi-step reasoning methods like tree search to explore diverse reasoning paths. However, existing methods often suffer from computational inefficiency and redundancy. First, they overlook the diversity of task difficulties, leading to unnecessarily extensive searches even for easy tasks. Second, they neglect the semantics of reasoning paths, resulting in redundant exploration of semantically identical paths. To address these limitations, we propose Semantic Exploration with Adaptive Gating (SEAG), a computationally efficient method. SEAG employs an adaptive gating mechanism that dynamically decides whether to conduct a tree search, based on the confidence level of answers from a preceding simple reasoning method. Furthermore, its tree-based exploration consolidates semantically identical reasoning steps, reducing redundant explorations while maintaining or even improving accuracy. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that SEAG significantly improves accuracy by 4.3% on average while requiring only 31% of computational costs compared to existing tree search-based methods on complex reasoning benchmarks including GSM8K and ARC with diverse language models such as Llama2, Llama3, and Mistral.

Diffusion models have obtained substantial progress in image-to-video (I2V) generation. However, such models are not fully understood. In this paper, we report a significant but previously overlooked issue in I2V diffusion models (I2V-DMs), namely, conditional image leakage. I2V-DMs tend to over-rely on the conditional image at large time steps, neglecting the crucial task of predicting the clean video from noisy inputs, which results in videos lacking dynamic and vivid motion. We further address this challenge from both inference and training aspects by presenting plug-and-play strategies accordingly. First, we introduce a training-free inference strategy that starts the generation process from an earlier time step to avoid the unreliable late-time steps of I2V-DMs, as well as an initial noise distribution with optimal analytic expressions (Analytic-Init) by minimizing the KL divergence between it and the actual marginal distribution to effectively bridge the training-inference gap. Second, to mitigate conditional image leakage during training, we design a time-dependent noise distribution for the conditional image, which favors high noise levels at large time steps to sufficiently interfere with the conditional image. We validate these strategies on various I2V-DMs using our collected open-domain image benchmark and the UCF101 dataset. Extensive results demonstrate that our methods outperform baselines by producing videos with more dynamic and natural motion without compromising image alignment and temporal consistency. The project page: https://cond-image-leak.github.io/.

Solving math word problems requires deductive reasoning over the quantities in the text. Various recent research efforts mostly relied on sequence-to-sequence or sequence-to-tree models to generate mathematical expressions without explicitly performing relational reasoning between quantities in the given context. While empirically effective, such approaches typically do not provide explanations for the generated expressions. In this work, we view the task as a complex relation extraction problem, proposing a novel approach that presents explainable deductive reasoning steps to iteratively construct target expressions, where each step involves a primitive operation over two quantities defining their relation. Through extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets, we show that the proposed model significantly outperforms existing strong baselines. We further demonstrate that the deductive procedure not only presents more explainable steps but also enables us to make more accurate predictions on questions that require more complex reasoning.

Feedforward computation, such as evaluating a neural network or sampling from an autoregressive model, is ubiquitous in machine learning. The sequential nature of feedforward computation, however, requires a strict order of execution and cannot be easily accelerated with parallel computing. To enable parallelization, we frame the task of feedforward computation as solving a system of nonlinear equations. We then propose to find the solution using a Jacobi or Gauss-Seidel fixed-point iteration method, as well as hybrid methods of both. Crucially, Jacobi updates operate independently on each equation and can be executed in parallel. Our method is guaranteed to give exactly the same values as the original feedforward computation with a reduced (or equal) number of parallelizable iterations, and hence reduced time given sufficient parallel computing power. Experimentally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in accelerating (i) backpropagation of RNNs, (ii) evaluation of DenseNets, and (iii) autoregressive sampling of MADE and PixelCNN++, with speedup factors between 2.1 and 26 under various settings.

The cultivation of expertise for large language models (LLMs) to solve tasks of specific areas often requires special-purpose tuning with calibrated behaviors on the expected stable outputs. To avoid huge cost brought by manual preparation of instruction datasets and training resources up to hundreds of hours, the exploitation of open knowledge including a wealth of low rank adaptation (LoRA) models and instruction datasets serves as a good starting point. However, existing methods on model and data selection focus on the performance of general-purpose capabilities while neglecting the knowledge gap exposed in domain-specific deployment. In the present study, we propose to bridge such gap by introducing few human-annotated samples (i.e., K-shot) for advancing task expertise of LLMs with open knowledge. Specifically, we develop an efficient and scalable pipeline to cost-efficiently produce task experts where K-shot data intervene in selecting the most promising expert candidates and the task-relevant instructions. A mixture-of-expert (MoE) system is built to make the best use of individual-yet-complementary knowledge between multiple experts. We unveil the two keys to the success of a MoE system, 1) the abidance by K-shot, and 2) the insistence on diversity. For the former, we ensure that models that truly possess problem-solving abilities on K-shot are selected rather than those blind guessers. Besides, during data selection, instructions that share task-relevant contexts with K-shot are prioritized. For the latter, we highlight the diversity of constituting experts and that of the fine-tuning instructions throughout the model and data selection process. Extensive experimental results confirm the superiority of our approach over existing methods on utilization of open knowledge across various tasks. Codes and models will be released later.

AI for Industrial Asset Lifecycle Management aims to automate complex operational workflows -- such as condition monitoring, maintenance planning, and intervention scheduling -- to reduce human workload and minimize system downtime. Traditional AI/ML approaches have primarily tackled these problems in isolation, solving narrow tasks within the broader operational pipeline. In contrast, the emergence of AI agents and large language models (LLMs) introduces a next-generation opportunity: enabling end-to-end automation across the entire asset lifecycle. This paper envisions a future where AI agents autonomously manage tasks that previously required distinct expertise and manual coordination. To this end, we introduce AssetOpsBench -- a unified framework and environment designed to guide the development, orchestration, and evaluation of domain-specific agents tailored for Industry 4.0 applications. We outline the key requirements for such holistic systems and provide actionable insights into building agents that integrate perception, reasoning, and control for real-world industrial operations. The software is available at https://github.com/IBM/AssetOpsBench.

Recent agent frameworks and inference-time algorithms often struggle with complex planning problems due to limitations in verifying generated plans or reasoning and varying complexity of instances within a single task. Many existing methods for these tasks either perform task-level verification without considering constraints or apply inference-time algorithms without adapting to instance-level complexity. To address these limitations, we propose PlanGEN, a model-agnostic and easily scalable agent framework with three key components: constraint, verification, and selection agents. Specifically, our approach proposes constraint-guided iterative verification to enhance performance of inference-time algorithms--Best of N, Tree-of-Thought, and REBASE. In PlanGEN framework, the selection agent optimizes algorithm choice based on instance complexity, ensuring better adaptability to complex planning problems. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements over the strongest baseline across multiple benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art results on NATURAL PLAN (sim8%uparrow), OlympiadBench (sim4%uparrow), DocFinQA (sim7%uparrow), and GPQA (sim1%uparrow). Our key finding highlights that constraint-guided iterative verification improves inference-time algorithms, and adaptive selection further boosts performance on complex planning and reasoning problems.

We introduce Graph of Thoughts (GoT): a framework that advances prompting capabilities in large language models (LLMs) beyond those offered by paradigms such as Chain-of-Thought or Tree of Thoughts (ToT). The key idea and primary advantage of GoT is the ability to model the information generated by an LLM as an arbitrary graph, where units of information ("LLM thoughts") are vertices, and edges correspond to dependencies between these vertices. This approach enables combining arbitrary LLM thoughts into synergistic outcomes, distilling the essence of whole networks of thoughts, or enhancing thoughts using feedback loops. We illustrate that GoT offers advantages over state of the art on different tasks, for example increasing the quality of sorting by 62% over ToT, while simultaneously reducing costs by >31%. We ensure that GoT is extensible with new thought transformations and thus can be used to spearhead new prompting schemes. This work brings the LLM reasoning closer to human thinking or brain mechanisms such as recurrence, both of which form complex networks.

Building a general-purpose task model similar to ChatGPT has been an important research direction for gene large language models. Instruction fine-tuning is a key component in building ChatGPT, but existing instructions are primarily based on natural language. Natural language and gene sequences have significant differences in tokenization and encoding. Therefore, constructing a multilingual model that can handle both natural language and gene sequences is crucial for solving this problem.In this paper, we expand the capabilities of the LLaMA large language model to include gene language. This involves expanding the vocabulary using the Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) method, specifically tailored for DNA and protein sequences, and conducting further pre-training on these sequences. We then convert various downstream gene task data into a unified format for instruction fine-tuning and further fine-tune the model on this data.Our study demonstrates that a mixed model of gene and natural language, fine-tuned with instructions, achieves results comparable to the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) in tasks such as gene classification and gene sequence interaction. This provides a promising direction for building a unified large language model for gene tasks.

Model merging aims to cheaply combine individual task-specific models into a single multitask model. In this work, we view past merging methods as leveraging different notions of a ''task subspace'' in which models are matched before being merged. We connect the task subspace of a given model to its loss landscape and formalize how this approach to model merging can be seen as solving a linear system of equations. While past work has generally been limited to linear systems that have a closed-form solution, we consider using the conjugate gradient method to find a solution. We show that using the conjugate gradient method can outperform closed-form solutions, enables merging via linear systems that are otherwise intractable to solve, and flexibly allows choosing from a wide variety of initializations and estimates for the ''task subspace''. We ultimately demonstrate that our merging framework called ''Matching Models in their Task Subspace'' (MaTS) achieves state-of-the-art results in multitask and intermediate-task model merging. We release all of the code and checkpoints used in our work at https://github.com/r-three/mats.

TaskGen is an open-sourced agentic framework which uses an Agent to solve an arbitrary task by breaking them down into subtasks. Each subtask is mapped to an Equipped Function or another Agent to execute. In order to reduce verbosity (and hence token usage), TaskGen uses StrictJSON that ensures JSON output from the Large Language Model (LLM), along with additional features such as type checking and iterative error correction. Key to the philosophy of TaskGen is the management of information/memory on a need-to-know basis. We empirically evaluate TaskGen on various environments such as 40x40 dynamic maze navigation with changing obstacle locations (100% solve rate), TextWorld escape room solving with dense rewards and detailed goals (96% solve rate), web browsing (69% of actions successful), solving the MATH dataset (71% solve rate over 100 Level-5 problems), Retrieval Augmented Generation on NaturalQuestions dataset (F1 score of 47.03%)

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have transformed tasks requiring visual and reasoning abilities, such as image retrieval and Visual Question Answering (VQA). Despite their success, VLMs face significant challenges with tasks involving geometric reasoning, algebraic problem-solving, and counting. These limitations stem from difficulties effectively integrating multiple modalities and accurately interpreting geometry-related tasks. Various works claim that introducing a captioning pipeline before VQA tasks enhances performance. We incorporated this pipeline for tasks involving geometry, algebra, and counting. We found that captioning results are not generalizable, specifically with larger VLMs primarily trained on downstream QnA tasks showing random performance on math-related challenges. However, we present a promising alternative: task-based prompting, enriching the prompt with task-specific guidance. This approach shows promise and proves more effective than direct captioning methods for math-heavy problems.

Transformers demonstrate impressive performance on a range of reasoning benchmarks. To evaluate the degree to which these abilities are a result of actual reasoning, existing work has focused on developing sophisticated benchmarks for behavioral studies. However, these studies do not provide insights into the internal mechanisms driving the observed capabilities. To improve our understanding of the internal mechanisms of transformers, we present a comprehensive mechanistic analysis of a transformer trained on a synthetic reasoning task. We identify a set of interpretable mechanisms the model uses to solve the task, and validate our findings using correlational and causal evidence. Our results suggest that it implements a depth-bounded recurrent mechanisms that operates in parallel and stores intermediate results in selected token positions. We anticipate that the motifs we identified in our synthetic setting can provide valuable insights into the broader operating principles of transformers and thus provide a basis for understanding more complex models.

Question answering plays a pivotal role in human daily life because it involves our acquisition of knowledge about the world. However, due to the dynamic and ever-changing nature of real-world facts, the answer can be completely different when the time constraint in the question changes. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable intelligence in question answering, while our experiments reveal that the aforementioned problems still pose a significant challenge to existing LLMs. This can be attributed to the LLMs' inability to perform rigorous reasoning based on surface-level text semantics. To overcome this limitation, rather than requiring LLMs to directly answer the question, we propose a novel approach where we reframe the Question Answering task as Programming (QAaP). Concretely, by leveraging modern LLMs' superior capability in understanding both natural language and programming language, we endeavor to harness LLMs to represent diversely expressed text as well-structured code and select the best matching answer from multiple candidates through programming. We evaluate our QAaP framework on several time-sensitive question answering datasets and achieve decent improvement, up to 14.5% over strong baselines. Our codes and data are available at https://github.com/TianHongZXY/qaap

Large language models (LLMs) excel at mathematical reasoning and logical problem-solving. The current popular training paradigms primarily use supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance the models' reasoning abilities. However, when using SFT or RL alone, there are respective challenges: SFT may suffer from overfitting, while RL is prone to mode collapse. The state-of-the-art methods have proposed hybrid training schemes. However, static switching faces challenges such as poor generalization across different tasks and high dependence on data quality. In response to these challenges, inspired by the curriculum learning-quiz mechanism in human reasoning cultivation, We propose SASR, a step-wise adaptive hybrid training framework that theoretically unifies SFT and RL and dynamically balances the two throughout optimization. SASR uses SFT for initial warm-up to establish basic reasoning skills, and then uses an adaptive dynamic adjustment algorithm based on gradient norm and divergence relative to the original distribution to seamlessly integrate SFT with the online RL method GRPO. By monitoring the training status of LLMs and adjusting the training process in sequence, SASR ensures a smooth transition between training schemes, maintaining core reasoning abilities while exploring different paths. Experimental results demonstrate that SASR outperforms SFT, RL, and static hybrid training methods.

Mathematical reasoning represents a critical frontier in advancing large language models (LLMs). While step-by-step approaches have emerged as the dominant paradigm for mathematical problem-solving in LLMs, the quality of reasoning steps in training data fundamentally constrains the performance of the models. Recent studies has demonstrated that more detailed intermediate steps can enhance model performance, yet existing methods for step expansion either require more powerful external models or incur substantial computational costs. In this paper, we introduce MathFimer, a novel framework for mathematical reasoning step expansion inspired by the "Fill-in-the-middle" task from code completion. By decomposing solution chains into prefix-suffix pairs and training models to reconstruct missing intermediate steps, we develop a specialized model, MathFimer-7B, on our carefully curated NuminaMath-FIM dataset. We then apply these models to enhance existing mathematical reasoning datasets by inserting detailed intermediate steps into their solution chains, creating MathFimer-expanded versions. Through comprehensive experiments on multiple mathematical reasoning datasets, including MathInstruct, MetaMathQA and etc., we demonstrate that models trained on MathFimer-expanded data consistently outperform their counterparts trained on original data across various benchmarks such as GSM8K and MATH. Our approach offers a practical, scalable solution for enhancing mathematical reasoning capabilities in LLMs without relying on powerful external models or expensive inference procedures.

One of the fundamental challenges in reinforcement learning (RL) is to take a complex task and be able to decompose it to subtasks that are simpler for the RL agent to learn. In this paper, we report on our work that would identify subtasks by using some given positive and negative trajectories for solving the complex task. We assume that the states are represented by first-order predicate logic using which we devise a novel algorithm to identify the subtasks. Then we employ a Large Language Model (LLM) to generate first-order logic rule templates for achieving each subtask. Such rules were then further fined tuned to a rule-based policy via an Inductive Logic Programming (ILP)-based RL agent. Through experiments, we verify the accuracy of our algorithm in detecting subtasks which successfully detect all of the subtasks correctly. We also investigated the quality of the common-sense rules produced by the language model to achieve the subtasks. Our experiments show that our LLM-guided rule template generation can produce rules that are necessary for solving a subtask, which leads to solving complex tasks with fewer assumptions about predefined first-order logic predicates of the environment.

We study the use of large language model-based agents for interacting with software via web browsers. Unlike prior work, we focus on measuring the agents' ability to perform tasks that span the typical daily work of knowledge workers utilizing enterprise software systems. To this end, we propose WorkArena, a remote-hosted benchmark of 29 tasks based on the widely-used ServiceNow platform. We also introduce BrowserGym, an environment for the design and evaluation of such agents, offering a rich set of actions as well as multimodal observations. Our empirical evaluation reveals that while current agents show promise on WorkArena, there remains a considerable gap towards achieving full task automation. Notably, our analysis uncovers a significant performance disparity between open and closed-source LLMs, highlighting a critical area for future exploration and development in the field.

Multiple-choice question (MCQ) datasets like Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) are widely used to evaluate the commonsense, understanding, and problem-solving abilities of large language models (LLMs). However, the open-source nature of these benchmarks and the broad sources of training data for LLMs have inevitably led to benchmark contamination, resulting in unreliable evaluation results. To alleviate this issue, we propose a contamination-free and more challenging MCQ benchmark called MMLU-CF. This benchmark reassesses LLMs' understanding of world knowledge by averting both unintentional and malicious data leakage. To avoid unintentional data leakage, we source data from a broader domain and design three decontamination rules. To prevent malicious data leakage, we divide the benchmark into validation and test sets with similar difficulty and subject distributions. The test set remains closed-source to ensure reliable results, while the validation set is publicly available to promote transparency and facilitate independent verification. Our evaluation of mainstream LLMs reveals that the powerful GPT-4o achieves merely a 5-shot score of 73.4% and a 0-shot score of 71.9% on the test set, which indicates the effectiveness of our approach in creating a more rigorous and contamination-free evaluation standard. The GitHub repository is available at https://github.com/microsoft/MMLU-CF and the dataset refers to https://huggingface.co/datasets/microsoft/MMLU-CF.

Natural Language-conditioned reinforcement learning (RL) enables the agents to follow human instructions. Previous approaches generally implemented language-conditioned RL by providing human instructions in natural language (NL) and training a following policy. In this outside-in approach, the policy needs to comprehend the NL and manage the task simultaneously. However, the unbounded NL examples often bring much extra complexity for solving concrete RL tasks, which can distract policy learning from completing the task. To ease the learning burden of the policy, we investigate an inside-out scheme for natural language-conditioned RL by developing a task language (TL) that is task-related and unique. The TL is used in RL to achieve highly efficient and effective policy training. Besides, a translator is trained to translate NL into TL. We implement this scheme as TALAR (TAsk Language with predicAte Representation) that learns multiple predicates to model object relationships as the TL. Experiments indicate that TALAR not only better comprehends NL instructions but also leads to a better instruction-following policy that improves 13.4% success rate and adapts to unseen expressions of NL instruction. The TL can also be an effective task abstraction, naturally compatible with hierarchical RL.

Spurred by advancements in scale, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the ability to perform a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks zero-shot -- i.e., without adaptation on downstream data. Recently, the debut of ChatGPT has drawn a great deal of attention from the natural language processing (NLP) community due to the fact that it can generate high-quality responses to human input and self-correct previous mistakes based on subsequent conversations. However, it is not yet known whether ChatGPT can serve as a generalist model that can perform many NLP tasks zero-shot. In this work, we empirically analyze the zero-shot learning ability of ChatGPT by evaluating it on 20 popular NLP datasets covering 7 representative task categories. With extensive empirical studies, we demonstrate both the effectiveness and limitations of the current version of ChatGPT. We find that ChatGPT performs well on many tasks favoring reasoning capabilities (e.g., arithmetic reasoning) while it still faces challenges when solving specific tasks such as sequence tagging. We additionally provide in-depth analysis through qualitative case studies.

Numerical reasoning over natural language has been a long-standing goal for the research community. However, cutting-edge language models have proven difficult to reliably generalize to a broad range of numbers, although they have shown proficiency in reasoning over common and simple numbers. In this paper, we propose a novel method to elicit and exploit the numerical reasoning knowledge hidden in pre-trained language models using simple anchor numbers. Concretely, we first leverage simple numbers as anchors to probe the implicitly inferred arithmetic expressions from language models, and then explicitly apply the expressions on complex numbers to get corresponding answers. To inversely elicit arithmetic expressions, we transform and formulate the task as an analytically solvable linear system. Experimental results on several numerical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our approach significantly improves numerical reasoning capabilities of existing LMs. More importantly, our approach is training-free and simply works in the inference phase, making it highly portable and achieving consistent performance benefits across a variety of language models (GPT-3, T5, BART, etc) in all zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning scenarios.

The field of natural language processing (NLP) has recently seen a large change towards using pre-trained language models for solving almost any task. Despite showing great improvements in benchmark datasets for various tasks, these models often perform sub-optimal in non-standard domains like the clinical domain where a large gap between pre-training documents and target documents is observed. In this paper, we aim at closing this gap with domain-specific training of the language model and we investigate its effect on a diverse set of downstream tasks and settings. We introduce the pre-trained CLIN-X (Clinical XLM-R) language models and show how CLIN-X outperforms other pre-trained transformer models by a large margin for ten clinical concept extraction tasks from two languages. In addition, we demonstrate how the transformer model can be further improved with our proposed task- and language-agnostic model architecture based on ensembles over random splits and cross-sentence context. Our studies in low-resource and transfer settings reveal stable model performance despite a lack of annotated data with improvements of up to 47 F1 points when only 250 labeled sentences are available. Our results highlight the importance of specialized language models as CLIN-X for concept extraction in non-standard domains, but also show that our task-agnostic model architecture is robust across the tested tasks and languages so that domain- or task-specific adaptations are not required.

Understanding the content of videos is one of the core techniques for developing various helpful applications in the real world, such as recognizing various human actions for surveillance systems or customer behavior analysis in an autonomous shop. However, understanding the content or story of the video still remains a challenging problem due to its sheer amount of data and temporal structure. In this paper, we propose a multi-channel neural network structure that adopts a two-stream network structure, which has been shown high performance in human action recognition field, and use it as a spatiotemporal video feature extractor for solving video question and answering task. We also adopt a squeeze-and-excitation structure to two-stream network structure for achieving a channel-wise attended spatiotemporal feature. For jointly modeling the spatiotemporal features from video and the textual features from the question, we design a context matching module with a level adjusting layer to remove the gap of information between visual and textual features by applying attention mechanism on joint modeling. Finally, we adopt a scoring mechanism and smoothed ranking loss objective function for selecting the correct answer from answer candidates. We evaluate our model with TVQA dataset, and our approach shows the improved result in textual only setting, but the result with visual feature shows the limitation and possibility of our approach.

Despite the promise of Multi-Task Learning in leveraging complementary knowledge across tasks, existing multi-task optimization (MTO) techniques remain fixated on resolving conflicts via optimizer-centric loss scaling and gradient manipulation strategies, yet fail to deliver consistent gains. In this paper, we argue that the shared representation space, where task interactions naturally occur, offers rich information and potential for operations complementary to existing optimizers, especially for facilitating the inter-task complementarity, which is rarely explored in MTO. This intuition leads to Rep-MTL, which exploits the representation-level task saliency to quantify interactions between task-specific optimization and shared representation learning. By steering these saliencies through entropy-based penalization and sample-wise cross-task alignment, Rep-MTL aims to mitigate negative transfer by maintaining the effective training of individual tasks instead pure conflict-solving, while explicitly promoting complementary information sharing. Experiments are conducted on four challenging MTL benchmarks covering both task-shift and domain-shift scenarios. The results show that Rep-MTL, even paired with the basic equal weighting policy, achieves competitive performance gains with favorable efficiency. Beyond standard performance metrics, Power Law exponent analysis demonstrates Rep-MTL's efficacy in balancing task-specific learning and cross-task sharing. The project page is available at HERE.

Recent years, multimodal models have made remarkable strides and pave the way for intelligent browser use agents. However, when solving tasks on real world webpages in multi-turn, long-horizon trajectories, current agents still suffer from disordered action sequencing and excessive trial and error during execution. This paper introduces Recon-Act, a self-evolving multi-agent framework grounded in Reconnaissance-Action behavioral paradigm. The system comprises a Reconnaissance Team and an Action Team: the former conducts comparative analysis and tool generation, while the latter handles intent decomposition, tool orchestration, and execution. By contrasting the erroneous trajectories with successful ones, the Reconnaissance Team infers remedies, and abstracts them into a unified notion of generalized tools, either expressed as hints or as rule-based codes, and register to the tool archive in real time. The Action Team reinference the process empowered with these targeting tools, thus establishing a closed-loop training pipeline of data-tools-action-feedback. Following the 6 level implementation roadmap proposed in this work, we have currently reached Level 3 (with limited human-in-the-loop intervention). Leveraging generalized tools obtained through reconnaissance, Recon-Act substantially improves adaptability to unseen websites and solvability on long-horizon tasks, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the challenging VisualWebArena dataset.

Scaling test-time compute has emerged as a key strategy for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), particularly in tasks like mathematical problem-solving. A traditional approach, Self-Consistency (SC), generates multiple solutions to a problem and selects the most common answer via majority voting. Another common method involves scoring each solution with a reward model (verifier) and choosing the best one. Recent advancements in Generative Reward Models (GenRM) reframe verification as a next-token prediction task, enabling inference-time scaling along a new axis. Specifically, GenRM generates multiple verification chains-of-thought to score each solution. Under a limited inference budget, this introduces a fundamental trade-off: should you spend the budget on scaling solutions via SC or generate fewer solutions and allocate compute to verification via GenRM? To address this, we evaluate GenRM against SC under a fixed inference budget. Interestingly, we find that SC is more compute-efficient than GenRM for most practical inference budgets across diverse models and datasets. For instance, GenRM first matches SC after consuming up to 8x the inference compute and requires significantly more compute to outperform it. Furthermore, we derive inference scaling laws for the GenRM paradigm, revealing that compute-optimal inference favors scaling solution generation more aggressively than scaling the number of verifications. Our work provides practical guidance on optimizing test-time scaling by balancing solution generation and verification. The code is available at https://github.com/nishadsinghi/sc-genrm-scaling.

Despite their success in many natural language tasks, solving math problems remains a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs). A large gap exists between LLMs' pass-at-one and pass-at-N performance in solving math problems, suggesting LLMs might be close to finding correct solutions, motivating our exploration of fine-tuning methods to unlock LLMs' performance. Using the challenging MATH dataset, we investigate three fine-tuning strategies: (1) solution fine-tuning, where we fine-tune to generate a detailed solution for a given math problem; (2) solution-cluster re-ranking, where the LLM is fine-tuned as a solution verifier/evaluator to choose among generated candidate solution clusters; (3) multi-task sequential fine-tuning, which integrates both solution generation and evaluation tasks together efficiently to enhance the LLM performance. With these methods, we present a thorough empirical study on a series of PaLM 2 models and find: (1) The quality and style of the step-by-step solutions used for fine-tuning can make a significant impact on the model performance; (2) While solution re-ranking and majority voting are both effective for improving the model performance when used separately, they can also be used together for an even greater performance boost; (3) Multi-task fine-tuning that sequentially separates the solution generation and evaluation tasks can offer improved performance compared with the solution fine-tuning baseline. Guided by these insights, we design a fine-tuning recipe that yields approximately 58.8% accuracy on the MATH dataset with fine-tuned PaLM 2-L models, an 11.2% accuracy improvement over the few-shot performance of pre-trained PaLM 2-L model with majority voting.

Recent studies have highlighted their proficiency in some simple tasks like writing and coding through various reasoning strategies. However, LLM agents still struggle with tasks that require comprehensive planning, a process that challenges current models and remains a critical research issue. In this study, we concentrate on travel planning, a Multi-Phases planning problem, that involves multiple interconnected stages, such as outlining, information gathering, and planning, often characterized by the need to manage various constraints and uncertainties. Existing reasoning approaches have struggled to effectively address this complex task. Our research aims to address this challenge by developing a human-like planning framework for LLM agents, i.e., guiding the LLM agent to simulate various steps that humans take when solving Multi-Phases problems. Specifically, we implement several strategies to enable LLM agents to generate a coherent outline for each travel query, mirroring human planning patterns. Additionally, we integrate Strategy Block and Knowledge Block into our framework: Strategy Block facilitates information collection, while Knowledge Block provides essential information for detailed planning. Through our extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our framework significantly improves the planning capabilities of LLM agents, enabling them to tackle the travel planning task with improved efficiency and effectiveness. Our experimental results showcase the exceptional performance of the proposed framework; when combined with GPT-4-Turbo, it attains 10times the performance gains in comparison to the baseline framework deployed on GPT-4-Turbo.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging can produce detailed images of the anatomy and physiology of the human body that can assist doctors in diagnosing and treating pathologies such as tumours. However, MRI suffers from very long acquisition times that make it susceptible to patient motion artifacts and limit its potential to deliver dynamic treatments. Conventional approaches such as Parallel Imaging and Compressed Sensing allow for an increase in MRI acquisition speed by reconstructing MR images from sub-sampled MRI data acquired using multiple receiver coils. Recent advancements in Deep Learning combined with Parallel Imaging and Compressed Sensing techniques have the potential to produce high-fidelity reconstructions from highly accelerated MRI data. In this work we present a novel Deep Learning-based Inverse Problem solver applied to the task of Accelerated MRI Reconstruction, called the Recurrent Variational Network (RecurrentVarNet), by exploiting the properties of Convolutional Recurrent Neural Networks and unrolled algorithms for solving Inverse Problems. The RecurrentVarNet consists of multiple recurrent blocks, each responsible for one iteration of the unrolled variational optimization scheme for solving the inverse problem of multi-coil Accelerated MRI Reconstruction. Contrary to traditional approaches, the optimization steps are performed in the observation domain (k-space) instead of the image domain. Each block of the RecurrentVarNet refines the observed k-space and comprises a data consistency term and a recurrent unit which takes as input a learned hidden state and the prediction of the previous block. Our proposed method achieves new state of the art qualitative and quantitative reconstruction results on 5-fold and 10-fold accelerated data from a public multi-coil brain dataset, outperforming previous conventional and deep learning-based approaches.

Aligned language models face a significant limitation as their fine-tuning often results in compromised safety. To tackle this, we propose a simple method RESTA that performs LLM safety realignment. RESTA stands for REstoring Safety through Task Arithmetic. At its core, it involves a simple arithmetic addition of a safety vector to the weights of the compromised model. We demonstrate the effectiveness of RESTA in both parameter-efficient and full fine-tuning, covering a wide range of downstream tasks, including instruction following in Chinese, English, and Hindi, as well as problem-solving capabilities in Code and Math. We also showcase the generalizability of RESTA on three existing safety evaluation benchmarks and a multilingual benchmark dataset proposed as a part of this work, consisting of 550 harmful questions covering 11 categories, each with 5 sub-categories of harm. Overall, RESTA decreases the harmfulness of the compromised model from 18.6% to 5.1% and from 9.2% to 1.5% in parameter-efficient and full fine-tuning, respectively, while maintaining most of the model's performance on the task. We release the source codes at: https://github.com/declare-lab/resta.

Most existing chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting methods suffer from the issues of generalizability and consistency, as they often rely on instance-specific solutions that may not be applicable to other cases and lack task-level consistency in their reasoning steps. To address these limitations, we propose a comprehensive framework, StrategyLLM, harnessing the capabilities of LLMs to construct generalizable and consistent few-shot prompts for various tasks automatically. To this end, StrategyLLM employs four LLM-based agents: strategy generator, executor, optimizer, and evaluator, working together to generate, evaluate, and select promising strategies for a given task. The experimental results demonstrate that StrategyLLM outperforms the competitive baseline CoT-SC that requires human-annotated solutions on 13 datasets across 4 challenging tasks without human involvement, including math reasoning (34.21% rightarrow 38.79%), commonsense reasoning (70.3% rightarrow 72.5%), algorithmic reasoning (51.7% rightarrow 62.0%), and symbolic reasoning (30.0% rightarrow 79.2%).

We study visual question answering in a setting where the answer has to be mined from a pool of relevant and irrelevant images given as a context. For such a setting, a model must first retrieve relevant images from the pool and answer the question from these retrieved images. We refer to this problem as retrieval-based visual question answering (or RETVQA in short). The RETVQA is distinctively different and more challenging than the traditionally-studied Visual Question Answering (VQA), where a given question has to be answered with a single relevant image in context. Towards solving the RETVQA task, we propose a unified Multi Image BART (MI-BART) that takes a question and retrieved images using our relevance encoder for free-form fluent answer generation. Further, we introduce the largest dataset in this space, namely RETVQA, which has the following salient features: multi-image and retrieval requirement for VQA, metadata-independent questions over a pool of heterogeneous images, expecting a mix of classification-oriented and open-ended generative answers. Our proposed framework achieves an accuracy of 76.5% and a fluency of 79.3% on the proposed dataset, namely RETVQA and also outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 4.9% and 11.8% on the image segment of the publicly available WebQA dataset on the accuracy and fluency metrics, respectively.

Intelligent agent naturally learns from motion. Various self-supervised algorithms have leveraged motion cues to learn effective visual representations. The hurdle here is that motion is both ambiguous and complex, rendering previous works either suffer from degraded learning efficacy, or resort to strong assumptions on object motions. In this work, we design a new learning-from-motion paradigm to bridge these gaps. Instead of explicitly modeling the motion probabilities, we design the pretext task as a conditional motion propagation problem. Given an input image and several sparse flow guidance vectors on it, our framework seeks to recover the full-image motion. Compared to other alternatives, our framework has several appealing properties: (1) Using sparse flow guidance during training resolves the inherent motion ambiguity, and thus easing feature learning. (2) Solving the pretext task of conditional motion propagation encourages the emergence of kinematically-sound representations that poss greater expressive power. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework learns structural and coherent features; and achieves state-of-the-art self-supervision performance on several downstream tasks including semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, and human parsing. Furthermore, our framework is successfully extended to several useful applications such as semi-automatic pixel-level annotation. Project page: "http://mmlab.ie.cuhk.edu.hk/projects/CMP/".

Humanities scholars commonly provide evidence for claims that they make about a work of literature (e.g., a novel) in the form of quotations from the work. We collect a large-scale dataset (RELiC) of 78K literary quotations and surrounding critical analysis and use it to formulate the novel task of literary evidence retrieval, in which models are given an excerpt of literary analysis surrounding a masked quotation and asked to retrieve the quoted passage from the set of all passages in the work. Solving this retrieval task requires a deep understanding of complex literary and linguistic phenomena, which proves challenging to methods that overwhelmingly rely on lexical and semantic similarity matching. We implement a RoBERTa-based dense passage retriever for this task that outperforms existing pretrained information retrieval baselines; however, experiments and analysis by human domain experts indicate that there is substantial room for improvement over our dense retriever.

Solving math story problems is a complex task for students and NLP models alike, requiring them to understand the world as described in the story and reason over it to compute an answer. Recent years have seen impressive performance on automatically solving these problems with large pre-trained language models and innovative techniques to prompt them. However, it remains unclear if these models possess accurate representations of mathematical concepts. This leads to lack of interpretability and trustworthiness which impedes their usefulness in various applications. In this paper, we consolidate previous work on categorizing and representing math story problems and develop MathWorld, which is a graph-based semantic formalism specific for the domain of math story problems. With MathWorld, we can assign world models to math story problems which represent the situations and actions introduced in the text and their mathematical relationships. We combine math story problems from several existing datasets and annotate a corpus of 1,019 problems and 3,204 logical forms with MathWorld. Using this data, we demonstrate the following use cases of MathWorld: (1) prompting language models with synthetically generated question-answer pairs to probe their reasoning and world modeling abilities, and (2) generating new problems by using the world models as a design space.

A riddle is a question or statement with double or veiled meanings, followed by an unexpected answer. Solving riddle is a challenging task for both machine and human, testing the capability of understanding figurative, creative natural language and reasoning with commonsense knowledge. We introduce BiRdQA, a bilingual multiple-choice question answering dataset with 6614 English riddles and 8751 Chinese riddles. For each riddle-answer pair, we provide four distractors with additional information from Wikipedia. The distractors are automatically generated at scale with minimal bias. Existing monolingual and multilingual QA models fail to perform well on our dataset, indicating that there is a long way to go before machine can beat human on solving tricky riddles. The dataset has been released to the community.

Solving partial differential equations (PDEs) is a central task in scientific computing. Recently, neural network approximation of PDEs has received increasing attention due to its flexible meshless discretization and its potential for high-dimensional problems. One fundamental numerical difficulty is that random samples in the training set introduce statistical errors into the discretization of loss functional which may become the dominant error in the final approximation, and therefore overshadow the modeling capability of the neural network. In this work, we propose a new minmax formulation to optimize simultaneously the approximate solution, given by a neural network model, and the random samples in the training set, provided by a deep generative model. The key idea is to use a deep generative model to adjust random samples in the training set such that the residual induced by the approximate PDE solution can maintain a smooth profile when it is being minimized. Such an idea is achieved by implicitly embedding the Wasserstein distance between the residual-induced distribution and the uniform distribution into the loss, which is then minimized together with the residual. A nearly uniform residual profile means that its variance is small for any normalized weight function such that the Monte Carlo approximation error of the loss functional is reduced significantly for a certain sample size. The adversarial adaptive sampling (AAS) approach proposed in this work is the first attempt to formulate two essential components, minimizing the residual and seeking the optimal training set, into one minmax objective functional for the neural network approximation of PDEs.

Mathematical word problem-solving has long been recognized as a complex task for small language models (SLMs). A recent study hypothesized that the smallest model size, needed to achieve over 80% accuracy on the GSM8K benchmark, is 34 billion parameters. To reach this level of performance with smaller models, researcher often train SLMs to generate Python code or use tools to help avoid calculation errors. Additionally, they employ ensembling, where outputs of up to 100 model runs are combined to arrive at a more accurate result. Result selection is done using consensus, majority vote or a separate a verifier model used in conjunction with the SLM. Ensembling provides a substantial boost in accuracy but at a significant cost increase with multiple calls to the model (e.g., Phi-GSM uses top-48 to boost the performance from 68.2 to 81.5). In this work, we present Orca-Math, a 7-billion-parameter SLM based on the Mistral-7B, which achieves 86.81% on GSM8k without the need for multiple model calls or the use of verifiers, code execution or any other external tools. Our approach has the following key elements: (1) A high quality synthetic dataset of 200K math problems created using a multi-agent setup where agents collaborate to create the data, (2) An iterative learning techniques that enables the SLM to practice solving problems, receive feedback on its solutions and learn from preference pairs incorporating the SLM solutions and the feedback. When trained with Supervised Fine-Tuning alone, Orca-Math achieves 81.50% on GSM8k pass@1 metric. With iterative preference learning, Orca-Math achieves 86.81% pass@1. Orca-Math surpasses the performance of significantly larger models such as LLAMA-2-70B, WizardMath-70B, Gemini-Pro, ChatGPT-3.5. It also significantly outperforms other smaller models while using much smaller data (hundreds of thousands vs. millions of problems).

Language models have been shown to exhibit positive scaling, where performance improves as models are scaled up in terms of size, compute, or data. In this work, we introduce NeQA, a dataset consisting of questions with negation in which language models do not exhibit straightforward positive scaling. We show that this task can exhibit inverse scaling, U-shaped scaling, or positive scaling, and the three scaling trends shift in this order as we use more powerful prompting methods or model families. We hypothesize that solving NeQA depends on two subtasks: question answering (task 1) and negation understanding (task 2). We find that task 1 has linear scaling, while task 2 has sigmoid-shaped scaling with an emergent transition point, and composing these two scaling trends yields the final scaling trend of NeQA. Our work reveals and provides a way to analyze the complex scaling trends of language models.

Training reinforcement learning agents at solving a given task is highly dependent on identifying optimal sets of hyperparameters and selecting suitable environment input / output configurations. This tedious process could be eased with a straightforward toolbox allowing its user to quickly compare different training parameter sets. We present rl_reach, a self-contained, open-source and easy-to-use software package designed to run reproducible reinforcement learning experiments for customisable robotic reaching tasks. rl_reach packs together training environments, agents, hyperparameter optimisation tools and policy evaluation scripts, allowing its users to quickly investigate and identify optimal training configurations. rl_reach is publicly available at this URL: https://github.com/PierreExeter/rl_reach.

We introduce DABstep, a novel benchmark for evaluating AI agents on realistic multi-step data analysis tasks. DABstep comprises over 450 real-world challenges derived from a financial analytics platform, requiring models to combine code-based data processing with contextual reasoning over heterogeneous documentation. Each task demands an iterative, multi-step problem-solving approach, testing capabilities in data manipulation, cross-referencing multiple sources, and precise result reporting. The benchmark provides a factoid-style answer format with automatic correctness checks for objective scoring at scale. We evaluate leading LLM-based agents, revealing a substantial performance gap: even the best agent achieves only 14.55% accuracy on the hardest tasks. We detail our benchmark's design, dataset composition, task formulation, evaluation protocol, report baseline results and analyze failure modes. DABstep is released with a public leaderboard and toolkit to accelerate research in autonomous data analysis.

Geometry problem-solving (GPS), a challenging task requiring both visual comprehension and symbolic reasoning, effectively measures the reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Humans exhibit strong reasoning ability in this task through accurate identification and adaptive application of geometric principles within visual contexts. However, existing benchmarks fail to jointly assess both dimensions of the human-like geometric reasoning mechanism in MLLMs, remaining a critical gap in assessing their ability to tackle GPS. To this end, we introduce GeoSense, the first comprehensive bilingual benchmark designed to systematically evaluate the geometric reasoning abilities of MLLMs through the lens of geometric principles. GeoSense features a five-level hierarchical framework of geometric principles spanning plane and solid geometry, an intricately annotated dataset of 1,789 problems, and an innovative evaluation strategy. Through extensive experiments on GeoSense with various open-source and closed-source MLLMs, we observe that Gemini-2.0-pro-flash performs best, achieving an overall score of 65.3. Our in-depth analysis reveals that the identification and application of geometric principles remain a bottleneck for leading MLLMs, jointly hindering their reasoning abilities. These findings underscore GeoSense's potential to guide future advancements in MLLMs' geometric reasoning capabilities, paving the way for more robust and human-like reasoning in artificial intelligence.

Large language models, such as ChatGPT, Claude, or LLaMA, are gigantic, monolithic, and possess the superpower to simultaneously support thousands of tasks. However, high-throughput applications often prefer smaller task-specific models because of their lower latency and cost. One challenge of using task-specific models is the incremental need for solving newer tasks after the model is already deployed for existing tasks. A straightforward solution requires fine-tuning the model again for both existing and new tasks, which is computationally expensive and time-consuming. To address this issue, we propose a model merging based approach called SUPERMERGE. SUPERMERGE is a gradient-based method to systematically merge several fine-tuned models trained on existing and new tasks. SUPERMERGE is designed to be lightweight and fast, and the merged model achieves similar performance to fully fine-tuned models on all tasks. Furthermore, we proposed a hierarchical model merging strategy to reduce the peak space requirement without sacrificing the performance of the merged model. We experimentally demonstrate that SUPERMERGE outperforms existing model merging methods on common natural language processing and computer vision tasks.

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly powerful and have become capable of solving a plethora of tasks through proper instructions in natural language. However, the vast majority of testing suites assume that the instructions are written in English, the de facto prompting language. Code intelligence and problem solving still remain a difficult task, even for the most advanced LLMs. Currently, there are no datasets to measure the generalization power for code-generation models in a language other than English. In this work, we present RoCode, a competitive programming dataset, consisting of 2,642 problems written in Romanian, 11k solutions in C, C++ and Python and comprehensive testing suites for each problem. The purpose of RoCode is to provide a benchmark for evaluating the code intelligence of language models trained on Romanian / multilingual text as well as a fine-tuning set for pretrained Romanian models. Through our results and review of related works, we argue for the need to develop code models for languages other than English.

Solving multi-label recognition (MLR) for images in the low-label regime is a challenging task with many real-world applications. Recent work learns an alignment between textual and visual spaces to compensate for insufficient image labels, but loses accuracy because of the limited amount of available MLR annotations. In this work, we utilize the strong alignment of textual and visual features pretrained with millions of auxiliary image-text pairs and propose Dual Context Optimization (DualCoOp) as a unified framework for partial-label MLR and zero-shot MLR. DualCoOp encodes positive and negative contexts with class names as part of the linguistic input (i.e. prompts). Since DualCoOp only introduces a very light learnable overhead upon the pretrained vision-language framework, it can quickly adapt to multi-label recognition tasks that have limited annotations and even unseen classes. Experiments on standard multi-label recognition benchmarks across two challenging low-label settings demonstrate the advantages of our approach over state-of-the-art methods.

This paper introduces the novel task of multimodal puzzle solving, framed within the context of visual question-answering. We present a new dataset, AlgoPuzzleVQA designed to challenge and evaluate the capabilities of multimodal language models in solving algorithmic puzzles that necessitate both visual understanding, language understanding, and complex algorithmic reasoning. We create the puzzles to encompass a diverse array of mathematical and algorithmic topics such as boolean logic, combinatorics, graph theory, optimization, search, etc., aiming to evaluate the gap between visual data interpretation and algorithmic problem-solving skills. The dataset is generated automatically from code authored by humans. All our puzzles have exact solutions that can be found from the algorithm without tedious human calculations. It ensures that our dataset can be scaled up arbitrarily in terms of reasoning complexity and dataset size. Our investigation reveals that large language models (LLMs) such as GPT4V and Gemini exhibit limited performance in puzzle-solving tasks. We find that their performance is near random in a multi-choice question-answering setup for a significant number of puzzles. The findings emphasize the challenges of integrating visual, language, and algorithmic knowledge for solving complex reasoning problems.

Long video understanding (LVU) presents a significant challenge for current multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) due to the task's inherent complexity and context window constraint. It is widely assumed that addressing LVU tasks requires foundation MLLMs with extended context windows, strong visual perception capabilities, and proficient domain expertise. In this work, we challenge this common belief by introducing VideoDeepResearch, a novel agentic framework for long video understanding. Our approach relies solely on a text-only large reasoning model (LRM) combined with a modular multi-modal toolkit, including multimodal retrievers and visual perceivers, all of which are readily available in practice. For each LVU task, the system formulates a problem-solving strategy through reasoning, while selectively accessing and utilizing essential video content via tool using. We conduct extensive experiments on popular LVU benchmarks, including MLVU, Video-MME, and LVBench. Our results demonstrate that VideoDeepResearch achieves substantial improvements over existing MLLM baselines, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art by 9.6%, 6.6%, and 3.9% on MLVU (test), LVBench, and LongVideoBench, respectively. These findings highlight the promise of agentic systems in overcoming key challenges in LVU problems.

Solving complex planning problems requires Large Language Models (LLMs) to explicitly model the state transition to avoid rule violations, comply with constraints, and ensure optimality-a task hindered by the inherent ambiguity of natural language. To overcome such ambiguity, Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL) is leveraged as a planning abstraction that enables precise and formal state descriptions. With PDDL, we can generate a symbolic world model where classic searching algorithms, such as A*, can be seamlessly applied to find optimal plans. However, directly generating PDDL domains with current LLMs remains an open challenge due to the lack of PDDL training data. To address this challenge, we propose to scale up the test-time computation of LLMs to enhance their PDDL reasoning capabilities, thereby enabling the generation of high-quality PDDL domains. Specifically, we introduce a simple yet effective algorithm, which first employs a Best-of-N sampling approach to improve the quality of the initial solution and then refines the solution in a fine-grained manner with verbalized machine learning. Our method outperforms o1-mini by a considerable margin in the generation of PDDL domain, achieving over 50% success rate on two tasks (i.e., generating PDDL domains from natural language description or PDDL problems). This is done without requiring additional training. By taking advantage of PDDL as state abstraction, our method is able to outperform current state-of-the-art methods on almost all competition-level planning tasks.

Solving mechanics problems using numerical methods requires comprehensive intelligent capability of retrieving relevant knowledge and theory, constructing and executing codes, analyzing the results, a task that has thus far mainly been reserved for humans. While emerging AI methods can provide effective approaches to solve end-to-end problems, for instance via the use of deep surrogate models or various data analytics strategies, they often lack physical intuition since knowledge is baked into the parametric complement through training, offering less flexibility when it comes to incorporating mathematical or physical insights. By leveraging diverse capabilities of multiple dynamically interacting large language models (LLMs), we can overcome the limitations of conventional approaches and develop a new class of physics-inspired generative machine learning platform, here referred to as MechAgents. A set of AI agents can solve mechanics tasks, here demonstrated for elasticity problems, via autonomous collaborations. A two-agent team can effectively write, execute and self-correct code, in order to apply finite element methods to solve classical elasticity problems in various flavors (different boundary conditions, domain geometries, meshes, small/finite deformation and linear/hyper-elastic constitutive laws, and others). For more complex tasks, we construct a larger group of agents with enhanced division of labor among planning, formulating, coding, executing and criticizing the process and results. The agents mutually correct each other to improve the overall team-work performance in understanding, formulating and validating the solution. Our framework shows the potential of synergizing the intelligence of language models, the reliability of physics-based modeling, and the dynamic collaborations among diverse agents, opening novel avenues for automation of solving engineering problems.

This paper introduces OSC (Orchestrating Cognitive Synergy), a knowledge-aware adaptive collaboration framework designed to enhance cognitive synergy in multi-agent systems with large language models. While prior work has advanced agent selection and result aggregation, efficient linguistic interactions for deep collaboration among expert agents remain a critical bottleneck. OSC addresses this gap as a pivotal intermediate layer between selection and aggregation, introducing Collaborator Knowledge Models (CKM) to enable each agent to dynamically perceive its collaborators' cognitive states. Through real-time cognitive gap analysis, agents adaptively adjust communication behaviors, including content focus, detail level, and expression style, using learned strategies. Experiments on complex reasoning and problem-solving benchmarks demonstrate that OSC significantly improves task performance and communication efficiency, transforming "parallel-working individuals'' into a "deeply collaborative cognitive team.'' This framework not only optimizes multi-agent collaboration but also offers new insights into LLM agent interaction behaviors.

Although large language models demonstrate emergent abilities in solving math word problems, there is a challenging task in complex multi-step mathematical reasoning tasks. To improve model performance on mathematical reasoning tasks, previous work has conducted supervised fine-tuning on open-source models by improving the quality and quantity of data. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, named Brain, to imitate human thought processes to enhance mathematical reasoning abilities, using the Frontal Lobe Model to generate plans, and then employing the Parietal Lobe Model to generate code and execute to obtain answers. First, we achieve SOTA performance in comparison with Code LLaMA 7B based models through this method. Secondly, we find that plans can be explicitly extracted from natural language, code, or formal language. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/cyzhh/Brain.

Mathematical modeling is a cornerstone of scientific discovery and engineering practice, enabling the translation of real-world problems into formal systems across domains such as physics, biology, and economics. Unlike mathematical reasoning, which assumes a predefined formulation, modeling requires open-ended problem analysis, abstraction, and principled formalization. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong reasoning capabilities, they fall short in rigorous model construction, limiting their utility in real-world problem-solving. To this end, we formalize the task of LLM-powered real-world mathematical modeling, where agents must analyze problems, construct domain-appropriate formulations, and generate complete end-to-end solutions. We introduce MM-Bench, a curated benchmark of 111 problems from the Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM/ICM), spanning the years 2000 to 2025 and across ten diverse domains such as physics, biology, and economics. To tackle this task, we propose MM-Agent, an expert-inspired framework that decomposes mathematical modeling into four stages: open-ended problem analysis, structured model formulation, computational problem solving, and report generation. Experiments on MM-Bench show that MM-Agent significantly outperforms baseline agents, achieving an 11.88\% improvement over human expert solutions while requiring only 15 minutes and \$0.88 per task using GPT-4o. Furthermore, under official MCM/ICM protocols, MM-Agent assisted two undergraduate teams in winning the Finalist Award (top 2.0\% among 27,456 teams) in MCM/ICM 2025, demonstrating its practical effectiveness as a modeling copilot. Our code is available at https://github.com/usail-hkust/LLM-MM-Agent

This paper presents XLSR which learns cross-lingual speech representations by pretraining a single model from the raw waveform of speech in multiple languages. We build on wav2vec 2.0 which is trained by solving a contrastive task over masked latent speech representations and jointly learns a quantization of the latents shared across languages. The resulting model is fine-tuned on labeled data and experiments show that cross-lingual pretraining significantly outperforms monolingual pretraining. On the CommonVoice benchmark, XLSR shows a relative phoneme error rate reduction of 72% compared to the best known results. On BABEL, our approach improves word error rate by 16% relative compared to a comparable system. Our approach enables a single multilingual speech recognition model which is competitive to strong individual models. Analysis shows that the latent discrete speech representations are shared across languages with increased sharing for related languages. We hope to catalyze research in low-resource speech understanding by releasing XLSR-53, a large model pretrained in 53 languages.

Recent progress in o1-like models has significantly enhanced the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), empowering them to tackle increasingly complex tasks through reflection capabilities, such as making assumptions, backtracking, and self-refinement. However, effectively evaluating such reflection capabilities remains challenging due to the lack of appropriate benchmarks. To bridge this gap, we introduce LR^2Bench, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate the Long-chain Reflective Reasoning capabilities of LLMs. LR^2Bench comprises 850 samples across six Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs) where reflective reasoning is crucial for deriving solutions that meet all given constraints. Each type of task focuses on distinct constraint patterns, such as knowledge-based, logical, and spatial constraints, providing a comprehensive evaluation of diverse problem-solving scenarios. We conduct extensive evaluation on both conventional models and o1-like models. Our experimental results reveal that even the most advanced reasoning-specific models, such as DeepSeek-R1 and OpenAI o1-preview, struggle with tasks in LR^2Bench, achieving an average Exact Match score of only 20.0% and 23.6%, respectively. These findings underscore the significant room for improvement in the reflective reasoning capabilities of current LLMs. The leaderboard of our benchmark is available at https://huggingface.co/spaces/UltraRonin/LR2Bench

Large language models (LLMs) have been routinely used to solve various tasks using step-by-step reasoning. However, the structure of intermediate reasoning steps, or thoughts, is rigid and unidirectional, such as chains, trees, or acyclic-directed graphs. Consequently, the resulting inflexible and forward-only reasoning may not address challenging tasks and fail when the LLM frequently gives false responses, i.e., ``hallucinations''. This paper proposes a new reasoning framework, called Thought Rollback (TR), allowing LLMs to adaptively build thought structure while maintaining effective reasoning toward problem-solving under ``hallucinations''. The core mechanism of TR is rolling back thoughts, which allows LLMs to perform error analysis on thoughts, and thus roll back to any previously mistaken thought for revision. Subsequently, by including such trial-and-error in the prompt to guide the LLM, each rollback leads to one more reliable reasoning path. Therefore, starting with a simple prompt without human annotations, LLM with TR adaptively and gradually explores thoughts for a correct solution. Comprehensive experiments on mathematical problems and multi-task reasoning demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of TR in terms of problem-solving rate and interaction cost. For instance, the solving rate of GPT-4 with TR outperforms the current best by 9% on the MATH dataset.

Predicting temporal progress from visual trajectories is important for intelligent robots that can learn, adapt, and improve. However, learning such progress estimator, or temporal value function, across different tasks and domains requires both a large amount of diverse data and methods which can scale and generalize. To address these challenges, we present Generative Value Learning (\GVL), a universal value function estimator that leverages the world knowledge embedded in vision-language models (VLMs) to predict task progress. Naively asking a VLM to predict values for a video sequence performs poorly due to the strong temporal correlation between successive frames. Instead, GVL poses value estimation as a temporal ordering problem over shuffled video frames; this seemingly more challenging task encourages VLMs to more fully exploit their underlying semantic and temporal grounding capabilities to differentiate frames based on their perceived task progress, consequently producing significantly better value predictions. Without any robot or task specific training, GVL can in-context zero-shot and few-shot predict effective values for more than 300 distinct real-world tasks across diverse robot platforms, including challenging bimanual manipulation tasks. Furthermore, we demonstrate that GVL permits flexible multi-modal in-context learning via examples from heterogeneous tasks and embodiments, such as human videos. The generality of GVL enables various downstream applications pertinent to visuomotor policy learning, including dataset filtering, success detection, and advantage-weighted regression -- all without any model training or finetuning.

This paper describes the architecture and systems built towards solving the SemEval 2023 Task 2: MultiCoNER II (Multilingual Complex Named Entity Recognition) [1]. We evaluate two approaches (a) a traditional Conditional Random Fields model and (b) a Large Language Model (LLM) fine-tuned with a customized head and compare the two approaches. The novel ideas explored are: 1) Decaying auxiliary loss (with residual) - where we train the model on an auxiliary task of Coarse-Grained NER and include this task as a part of the loss function 2) Triplet token blending - where we explore ways of blending the embeddings of neighboring tokens in the final NER layer prior to prediction 3) Task-optimal heads - where we explore a variety of custom heads and learning rates for the final layer of the LLM. We also explore multiple LLMs including GPT-3 and experiment with a variety of dropout and other hyperparameter settings before arriving at our final model which achieves micro & macro f1 of 0.85/0.84 (on dev) and 0.67/0.61 on the test data . We show that while pre-trained LLMs, by themselves, bring about a large improvement in scores as compared to traditional models, we also demonstrate that tangible improvements to the Macro-F1 score can be made by augmenting the LLM with additional feature/loss/model engineering techniques described above.

Audio-driven co-speech human gesture generation has made remarkable advancements recently. However, most previous works only focus on single person audio-driven gesture generation. We aim at solving the problem of conversational co-speech gesture generation that considers multiple participants in a conversation, which is a novel and challenging task due to the difficulty of simultaneously incorporating semantic information and other relevant features from both the primary speaker and the interlocutor. To this end, we propose CoDiffuseGesture, a diffusion model-based approach for speech-driven interaction gesture generation via modeling bilateral conversational intention, emotion, and semantic context. Our method synthesizes appropriate interactive, speech-matched, high-quality gestures for conversational motions through the intention perception module and emotion reasoning module at the sentence level by a pretrained language model. Experimental results demonstrate the promising performance of the proposed method.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a low-level task often used as a foundation for solving higher level NLP problems. In the context of character detection in novels, NER false negatives can be an issue as they possibly imply missing certain characters or relationships completely. In this article, we demonstrate that applying a straightforward data augmentation technique allows training a model achieving higher recall, at the cost of a certain amount of precision regarding ambiguous entities. We show that this decrease in precision can be mitigated by giving the model more local context, which resolves some of the ambiguities.

Recent advances such as LLaVA and Mini-GPT4 have successfully integrated visual information into LLMs, yielding inspiring outcomes and giving rise to a new generation of multi-modal LLMs, or MLLMs. Nevertheless, these methods struggle with hallucinations and the mutual interference between tasks. To tackle these problems, we propose an efficient and accurate approach to adapt to downstream tasks by utilizing LLM as a bridge to connect multiple expert models, namely u-LLaVA. Firstly, we incorporate the modality alignment module and multi-task modules into LLM. Then, we reorganize or rebuild multi-type public datasets to enable efficient modality alignment and instruction following. Finally, task-specific information is extracted from the trained LLM and provided to different modules for solving downstream tasks. The overall framework is simple, effective, and achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks. We also release our model, the generated data, and the code base publicly available.

Existing reasoning evaluation frameworks for Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) predominantly either assess text-based reasoning or vision-language understanding capabilities, with limited dynamic interplay between textual and visual constraints. To address this limitation, we introduce CrossWordBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of both LLMs and LVLMs through the medium of crossword puzzles-a task requiring multimodal adherence to semantic constraints from text-based clues and intersectional constraints from visual grid structures. CrossWordBench leverages a controllable puzzle generation framework that produces puzzles in multiple formats (text and image) and offers different evaluation strategies ranging from direct puzzle solving to interactive modes. Our extensive evaluation of over 20 models reveals that reasoning LLMs outperform non-reasoning models substantially by effectively leveraging crossing-letter constraints. We further demonstrate that LVLMs struggle with the task, showing a strong correlation between their puzzle-solving performance and grid-parsing accuracy. Our findings offer insights into the limitations of the reasoning capabilities of current LLMs and LVLMs, and provide an effective approach for creating multimodal constrained tasks for future evaluations.

To augment language models with the ability to reason, researchers usually prompt or finetune them to produce chain of thought reasoning steps before producing the final answer. However, although people use natural language to reason effectively, it may be that LMs could reason more effectively with some intermediate computation that is not in natural language. In this work, we explore an alternative reasoning approach: instead of explicitly producing the chain of thought reasoning steps, we use the language model's internal hidden states to perform implicit reasoning. The implicit reasoning steps are distilled from a teacher model trained on explicit chain-of-thought reasoning, and instead of doing reasoning "horizontally" by producing intermediate words one-by-one, we distill it such that the reasoning happens "vertically" among the hidden states in different layers. We conduct experiments on a multi-digit multiplication task and a grade school math problem dataset and find that this approach enables solving tasks previously not solvable without explicit chain-of-thought, at a speed comparable to no chain-of-thought.

Mathematical reasoning is a cornerstone of artificial general intelligence and a primary benchmark for evaluating the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). While state-of-the-art models show promise, they often falter when faced with complex problems that demand deep conceptual understanding and intricate, multi-step deliberation. To address this challenge, we introduce JT-Math-8B, a series of open-source models comprising base, instruct, and thinking versions, built upon a systematic, multi-stage optimization framework. Our pre-training corpus is a high-quality, 210B-token dataset curated through a dedicated data pipeline that uses model-based validation to ensure quality and diversity. The Instruct Model is optimized for direct, concise answers through Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and a GRPO-based reinforcement learning (RL) method. The Thinking Model is trained for complex problem-solving using a Long Chain-of-Thought (Long CoT) approach, combining SFT with a novel, multi-stage RL curriculum that progressively increases task difficulty and context length up to 32K tokens. JT-Math-8B achieves state-of-the-art results among open-source models of similar size, surpassing prominent models like OpenAI's O1-mini and GPT-4o , and demonstrating superior performance on competition-level mathematics.

With the proliferation of large language models (LLMs), the comprehensive alignment of such models across multiple tasks has emerged as a critical area of research. Existing alignment methodologies primarily address single task, such as multi-turn dialogue, coding, mathematical problem-solving, and tool usage. However, AI-driven products that leverage language models usually necessitate a fusion of these abilities to function effectively in real-world scenarios. Moreover, the considerable computational resources required for proper alignment of LLMs underscore the need for a more robust, efficient, and encompassing approach to multi-task alignment, ensuring improved generative performance. In response to these challenges, we introduce a novel technique termed Mixture-of-Instructions (MoI), which employs a strategy of instruction concatenation combined with diverse system prompts to boost the alignment efficiency of language models. We have also compiled a diverse set of seven benchmark datasets to rigorously evaluate the alignment efficacy of the MoI-enhanced language model. Our methodology was applied to the open-source Qwen-7B-chat model, culminating in the development of Qwen-SFT-MoI. This enhanced model demonstrates significant advancements in generative capabilities across coding, mathematics, and tool use tasks.

We introduce the Glauber Generative Model (GGM), a new class of discrete diffusion models, to obtain new samples from a distribution given samples from a discrete space. GGM deploys a discrete Markov chain called the heat bath dynamics (or the Glauber dynamics) to denoise a sequence of noisy tokens to a sample from a joint distribution of discrete tokens. Our novel conceptual framework provides an exact reduction of the task of learning the denoising Markov chain to solving a class of binary classification tasks. More specifically, the model learns to classify a given token in a noisy sequence as signal or noise. In contrast, prior works on discrete diffusion models either solve regression problems to learn importance ratios, or minimize loss functions given by variational approximations. We apply GGM to language modeling and image generation, where images are discretized using image tokenizers like VQGANs. We show that it outperforms existing discrete diffusion models in language generation, and demonstrates strong performance for image generation without using dataset-specific image tokenizers. We also show that our model is capable of performing well in zero-shot control settings like text and image infilling.

Charts provide visual representations of data and are widely used for analyzing information, addressing queries, and conveying insights to others. Various chart-related downstream tasks have emerged recently, such as question-answering and summarization. A common strategy to solve these tasks is to fine-tune various models originally trained on vision tasks language. However, such task-specific models are not capable of solving a wide range of chart-related tasks, constraining their real-world applicability. To overcome these challenges, we introduce ChartInstruct: a novel chart-specific vision-language Instruction-following dataset comprising 191K instructions generated with 71K charts. We then present two distinct systems for instruction tuning on such datasets: (1) an end-to-end model that connects a vision encoder for chart understanding with a LLM; and (2) a pipeline model that employs a two-step approach to extract chart data tables and input them into the LLM. In experiments on four downstream tasks, we first show the effectiveness of our model--achieving a new set of state-of-the-art results. Further evaluation shows that our instruction-tuning approach supports a wide array of real-world chart comprehension and reasoning scenarios, thereby expanding the scope and applicability of our models to new kinds of tasks.

LLM-based agents have recently emerged as promising tools for solving challenging problems without the need for task-specific finetuned models that can be expensive to procure. Currently, the design and implementation of such agents is ad hoc, as the wide variety of tasks that LLM-based agents may be applied to naturally means there can be no one-size-fits-all approach to agent design. In this work we aim to alleviate the difficulty of designing and implementing new agents by proposing a minimalistic, high-level generation framework that simplifies the process of building agents. The framework we introduce allows the user to specify desired agent behaviors in Linear Temporal Logic (LTL). The declarative LTL specification is then used to construct a constrained decoder that guarantees the LLM will produce an output exhibiting the desired behavior. By designing our framework in this way, we obtain several benefits, including the ability to enforce complex agent behavior, the ability to formally validate prompt examples, and the ability to seamlessly incorporate content-focused logical constraints into generation. In particular, our declarative approach, in which the desired behavior is simply described without concern for how it should be implemented or enforced, enables rapid design, implementation and experimentation with different LLM-based agents. We demonstrate how the proposed framework can be used to implement recent LLM-based agents, and show how the guardrails our approach provides can lead to improvements in agent performance. In addition, we release our code for general use.

While paragraph embedding models are remarkably effective for downstream classification tasks, what they learn and encode into a single vector remains opaque. In this paper, we investigate a state-of-the-art paragraph embedding method proposed by Zhang et al. (2017) and discover that it cannot reliably tell whether a given sentence occurs in the input paragraph or not. We formulate a sentence content task to probe for this basic linguistic property and find that even a much simpler bag-of-words method has no trouble solving it. This result motivates us to replace the reconstruction-based objective of Zhang et al. (2017) with our sentence content probe objective in a semi-supervised setting. Despite its simplicity, our objective improves over paragraph reconstruction in terms of (1) downstream classification accuracies on benchmark datasets, (2) faster training, and (3) better generalization ability.

We introduce CLEVR-Math, a multi-modal math word problems dataset consisting of simple math word problems involving addition/subtraction, represented partly by a textual description and partly by an image illustrating the scenario. The text describes actions performed on the scene that is depicted in the image. Since the question posed may not be about the scene in the image, but about the state of the scene before or after the actions are applied, the solver envision or imagine the state changes due to these actions. Solving these word problems requires a combination of language, visual and mathematical reasoning. We apply state-of-the-art neural and neuro-symbolic models for visual question answering on CLEVR-Math and empirically evaluate their performances. Our results show how neither method generalise to chains of operations. We discuss the limitations of the two in addressing the task of multi-modal word problem solving.

Algorithmic reasoning refers to the ability to understand the complex patterns behind the problem and decompose them into a sequence of reasoning steps towards the solution. Such nature of algorithmic reasoning makes it a challenge for large language models (LLMs), even though they have demonstrated promising performance in other reasoning tasks. Within this context, some recent studies use programming languages (e.g., Python) to express the necessary logic for solving a given instance/question (e.g., Program-of-Thought) as inspired by their strict and precise syntaxes. However, it is non-trivial to write an executable code that expresses the correct logic on the fly within a single inference call. Also, the code generated specifically for an instance cannot be reused for others, even if they are from the same task and might require identical logic to solve. This paper presents Think-and-Execute, a novel framework that decomposes the reasoning process of language models into two steps. (1) In Think, we discover a task-level logic that is shared across all instances for solving a given task and then express the logic with pseudocode; (2) In Execute, we further tailor the generated pseudocode to each instance and simulate the execution of the code. With extensive experiments on seven algorithmic reasoning tasks, we demonstrate the effectiveness of Think-and-Execute. Our approach better improves LMs' reasoning compared to several strong baselines performing instance-specific reasoning (e.g., CoT and PoT), suggesting the helpfulness of discovering task-level logic. Also, we show that compared to natural language, pseudocode can better guide the reasoning of LMs, even though they are trained to follow natural language instructions.

Recent Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have achieved remarkable progress on task-specific benchmarks, yet their evaluation methods remain constrained by isolated problem-solving paradigms. Existing benchmarks predominantly assess single-question reasoning through sequential testing, resulting critical limitations: (1) vulnerability to data contamination and less challenging (e.g., DeepSeek-R1 achieves 97.0% on MATH500), forcing costly and perpetual creation of new questions with large human efforts, (2) failure to evaluate models under multi-context pressure, a key requirement for real-world deployment. To bridge this gap, we present REST (Reasoning Evaluation through Simultaneous Testing), a stress-testing framework that concurrently exposes LRMs to multiple problems simultaneously. Beyond basic reasoning, REST specifically evaluates several under-tested capabilities: contextual priority allocation, cross-problem interference resistance, and dynamic cognitive load management. Our evaluation reveals several striking findings: Even state-of-the-art (SOTA) models like DeepSeek-R1 exhibit substantial performance degradation under stress testing. Crucially, REST demonstrates stronger discriminative power than existing benchmarks, revealing pronounced performance differences among models that exhibit similar, near-ceiling performance under single-question evaluations. Some key mechanistic insights emerge from our analysis: (1) the "overthinking trap" is a critical factor contributing to the performance degradation; (2) the models trained with "long2short" technique preserve more accuracy of their single-problem performance under REST, outperforming standard-trained counterparts. These results establish REST as a cost-efficient, future-proof evaluation paradigm that better reflects real-world reasoning demands while reducing reliance on continuous human annotation.

Language agents perform complex tasks by using tools to execute each step precisely. However, most existing agents are based on proprietary models or designed to target specific tasks, such as mathematics or multi-hop question answering. We introduce Husky, a holistic, open-source language agent that learns to reason over a unified action space to address a diverse set of complex tasks involving numerical, tabular, and knowledge-based reasoning. Husky iterates between two stages: 1) generating the next action to take towards solving a given task and 2) executing the action using expert models and updating the current solution state. We identify a thorough ontology of actions for addressing complex tasks and curate high-quality data to train expert models for executing these actions. Our experiments show that Husky outperforms prior language agents across 14 evaluation datasets. Moreover, we introduce HuskyQA, a new evaluation set which stress tests language agents for mixed-tool reasoning, with a focus on retrieving missing knowledge and performing numerical reasoning. Despite using 7B models, Husky matches or even exceeds frontier LMs such as GPT-4 on these tasks, showcasing the efficacy of our holistic approach in addressing complex reasoning problems. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/agent-husky/Husky-v1.

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become the mainstream technique for training LLM agents. However, RLVR highly depends on well-crafted task queries and corresponding ground-truth answers to provide accurate rewards, which requires massive human efforts and hinders the RL scaling processes, especially under agentic scenarios. Although a few recent works explore task synthesis methods, the difficulty of generated agentic tasks can hardly be controlled to provide effective RL training advantages. To achieve agentic RLVR with higher scalability, we explore self-play training for deep search agents, in which the learning LLM utilizes multi-turn search engine calling and acts simultaneously as both a task proposer and a problem solver. The task proposer aims to generate deep search queries with well-defined ground-truth answers and increasing task difficulty. The problem solver tries to handle the generated search queries and output the correct answer predictions. To ensure that each generated search query has accurate ground truth, we collect all the searching results from the proposer's trajectory as external knowledge, then conduct retrieval-augmentation generation (RAG) to test whether the proposed query can be correctly answered with all necessary search documents provided. In this search self-play (SSP) game, the proposer and the solver co-evolve their agent capabilities through both competition and cooperation. With substantial experimental results, we find that SSP can significantly improve search agents' performance uniformly on various benchmarks without any supervision under both from-scratch and continuous RL training setups. The code is at https://github.com/Alibaba-Quark/SSP.

Partial differential equations (PDEs) are fundamental to modeling physical systems, yet solving them remains a complex challenge. Traditional numerical solvers rely on expert knowledge to implement and are computationally expensive, while neural-network-based solvers require large training datasets and often lack interpretability. In this work, we frame PDE solving as a code generation task and introduce CodePDE, the first inference framework for generating PDE solvers using large language models (LLMs). Leveraging advanced inference-time algorithms and scaling strategies, CodePDE unlocks critical capacities of LLM for PDE solving: reasoning, debugging, selfrefinement, and test-time scaling -- all without task-specific tuning. CodePDE achieves superhuman performance across a range of representative PDE problems. We also present a systematic empirical analysis of LLM generated solvers, analyzing their accuracy, efficiency, and numerical scheme choices. Our findings highlight the promise and the current limitations of LLMs in PDE solving, offering a new perspective on solver design and opportunities for future model development. Our code is available at https://github.com/LithiumDA/CodePDE.

Historically, artificial intelligence has drawn much inspiration from neuroscience to fuel advances in the field. However, current progress in reinforcement learning is largely focused on benchmark problems that fail to capture many of the aspects that are of interest in neuroscience today. We illustrate this point by extending a T-maze task from neuroscience for use with reinforcement learning algorithms, and show that state-of-the-art algorithms are not capable of solving this problem. Finally, we point out where insights from neuroscience could help explain some of the issues encountered.

In this paper, we propose a framework for solving a single-agent task by using multiple agents, each focusing on different aspects of the task. This approach has two main advantages: 1) it allows for training specialized agents on different parts of the task, and 2) it provides a new way to transfer knowledge, by transferring trained agents. Our framework generalizes the traditional hierarchical decomposition, in which, at any moment in time, a single agent has control until it has solved its particular subtask. We illustrate our framework with empirical experiments on two domains.

Achieving generalizability in solving out-of-distribution tasks is one of the ultimate goals of learning robotic manipulation. Recent progress of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has shown that VLM-based task planners can alleviate the difficulty of solving novel tasks, by decomposing the compounded tasks as a plan of sequentially executing primitive-level skills that have been already mastered. It is also promising for robotic manipulation to adapt such composable generalization ability, in the form of composable generalization agents (CGAs). However, the community lacks of reliable design of primitive skills and a sufficient amount of primitive-level data annotations. Therefore, we propose RH20T-P, a primitive-level robotic manipulation dataset, which contains about 38k video clips covering 67 diverse manipulation tasks in real-world scenarios. Each clip is manually annotated according to a set of meticulously designed primitive skills that are common in robotic manipulation. Furthermore, we standardize a plan-execute CGA paradigm and implement an exemplar baseline called RA-P on our RH20T-P, whose positive performance on solving unseen tasks validates that the proposed dataset can offer composable generalization ability to robotic manipulation agents.

Recently, 3D generative models have shown promising performances in structure-based drug design by learning to generate ligands given target binding sites. However, only modeling the target-ligand distribution can hardly fulfill one of the main goals in drug discovery -- designing novel ligands with desired properties, e.g., high binding affinity, easily synthesizable, etc. This challenge becomes particularly pronounced when the target-ligand pairs used for training do not align with these desired properties. Moreover, most existing methods aim at solving de novo design task, while many generative scenarios requiring flexible controllability, such as R-group optimization and scaffold hopping, have received little attention. In this work, we propose DecompOpt, a structure-based molecular optimization method based on a controllable and decomposed diffusion model. DecompOpt presents a new generation paradigm which combines optimization with conditional diffusion models to achieve desired properties while adhering to the molecular grammar. Additionally, DecompOpt offers a unified framework covering both de novo design and controllable generation. To achieve so, ligands are decomposed into substructures which allows fine-grained control and local optimization. Experiments show that DecompOpt can efficiently generate molecules with improved properties than strong de novo baselines, and demonstrate great potential in controllable generation tasks.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated great capabilities in solving a wide range of tasks in a resource-efficient manner through prompting, which does not require task-specific training, but suffers from performance fluctuation when there are multiple prompt candidates. Previous works have introduced gradient-free probability-based prompt selection methods that aim to choose the optimal prompt among the candidates for a given task but fail to provide a comprehensive and fair comparison between each other. In this paper, we propose a unified framework to interpret and evaluate the existing probability-based prompt selection methods by performing extensive experiments on 13 common NLP tasks. We find that all existing methods can be unified into some variant of the method that maximizes the mutual information between the input and the corresponding model output (denoted as MI). Using the finding, we develop several variants of MI and increases the effectiveness of the best prompt selection method from 87.79% to 94.98%, measured as the ratio of the performance of the selected prompt to that of the optimal oracle prompt. Furthermore, we propose a novel calibration method called Calibration by Marginalization (CBM) that is orthogonal to existing methods and helps increase the prompt selection effectiveness of the best method by 99.44%. The code and datasets used in our work will be released at https://github.com/soheeyang/unified-prompt-selection.

Although deep neural networks have achieved reasonable accuracy in solving face alignment, it is still a challenging task, specifically when we deal with facial images, under occlusion, or extreme head poses. Heatmap-based Regression (HBR) and Coordinate-based Regression (CBR) are among the two mainly used methods for face alignment. CBR methods require less computer memory, though their performance is less than HBR methods. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Coordinate-based Regression (ACR) loss to improve the accuracy of CBR for face alignment. Inspired by the Active Shape Model (ASM), we generate Smooth-Face objects, a set of facial landmark points with less variations compared to the ground truth landmark points. We then introduce a method to estimate the level of difficulty in predicting each landmark point for the network by comparing the distribution of the ground truth landmark points and the corresponding Smooth-Face objects. Our proposed ACR Loss can adaptively modify its curvature and the influence of the loss based on the difficulty level of predicting each landmark point in a face. Accordingly, the ACR Loss guides the network toward challenging points than easier points, which improves the accuracy of the face alignment task. Our extensive evaluation shows the capabilities of the proposed ACR Loss in predicting facial landmark points in various facial images.

In dynamic programming (DP) and reinforcement learning (RL), an agent learns to act optimally in terms of expected long-term return by sequentially interacting with its environment modeled by a Markov decision process (MDP). More generally in distributional reinforcement learning (DRL), the focus is on the whole distribution of the return, not just its expectation. Although DRL-based methods produced state-of-the-art performance in RL with function approximation, they involve additional quantities (compared to the non-distributional setting) that are still not well understood. As a first contribution, we introduce a new class of distributional operators, together with a practical DP algorithm for policy evaluation, that come with a robust MDP interpretation. Indeed, our approach reformulates through an augmented state space where each state is split into a worst-case substate and a best-case substate, whose values are maximized by safe and risky policies respectively. Finally, we derive distributional operators and DP algorithms solving a new control task: How to distinguish safe from risky optimal actions in order to break ties in the space of optimal policies?

In self-supervised visual representation learning, a feature extractor is trained on a "pretext task" for which labels can be generated cheaply, without human annotation. A central challenge in this approach is that the feature extractor quickly learns to exploit low-level visual features such as color aberrations or watermarks and then fails to learn useful semantic representations. Much work has gone into identifying such "shortcut" features and hand-designing schemes to reduce their effect. Here, we propose a general framework for mitigating the effect shortcut features. Our key assumption is that those features which are the first to be exploited for solving the pretext task may also be the most vulnerable to an adversary trained to make the task harder. We show that this assumption holds across common pretext tasks and datasets by training a "lens" network to make small image changes that maximally reduce performance in the pretext task. Representations learned with the modified images outperform those learned without in all tested cases. Additionally, the modifications made by the lens reveal how the choice of pretext task and dataset affects the features learned by self-supervision.

Standard artificial neural networks suffer from the well-known issue of catastrophic forgetting, making continual or lifelong learning difficult for machine learning. In recent years, numerous methods have been proposed for continual learning, but due to differences in evaluation protocols it is difficult to directly compare their performance. To enable more structured comparisons, we describe three continual learning scenarios based on whether at test time task identity is provided and--in case it is not--whether it must be inferred. Any sequence of well-defined tasks can be performed according to each scenario. Using the split and permuted MNIST task protocols, for each scenario we carry out an extensive comparison of recently proposed continual learning methods. We demonstrate substantial differences between the three scenarios in terms of difficulty and in terms of how efficient different methods are. In particular, when task identity must be inferred (i.e., class incremental learning), we find that regularization-based approaches (e.g., elastic weight consolidation) fail and that replaying representations of previous experiences seems required for solving this scenario.

We present a principled approach to uncover the structure of visual data by solving a novel deep learning task coined visual permutation learning. The goal of this task is to find the permutation that recovers the structure of data from shuffled versions of it. In the case of natural images, this task boils down to recovering the original image from patches shuffled by an unknown permutation matrix. Unfortunately, permutation matrices are discrete, thereby posing difficulties for gradient-based methods. To this end, we resort to a continuous approximation of these matrices using doubly-stochastic matrices which we generate from standard CNN predictions using Sinkhorn iterations. Unrolling these iterations in a Sinkhorn network layer, we propose DeepPermNet, an end-to-end CNN model for this task. The utility of DeepPermNet is demonstrated on two challenging computer vision problems, namely, (i) relative attributes learning and (ii) self-supervised representation learning. Our results show state-of-the-art performance on the Public Figures and OSR benchmarks for (i) and on the classification and segmentation tasks on the PASCAL VOC dataset for (ii).

We introduce self-invoking code generation, a new task designed to evaluate the progressive reasoning and problem-solving capabilities of LLMs. In this task, models are presented with a base problem and a related, more complex problem. They must solve the base problem and then utilize its solution to address the more complex one. This work features three key contributions. First, we propose a general recipe for generating more challenging versions of existing benchmarks, resulting in three new benchmarks: HumanEval Pro, MBPP Pro, and BigCodeBench-Lite Pro, specifically designed to assess LLMs on self-invoking code generation. Second, from the analysis of experimental results over twenty LLMs on our benchmarks, we have two important observations: (i) Most LLMs excel in traditional code generation benchmarks like HumanEval and MBPP, but their performance declines on self-invoking tasks. For example, o1-mini achieves 96.2% pass@1 on HumanEval but only 76.2% on HumanEval Pro. (ii) On self-invoking code generation task, the instruction-tuned models demonstrate only marginal improvements compared to the base models. Third, we disclose the types of failure modes that exist in our evaluation results. All these results underscore the need for further advancements in self-invoking code generation tasks and provide a new direction for future research on enhancing LLMs' code reasoning capabilities.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has proven to be effective in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) with at least 100 billion parameters. However, it is ineffective or even detrimental when applied to reasoning tasks in Smaller Language Models (SLMs) with less than 10 billion parameters. To address this limitation, we introduce Dialogue-guided Chain-of-Thought (DialCoT) which employs a dialogue format to generate intermediate reasoning steps, guiding the model toward the final answer. Additionally, we optimize the model's reasoning path selection using the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm, further enhancing its reasoning capabilities. Our method offers several advantages compared to previous approaches. Firstly, we transform the process of solving complex reasoning questions by breaking them down into a series of simpler sub-questions, significantly reducing the task difficulty and making it more suitable for SLMs. Secondly, we optimize the model's reasoning path selection through the PPO algorithm. We conduct comprehensive experiments on four arithmetic reasoning datasets, demonstrating that our method achieves significant performance improvements compared to state-of-the-art competitors.

LLM-based agents have demonstrated impressive zero-shot performance in vision-language navigation (VLN) task. However, existing LLM-based methods often focus only on solving high-level task planning by selecting nodes in predefined navigation graphs for movements, overlooking low-level control in navigation scenarios. To bridge this gap, we propose AO-Planner, a novel Affordances-Oriented Planner for continuous VLN task. Our AO-Planner integrates various foundation models to achieve affordances-oriented low-level motion planning and high-level decision-making, both performed in a zero-shot setting. Specifically, we employ a Visual Affordances Prompting (VAP) approach, where the visible ground is segmented by SAM to provide navigational affordances, based on which the LLM selects potential candidate waypoints and plans low-level paths towards selected waypoints. We further propose a high-level PathAgent which marks planned paths into the image input and reasons the most probable path by comprehending all environmental information. Finally, we convert the selected path into 3D coordinates using camera intrinsic parameters and depth information, avoiding challenging 3D predictions for LLMs. Experiments on the challenging R2R-CE and RxR-CE datasets show that AO-Planner achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance (8.8% improvement on SPL). Our method can also serve as a data annotator to obtain pseudo-labels, distilling its waypoint prediction ability into a learning-based predictor. This new predictor does not require any waypoint data from the simulator and achieves 47% SR competing with supervised methods. We establish an effective connection between LLM and 3D world, presenting novel prospects for employing foundation models in low-level motion control.

Autonomous embodied agents live on an Internet of multimedia websites. Can they hop around multimodal websites to complete complex user tasks? Existing benchmarks fail to assess them in a realistic, evolving environment for their embodiment across websites. To answer this question, we present MMInA, a multihop and multimodal benchmark to evaluate the embodied agents for compositional Internet tasks, with several appealing properties: 1) Evolving real-world multimodal websites. Our benchmark uniquely operates on evolving real-world websites, ensuring a high degree of realism and applicability to natural user tasks. Our data includes 1,050 human-written tasks covering various domains such as shopping and travel, with each task requiring the agent to autonomously extract multimodal information from web pages as observations; 2) Multihop web browsing. Our dataset features naturally compositional tasks that require information from or actions on multiple websites to solve, to assess long-range reasoning capabilities on web tasks; 3) Holistic evaluation. We propose a novel protocol for evaluating an agent's progress in completing multihop tasks. We experiment with both standalone (multimodal) language models and heuristic-based web agents. Extensive experiments demonstrate that while long-chain multihop web tasks are easy for humans, they remain challenging for state-of-the-art web agents. We identify that agents are more likely to fail on the early hops when solving tasks of more hops, which results in lower task success rates. To address this issue, we propose a simple memory augmentation approach replaying past action trajectories to reflect. Our method significantly improved both the single-hop and multihop web browsing abilities of agents. See our code and data at https://mmina.cliangyu.com