new

Get trending papers in your email inbox!

Subscribe

Daily Papers

byAK and the research community

Oct 29

Large Action Models: From Inception to Implementation

As AI continues to advance, there is a growing demand for systems that go beyond language-based assistance and move toward intelligent agents capable of performing real-world actions. This evolution requires the transition from traditional Large Language Models (LLMs), which excel at generating textual responses, to Large Action Models (LAMs), designed for action generation and execution within dynamic environments. Enabled by agent systems, LAMs hold the potential to transform AI from passive language understanding to active task completion, marking a significant milestone in the progression toward artificial general intelligence. In this paper, we present a comprehensive framework for developing LAMs, offering a systematic approach to their creation, from inception to deployment. We begin with an overview of LAMs, highlighting their unique characteristics and delineating their differences from LLMs. Using a Windows OS-based agent as a case study, we provide a detailed, step-by-step guide on the key stages of LAM development, including data collection, model training, environment integration, grounding, and evaluation. This generalizable workflow can serve as a blueprint for creating functional LAMs in various application domains. We conclude by identifying the current limitations of LAMs and discussing directions for future research and industrial deployment, emphasizing the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead in realizing the full potential of LAMs in real-world applications. The code for the data collection process utilized in this paper is publicly available at: https://github.com/microsoft/UFO/tree/main/dataflow, and comprehensive documentation can be found at https://microsoft.github.io/UFO/dataflow/overview/.

  • 18 authors
·
Dec 13, 2024 5

A Comprehensive Survey of Large AI Models for Future Communications: Foundations, Applications and Challenges

The 6G wireless communications aim to establish an intelligent world of ubiquitous connectivity, providing an unprecedented communication experience. Large artificial intelligence models (LAMs) are characterized by significantly larger scales (e.g., billions or trillions of parameters) compared to typical artificial intelligence (AI) models. LAMs exhibit outstanding cognitive abilities, including strong generalization capabilities for fine-tuning to downstream tasks, and emergent capabilities to handle tasks unseen during training. Therefore, LAMs efficiently provide AI services for diverse communication applications, making them crucial tools for addressing complex challenges in future wireless communication systems. This study provides a comprehensive review of the foundations, applications, and challenges of LAMs in communication. First, we introduce the current state of AI-based communication systems, emphasizing the motivation behind integrating LAMs into communications and summarizing the key contributions. We then present an overview of the essential concepts of LAMs in communication. This includes an introduction to the main architectures of LAMs, such as transformer, diffusion models, and mamba. We also explore the classification of LAMs, including large language models (LLMs), large vision models (LVMs), large multimodal models (LMMs), and world models, and examine their potential applications in communication. Additionally, we cover the training methods and evaluation techniques for LAMs in communication systems. Lastly, we introduce optimization strategies such as chain of thought (CoT), retrieval augmented generation (RAG), and agentic systems. Following this, we discuss the research advancements of LAMs across various communication scenarios. Finally, we analyze the challenges in the current research and provide insights into potential future research directions.

On the limits of agency in agent-based models

Agent-based modeling (ABM) seeks to understand the behavior of complex systems by simulating a collection of agents that act and interact within an environment. Their practical utility requires capturing realistic environment dynamics and adaptive agent behavior while efficiently simulating million-size populations. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) present an opportunity to enhance ABMs by using LLMs as agents with further potential to capture adaptive behavior. However, the computational infeasibility of using LLMs for large populations has hindered their widespread adoption. In this paper, we introduce AgentTorch -- a framework that scales ABMs to millions of agents while capturing high-resolution agent behavior using LLMs. We benchmark the utility of LLMs as ABM agents, exploring the trade-off between simulation scale and individual agency. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study, we demonstrate how AgentTorch can simulate 8.4 million agents representing New York City, capturing the impact of isolation and employment behavior on health and economic outcomes. We compare the performance of different agent architectures based on heuristic and LLM agents in predicting disease waves and unemployment rates. Furthermore, we showcase AgentTorch's capabilities for retrospective, counterfactual, and prospective analyses, highlighting how adaptive agent behavior can help overcome the limitations of historical data in policy design. AgentTorch is an open-source project actively being used for policy-making and scientific discovery around the world. The framework is available here: github.com/AgentTorch/AgentTorch.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 14, 2024 2

Cultural Evolution of Cooperation among LLM Agents

Large language models (LLMs) provide a compelling foundation for building generally-capable AI agents. These agents may soon be deployed at scale in the real world, representing the interests of individual humans (e.g., AI assistants) or groups of humans (e.g., AI-accelerated corporations). At present, relatively little is known about the dynamics of multiple LLM agents interacting over many generations of iterative deployment. In this paper, we examine whether a "society" of LLM agents can learn mutually beneficial social norms in the face of incentives to defect, a distinctive feature of human sociality that is arguably crucial to the success of civilization. In particular, we study the evolution of indirect reciprocity across generations of LLM agents playing a classic iterated Donor Game in which agents can observe the recent behavior of their peers. We find that the evolution of cooperation differs markedly across base models, with societies of Claude 3.5 Sonnet agents achieving significantly higher average scores than Gemini 1.5 Flash, which, in turn, outperforms GPT-4o. Further, Claude 3.5 Sonnet can make use of an additional mechanism for costly punishment to achieve yet higher scores, while Gemini 1.5 Flash and GPT-4o fail to do so. For each model class, we also observe variation in emergent behavior across random seeds, suggesting an understudied sensitive dependence on initial conditions. We suggest that our evaluation regime could inspire an inexpensive and informative new class of LLM benchmarks, focussed on the implications of LLM agent deployment for the cooperative infrastructure of society.

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 13, 2024

ArCHer: Training Language Model Agents via Hierarchical Multi-Turn RL

A broad use case of large language models (LLMs) is in goal-directed decision-making tasks (or "agent" tasks), where an LLM needs to not just generate completions for a given prompt, but rather make intelligent decisions over a multi-turn interaction to accomplish a task (e.g., when interacting with the web, using tools, or providing customer support). Reinforcement learning (RL) provides a general paradigm to address such agent tasks, but current RL methods for LLMs largely focus on optimizing single-turn rewards. By construction, most single-turn RL methods cannot endow LLMs with the ability to intelligently seek information over multiple turns, perform credit assignment, or reason about their past actions -- all of which are critical in agent tasks. This raises the question: how can we design effective and efficient multi-turn RL algorithms for LLMs? In this paper, we develop a framework for building multi-turn RL algorithms for fine-tuning LLMs, that preserves the flexibility of existing single-turn RL methods for LLMs (e.g., proximal policy optimization), while accommodating multiple turns, long horizons, and delayed rewards effectively. To do this, our framework adopts a hierarchical RL approach and runs two RL algorithms in parallel: a high-level off-policy value-based RL algorithm to aggregate reward over utterances, and a low-level RL algorithm that utilizes this high-level value function to train a token policy within each utterance or turn. Our hierarchical framework, Actor-Critic Framework with a Hierarchical Structure (ArCHer), can also give rise to other RL methods. Empirically, we find that ArCHer significantly improves efficiency and performance on agent tasks, attaining a sample efficiency of about 100x over existing methods, while also improving with larger model capacity (upto the 7 billion scale that we tested on).

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 29, 2024

Harnessing Multi-Agent LLMs for Complex Engineering Problem-Solving: A Framework for Senior Design Projects

Multi-Agent Large Language Models (LLMs) are gaining significant attention for their ability to harness collective intelligence in complex problem-solving, decision-making, and planning tasks. This aligns with the concept of the wisdom of crowds, where diverse agents contribute collectively to generating effective solutions, making it particularly suitable for educational settings. Senior design projects, also known as capstone or final year projects, are pivotal in engineering education as they integrate theoretical knowledge with practical application, fostering critical thinking, teamwork, and real-world problem-solving skills. In this paper, we explore the use of Multi-Agent LLMs in supporting these senior design projects undertaken by engineering students, which often involve multidisciplinary considerations and conflicting objectives, such as optimizing technical performance while addressing ethical, social, and environmental concerns. We propose a framework where distinct LLM agents represent different expert perspectives, such as problem formulation agents, system complexity agents, societal and ethical agents, or project managers, thus facilitating a holistic problem-solving approach. This implementation leverages standard multi-agent system (MAS) concepts such as coordination, cooperation, and negotiation, incorporating prompt engineering to develop diverse personas for each agent. These agents engage in rich, collaborative dialogues to simulate human engineering teams, guided by principles from swarm AI to efficiently balance individual contributions towards a unified solution. We adapt these techniques to create a collaboration structure for LLM agents, encouraging interdisciplinary reasoning and negotiation similar to real-world senior design projects. To assess the efficacy of this framework, we collected six proposals of engineering and computer science of...

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 2

Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is: Evaluating Strategic Planning and Execution of LLM Agents in an Auction Arena

Can Large Language Models (LLMs) simulate human behavior in complex environments? LLMs have recently been shown to exhibit advanced reasoning skills but much of NLP evaluation still relies on static benchmarks. Answering this requires evaluation environments that probe strategic reasoning in competitive, dynamic scenarios that involve long-term planning. We introduce AucArena, a novel simulation environment for evaluating LLMs within auctions, a setting chosen for being highly unpredictable and involving many skills related to resource and risk management, while also being easy to evaluate. We conduct several controlled simulations using state-of-the-art LLMs as bidding agents. We find that through simple prompting, LLMs do indeed demonstrate many of the skills needed for effectively engaging in auctions (e.g., managing budget, adhering to long-term goals and priorities), skills that we find can be sharpened by explicitly encouraging models to be adaptive and observe strategies in past auctions. These results are significant as they show the potential of using LLM agents to model intricate social dynamics, especially in competitive settings. However, we also observe considerable variability in the capabilities of individual LLMs. Notably, even our most advanced models (GPT-4) are occasionally surpassed by heuristic baselines and human agents, highlighting the potential for further improvements in the design of LLM agents and the important role that our simulation environment can play in further testing and refining agent architectures.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 9, 2023

GLEE: A Unified Framework and Benchmark for Language-based Economic Environments

Large Language Models (LLMs) show significant potential in economic and strategic interactions, where communication via natural language is often prevalent. This raises key questions: Do LLMs behave rationally? Can they mimic human behavior? Do they tend to reach an efficient and fair outcome? What is the role of natural language in the strategic interaction? How do characteristics of the economic environment influence these dynamics? These questions become crucial concerning the economic and societal implications of integrating LLM-based agents into real-world data-driven systems, such as online retail platforms and recommender systems. While the ML community has been exploring the potential of LLMs in such multi-agent setups, varying assumptions, design choices and evaluation criteria across studies make it difficult to draw robust and meaningful conclusions. To address this, we introduce a benchmark for standardizing research on two-player, sequential, language-based games. Inspired by the economic literature, we define three base families of games with consistent parameterization, degrees of freedom and economic measures to evaluate agents' performance (self-gain), as well as the game outcome (efficiency and fairness). We develop an open-source framework for interaction simulation and analysis, and utilize it to collect a dataset of LLM vs. LLM interactions across numerous game configurations and an additional dataset of human vs. LLM interactions. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate how our framework and dataset can be used to: (i) compare the behavior of LLM-based agents to human players in various economic contexts; (ii) evaluate agents in both individual and collective performance measures; and (iii) quantify the effect of the economic characteristics of the environments on the behavior of agents.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 7, 2024 2

StockBench: Can LLM Agents Trade Stocks Profitably In Real-world Markets?

Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated strong capabilities as autonomous agents, showing promise in reasoning, tool use, and sequential decision-making. While prior benchmarks have evaluated LLM agents in domains such as software engineering and scientific discovery, the finance domain remains underexplored, despite its direct relevance to economic value and high-stakes decision-making. Existing financial benchmarks primarily test static knowledge through question answering, but they fall short of capturing the dynamic and iterative nature of trading. To address this gap, we introduce StockBench, a contamination-free benchmark designed to evaluate LLM agents in realistic, multi-month stock trading environments. Agents receive daily market signals -- including prices, fundamentals, and news -- and must make sequential buy, sell, or hold decisions. Performance is assessed using financial metrics such as cumulative return, maximum drawdown, and the Sortino ratio. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art proprietary (e.g., GPT-5, Claude-4) and open-weight (e.g., Qwen3, Kimi-K2, GLM-4.5) models shows that while most LLM agents struggle to outperform the simple buy-and-hold baseline, several models demonstrate the potential to deliver higher returns and manage risk more effectively. These findings highlight both the challenges and opportunities in developing LLM-powered financial agents, showing that excelling at static financial knowledge tasks does not necessarily translate into successful trading strategies. We release StockBench as an open-source resource to support reproducibility and advance future research in this domain.

Cash or Comfort? How LLMs Value Your Inconvenience

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly proposed as near-autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) agents capable of making everyday decisions on behalf of humans. Although LLMs perform well on many technical tasks, their behaviour in personal decision-making remains less understood. Previous studies have assessed their rationality and moral alignment with human decisions. However, the behaviour of AI assistants in scenarios where financial rewards are at odds with user comfort has not yet been thoroughly explored. In this paper, we tackle this problem by quantifying the prices assigned by multiple LLMs to a series of user discomforts: additional walking, waiting, hunger and pain. We uncover several key concerns that strongly question the prospect of using current LLMs as decision-making assistants: (1) a large variance in responses between LLMs, (2) within a single LLM, responses show fragility to minor variations in prompt phrasing (e.g., reformulating the question in the first person can considerably alter the decision), (3) LLMs can accept unreasonably low rewards for major inconveniences (e.g., 1 Euro to wait 10 hours), and (4) LLMs can reject monetary gains where no discomfort is imposed (e.g., 1,000 Euro to wait 0 minutes). These findings emphasize the need for scrutiny of how LLMs value human inconvenience, particularly as we move toward applications where such cash-versus-comfort trade-offs are made on users' behalf.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 20

Doing More with Less -- Implementing Routing Strategies in Large Language Model-Based Systems: An Extended Survey

Large Language Models (LLM)-based systems, i.e. interconnected elements that include an LLM as a central component (e.g., conversational agents), are typically monolithic static architectures that rely on a single LLM for all user queries. However, they often require different preprocessing strategies, levels of reasoning, or knowledge. Generalist LLMs (i.e. GPT-4), trained on very large multi-topic corpora, can perform well in a variety of tasks. However, they require significant financial, energy, and hardware resources that may not be justified for basic tasks. This implies potentially investing in unnecessary costs for a given query. To overcome this problem, a routing mechanism routes user queries to the most suitable components, such as smaller LLMs or experts in specific topics. This approach may improve response quality while minimising costs. Routing can be expanded to other components of the conversational agent architecture, such as the selection of optimal embedding strategies. This paper explores key considerations for integrating routing into LLM-based systems, focusing on resource management, cost definition, and strategy selection. Our main contributions include a formalisation of the problem, a novel taxonomy of existing approaches emphasising relevance and resource efficiency, and a comparative analysis of these strategies in relation to industry practices. Finally, we identify critical challenges and directions for future research.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 1

A Survey on the Optimization of Large Language Model-based Agents

With the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs), LLM-based agents have been widely adopted in various fields, becoming essential for autonomous decision-making and interactive tasks. However, current work typically relies on prompt design or fine-tuning strategies applied to vanilla LLMs, which often leads to limited effectiveness or suboptimal performance in complex agent-related environments. Although LLM optimization techniques can improve model performance across many general tasks, they lack specialized optimization towards critical agent functionalities such as long-term planning, dynamic environmental interaction, and complex decision-making. Although numerous recent studies have explored various strategies to optimize LLM-based agents for complex agent tasks, a systematic review summarizing and comparing these methods from a holistic perspective is still lacking. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of LLM-based agent optimization approaches, categorizing them into parameter-driven and parameter-free methods. We first focus on parameter-driven optimization, covering fine-tuning-based optimization, reinforcement learning-based optimization, and hybrid strategies, analyzing key aspects such as trajectory data construction, fine-tuning techniques, reward function design, and optimization algorithms. Additionally, we briefly discuss parameter-free strategies that optimize agent behavior through prompt engineering and external knowledge retrieval. Finally, we summarize the datasets and benchmarks used for evaluation and tuning, review key applications of LLM-based agents, and discuss major challenges and promising future directions. Our repository for related references is available at https://github.com/YoungDubbyDu/LLM-Agent-Optimization.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 16

Small Language Models are the Future of Agentic AI

Large language models (LLMs) are often praised for exhibiting near-human performance on a wide range of tasks and valued for their ability to hold a general conversation. The rise of agentic AI systems is, however, ushering in a mass of applications in which language models perform a small number of specialized tasks repetitively and with little variation. Here we lay out the position that small language models (SLMs) are sufficiently powerful, inherently more suitable, and necessarily more economical for many invocations in agentic systems, and are therefore the future of agentic AI. Our argumentation is grounded in the current level of capabilities exhibited by SLMs, the common architectures of agentic systems, and the economy of LM deployment. We further argue that in situations where general-purpose conversational abilities are essential, heterogeneous agentic systems (i.e., agents invoking multiple different models) are the natural choice. We discuss the potential barriers for the adoption of SLMs in agentic systems and outline a general LLM-to-SLM agent conversion algorithm. Our position, formulated as a value statement, highlights the significance of the operational and economic impact even a partial shift from LLMs to SLMs is to have on the AI agent industry. We aim to stimulate the discussion on the effective use of AI resources and hope to advance the efforts to lower the costs of AI of the present day. Calling for both contributions to and critique of our position, we commit to publishing all such correspondence at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/lpr/slm-agents.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 2 2

ContestTrade: A Multi-Agent Trading System Based on Internal Contest Mechanism

In financial trading, large language model (LLM)-based agents demonstrate significant potential. However, the high sensitivity to market noise undermines the performance of LLM-based trading systems. To address this limitation, we propose a novel multi-agent system featuring an internal competitive mechanism inspired by modern corporate management structures. The system consists of two specialized teams: (1) Data Team - responsible for processing and condensing massive market data into diversified text factors, ensuring they fit the model's constrained context. (2) Research Team - tasked with making parallelized multipath trading decisions based on deep research methods. The core innovation lies in implementing a real-time evaluation and ranking mechanism within each team, driven by authentic market feedback. Each agent's performance undergoes continuous scoring and ranking, with only outputs from top-performing agents being adopted. The design enables the system to adaptively adjust to dynamic environment, enhances robustness against market noise and ultimately delivers superior trading performance. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed system significantly outperforms prevailing multi-agent systems and traditional quantitative investment methods across diverse evaluation metrics. ContestTrade is open-sourced on GitHub at https://github.com/FinStep-AI/ContestTrade.

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 1

OASIS: Open Agent Social Interaction Simulations with One Million Agents

There has been a growing interest in enhancing rule-based agent-based models (ABMs) for social media platforms (i.e., X, Reddit) with more realistic large language model (LLM) agents, thereby allowing for a more nuanced study of complex systems. As a result, several LLM-based ABMs have been proposed in the past year. While they hold promise, each simulator is specifically designed to study a particular scenario, making it time-consuming and resource-intensive to explore other phenomena using the same ABM. Additionally, these models simulate only a limited number of agents, whereas real-world social media platforms involve millions of users. To this end, we propose OASIS, a generalizable and scalable social media simulator. OASIS is designed based on real-world social media platforms, incorporating dynamically updated environments (i.e., dynamic social networks and post information), diverse action spaces (i.e., following, commenting), and recommendation systems (i.e., interest-based and hot-score-based). Additionally, OASIS supports large-scale user simulations, capable of modeling up to one million users. With these features, OASIS can be easily extended to different social media platforms to study large-scale group phenomena and behaviors. We replicate various social phenomena, including information spreading, group polarization, and herd effects across X and Reddit platforms. Moreover, we provide observations of social phenomena at different agent group scales. We observe that the larger agent group scale leads to more enhanced group dynamics and more diverse and helpful agents' opinions. These findings demonstrate OASIS's potential as a powerful tool for studying complex systems in digital environments.

  • 23 authors
·
Nov 18, 2024

Multi-Agent Collaboration Mechanisms: A Survey of LLMs

With recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), Agentic AI has become phenomenal in real-world applications, moving toward multiple LLM-based agents to perceive, learn, reason, and act collaboratively. These LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems (MASs) enable groups of intelligent agents to coordinate and solve complex tasks collectively at scale, transitioning from isolated models to collaboration-centric approaches. This work provides an extensive survey of the collaborative aspect of MASs and introduces an extensible framework to guide future research. Our framework characterizes collaboration mechanisms based on key dimensions: actors (agents involved), types (e.g., cooperation, competition, or coopetition), structures (e.g., peer-to-peer, centralized, or distributed), strategies (e.g., role-based or model-based), and coordination protocols. Through a review of existing methodologies, our findings serve as a foundation for demystifying and advancing LLM-based MASs toward more intelligent and collaborative solutions for complex, real-world use cases. In addition, various applications of MASs across diverse domains, including 5G/6G networks, Industry 5.0, question answering, and social and cultural settings, are also investigated, demonstrating their wider adoption and broader impacts. Finally, we identify key lessons learned, open challenges, and potential research directions of MASs towards artificial collective intelligence.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 10

A Survey of AI Agent Protocols

The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has led to the widespread deployment of LLM agents across diverse industries, including customer service, content generation, data analysis, and even healthcare. However, as more LLM agents are deployed, a major issue has emerged: there is no standard way for these agents to communicate with external tools or data sources. This lack of standardized protocols makes it difficult for agents to work together or scale effectively, and it limits their ability to tackle complex, real-world tasks. A unified communication protocol for LLM agents could change this. It would allow agents and tools to interact more smoothly, encourage collaboration, and triggering the formation of collective intelligence. In this paper, we provide the first comprehensive analysis of existing agent protocols, proposing a systematic two-dimensional classification that differentiates context-oriented versus inter-agent protocols and general-purpose versus domain-specific protocols. Additionally, we conduct a comparative performance analysis of these protocols across key dimensions such as security, scalability, and latency. Finally, we explore the future landscape of agent protocols by identifying critical research directions and characteristics necessary for next-generation protocols. These characteristics include adaptability, privacy preservation, and group-based interaction, as well as trends toward layered architectures and collective intelligence infrastructures. We expect this work to serve as a practical reference for both researchers and engineers seeking to design, evaluate, or integrate robust communication infrastructures for intelligent agents.

  • 14 authors
·
Apr 23

LLM-Powered Decentralized Generative Agents with Adaptive Hierarchical Knowledge Graph for Cooperative Planning

Developing intelligent agents for long-term cooperation in dynamic open-world scenarios is a major challenge in multi-agent systems. Traditional Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) frameworks like centralized training decentralized execution (CTDE) struggle with scalability and flexibility. They require centralized long-term planning, which is difficult without custom reward functions, and face challenges in processing multi-modal data. CTDE approaches also assume fixed cooperation strategies, making them impractical in dynamic environments where agents need to adapt and plan independently. To address decentralized multi-agent cooperation, we propose Decentralized Adaptive Knowledge Graph Memory and Structured Communication System (DAMCS) in a novel Multi-agent Crafter environment. Our generative agents, powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), are more scalable than traditional MARL agents by leveraging external knowledge and language for long-term planning and reasoning. Instead of fully sharing information from all past experiences, DAMCS introduces a multi-modal memory system organized as a hierarchical knowledge graph and a structured communication protocol to optimize agent cooperation. This allows agents to reason from past interactions and share relevant information efficiently. Experiments on novel multi-agent open-world tasks show that DAMCS outperforms both MARL and LLM baselines in task efficiency and collaboration. Compared to single-agent scenarios, the two-agent scenario achieves the same goal with 63% fewer steps, and the six-agent scenario with 74% fewer steps, highlighting the importance of adaptive memory and structured communication in achieving long-term goals. We publicly release our project at: https://happyeureka.github.io/damcs.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 8

AgentsNet: Coordination and Collaborative Reasoning in Multi-Agent LLMs

Large-language models (LLMs) have demonstrated powerful problem-solving capabilities, in particular when organized in multi-agent systems. However, the advent of such systems also raises several questions on the ability of a complex network of agents to effectively self-organize and collaborate. While measuring performance on standard reasoning benchmarks indicates how well multi-agent systems can solve reasoning tasks, it is unclear whether these systems are able to leverage their topology effectively. Here, we propose AgentsNet, a new benchmark for multi-agent reasoning. By drawing inspiration from classical problems in distributed systems and graph theory, AgentsNet measures the ability of multi-agent systems to collaboratively form strategies for problem-solving, self-organization, and effective communication given a network topology. We evaluate a variety of baseline methods on AgentsNet including homogeneous networks of agents which first have to agree on basic protocols for organization and communication. We find that some frontier LLMs are already demonstrating strong performance for small networks but begin to fall off once the size of the network scales. While existing multi-agent benchmarks cover at most 2-5 agents, AgentsNet is practically unlimited in size and can scale with new generations of LLMs. As such, we also probe frontier models in a setup with up to 100 agents.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 11 1

A Survey on Large Language Model based Autonomous Agents

Autonomous agents have long been a prominent research focus in both academic and industry communities. Previous research in this field often focuses on training agents with limited knowledge within isolated environments, which diverges significantly from human learning processes, and thus makes the agents hard to achieve human-like decisions. Recently, through the acquisition of vast amounts of web knowledge, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in achieving human-level intelligence. This has sparked an upsurge in studies investigating LLM-based autonomous agents. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of these studies, delivering a systematic review of the field of LLM-based autonomous agents from a holistic perspective. More specifically, we first discuss the construction of LLM-based autonomous agents, for which we propose a unified framework that encompasses a majority of the previous work. Then, we present a comprehensive overview of the diverse applications of LLM-based autonomous agents in the fields of social science, natural science, and engineering. Finally, we delve into the evaluation strategies commonly used for LLM-based autonomous agents. Based on the previous studies, we also present several challenges and future directions in this field. To keep track of this field and continuously update our survey, we maintain a repository of relevant references at https://github.com/Paitesanshi/LLM-Agent-Survey.

  • 13 authors
·
Aug 22, 2023 2

Can We Rely on LLM Agents to Draft Long-Horizon Plans? Let's Take TravelPlanner as an Example

Large language models (LLMs) have brought autonomous agents closer to artificial general intelligence (AGI) due to their promising generalization and emergent capabilities. There is, however, a lack of studies on how LLM-based agents behave, why they could potentially fail, and how to improve them, particularly in demanding real-world planning tasks. In this paper, as an effort to fill the gap, we present our study using a realistic benchmark, TravelPlanner, where an agent must meet multiple constraints to generate accurate plans. We leverage this benchmark to address four key research questions: (1) are LLM agents robust enough to lengthy and noisy contexts when it comes to reasoning and planning? (2) can few-shot prompting adversely impact the performance of LLM agents in scenarios with long context? (3) can we rely on refinement to improve plans, and (4) can fine-tuning LLMs with both positive and negative feedback lead to further improvement? Our comprehensive experiments indicate that, firstly, LLMs often fail to attend to crucial parts of a long context, despite their ability to handle extensive reference information and few-shot examples; secondly, they still struggle with analyzing the long plans and cannot provide accurate feedback for refinement; thirdly, we propose Feedback-Aware Fine-Tuning (FAFT), which leverages both positive and negative feedback, resulting in substantial gains over Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). Our findings offer in-depth insights to the community on various aspects related to real-world planning applications.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 12, 2024

AgentGym: Evolving Large Language Model-based Agents across Diverse Environments

Building generalist agents that can handle diverse tasks and evolve themselves across different environments is a long-term goal in the AI community. Large language models (LLMs) are considered a promising foundation to build such agents due to their generalized capabilities. Current approaches either have LLM-based agents imitate expert-provided trajectories step-by-step, requiring human supervision, which is hard to scale and limits environmental exploration; or they let agents explore and learn in isolated environments, resulting in specialist agents with limited generalization. In this paper, we take the first step towards building generally-capable LLM-based agents with self-evolution ability. We identify a trinity of ingredients: 1) diverse environments for agent exploration and learning, 2) a trajectory set to equip agents with basic capabilities and prior knowledge, and 3) an effective and scalable evolution method. We propose AgentGym, a new framework featuring a variety of environments and tasks for broad, real-time, uni-format, and concurrent agent exploration. AgentGym also includes a database with expanded instructions, a benchmark suite, and high-quality trajectories across environments. Next, we propose a novel method, AgentEvol, to investigate the potential of agent self-evolution beyond previously seen data across tasks and environments. Experimental results show that the evolved agents can achieve results comparable to SOTA models. We release the AgentGym suite, including the platform, dataset, benchmark, checkpoints, and algorithm implementations. The AgentGym suite is available on https://github.com/WooooDyy/AgentGym.

  • 20 authors
·
Jun 6, 2024 1

PilotRL: Training Language Model Agents via Global Planning-Guided Progressive Reinforcement Learning

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable advancements in tackling agent-oriented tasks. Despite their potential, existing work faces challenges when deploying LLMs in agent-based environments. The widely adopted agent paradigm ReAct centers on integrating single-step reasoning with immediate action execution, which limits its effectiveness in complex tasks requiring long-term strategic planning. Furthermore, the coordination between the planner and executor during problem-solving is also a critical factor to consider in agent design. Additionally, current approaches predominantly rely on supervised fine-tuning, which often leads models to memorize established task completion trajectories, thereby restricting their generalization ability when confronted with novel problem contexts. To address these challenges, we introduce an adaptive global plan-based agent paradigm AdaPlan, aiming to synergize high-level explicit guidance with execution to support effective long-horizon decision-making. Based on the proposed paradigm, we further put forward PilotRL, a global planning-guided training framework for LLM agents driven by progressive reinforcement learning. We first develop the model's ability to follow explicit guidance from global plans when addressing agent tasks. Subsequently, based on this foundation, we focus on optimizing the quality of generated plans. Finally, we conduct joint optimization of the model's planning and execution coordination. Experiments indicate that PilotRL could achieve state-of-the-art performances, with LLaMA3.1-8B-Instruct + PilotRL surpassing closed-sourced GPT-4o by 3.60%, while showing a more substantial gain of 55.78% comparing to GPT-4o-mini at a comparable parameter scale.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 1

From Individual to Society: A Survey on Social Simulation Driven by Large Language Model-based Agents

Traditional sociological research often relies on human participation, which, though effective, is expensive, challenging to scale, and with ethical concerns. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) highlight their potential to simulate human behavior, enabling the replication of individual responses and facilitating studies on many interdisciplinary studies. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey of this field, illustrating the recent progress in simulation driven by LLM-empowered agents. We categorize the simulations into three types: (1) Individual Simulation, which mimics specific individuals or demographic groups; (2) Scenario Simulation, where multiple agents collaborate to achieve goals within specific contexts; and (3) Society Simulation, which models interactions within agent societies to reflect the complexity and variety of real-world dynamics. These simulations follow a progression, ranging from detailed individual modeling to large-scale societal phenomena. We provide a detailed discussion of each simulation type, including the architecture or key components of the simulation, the classification of objectives or scenarios and the evaluation method. Afterward, we summarize commonly used datasets and benchmarks. Finally, we discuss the trends across these three types of simulation. A repository for the related sources is at {https://github.com/FudanDISC/SocialAgent}.

  • 11 authors
·
Dec 4, 2024

MetaChain: A Fully-Automated and Zero-Code Framework for LLM Agents

Large Language Model (LLM) Agents have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in task automation and intelligent decision-making, driving the widespread adoption of agent development frameworks such as LangChain and AutoGen. However, these frameworks predominantly serve developers with extensive technical expertise - a significant limitation considering that only 0.03 % of the global population possesses the necessary programming skills. This stark accessibility gap raises a fundamental question: Can we enable everyone, regardless of technical background, to build their own LLM agents using natural language alone? To address this challenge, we introduce MetaChain-a Fully-Automated and highly Self-Developing framework that enables users to create and deploy LLM agents through Natural Language Alone. Operating as an autonomous Agent Operating System, MetaChain comprises four key components: i) Agentic System Utilities, ii) LLM-powered Actionable Engine, iii) Self-Managing File System, and iv) Self-Play Agent Customization module. This lightweight yet powerful system enables efficient and dynamic creation and modification of tools, agents, and workflows without coding requirements or manual intervention. Beyond its code-free agent development capabilities, MetaChain also serves as a versatile multi-agent system for General AI Assistants. Comprehensive evaluations on the GAIA benchmark demonstrate MetaChain's effectiveness in generalist multi-agent tasks, surpassing existing state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, MetaChain's Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-related capabilities have shown consistently superior performance compared to many alternative LLM-based solutions.

Evaluating Binary Decision Biases in Large Language Models: Implications for Fair Agent-Based Financial Simulations

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being used to simulate human-like decision making in agent-based financial market models (ABMs). As models become more powerful and accessible, researchers can now incorporate individual LLM decisions into ABM environments. However, integration may introduce inherent biases that need careful evaluation. In this paper we test three state-of-the-art GPT models for bias using two model sampling approaches: one-shot and few-shot API queries. We observe significant variations in distributions of outputs between specific models, and model sub versions, with GPT-4o-Mini-2024-07-18 showing notably better performance (32-43% yes responses) compared to GPT-4-0125-preview's extreme bias (98-99% yes responses). We show that sampling methods and model sub-versions significantly impact results: repeated independent API calls produce different distributions compared to batch sampling within a single call. While no current GPT model can simultaneously achieve a uniform distribution and Markovian properties in one-shot testing, few-shot sampling can approach uniform distributions under certain conditions. We explore the Temperature parameter, providing a definition and comparative results. We further compare our results to true random binary series and test specifically for the common human bias of Negative Recency - finding LLMs have a mixed ability to 'beat' humans in this one regard. These findings emphasise the critical importance of careful LLM integration into ABMs for financial markets and more broadly.

  • 2 authors
·
Jan 20

Why do AI agents communicate in human language?

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become foundational to modern AI agent systems, enabling autonomous agents to reason and plan. In most existing systems, inter-agent communication relies primarily on natural language. While this design supports interpretability and human oversight, we argue that it introduces fundamental limitations in agent-to-agent coordination. The semantic space of natural language is structurally misaligned with the high-dimensional vector spaces in which LLMs operate, resulting in information loss and behavioral drift. Beyond surface-level inefficiencies, we highlight a deeper architectural limitation: current LLMs were not trained with the objective of supporting agentic behavior. As such, they lack mechanisms for modeling role continuity, task boundaries, and multi-agent dependencies. The standard next-token prediction paradigm fails to support the structural alignment required for robust, scalable agent coordination. Based on this, we argue that two core questions deserve careful examination: first, given that AI agents fundamentally operate in high-dimensional vector spaces, should they rely on a language system originally designed for human cognition as their communication medium? Second, should we consider developing a new model construction paradigm that builds models from the ground up to natively support structured communication, shared intentionality, and task alignment in multi-role, multi-agent environments? This paper calls for a reconsideration not only of how agents should communicate, but also of what it fundamentally means to train a model that natively supports multi-agent coordination and communication.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 3

MAgIC: Investigation of Large Language Model Powered Multi-Agent in Cognition, Adaptability, Rationality and Collaboration

Large Language Models (LLMs) have marked a significant advancement in the field of natural language processing, demonstrating exceptional capabilities in reasoning, tool usage, and memory. As their applications extend into multi-agent environments, a need has arisen for a comprehensive evaluation framework that captures their abilities in reasoning, planning, collaboration, and more. This work introduces a novel benchmarking framework specifically tailored to assess LLMs within multi-agent settings, providing quantitative metrics to evaluate their judgment, reasoning, deception, self-awareness, cooperation, coordination, and rationality. We utilize games such as Chameleon and Undercover, alongside game theory scenarios like Cost Sharing, Multi-player Prisoner's Dilemma, and Public Good, to create diverse testing environments. Our framework is fortified with the Probabilistic Graphical Modeling (PGM) method, enhancing the LLMs' capabilities in navigating complex social and cognitive dimensions. The benchmark evaluates seven multi-agent systems powered by different LLMs, quantitatively highlighting a significant capability gap over threefold between the strongest, GPT-4, and the weakest, Llama-2-70B. It also confirms that our PGM enhancement boosts the inherent abilities of all selected models by 50% on average. Our codes are released here https://github.com/cathyxl/MAgIC.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 14, 2023

LLM-based Multi-Agent Blackboard System for Information Discovery in Data Science

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has opened new opportunities in data science, yet their practical deployment is often constrained by the challenge of discovering relevant data within large heterogeneous data lakes. Existing methods struggle with this: single-agent systems are quickly overwhelmed by large, heterogeneous files in the large data lakes, while multi-agent systems designed based on a master-slave paradigm depend on a rigid central controller for task allocation that requires precise knowledge of each sub-agent's capabilities. To address these limitations, we propose a novel multi-agent communication paradigm inspired by the blackboard architecture for traditional AI models. In this framework, a central agent posts requests to a shared blackboard, and autonomous subordinate agents -- either responsible for a partition of the data lake or general information retrieval -- volunteer to respond based on their capabilities. This design improves scalability and flexibility by eliminating the need for a central coordinator to have prior knowledge of all sub-agents' expertise. We evaluate our method on three benchmarks that require explicit data discovery: KramaBench and modified versions of DS-Bench and DA-Code to incorporate data discovery. Experimental results demonstrate that the blackboard architecture substantially outperforms baselines, including RAG and the master-slave multi-agent paradigm, achieving between 13% to 57% relative improvement in end-to-end task success and up to a 9% relative gain in F1 score for data discovery over the best-performing baselines across both proprietary and open-source LLMs. Our findings establish the blackboard paradigm as a scalable and generalizable communication framework for multi-agent systems.

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 30

Securing AI Agents: Implementing Role-Based Access Control for Industrial Applications

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly advanced solutions across various domains, from political science to software development. However, these models are constrained by their training data, which is static and limited to information available up to a specific date. Additionally, their generalized nature often necessitates fine-tuning -- whether for classification or instructional purposes -- to effectively perform specific downstream tasks. AI agents, leveraging LLMs as their core, mitigate some of these limitations by accessing external tools and real-time data, enabling applications such as live weather reporting and data analysis. In industrial settings, AI agents are transforming operations by enhancing decision-making, predictive maintenance, and process optimization. For example, in manufacturing, AI agents enable near-autonomous systems that boost productivity and support real-time decision-making. Despite these advancements, AI agents remain vulnerable to security threats, including prompt injection attacks, which pose significant risks to their integrity and reliability. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a framework for integrating Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) into AI agents, providing a robust security guardrail. This framework aims to support the effective and scalable deployment of AI agents, with a focus on on-premises implementations.

  • 1 authors
·
Sep 14

LMRL Gym: Benchmarks for Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning with Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) provide excellent text-generation capabilities, but standard prompting and generation methods generally do not lead to intentional or goal-directed agents and might necessitate considerable prompt tuning. This becomes particularly apparent in multi-turn conversations: even the best current LLMs rarely ask clarifying questions, engage in explicit information gathering, or take actions now that lead to better decisions after multiple turns. Reinforcement learning has the potential to leverage the powerful modeling capabilities of LLMs, as well as their internal representation of textual interactions, to create capable goal-directed language agents. This can enable intentional and temporally extended interactions, such as with humans, through coordinated persuasion and carefully crafted questions, or in goal-directed play through text games to bring about desired final outcomes. However, enabling this requires the community to develop stable and reliable reinforcement learning algorithms that can effectively train LLMs. Developing such algorithms requires tasks that can gauge progress on algorithm design, provide accessible and reproducible evaluations for multi-turn interactions, and cover a range of task properties and challenges in improving reinforcement learning algorithms. Our paper introduces the LMRL-Gym benchmark for evaluating multi-turn RL for LLMs, together with an open-source research framework containing a basic toolkit for getting started on multi-turn RL with offline value-based and policy-based RL methods. Our benchmark consists of 8 different language tasks, which require multiple rounds of language interaction and cover a range of tasks in open-ended dialogue and text games.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 29, 2023

Autonomous Agents for Collaborative Task under Information Asymmetry

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.

  • 10 authors
·
Jun 21, 2024

FML-bench: A Benchmark for Automatic ML Research Agents Highlighting the Importance of Exploration Breadth

Large language models (LLMs) have sparked growing interest in automatic machine learning research agents. Among them, agents capable of autonomously proposing ideas and conducting machine learning experiments are particularly promising, as they maximize research automation and accelerate scientific progress by iteratively refining ideas based on experimental results. However, comprehensively evaluating such agents remains challenging. Existing benchmarks tend to overemphasize engineering aspects while neglecting academic rigor, creating barriers that obscure a clear assessment of an agent's scientific capabilities in machine learning research. They also suffer from limited task diversity, an overemphasis on application-oriented tasks over fundamental research problems, and limited scalability to realistic research settings. To address these limitations, we introduce FML-bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate automatic machine learning research agents on 8 diverse and fundamental machine learning research problems. It reduces coding burden, emphasizes fundamental problems rather than specific use cases, offers high task diversity, and is extensible to real-world machine learning GitHub repositories. Furthermore, we present a unified evaluation framework with five complementary metrics, designed to comprehensively assess agent performance on our benchmark. We evaluate state-of-the-art automatic research agents on FML-bench, and find that agents employing broad research exploration strategies outperform those focusing on narrow but deep exploration. These findings suggest that emphasizing the breadth of exploration may lead to more effective research outcomes than focusing solely on incremental refinement. Our benchmark is available at https://github.com/qrzou/FML-bench.

Very Large-Scale Multi-Agent Simulation in AgentScope

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have opened new avenues for applying multi-agent systems in very large-scale simulations. However, there remain several challenges when conducting multi-agent simulations with existing platforms, such as limited scalability and low efficiency, unsatisfied agent diversity, and effort-intensive management processes. To address these challenges, we develop several new features and components for AgentScope, a user-friendly multi-agent platform, enhancing its convenience and flexibility for supporting very large-scale multi-agent simulations. Specifically, we propose an actor-based distributed mechanism as the underlying technological infrastructure towards great scalability and high efficiency, and provide flexible environment support for simulating various real-world scenarios, which enables parallel execution of multiple agents, centralized workflow orchestration, and both inter-agent and agent-environment interactions among agents. Moreover, we integrate an easy-to-use configurable tool and an automatic background generation pipeline in AgentScope, simplifying the process of creating agents with diverse yet detailed background settings. Last but not least, we provide a web-based interface for conveniently monitoring and managing a large number of agents that might deploy across multiple devices. We conduct a comprehensive simulation to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed enhancements in AgentScope, and provide detailed observations and discussions to highlight the great potential of applying multi-agent systems in large-scale simulations. The source code is released on GitHub at https://github.com/modelscope/agentscope to inspire further research and development in large-scale multi-agent simulations.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 25, 2024 2

Enhancing the General Agent Capabilities of Low-Parameter LLMs through Tuning and Multi-Branch Reasoning

Open-source pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong language understanding and generation capabilities, making them highly successful in a variety of tasks. However, when used as agents for dealing with complex problems in the real world, their performance is far inferior to large commercial models such as ChatGPT and GPT-4. As intelligent agents, LLMs need to have the capabilities of task planning, long-term memory, and the ability to leverage external tools to achieve satisfactory performance. Various methods have been proposed to enhance the agent capabilities of LLMs. On the one hand, methods involve constructing agent-specific data and fine-tuning the models. On the other hand, some methods focus on designing prompts that effectively activate the reasoning abilities of the LLMs. We explore both strategies on the 7B and 13B models. We propose a comprehensive method for constructing agent-specific data using GPT-4. Through supervised fine-tuning with constructed data, we find that for these models with a relatively small number of parameters, supervised fine-tuning can significantly reduce hallucination outputs and formatting errors in agent tasks. Furthermore, techniques such as multi-path reasoning and task decomposition can effectively decrease problem complexity and enhance the performance of LLMs as agents. We evaluate our method on five agent tasks of AgentBench and achieve satisfactory results.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 28, 2024

The Rise and Potential of Large Language Model Based Agents: A Survey

For a long time, humanity has pursued artificial intelligence (AI) equivalent to or surpassing the human level, with AI agents considered a promising vehicle for this pursuit. AI agents are artificial entities that sense their environment, make decisions, and take actions. Many efforts have been made to develop intelligent AI agents since the mid-20th century. However, these efforts have mainly focused on advancement in algorithms or training strategies to enhance specific capabilities or performance on particular tasks. Actually, what the community lacks is a sufficiently general and powerful model to serve as a starting point for designing AI agents that can adapt to diverse scenarios. Due to the versatile and remarkable capabilities they demonstrate, large language models (LLMs) are regarded as potential sparks for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), offering hope for building general AI agents. Many research efforts have leveraged LLMs as the foundation to build AI agents and have achieved significant progress. We start by tracing the concept of agents from its philosophical origins to its development in AI, and explain why LLMs are suitable foundations for AI agents. Building upon this, we present a conceptual framework for LLM-based agents, comprising three main components: brain, perception, and action, and the framework can be tailored to suit different applications. Subsequently, we explore the extensive applications of LLM-based agents in three aspects: single-agent scenarios, multi-agent scenarios, and human-agent cooperation. Following this, we delve into agent societies, exploring the behavior and personality of LLM-based agents, the social phenomena that emerge when they form societies, and the insights they offer for human society. Finally, we discuss a range of key topics and open problems within the field.

  • 30 authors
·
Sep 14, 2023

Scaling Autonomous Agents via Automatic Reward Modeling And Planning

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a range of text-generation tasks. However, LLMs still struggle with problems requiring multi-step decision-making and environmental feedback, such as online shopping, scientific reasoning, and mathematical problem-solving. Unlike pure text data, collecting large-scale decision-making data is challenging. Moreover, many powerful LLMs are only accessible through APIs, which hinders their fine-tuning for agent tasks due to cost and complexity. To address LLM agents' limitations, we propose a framework that can automatically learn a reward model from the environment without human annotations. This model can be used to evaluate the action trajectories of LLM agents and provide heuristics for task planning. Specifically, our approach involves employing one LLM-based agent to navigate an environment randomly, generating diverse action trajectories. Subsequently, a separate LLM is leveraged to assign a task intent and synthesize a negative response alongside the correct response for each trajectory. These triplets (task intent, positive response, and negative response) are then utilized as training data to optimize a reward model capable of scoring action trajectories. The effectiveness and generalizability of our framework are demonstrated through evaluations conducted on different agent benchmarks. In conclusion, our proposed framework represents a significant advancement in enhancing LLM agents' decision-making capabilities. By automating the learning of reward models, we overcome the challenges of data scarcity and API limitations, potentially revolutionizing the application of LLMs in complex and interactive environments. This research paves the way for more sophisticated AI agents capable of tackling a wide range of real-world problems requiring multi-step decision-making.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 17 2

A Survey on Agentic Multimodal Large Language Models

With the recent emergence of revolutionary autonomous agentic systems, research community is witnessing a significant shift from traditional static, passive, and domain-specific AI agents toward more dynamic, proactive, and generalizable agentic AI. Motivated by the growing interest in agentic AI and its potential trajectory toward AGI, we present a comprehensive survey on Agentic Multimodal Large Language Models (Agentic MLLMs). In this survey, we explore the emerging paradigm of agentic MLLMs, delineating their conceptual foundations and distinguishing characteristics from conventional MLLM-based agents. We establish a conceptual framework that organizes agentic MLLMs along three fundamental dimensions: (i) Agentic internal intelligence functions as the system's commander, enabling accurate long-horizon planning through reasoning, reflection, and memory; (ii) Agentic external tool invocation, whereby models proactively use various external tools to extend their problem-solving capabilities beyond their intrinsic knowledge; and (iii) Agentic environment interaction further situates models within virtual or physical environments, allowing them to take actions, adapt strategies, and sustain goal-directed behavior in dynamic real-world scenarios. To further accelerate research in this area for the community, we compile open-source training frameworks, training and evaluation datasets for developing agentic MLLMs. Finally, we review the downstream applications of agentic MLLMs and outline future research directions for this rapidly evolving field. To continuously track developments in this rapidly evolving field, we will also actively update a public repository at https://github.com/HJYao00/Awesome-Agentic-MLLMs.

  • 11 authors
·
Oct 13

AgentSwift: Efficient LLM Agent Design via Value-guided Hierarchical Search

Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated strong capabilities across diverse domains. However, designing high-performing agentic systems remains challenging. Existing agent search methods suffer from three major limitations: (1) an emphasis on optimizing agentic workflows while under-utilizing proven human-designed components such as memory, planning, and tool use; (2) high evaluation costs, as each newly generated agent must be fully evaluated on benchmarks; and (3) inefficient search in large search space. In this work, we introduce a comprehensive framework to address these challenges. First, We propose a hierarchical search space that jointly models agentic workflow and composable functional components, enabling richer agentic system designs. Building on this structured design space, we introduce a predictive value model that estimates agent performance given agentic system and task description, allowing for efficient, low-cost evaluation during the search process. Finally, we present a hierarchical Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) strategy informed by uncertainty to guide the search. Experiments on seven benchmarks, covering embodied, math, web, tool, and game, show that our method achieves an average performance gain of 8.34\% over state-of-the-art baselines and exhibits faster search progress with steeper improvement trajectories. Code repo is available at https://github.com/Ericccc02/AgentSwift.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 6

Playing repeated games with Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming society and permeating into diverse applications. As a result, LLMs will frequently interact with us and other agents. It is, therefore, of great societal value to understand how LLMs behave in interactive social settings. Here, we propose to use behavioral game theory to study LLM's cooperation and coordination behavior. To do so, we let different LLMs (GPT-3, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4) play finitely repeated games with each other and with other, human-like strategies. Our results show that LLMs generally perform well in such tasks and also uncover persistent behavioral signatures. In a large set of two players-two strategies games, we find that LLMs are particularly good at games where valuing their own self-interest pays off, like the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma family. However, they behave sub-optimally in games that require coordination. We, therefore, further focus on two games from these distinct families. In the canonical iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, we find that GPT-4 acts particularly unforgivingly, always defecting after another agent has defected only once. In the Battle of the Sexes, we find that GPT-4 cannot match the behavior of the simple convention to alternate between options. We verify that these behavioral signatures are stable across robustness checks. Finally, we show how GPT-4's behavior can be modified by providing further information about the other player as well as by asking it to predict the other player's actions before making a choice. These results enrich our understanding of LLM's social behavior and pave the way for a behavioral game theory for machines.

  • 6 authors
·
May 26, 2023

MARFT: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Fine-Tuning

LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in addressing complex, agentic tasks, from generating high-quality presentation slides to even conducting sophisticated scientific research. Meanwhile, RL has been widely recognized for its effectiveness in enhancing agent intelligence, but limited research has investigated the fine-tuning of LaMAS using foundational RL techniques. Moreover, the direct application of MARL methods to LaMAS introduces significant challenges, stemming from the unique characteristics and mechanisms inherent to LaMAS. To address these challenges, this article presents a comprehensive study of LLM-based MARL and proposes a novel paradigm termed Multi-Agent Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (MARFT). We introduce a brand-new POMDP called Flex-POMDP, which aligns with the LaMAS optimization in real-world applications and a universal algorithmic framework tailored specifically for LaMAS, outlining the conceptual foundations, key distinctions, and practical implementation strategies. We review the evolution from RL to RFT, setting the stage for a parallel analysis in the multi-agent domain. In the context of LaMAS, we elucidate critical differences between MARL and MARFT. These differences motivate a transition toward a LaMAS-oriented formulation of RFT. Central to this work is a robust and scalable MARFT framework. We detail the core algorithm and provide a complete, open-source implementation to facilitate adoption and further research. The latter sections of the paper explore real-world application perspectives and opening challenges in MARFT. By bridging theoretical underpinnings with practical methodologies, this work serves as a roadmap for researchers seeking to advance MARFT toward resilient and adaptive solutions in agentic systems. Our implementation of the proposed framework is publicly available at: https://github.com/jwliao-ai/MARFT.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 21

Do LLM Agents Have Regret? A Case Study in Online Learning and Games

Large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly employed for (interactive) decision-making, via the development of LLM-based autonomous agents. Despite their emerging successes, the performance of LLM agents in decision-making has not been fully investigated through quantitative metrics, especially in the multi-agent setting when they interact with each other, a typical scenario in real-world LLM-agent applications. To better understand the limits of LLM agents in these interactive environments, we propose to study their interactions in benchmark decision-making settings in online learning and game theory, through the performance metric of regret. We first empirically study the {no-regret} behaviors of LLMs in canonical (non-stationary) online learning problems, as well as the emergence of equilibria when LLM agents interact through playing repeated games. We then provide some theoretical insights into the no-regret behaviors of LLM agents, under certain assumptions on the supervised pre-training and the rationality model of human decision-makers who generate the data. Notably, we also identify (simple) cases where advanced LLMs such as GPT-4 fail to be no-regret. To promote the no-regret behaviors, we propose a novel unsupervised training loss of regret-loss, which, in contrast to the supervised pre-training loss, does not require the labels of (optimal) actions. We then establish the statistical guarantee of generalization bound for regret-loss minimization, followed by the optimization guarantee that minimizing such a loss may automatically lead to known no-regret learning algorithms. Our further experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our regret-loss, especially in addressing the above ``regrettable'' cases.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 25, 2024

AgentSociety: Large-Scale Simulation of LLM-Driven Generative Agents Advances Understanding of Human Behaviors and Society

Understanding human behavior and society is a central focus in social sciences, with the rise of generative social science marking a significant paradigmatic shift. By leveraging bottom-up simulations, it replaces costly and logistically challenging traditional experiments with scalable, replicable, and systematic computational approaches for studying complex social dynamics. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have further transformed this research paradigm, enabling the creation of human-like generative social agents and realistic simulacra of society. In this paper, we propose AgentSociety, a large-scale social simulator that integrates LLM-driven agents, a realistic societal environment, and a powerful large-scale simulation engine. Based on the proposed simulator, we generate social lives for over 10k agents, simulating their 5 million interactions both among agents and between agents and their environment. Furthermore, we explore the potential of AgentSociety as a testbed for computational social experiments, focusing on four key social issues: polarization, the spread of inflammatory messages, the effects of universal basic income policies, and the impact of external shocks such as hurricanes. These four issues serve as valuable cases for assessing AgentSociety's support for typical research methods -- such as surveys, interviews, and interventions -- as well as for investigating the patterns, causes, and underlying mechanisms of social issues. The alignment between AgentSociety's outcomes and real-world experimental results not only demonstrates its ability to capture human behaviors and their underlying mechanisms, but also underscores its potential as an important platform for social scientists and policymakers.

  • 16 authors
·
Feb 12

Aime: Towards Fully-Autonomous Multi-Agent Framework

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) are emerging as a powerful paradigm for solving complex, multifaceted problems. However, the potential of these systems is often constrained by the prevalent plan-and-execute framework, which suffers from critical limitations: rigid plan execution, static agent capabilities, and inefficient communication. These weaknesses hinder their adaptability and robustness in dynamic environments. This paper introduces Aime, a novel multi-agent framework designed to overcome these challenges through dynamic, reactive planning and execution. Aime replaces the conventional static workflow with a fluid and adaptive architecture. Its core innovations include: (1) a Dynamic Planner that continuously refines the overall strategy based on real-time execution feedback; (2) an Actor Factory that implements Dynamic Actor instantiation, assembling specialized agents on-demand with tailored tools and knowledge; and (3) a centralized Progress Management Module that serves as a single source of truth for coherent, system-wide state awareness. We empirically evaluated Aime on a diverse suite of benchmarks spanning general reasoning (GAIA), software engineering (SWE-bench Verified), and live web navigation (WebVoyager). The results demonstrate that Aime consistently outperforms even highly specialized state-of-the-art agents in their respective domains. Its superior adaptability and task success rate establish Aime as a more resilient and effective foundation for multi-agent collaboration.

  • 15 authors
·
Jul 16

Efficient Agents: Building Effective Agents While Reducing Cost

The remarkable capabilities of Large Language Model (LLM)-driven agents have enabled sophisticated systems to tackle complex, multi-step tasks, but their escalating costs threaten scalability and accessibility. This work presents the first systematic study of the efficiency-effectiveness trade-off in modern agent systems, addressing the critical need for cost-effective designs without sacrificing performance. We investigate three key questions: (1) How much complexity do agentic tasks inherently require? (2) When do additional modules yield diminishing returns? (3) How much efficiency can be gained through the design of efficient agent frameworks? Through an empirical analysis on the GAIA benchmark, we evaluate the impact of LLM backbone selection, agent framework designs, and test-time scaling strategies. Using the cost-of-pass metric, we quantify the efficiency-performance trade-off across these dimensions. Our findings inform the development of Efficient Agents , a novel agent framework that has an optimal complexity to task requirements. Efficient Agents retains 96.7% of the performance of OWL, one leading open-source agent framework, while reducing operational costs from 0.398 to 0.228, resulting in a 28.4% improvement in cost-of-pass. Our work provides actionable insights for designing efficient, high-performing agent systems, advancing the accessibility and sustainability of AI-driven solutions.

Chain-of-Agents: End-to-End Agent Foundation Models via Multi-Agent Distillation and Agentic RL

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and multi-agent systems have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex problem-solving tasks such as deep research, vibe coding, and mathematical reasoning. However, most existing multi-agent systems are built upon manual prompt/workflow engineering with sophisticated agent frameworks, making them computationally inefficient, less capable, and can not benefit from data-centric learning. In this work, we introduce Chain-of-Agents (CoA), a novel paradigm of LLM reasoning that enables native end-to-end complex problem-solving in the same way as a multi-agent system (i.e., multi-turn problem solving with multiple tools and multiple agents) within one model. In chain-of-agents problem-solving, the model dynamically activates different tool agents and role-playing agents to simulate multi-agent collaboration in an end-to-end fashion. To elicit end-to-end chain-of-agents problem-solving abilities in LLMs, we introduce a multi-agent distillation framework to distill state-of-the-art multi-agent systems into chain-of-agents trajectories for agentic supervised fine-tuning. We then use agentic reinforcement learning on verifiable agentic tasks to further improve the models' capabilities on chain-of-agents problem solving. We call the resulting models Agent Foundation Models (AFMs). Our empirical studies demonstrate that AFM establishes new state-of-the-art performance across diverse benchmarks in both web agent and code agent settings. We make the entire research, including the model weights, code for training and evaluation, and the training data, fully open-sourced, which offers a solid starting point for future research on agent models and agentic RL.

Cooperative Multi-Agent Planning with Adaptive Skill Synthesis

Despite much progress in training distributed artificial intelligence (AI), building cooperative multi-agent systems with multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) faces challenges in sample efficiency, interpretability, and transferability. Unlike traditional learning-based methods that require extensive interaction with the environment, large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities in zero-shot planning and complex reasoning. However, existing LLM-based approaches heavily rely on text-based observations and struggle with the non-Markovian nature of multi-agent interactions under partial observability. We present COMPASS, a novel multi-agent architecture that integrates vision-language models (VLMs) with a dynamic skill library and structured communication for decentralized closed-loop decision-making. The skill library, bootstrapped from demonstrations, evolves via planner-guided tasks to enable adaptive strategies. COMPASS propagates entity information through multi-hop communication under partial observability. Evaluations on the improved StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenge (SMACv2) demonstrate COMPASS's strong performance against state-of-the-art MARL baselines across both symmetric and asymmetric scenarios. Notably, in the symmetric Protoss 5v5 task, COMPASS achieved a 57\% win rate, representing a 30 percentage point advantage over QMIX (27\%). Project page can be found at https://stellar-entremet-1720bb.netlify.app/.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 14

WebLeaper: Empowering Efficiency and Efficacy in WebAgent via Enabling Info-Rich Seeking

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents have emerged as a transformative approach for open-ended problem solving, with information seeking (IS) being a core capability that enables autonomous reasoning and decision-making. While prior research has largely focused on improving retrieval depth, we observe that current IS agents often suffer from low search efficiency, which in turn constrains overall performance. A key factor underlying this inefficiency is the sparsity of target entities in training tasks, which limits opportunities for agents to learn and generalize efficient search behaviors. To address these challenges, we propose WebLeaper, a framework for constructing high-coverage IS tasks and generating efficient solution trajectories. We formulate IS as a tree-structured reasoning problem, enabling a substantially larger set of target entities to be embedded within a constrained context. Leveraging curated Wikipedia tables, we propose three variants for synthesizing IS tasks, Basic, Union, and Reverse-Union, to systematically increase both IS efficiency and efficacy. Finally, we curate training trajectories by retaining only those that are simultaneously accurate and efficient, ensuring that the model is optimized for both correctness and search performance. Extensive experiments on both basic and comprehensive settings, conducted on five IS benchmarks, BrowserComp, GAIA, xbench-DeepSearch, WideSearch, and Seal-0, demonstrate that our method consistently achieves improvements in both effectiveness and efficiency over strong baselines.

AlibabaTongyiLab TongyiLab
·
Oct 28 2

MasHost Builds It All: Autonomous Multi-Agent System Directed by Reinforcement Learning

Large Language Model (LLM)-driven Multi-agent systems (Mas) have recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for tackling complex real-world tasks. However, existing Mas construction methods typically rely on manually crafted interaction mechanisms or heuristic rules, introducing human biases and constraining the autonomous ability. Even with recent advances in adaptive Mas construction, existing systems largely remain within the paradigm of semi-autonomous patterns. In this work, we propose MasHost, a Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based framework for autonomous and query-adaptive Mas design. By formulating Mas construction as a graph search problem, our proposed MasHost jointly samples agent roles and their interactions through a unified probabilistic sampling mechanism. Beyond the accuracy and efficiency objectives pursued in prior works, we introduce component rationality as an additional and novel design principle in Mas. To achieve this multi-objective optimization, we propose Hierarchical Relative Policy Optimization (HRPO), a novel RL strategy that collaboratively integrates group-relative advantages and action-wise rewards. To our knowledge, our proposed MasHost is the first RL-driven framework for autonomous Mas graph construction. Extensive experiments on six benchmarks demonstrate that MasHost consistently outperforms most competitive baselines, validating its effectiveness, efficiency, and structure rationality.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 10

Small LLMs Are Weak Tool Learners: A Multi-LLM Agent

Large Language Model (LLM) agents significantly extend the capabilities of standalone LLMs, empowering them to interact with external tools (e.g., APIs, functions) and complete complex tasks in a self-directed fashion. The challenge of tool use demands that LLMs not only understand user queries and generate answers but also excel in task planning, memory management, tool invocation, and result summarization. While traditional approaches focus on training a single LLM with all these capabilities, performance limitations become apparent, particularly with smaller models. Moreover, the entire LLM may require retraining when tools are updated. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel strategy that decomposes the aforementioned capabilities into a planner, caller, and summarizer. Each component is implemented by a single LLM that focuses on a specific capability and collaborates with other components to accomplish the task. This modular framework facilitates individual updates and the potential use of smaller LLMs for building each capability. To effectively train this framework, we introduce a two-stage training paradigm. First, we fine-tune a backbone LLM on the entire dataset without discriminating sub-tasks, providing the model with a comprehensive understanding of the task. Second, the fine-tuned LLM is used to instantiate the planner, caller, and summarizer respectively, which are continually fine-tuned on respective sub-tasks. Evaluation across various tool-use benchmarks illustrates that our proposed multi-LLM framework surpasses the traditional single-LLM approach, highlighting its efficacy and advantages in tool learning.

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 14, 2024 2

Adapting LLM Agents Through Communication

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown potential for human-like agents. To help these agents adapt to new tasks without extensive human supervision, we propose the Learning through Communication (LTC) paradigm, a novel training approach enabling LLM agents to improve continuously through interactions with their environments and other agents. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown potential for human-like agents. To help these agents adapt to new tasks without extensive human supervision, we propose the Learning through Communication (LTC) paradigm, a novel training approach enabling LLM agents to improve continuously through interactions with their environments and other agents. Through iterative exploration and PPO training, LTC empowers the agent to assimilate short-term experiences into long-term memory. To optimize agent interactions for task-specific learning, we introduce three structured communication patterns: Monologue, Dialogue, and Analogue-tailored for common tasks such as decision-making, knowledge-intensive reasoning, and numerical reasoning. We evaluated LTC on three datasets: ALFWorld (decision-making), HotpotQA (knowledge-intensive reasoning), and GSM8k (numerical reasoning). On ALFWorld, it exceeds the instruction tuning baseline by 12% in success rate. On HotpotQA, LTC surpasses the instruction-tuned LLaMA-7B agent by 5.1% in EM score, and it outperforms the instruction-tuned 9x larger PaLM-62B agent by 0.6%. On GSM8k, LTC outperforms the CoT-Tuning baseline by 3.6% in accuracy. The results showcase the versatility and efficiency of the LTC approach across diverse domains. We will open-source our code to promote further development of the community.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 1, 2023

FinCon: A Synthesized LLM Multi-Agent System with Conceptual Verbal Reinforcement for Enhanced Financial Decision Making

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated notable potential in conducting complex tasks and are increasingly utilized in various financial applications. However, high-quality sequential financial investment decision-making remains challenging. These tasks require multiple interactions with a volatile environment for every decision, demanding sufficient intelligence to maximize returns and manage risks. Although LLMs have been used to develop agent systems that surpass human teams and yield impressive investment returns, opportunities to enhance multi-sourced information synthesis and optimize decision-making outcomes through timely experience refinement remain unexplored. Here, we introduce the FinCon, an LLM-based multi-agent framework with CONceptual verbal reinforcement tailored for diverse FINancial tasks. Inspired by effective real-world investment firm organizational structures, FinCon utilizes a manager-analyst communication hierarchy. This structure allows for synchronized cross-functional agent collaboration towards unified goals through natural language interactions and equips each agent with greater memory capacity than humans. Additionally, a risk-control component in FinCon enhances decision quality by episodically initiating a self-critiquing mechanism to update systematic investment beliefs. The conceptualized beliefs serve as verbal reinforcement for the future agent's behavior and can be selectively propagated to the appropriate node that requires knowledge updates. This feature significantly improves performance while reducing unnecessary peer-to-peer communication costs. Moreover, FinCon demonstrates strong generalization capabilities in various financial tasks, including single stock trading and portfolio management.

TheFinAI The Fin AI
·
Jul 9, 2024

Rethinking Scale: The Efficacy of Fine-Tuned Open-Source LLMs in Large-Scale Reproducible Social Science Research

Large Language Models (LLMs) are distinguished by their architecture, which dictates their parameter size and performance capabilities. Social scientists have increasingly adopted LLMs for text classification tasks, which are difficult to scale with human coders. While very large, closed-source models often deliver superior performance, their use presents significant risks. These include lack of transparency, potential exposure of sensitive data, challenges to replicability, and dependence on proprietary systems. Additionally, their high costs make them impractical for large-scale research projects. In contrast, open-source models, although available in various sizes, may underperform compared to commercial alternatives if used without further fine-tuning. However, open-source models offer distinct advantages: they can be run locally (ensuring data privacy), fine-tuned for specific tasks, shared within the research community, and integrated into reproducible workflows. This study demonstrates that small, fine-tuned open-source LLMs can achieve equal or superior performance to models such as ChatGPT-4. We further explore the relationship between training set size and fine-tuning efficacy in open-source models. Finally, we propose a hybrid workflow that leverages the strengths of both open and closed models, offering a balanced approach to performance, transparency, and reproducibility.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 31, 2024

AgentFly: Fine-tuning LLM Agents without Fine-tuning LLMs

In this paper, we introduce a novel learning paradigm for adaptive Large Language Model (LLM) agents that eliminates the need for fine-tuning the underlying LLMs. Existing approaches are often either rigid, relying on static, handcrafted reflection workflows, or computationally intensive, requiring gradient updates of LLM model parameters. In contrast, our method enables low-cost continual adaptation via memory-based online reinforcement learning. We formalise this as a Memory-augmented Markov Decision Process (M-MDP), equipped with a neural case-selection policy to guide action decisions. Past experiences are stored in an episodic memory, either differentiable or non-parametric. The policy is continually updated based on environmental feedback through a memory rewriting mechanism, whereas policy improvement is achieved through efficient memory reading (retrieval). We instantiate our agent model in the deep research setting, namely AgentFly, which attains top-1 on GAIA validation (87.88% Pass@3) and 79.40% on the test set. It reaches 66.6% F1 and 80.4% PM on the DeepResearcher dataset, outperforming the state-of-the-art training-based method, while case-based memory adds 4.7% to 9.6% absolute points on out-of-distribution tasks. Our approach offers a scalable and efficient pathway for developing generalist LLM agents capable of continuous, real-time learning without gradient updates, advancing machine learning towards open-ended skill acquisition and deep research scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/Agent-on-the-Fly/AgentFly.

  • 11 authors
·
Aug 22 11

AgentNet: Decentralized Evolutionary Coordination for LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has enabled the development of multi-agent systems where multiple LLM-based agents collaborate on complex tasks. However, existing systems often rely on centralized coordination, leading to scalability bottlenecks, reduced adaptability, and single points of failure. Privacy and proprietary knowledge concerns further hinder cross-organizational collaboration, resulting in siloed expertise. We propose AgentNet, a decentralized, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-based framework that enables LLM-based agents to specialize, evolve, and collaborate autonomously in a dynamically structured Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). Unlike prior approaches with static roles or centralized control, AgentNet allows agents to adjust connectivity and route tasks based on local expertise and context. AgentNet introduces three key innovations: (1) a fully decentralized coordination mechanism that eliminates the need for a central orchestrator, enhancing robustness and emergent intelligence; (2) dynamic agent graph topology that adapts in real time to task demands, ensuring scalability and resilience; and (3) a retrieval-based memory system for agents that supports continual skill refinement and specialization. By minimizing centralized control and data exchange, AgentNet enables fault-tolerant, privacy-preserving collaboration across organizations. Experiments show that AgentNet achieves higher task accuracy than both single-agent and centralized multi-agent baselines.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 1

A Comprehensive Survey of Small Language Models in the Era of Large Language Models: Techniques, Enhancements, Applications, Collaboration with LLMs, and Trustworthiness

Large language models (LLM) have demonstrated emergent abilities in text generation, question answering, and reasoning, facilitating various tasks and domains. Despite their proficiency in various tasks, LLMs like LaPM 540B and Llama-3.1 405B face limitations due to large parameter sizes and computational demands, often requiring cloud API use which raises privacy concerns, limits real-time applications on edge devices, and increases fine-tuning costs. Additionally, LLMs often underperform in specialized domains such as healthcare and law due to insufficient domain-specific knowledge, necessitating specialized models. Therefore, Small Language Models (SLMs) are increasingly favored for their low inference latency, cost-effectiveness, efficient development, and easy customization and adaptability. These models are particularly well-suited for resource-limited environments and domain knowledge acquisition, addressing LLMs' challenges and proving ideal for applications that require localized data handling for privacy, minimal inference latency for efficiency, and domain knowledge acquisition through lightweight fine-tuning. The rising demand for SLMs has spurred extensive research and development. However, a comprehensive survey investigating issues related to the definition, acquisition, application, enhancement, and reliability of SLM remains lacking, prompting us to conduct a detailed survey on these topics. The definition of SLMs varies widely, thus to standardize, we propose defining SLMs by their capability to perform specialized tasks and suitability for resource-constrained settings, setting boundaries based on the minimal size for emergent abilities and the maximum size sustainable under resource constraints. For other aspects, we provide a taxonomy of relevant models/methods and develop general frameworks for each category to enhance and utilize SLMs effectively.

  • 14 authors
·
Nov 3, 2024

MALT: Improving Reasoning with Multi-Agent LLM Training

Enabling effective collaboration among LLMs is a crucial step toward developing autonomous systems capable of solving complex problems. While LLMs are typically used as single-model generators, where humans critique and refine their outputs, the potential for jointly-trained collaborative models remains largely unexplored. Despite promising results in multi-agent communication and debate settings, little progress has been made in training models to work together on tasks. In this paper, we present a first step toward "Multi-agent LLM training" (MALT) on reasoning problems. Our approach employs a sequential multi-agent setup with heterogeneous LLMs assigned specialized roles: a generator, verifier, and refinement model iteratively solving problems. We propose a trajectory-expansion-based synthetic data generation process and a credit assignment strategy driven by joint outcome based rewards. This enables our post-training setup to utilize both positive and negative trajectories to autonomously improve each model's specialized capabilities as part of a joint sequential system. We evaluate our approach across MATH, GSM8k, and CQA, where MALT on Llama 3.1 8B models achieves relative improvements of 14.14%, 7.12%, and 9.40% respectively over the same baseline model. This demonstrates an early advance in multi-agent cooperative capabilities for performance on mathematical and common sense reasoning questions. More generally, our work provides a concrete direction for research around multi-agent LLM training approaches.

  • 9 authors
·
Dec 2, 2024 4

From Commands to Prompts: LLM-based Semantic File System for AIOS

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in the development of intelligent applications and systems such as LLM-based agents and agent operating systems (AIOS). However, when these applications and systems interact with the underlying file system, the file system still remains the traditional paradigm: reliant on manual navigation through precise commands. This paradigm poses a bottleneck to the usability of these systems as users are required to navigate complex folder hierarchies and remember cryptic file names. To address this limitation, we propose an LLM-based semantic file system ( LSFS ) for prompt-driven file management. Unlike conventional approaches, LSFS incorporates LLMs to enable users or agents to interact with files through natural language prompts, facilitating semantic file management. At the macro-level, we develop a comprehensive API set to achieve semantic file management functionalities, such as semantic file retrieval, file update monitoring and summarization, and semantic file rollback). At the micro-level, we store files by constructing semantic indexes for them, design and implement syscalls of different semantic operations (e.g., CRUD, group by, join) powered by vector database. Our experiments show that LSFS offers significant improvements over traditional file systems in terms of user convenience, the diversity of supported functions, and the accuracy and efficiency of file operations. Additionally, with the integration of LLM, our system enables more intelligent file management tasks, such as content summarization and version comparison, further enhancing its capabilities.

  • 12 authors
·
Sep 23, 2024 1

AI Agent Behavioral Science

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled the development of AI agents that exhibit increasingly human-like behaviors, including planning, adaptation, and social dynamics across diverse, interactive, and open-ended scenarios. These behaviors are not solely the product of the internal architectures of the underlying models, but emerge from their integration into agentic systems operating within specific contexts, where environmental factors, social cues, and interaction feedbacks shape behavior over time. This evolution necessitates a new scientific perspective: AI Agent Behavioral Science. Rather than focusing only on internal mechanisms, this perspective emphasizes the systematic observation of behavior, design of interventions to test hypotheses, and theory-guided interpretation of how AI agents act, adapt, and interact over time. We systematize a growing body of research across individual agent, multi-agent, and human-agent interaction settings, and further demonstrate how this perspective informs responsible AI by treating fairness, safety, interpretability, accountability, and privacy as behavioral properties. By unifying recent findings and laying out future directions, we position AI Agent Behavioral Science as a necessary complement to traditional model-centric approaches, providing essential tools for understanding, evaluating, and governing the real-world behavior of increasingly autonomous AI systems.

A Survey of GPT-3 Family Large Language Models Including ChatGPT and GPT-4

Large language models (LLMs) are a special class of pretrained language models obtained by scaling model size, pretraining corpus and computation. LLMs, because of their large size and pretraining on large volumes of text data, exhibit special abilities which allow them to achieve remarkable performances without any task-specific training in many of the natural language processing tasks. The era of LLMs started with OpenAI GPT-3 model, and the popularity of LLMs is increasing exponentially after the introduction of models like ChatGPT and GPT4. We refer to GPT-3 and its successor OpenAI models, including ChatGPT and GPT4, as GPT-3 family large language models (GLLMs). With the ever-rising popularity of GLLMs, especially in the research community, there is a strong need for a comprehensive survey which summarizes the recent research progress in multiple dimensions and can guide the research community with insightful future research directions. We start the survey paper with foundation concepts like transformers, transfer learning, self-supervised learning, pretrained language models and large language models. We then present a brief overview of GLLMs and discuss the performances of GLLMs in various downstream tasks, specific domains and multiple languages. We also discuss the data labelling and data augmentation abilities of GLLMs, the robustness of GLLMs, the effectiveness of GLLMs as evaluators, and finally, conclude with multiple insightful future research directions. To summarize, this comprehensive survey paper will serve as a good resource for both academic and industry people to stay updated with the latest research related to GPT-3 family large language models.

  • 1 authors
·
Oct 4, 2023

Revisiting Multi-Agent Debate as Test-Time Scaling: A Systematic Study of Conditional Effectiveness

The remarkable growth in large language model (LLM) capabilities has spurred exploration into multi-agent systems, with debate frameworks emerging as a promising avenue for enhanced problem-solving. These multi-agent debate (MAD) approaches, where agents collaboratively present, critique, and refine arguments, potentially offer improved reasoning, robustness, and diverse perspectives over monolithic models. Despite prior studies leveraging MAD, a systematic understanding of its effectiveness compared to self-agent methods, particularly under varying conditions, remains elusive. This paper seeks to fill this gap by conceptualizing MAD as a test-time computational scaling technique, distinguished by collaborative refinement and diverse exploration capabilities. We conduct a comprehensive empirical investigation comparing MAD with strong self-agent test-time scaling baselines on mathematical reasoning and safety-related tasks. Our study systematically examines the influence of task difficulty, model scale, and agent diversity on MAD's performance. Key findings reveal that, for mathematical reasoning, MAD offers limited advantages over self-agent scaling but becomes more effective with increased problem difficulty and decreased model capability, while agent diversity shows little benefit. Conversely, for safety tasks, MAD's collaborative refinement can increase vulnerability, but incorporating diverse agent configurations facilitates a gradual reduction in attack success through the collaborative refinement process. We believe our findings provide critical guidance for the future development of more effective and strategically deployed MAD systems.

  • 6 authors
·
May 28 1

Pangu-Agent: A Fine-Tunable Generalist Agent with Structured Reasoning

A key method for creating Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents is Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, constructing a standalone RL policy that maps perception to action directly encounters severe problems, chief among them being its lack of generality across multiple tasks and the need for a large amount of training data. The leading cause is that it cannot effectively integrate prior information into the perception-action cycle when devising the policy. Large language models (LLMs) emerged as a fundamental way to incorporate cross-domain knowledge into AI agents but lack crucial learning and adaptation toward specific decision problems. This paper presents a general framework model for integrating and learning structured reasoning into AI agents' policies. Our methodology is motivated by the modularity found in the human brain. The framework utilises the construction of intrinsic and extrinsic functions to add previous understandings of reasoning structures. It also provides the adaptive ability to learn models inside every module or function, consistent with the modular structure of cognitive processes. We describe the framework in-depth and compare it with other AI pipelines and existing frameworks. The paper explores practical applications, covering experiments that show the effectiveness of our method. Our results indicate that AI agents perform and adapt far better when organised reasoning and prior knowledge are embedded. This opens the door to more resilient and general AI agent systems.

  • 16 authors
·
Dec 22, 2023 4

Learning Strategic Language Agents in the Werewolf Game with Iterative Latent Space Policy Optimization

Large language model (LLM)-based agents have recently shown impressive progress in a variety of domains, including open-ended conversation and multi-step decision-making. However, applying these agents to social deduction games such as Werewolf, which requires both strategic decision-making and free-form language interaction, remains non-trivial. Traditional methods based on Counterfactual Regret Minimization (CFR) or reinforcement learning (RL) typically depend on a predefined action space, making them unsuitable for language games with unconstrained text action space. Meanwhile, pure LLM-based agents often suffer from intrinsic biases and require prohibitively large datasets for fine-tuning. We propose Latent Space Policy Optimization (LSPO), an iterative framework that addresses these challenges by first mapping free-form text to a discrete latent space, where methods like CFR and RL can learn strategic policy more effectively. We then translate the learned policy back into natural language dialogues, which are used to fine-tune an LLM via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). By iteratively alternating between these stages, our LSPO agent progressively enhances both strategic reasoning and language communication. Experiment results on the Werewolf game show that our method improves the agent's performance in each iteration and outperforms existing Werewolf agents, underscoring its promise for free-form language decision-making.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 7

MarS: a Financial Market Simulation Engine Powered by Generative Foundation Model

Generative models aim to simulate realistic effects of various actions across different contexts, from text generation to visual effects. Despite significant efforts to build real-world simulators, the application of generative models to virtual worlds, like financial markets, remains under-explored. In financial markets, generative models can simulate complex market effects of participants with various behaviors, enabling interaction under different market conditions, and training strategies without financial risk. This simulation relies on the finest structured data in financial market like orders thus building the finest realistic simulation. We propose Large Market Model (LMM), an order-level generative foundation model, for financial market simulation, akin to language modeling in the digital world. Our financial Market Simulation engine (MarS), powered by LMM, addresses the domain-specific need for realistic, interactive and controllable order generation. Key observations include LMM's strong scalability across data size and model complexity, and MarS's robust and practicable realism in controlled generation with market impact. We showcase MarS as a forecast tool, detection system, analysis platform, and agent training environment, thus demonstrating MarS's "paradigm shift" potential for a variety of financial applications. We release the code of MarS at https://github.com/microsoft/MarS/.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 4, 2024 1

Learning to Be A Doctor: Searching for Effective Medical Agent Architectures

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents have demonstrated strong capabilities across a wide range of tasks, and their application in the medical domain holds particular promise due to the demand for high generalizability and reliance on interdisciplinary knowledge. However, existing medical agent systems often rely on static, manually crafted workflows that lack the flexibility to accommodate diverse diagnostic requirements and adapt to emerging clinical scenarios. Motivated by the success of automated machine learning (AutoML), this paper introduces a novel framework for the automated design of medical agent architectures. Specifically, we define a hierarchical and expressive agent search space that enables dynamic workflow adaptation through structured modifications at the node, structural, and framework levels. Our framework conceptualizes medical agents as graph-based architectures composed of diverse, functional node types and supports iterative self-improvement guided by diagnostic feedback. Experimental results on skin disease diagnosis tasks demonstrate that the proposed method effectively evolves workflow structures and significantly enhances diagnostic accuracy over time. This work represents the first fully automated framework for medical agent architecture design and offers a scalable, adaptable foundation for deploying intelligent agents in real-world clinical environments.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 15

RLAdapter: Bridging Large Language Models to Reinforcement Learning in Open Worlds

While reinforcement learning (RL) shows remarkable success in decision-making problems, it often requires a lot of interactions with the environment, and in sparse-reward environments, it is challenging to learn meaningful policies. Large Language Models (LLMs) can potentially provide valuable guidance to agents in learning policies, thereby enhancing the performance of RL algorithms in such environments. However, LLMs often encounter difficulties in understanding downstream tasks, which hinders their ability to optimally assist agents in these tasks. A common approach to mitigating this issue is to fine-tune the LLMs with task-related data, enabling them to offer useful guidance for RL agents. However, this approach encounters several difficulties, such as inaccessible model weights or the need for significant computational resources, making it impractical. In this work, we introduce RLAdapter, a framework that builds a better connection between RL algorithms and LLMs by incorporating an adapter model. Within the RLAdapter framework, fine-tuning a lightweight language model with information generated during the training process of RL agents significantly aids LLMs in adapting to downstream tasks, thereby providing better guidance for RL agents. We conducted experiments to evaluate RLAdapter in the Crafter environment, and the results show that RLAdapter surpasses the SOTA baselines. Furthermore, agents under our framework exhibit common-sense behaviors that are absent in baseline models.

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 29, 2023

A Survey of Self-Evolving Agents: On Path to Artificial Super Intelligence

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities but remain fundamentally static, unable to adapt their internal parameters to novel tasks, evolving knowledge domains, or dynamic interaction contexts. As LLMs are increasingly deployed in open-ended, interactive environments, this static nature has become a critical bottleneck, necessitating agents that can adaptively reason, act, and evolve in real time. This paradigm shift -- from scaling static models to developing self-evolving agents -- has sparked growing interest in architectures and methods enabling continual learning and adaptation from data, interactions, and experiences. This survey provides the first systematic and comprehensive review of self-evolving agents, organized around three foundational dimensions -- what to evolve, when to evolve, and how to evolve. We examine evolutionary mechanisms across agent components (e.g., models, memory, tools, architecture), categorize adaptation methods by stages (e.g., intra-test-time, inter-test-time), and analyze the algorithmic and architectural designs that guide evolutionary adaptation (e.g., scalar rewards, textual feedback, single-agent and multi-agent systems). Additionally, we analyze evaluation metrics and benchmarks tailored for self-evolving agents, highlight applications in domains such as coding, education, and healthcare, and identify critical challenges and research directions in safety, scalability, and co-evolutionary dynamics. By providing a structured framework for understanding and designing self-evolving agents, this survey establishes a roadmap for advancing adaptive agentic systems in both research and real-world deployments, ultimately shedding lights to pave the way for the realization of Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI), where agents evolve autonomously, performing at or beyond human-level intelligence across a wide array of tasks.

Lita: Light Agent Uncovers the Agentic Coding Capabilities of LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being applied to programming tasks, ranging from single-turn code completion to autonomous agents. Current code agent designs frequently depend on complex, hand-crafted workflows and tool sets. However, this reliance on elaborate scaffolding presents several challenges: agent performance becomes overly dependent on prompt tuning and custom design choices, heavy human intervention obscures a model's true underlying capabilities, and intricate pipelines are costly to build and maintain. Furthermore, optimizing complex task prompts increases the risk of data leakage. Currently, when introducing new models, LLM providers like OpenAI and Anthropic often publish benchmark scores to demonstrate their models' coding proficiency, but keep their proprietary evaluation frameworks confidential. To address these limitations, we introduce Lita (Lite Agent), which operationalizes liteness, a principle of minimizing manual design while retaining the essential elements of a fully autonomous agent. Lita enables a more faithful and unified evaluation without elaborate scaffolding. Experiments on the Aider Polyglot and SWE-Bench with frontier models demonstrate that Lita achieves competitive or superior performance compared to workflow-based and agentic baselines. Crucially, Lita also consumes fewer tokens and requires significantly less design effort. Our results suggest that Lita is sufficient to reveal the underlying coding competence of modern LLMs. Finally, we propose the Agent Complexity Law: the performance gap between agents of varying complexity, from simple to sophisticated designs, will shrink as the core model improves, ultimately converging to a negligible difference.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 30

Advances and Challenges in Foundation Agents: From Brain-Inspired Intelligence to Evolutionary, Collaborative, and Safe Systems

The advent of large language models (LLMs) has catalyzed a transformative shift in artificial intelligence, paving the way for advanced intelligent agents capable of sophisticated reasoning, robust perception, and versatile action across diverse domains. As these agents increasingly drive AI research and practical applications, their design, evaluation, and continuous improvement present intricate, multifaceted challenges. This survey provides a comprehensive overview, framing intelligent agents within a modular, brain-inspired architecture that integrates principles from cognitive science, neuroscience, and computational research. We structure our exploration into four interconnected parts. First, we delve into the modular foundation of intelligent agents, systematically mapping their cognitive, perceptual, and operational modules onto analogous human brain functionalities, and elucidating core components such as memory, world modeling, reward processing, and emotion-like systems. Second, we discuss self-enhancement and adaptive evolution mechanisms, exploring how agents autonomously refine their capabilities, adapt to dynamic environments, and achieve continual learning through automated optimization paradigms, including emerging AutoML and LLM-driven optimization strategies. Third, we examine collaborative and evolutionary multi-agent systems, investigating the collective intelligence emerging from agent interactions, cooperation, and societal structures, highlighting parallels to human social dynamics. Finally, we address the critical imperative of building safe, secure, and beneficial AI systems, emphasizing intrinsic and extrinsic security threats, ethical alignment, robustness, and practical mitigation strategies necessary for trustworthy real-world deployment.

  • 47 authors
·
Mar 31 7

AgentRefine: Enhancing Agent Generalization through Refinement Tuning

Large Language Model (LLM) based agents have proved their ability to perform complex tasks like humans. However, there is still a large gap between open-sourced LLMs and commercial models like the GPT series. In this paper, we focus on improving the agent generalization capabilities of LLMs via instruction tuning. We first observe that the existing agent training corpus exhibits satisfactory results on held-in evaluation sets but fails to generalize to held-out sets. These agent-tuning works face severe formatting errors and are frequently stuck in the same mistake for a long while. We analyze that the poor generalization ability comes from overfitting to several manual agent environments and a lack of adaptation to new situations. They struggle with the wrong action steps and can not learn from the experience but just memorize existing observation-action relations. Inspired by the insight, we propose a novel AgentRefine framework for agent-tuning. The core idea is to enable the model to learn to correct its mistakes via observation in the trajectory. Specifically, we propose an agent synthesis framework to encompass a diverse array of environments and tasks and prompt a strong LLM to refine its error action according to the environment feedback. AgentRefine significantly outperforms state-of-the-art agent-tuning work in terms of generalization ability on diverse agent tasks. It also has better robustness facing perturbation and can generate diversified thought in inference. Our findings establish the correlation between agent generalization and self-refinement and provide a new paradigm for future research.

  • 10 authors
·
Jan 3

Dynamic LLM-Agent Network: An LLM-agent Collaboration Framework with Agent Team Optimization

Large language model (LLM) agents have been shown effective on a wide range of tasks, and by ensembling multiple LLM agents, their performances could be further improved. Existing approaches employ a fixed set of agents to interact with each other in a static architecture, which limits their generalizability to various tasks and requires strong human prior in designing these agents. In this work, we propose to construct a strategic team of agents communicating in a dynamic interaction architecture based on the task query. Specifically, we build a framework named Dynamic LLM-Agent Network (DyLAN) for LLM-agent collaboration on complicated tasks like reasoning and code generation. DyLAN enables agents to interact for multiple rounds in a dynamic architecture with inference-time agent selection and an early-stopping mechanism to improve performance and efficiency. We further design an automatic agent team optimization algorithm based on an unsupervised metric termed Agent Importance Score, enabling the selection of best agents based on the contribution each agent makes. Empirically, we demonstrate that DyLAN performs well in both reasoning and code generation tasks with reasonable computational cost. DyLAN achieves 13.0% and 13.3% improvement on MATH and HumanEval, respectively, compared to a single execution on GPT-35-turbo. On specific subjects of MMLU, agent team optimization in DyLAN increases accuracy by up to 25.0%.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 3, 2023

TradingGroup: A Multi-Agent Trading System with Self-Reflection and Data-Synthesis

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have enabled powerful agent-based applications in finance, particularly for sentiment analysis, financial report comprehension, and stock forecasting. However, existing systems often lack inter-agent coordination, structured self-reflection, and access to high-quality, domain-specific post-training data such as data from trading activities including both market conditions and agent decisions. These data are crucial for agents to understand the market dynamics, improve the quality of decision-making and promote effective coordination. We introduce TradingGroup, a multi-agent trading system designed to address these limitations through a self-reflective architecture and an end-to-end data-synthesis pipeline. TradingGroup consists of specialized agents for news sentiment analysis, financial report interpretation, stock trend forecasting, trading style adaptation, and a trading decision making agent that merges all signals and style preferences to produce buy, sell or hold decisions. Specifically, we design self-reflection mechanisms for the stock forecasting, style, and decision-making agents to distill past successes and failures for similar reasoning in analogous future scenarios and a dynamic risk-management model to offer configurable dynamic stop-loss and take-profit mechanisms. In addition, TradingGroup embeds an automated data-synthesis and annotation pipeline that generates high-quality post-training data for further improving the agent performance through post-training. Our backtesting experiments across five real-world stock datasets demonstrate TradingGroup's superior performance over rule-based, machine learning, reinforcement learning, and existing LLM-based trading strategies.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 24

Large Language Model Hacking: Quantifying the Hidden Risks of Using LLMs for Text Annotation

Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly transforming social science research by enabling the automation of labor-intensive tasks like data annotation and text analysis. However, LLM outputs vary significantly depending on the implementation choices made by researchers (e.g., model selection, prompting strategy, or temperature settings). Such variation can introduce systematic biases and random errors, which propagate to downstream analyses and cause Type I, Type II, Type S, or Type M errors. We call this LLM hacking. We quantify the risk of LLM hacking by replicating 37 data annotation tasks from 21 published social science research studies with 18 different models. Analyzing 13 million LLM labels, we test 2,361 realistic hypotheses to measure how plausible researcher choices affect statistical conclusions. We find incorrect conclusions based on LLM-annotated data in approximately one in three hypotheses for state-of-the-art models, and in half the hypotheses for small language models. While our findings show that higher task performance and better general model capabilities reduce LLM hacking risk, even highly accurate models do not completely eliminate it. The risk of LLM hacking decreases as effect sizes increase, indicating the need for more rigorous verification of findings near significance thresholds. Our extensive analysis of LLM hacking mitigation techniques emphasizes the importance of human annotations in reducing false positive findings and improving model selection. Surprisingly, common regression estimator correction techniques are largely ineffective in reducing LLM hacking risk, as they heavily trade off Type I vs. Type II errors. Beyond accidental errors, we find that intentional LLM hacking is unacceptably simple. With few LLMs and just a handful of prompt paraphrases, anything can be presented as statistically significant.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 10 3

Learn as Individuals, Evolve as a Team: Multi-agent LLMs Adaptation in Embodied Environments

Large language models (LLMs) possess extensive knowledge bases and strong reasoning capabilities, making them promising tools for complex, multi-agent planning in embodied environments. However, despite LLMs' advanced abilities and the sophisticated modular design of agentic methods, existing LLM-based planning algorithms remain limited by weak adaptation capabilities to multi-agent embodied scenarios. We address this limitation by introducing a framework that enables LLM agents to learn and evolve both before and during test time, equipping them with environment-relevant knowledge for better planning and enhanced communication for improved cooperation. Inspired by centralized training with decentralized execution in multi-agent reinforcement learning, we propose a Learn as Individuals, Evolve as a Team (LIET) paradigm for multi-agent LLMs adaptation. At the individual level, LLM agents learn a local utility function from exploratory datasets to better comprehend the embodied environment, which is then queried during test time to support informed decision-making. At the team level, LLM agents collaboratively and iteratively maintain and update a shared cooperation knowledge list based on new experiences, using it to guide more effective communication. By combining individual learning with team evolution, LIET enables comprehensive and flexible adaptation for LLM agents. Our experiments on Communicative Watch-And-Help and ThreeD-World Multi-Agent Transport benchmarks demonstrate that LIET, instantiated with both LLaMA and GPT-4o, outperforms existing baselines and exhibits strong cooperative planning abilities.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 8

Reasoning Capacity in Multi-Agent Systems: Limitations, Challenges and Human-Centered Solutions

Remarkable performance of large language models (LLMs) in a variety of tasks brings forth many opportunities as well as challenges of utilizing them in production settings. Towards practical adoption of LLMs, multi-agent systems hold great promise to augment, integrate, and orchestrate LLMs in the larger context of enterprise platforms that use existing proprietary data and models to tackle complex real-world tasks. Despite the tremendous success of these systems, current approaches rely on narrow, single-focus objectives for optimization and evaluation, often overlooking potential constraints in real-world scenarios, including restricted budgets, resources and time. Furthermore, interpreting, analyzing, and debugging these systems requires different components to be evaluated in relation to one another. This demand is currently not feasible with existing methodologies. In this postion paper, we introduce the concept of reasoning capacity as a unifying criterion to enable integration of constraints during optimization and establish connections among different components within the system, which also enable a more holistic and comprehensive approach to evaluation. We present a formal definition of reasoning capacity and illustrate its utility in identifying limitations within each component of the system. We then argue how these limitations can be addressed with a self-reflective process wherein human-feedback is used to alleviate shortcomings in reasoning and enhance overall consistency of the system.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 1, 2024

From Instructions to Intrinsic Human Values -- A Survey of Alignment Goals for Big Models

Big models, exemplified by Large Language Models (LLMs), are models typically pre-trained on massive data and comprised of enormous parameters, which not only obtain significantly improved performance across diverse tasks but also present emergent capabilities absent in smaller models. However, the growing intertwining of big models with everyday human lives poses potential risks and might cause serious social harm. Therefore, many efforts have been made to align LLMs with humans to make them better follow user instructions and satisfy human preferences. Nevertheless, `what to align with' has not been fully discussed, and inappropriate alignment goals might even backfire. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey of different alignment goals in existing work and trace their evolution paths to help identify the most essential goal. Particularly, we investigate related works from two perspectives: the definition of alignment goals and alignment evaluation. Our analysis encompasses three distinct levels of alignment goals and reveals a goal transformation from fundamental abilities to value orientation, indicating the potential of intrinsic human values as the alignment goal for enhanced LLMs. Based on such results, we further discuss the challenges of achieving such intrinsic value alignment and provide a collection of available resources for future research on the alignment of big models.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 23, 2023

Flooding Spread of Manipulated Knowledge in LLM-Based Multi-Agent Communities

The rapid adoption of large language models (LLMs) in multi-agent systems has highlighted their impressive capabilities in various applications, such as collaborative problem-solving and autonomous negotiation. However, the security implications of these LLM-based multi-agent systems have not been thoroughly investigated, particularly concerning the spread of manipulated knowledge. In this paper, we investigate this critical issue by constructing a detailed threat model and a comprehensive simulation environment that mirrors real-world multi-agent deployments in a trusted platform. Subsequently, we propose a novel two-stage attack method involving Persuasiveness Injection and Manipulated Knowledge Injection to systematically explore the potential for manipulated knowledge (i.e., counterfactual and toxic knowledge) spread without explicit prompt manipulation. Our method leverages the inherent vulnerabilities of LLMs in handling world knowledge, which can be exploited by attackers to unconsciously spread fabricated information. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our attack method can successfully induce LLM-based agents to spread both counterfactual and toxic knowledge without degrading their foundational capabilities during agent communication. Furthermore, we show that these manipulations can persist through popular retrieval-augmented generation frameworks, where several benign agents store and retrieve manipulated chat histories for future interactions. This persistence indicates that even after the interaction has ended, the benign agents may continue to be influenced by manipulated knowledge. Our findings reveal significant security risks in LLM-based multi-agent systems, emphasizing the imperative need for robust defenses against manipulated knowledge spread, such as introducing ``guardian'' agents and advanced fact-checking tools.

  • 10 authors
·
Jul 10, 2024

Information Gain-based Policy Optimization: A Simple and Effective Approach for Multi-Turn LLM Agents

Large language model (LLM)-based agents are increasingly trained with reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance their ability to interact with external environments through tool use, particularly in search-based settings that require multi-turn reasoning and knowledge acquisition. However, existing approaches typically rely on outcome-based rewards that are only provided at the final answer. This reward sparsity becomes particularly problematic in multi-turn settings, where long trajectories exacerbate two critical issues: (i) advantage collapse, where all rollouts receive identical rewards and provide no useful learning signals, and (ii) lack of fine-grained credit assignment, where dependencies between turns are obscured, especially in long-horizon tasks. In this paper, we propose Information Gain-based Policy Optimization (IGPO), a simple yet effective RL framework that provides dense and intrinsic supervision for multi-turn agent training. IGPO models each interaction turn as an incremental process of acquiring information about the ground truth, and defines turn-level rewards as the marginal increase in the policy's probability of producing the correct answer. Unlike prior process-level reward approaches that depend on external reward models or costly Monte Carlo estimation, IGPO derives intrinsic rewards directly from the model's own belief updates. These intrinsic turn-level rewards are combined with outcome-level supervision to form dense reward trajectories. Extensive experiments on both in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks demonstrate that IGPO consistently outperforms strong baselines in multi-turn scenarios, achieving higher accuracy and improved sample efficiency.

antgroup Ant Group
·
Oct 16 2

DrafterBench: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Tasks Automation in Civil Engineering

Large Language Model (LLM) agents have shown great potential for solving real-world problems and promise to be a solution for tasks automation in industry. However, more benchmarks are needed to systematically evaluate automation agents from an industrial perspective, for example, in Civil Engineering. Therefore, we propose DrafterBench for the comprehensive evaluation of LLM agents in the context of technical drawing revision, a representation task in civil engineering. DrafterBench contains twelve types of tasks summarized from real-world drawing files, with 46 customized functions/tools and 1920 tasks in total. DrafterBench is an open-source benchmark to rigorously test AI agents' proficiency in interpreting intricate and long-context instructions, leveraging prior knowledge, and adapting to dynamic instruction quality via implicit policy awareness. The toolkit comprehensively assesses distinct capabilities in structured data comprehension, function execution, instruction following, and critical reasoning. DrafterBench offers detailed analysis of task accuracy and error statistics, aiming to provide deeper insight into agent capabilities and identify improvement targets for integrating LLMs in engineering applications. Our benchmark is available at https://github.com/Eason-Li-AIS/DrafterBench, with the test set hosted at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Eason666/DrafterBench.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 15 1

Formally Specifying the High-Level Behavior of LLM-Based Agents

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.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 12, 2023

S^3: Social-network Simulation System with Large Language Model-Empowered Agents

Social network simulation plays a crucial role in addressing various challenges within social science. It offers extensive applications such as state prediction, phenomena explanation, and policy-making support, among others. In this work, we harness the formidable human-like capabilities exhibited by large language models (LLMs) in sensing, reasoning, and behaving, and utilize these qualities to construct the S^3 system (short for Social network Simulation System). Adhering to the widely employed agent-based simulation paradigm, we employ prompt engineering and prompt tuning techniques to ensure that the agent's behavior closely emulates that of a genuine human within the social network. Specifically, we simulate three pivotal aspects: emotion, attitude, and interaction behaviors. By endowing the agent in the system with the ability to perceive the informational environment and emulate human actions, we observe the emergence of population-level phenomena, including the propagation of information, attitudes, and emotions. We conduct an evaluation encompassing two levels of simulation, employing real-world social network data. Encouragingly, the results demonstrate promising accuracy. This work represents an initial step in the realm of social network simulation empowered by LLM-based agents. We anticipate that our endeavors will serve as a source of inspiration for the development of simulation systems within, but not limited to, social science.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 27, 2023

Large Language Models Play StarCraft II: Benchmarks and A Chain of Summarization Approach

StarCraft II is a challenging benchmark for AI agents due to the necessity of both precise micro level operations and strategic macro awareness. Previous works, such as Alphastar and SCC, achieve impressive performance on tackling StarCraft II , however, still exhibit deficiencies in long term strategic planning and strategy interpretability. Emerging large language model (LLM) agents, such as Voyage and MetaGPT, presents the immense potential in solving intricate tasks. Motivated by this, we aim to validate the capabilities of LLMs on StarCraft II, a highly complex RTS game.To conveniently take full advantage of LLMs` reasoning abilities, we first develop textual StratCraft II environment, called TextStarCraft II, which LLM agent can interact. Secondly, we propose a Chain of Summarization method, including single frame summarization for processing raw observations and multi frame summarization for analyzing game information, providing command recommendations, and generating strategic decisions. Our experiment consists of two parts: first, an evaluation by human experts, which includes assessing the LLMs`s mastery of StarCraft II knowledge and the performance of LLM agents in the game; second, the in game performance of LLM agents, encompassing aspects like win rate and the impact of Chain of Summarization.Experiment results demonstrate that: 1. LLMs possess the relevant knowledge and complex planning abilities needed to address StarCraft II scenarios; 2. Human experts consider the performance of LLM agents to be close to that of an average player who has played StarCraft II for eight years; 3. LLM agents are capable of defeating the built in AI at the Harder(Lv5) difficulty level. We have open sourced the code and released demo videos of LLM agent playing StarCraft II.

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 19, 2023

AgentTuning: Enabling Generalized Agent Abilities for LLMs

Open large language models (LLMs) with great performance in various tasks have significantly advanced the development of LLMs. However, they are far inferior to commercial models such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 when acting as agents to tackle complex tasks in the real world. These agent tasks employ LLMs as the central controller responsible for planning, memorization, and tool utilization, necessitating both fine-grained prompting methods and robust LLMs to achieve satisfactory performance. Though many prompting methods have been proposed to complete particular agent tasks, there is lack of research focusing on improving the agent capabilities of LLMs themselves without compromising their general abilities. In this work, we present AgentTuning, a simple and general method to enhance the agent abilities of LLMs while maintaining their general LLM capabilities. We construct AgentInstruct, a lightweight instruction-tuning dataset containing high-quality interaction trajectories. We employ a hybrid instruction-tuning strategy by combining AgentInstruct with open-source instructions from general domains. AgentTuning is used to instruction-tune the Llama 2 series, resulting in AgentLM. Our evaluations show that AgentTuning enables LLMs' agent capabilities without compromising general abilities. The AgentLM-70B is comparable to GPT-3.5-turbo on unseen agent tasks, demonstrating generalized agent capabilities. We open source the AgentInstruct and AgentLM-7B, 13B, and 70B models at https://github.com/THUDM/AgentTuning , serving open and powerful alternatives to commercial LLMs for agent tasks.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 19, 2023 1

Progent: Programmable Privilege Control for LLM Agents

LLM agents are an emerging form of AI systems where large language models (LLMs) serve as the central component, utilizing a diverse set of tools to complete user-assigned tasks. Despite their great potential, LLM agents pose significant security risks. When interacting with the external world, they may encounter malicious commands from attackers, leading to the execution of dangerous actions. A promising way to address this is by enforcing the principle of least privilege: allowing only essential actions for task completion while blocking unnecessary ones. However, achieving this is challenging, as it requires covering diverse agent scenarios while preserving both security and utility. We introduce Progent, the first privilege control mechanism for LLM agents. At its core is a domain-specific language for flexibly expressing privilege control policies applied during agent execution. These policies provide fine-grained constraints over tool calls, deciding when tool calls are permissible and specifying fallbacks if they are not. This enables agent developers and users to craft suitable policies for their specific use cases and enforce them deterministically to guarantee security. Thanks to its modular design, integrating Progent does not alter agent internals and requires only minimal changes to agent implementation, enhancing its practicality and potential for widespread adoption. To automate policy writing, we leverage LLMs to generate policies based on user queries, which are then updated dynamically for improved security and utility. Our extensive evaluation shows that it enables strong security while preserving high utility across three distinct scenarios or benchmarks: AgentDojo, ASB, and AgentPoison. Furthermore, we perform an in-depth analysis, showcasing the effectiveness of its core components and the resilience of its automated policy generation against adaptive attacks.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 15 2

Optima: Optimizing Effectiveness and Efficiency for LLM-Based Multi-Agent System

Large Language Model (LLM) based multi-agent systems (MAS) show remarkable potential in collaborative problem-solving, yet they still face critical challenges: low communication efficiency, poor scalability, and a lack of effective parameter-updating optimization methods. We present Optima, a novel framework that addresses these issues by significantly enhancing both communication efficiency and task effectiveness in LLM-based MAS through LLM training. Optima employs an iterative generate, rank, select, and train paradigm with a reward function balancing task performance, token efficiency, and communication readability. We explore various RL algorithms, including Supervised Fine-Tuning, Direct Preference Optimization, and their hybrid approaches, providing insights into their effectiveness-efficiency trade-offs. We integrate Monte Carlo Tree Search-inspired techniques for DPO data generation, treating conversation turns as tree nodes to explore diverse interaction paths. Evaluated on common multi-agent tasks, including information-asymmetric question answering and complex reasoning, Optima shows consistent and substantial improvements over single-agent baselines and vanilla MAS based on Llama 3 8B, achieving up to 2.8x performance gain with less than 10\% tokens on tasks requiring heavy information exchange. Moreover, Optima's efficiency gains open new possibilities for leveraging inference-compute more effectively, leading to improved inference-time scaling laws. By addressing fundamental challenges in LLM-based MAS, Optima shows the potential towards scalable, efficient, and effective MAS (https://chenweize1998.github.io/optima-project-page).

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 10, 2024 2

MindAgent: Emergent Gaming Interaction

Large Language Models (LLMs) have the capacity of performing complex scheduling in a multi-agent system and can coordinate these agents into completing sophisticated tasks that require extensive collaboration. However, despite the introduction of numerous gaming frameworks, the community has insufficient benchmarks towards building general multi-agents collaboration infrastructure that encompass both LLM and human-NPCs collaborations. In this work, we propose a novel infrastructure - MindAgent - to evaluate planning and coordination emergent capabilities for gaming interaction. In particular, our infrastructure leverages existing gaming framework, to i) require understanding of the coordinator for a multi-agent system, ii) collaborate with human players via un-finetuned proper instructions, and iii) establish an in-context learning on few-shot prompt with feedback. Furthermore, we introduce CUISINEWORLD, a new gaming scenario and related benchmark that dispatch a multi-agent collaboration efficiency and supervise multiple agents playing the game simultaneously. We conduct comprehensive evaluations with new auto-metric CoS for calculating the collaboration efficiency. Finally, our infrastructure can be deployed into real-world gaming scenarios in a customized VR version of CUISINEWORLD and adapted in existing broader Minecraft gaming domain. We hope our findings on LLMs and the new infrastructure for general-purpose scheduling and coordination can help shed light on how such skills can be obtained by learning from large language corpora.

  • 11 authors
·
Sep 18, 2023 1

WebRL: Training LLM Web Agents via Self-Evolving Online Curriculum Reinforcement Learning

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable potential as autonomous agents, particularly in web-based tasks. However, existing LLM web agents heavily rely on expensive proprietary LLM APIs, while open LLMs lack the necessary decision-making capabilities. This paper introduces WebRL, a self-evolving online curriculum reinforcement learning framework designed to train high-performance web agents using open LLMs. WebRL addresses three key challenges in building LLM web agents, including the scarcity of training tasks, sparse feedback signals, and policy distribution drift in online learning. Specifically, WebRL incorporates 1) a self-evolving curriculum that generates new tasks from unsuccessful attempts, 2) a robust outcome-supervised reward model (ORM), and 3) adaptive reinforcement learning strategies to ensure consistent improvements. We apply WebRL to transform open Llama-3.1 and GLM-4 models into proficient web agents. On WebArena-Lite, WebRL improves the success rate of Llama-3.1-8B from 4.8% to 42.4%, and from 6.1% to 43% for GLM-4-9B. These open models significantly surpass the performance of GPT-4-Turbo (17.6%) and GPT-4o (13.9%) and outperform previous state-of-the-art web agents trained on open LLMs (AutoWebGLM, 18.2%). Our findings demonstrate WebRL's effectiveness in bridging the gap between open and proprietary LLM-based web agents, paving the way for more accessible and powerful autonomous web interaction systems.

  • 13 authors
·
Nov 4, 2024 1

Who's the MVP? A Game-Theoretic Evaluation Benchmark for Modular Attribution in LLM Agents

Large Language Model (LLM) agents frameworks often employ modular architectures, incorporating components such as planning, reasoning, action execution, and reflection to tackle complex tasks. However, quantifying the contribution of each module to overall system performance remains a significant challenge, impeding optimization and interpretability. To address this, we introduce CapaBench (Capability-level Assessment Benchmark), an evaluation framework grounded in cooperative game theory's Shapley Value, which systematically measures the marginal impact of individual modules and their interactions within an agent's architecture. By replacing default modules with test variants across all possible combinations, CapaBench provides a principle method for attributing performance contributions. Key contributions include: (1) We are the first to propose a Shapley Value-based methodology for quantifying the contributions of capabilities in LLM agents; (2) Modules with high Shapley Values consistently lead to predictable performance gains when combined, enabling targeted optimization; and (3) We build a multi-round dataset of over 1,500 entries spanning diverse domains and practical task scenarios, enabling comprehensive evaluation of agent capabilities. CapaBench bridges the gap between component-level evaluation and holistic system assessment, providing actionable insights for optimizing modular LLM agents and advancing their deployment in complex, real-world scenarios.

  • 16 authors
·
Feb 1

The Open Source Advantage in Large Language Models (LLMs)

Large language models (LLMs) mark a key shift in natural language processing (NLP), having advanced text generation, translation, and domain-specific reasoning. Closed-source models like GPT-4, powered by proprietary datasets and extensive computational resources, lead with state-of-the-art performance today. However, they face criticism for their "black box" nature and for limiting accessibility in a manner that hinders reproducibility and equitable AI development. By contrast, open-source initiatives like LLaMA and BLOOM prioritize democratization through community-driven development and computational efficiency. These models have significantly reduced performance gaps, particularly in linguistic diversity and domain-specific applications, while providing accessible tools for global researchers and developers. Notably, both paradigms rely on foundational architectural innovations, such as the Transformer framework by Vaswani et al. (2017). Closed-source models excel by scaling effectively, while open-source models adapt to real-world applications in underrepresented languages and domains. Techniques like Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and instruction-tuning datasets enable open-source models to achieve competitive results despite limited resources. To be sure, the tension between closed-source and open-source approaches underscores a broader debate on transparency versus proprietary control in AI. Ethical considerations further highlight this divide. Closed-source systems restrict external scrutiny, while open-source models promote reproducibility and collaboration but lack standardized auditing documentation frameworks to mitigate biases. Hybrid approaches that leverage the strengths of both paradigms are likely to shape the future of LLM innovation, ensuring accessibility, competitive technical performance, and ethical deployment.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 16, 2024 2

LLM Agent Operating System

The integration and deployment of large language model (LLM)-based intelligent agents have been fraught with challenges that compromise their efficiency and efficacy. Among these issues are sub-optimal scheduling and resource allocation of agent requests over the LLM, the difficulties in maintaining context during interactions between agent and LLM, and the complexities inherent in integrating heterogeneous agents with different capabilities and specializations. The rapid increase of agent quantity and complexity further exacerbates these issues, often leading to bottlenecks and sub-optimal utilization of resources. Inspired by these challenges, this paper presents AIOS, an LLM agent operating system, which embeds large language model into operating systems (OS). Specifically, AIOS is designed to optimize resource allocation, facilitate context switch across agents, enable concurrent execution of agents, provide tool service for agents, and maintain access control for agents. We present the architecture of such an operating system, outline the core challenges it aims to resolve, and provide the basic design and implementation of the AIOS. Our experiments on concurrent execution of multiple agents demonstrate the reliability and efficiency of our AIOS modules. Through this, we aim to not only improve the performance and efficiency of LLM agents but also to pioneer for better development and deployment of the AIOS ecosystem in the future. The project is open-source at https://github.com/agiresearch/AIOS.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 25, 2024 4

A Survey on Evaluation of Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) are gaining increasing popularity in both academia and industry, owing to their unprecedented performance in various applications. As LLMs continue to play a vital role in both research and daily use, their evaluation becomes increasingly critical, not only at the task level, but also at the society level for better understanding of their potential risks. Over the past years, significant efforts have been made to examine LLMs from various perspectives. This paper presents a comprehensive review of these evaluation methods for LLMs, focusing on three key dimensions: what to evaluate, where to evaluate, and how to evaluate. Firstly, we provide an overview from the perspective of evaluation tasks, encompassing general natural language processing tasks, reasoning, medical usage, ethics, educations, natural and social sciences, agent applications, and other areas. Secondly, we answer the `where' and `how' questions by diving into the evaluation methods and benchmarks, which serve as crucial components in assessing performance of LLMs. Then, we summarize the success and failure cases of LLMs in different tasks. Finally, we shed light on several future challenges that lie ahead in LLMs evaluation. Our aim is to offer invaluable insights to researchers in the realm of LLMs evaluation, thereby aiding the development of more proficient LLMs. Our key point is that evaluation should be treated as an essential discipline to better assist the development of LLMs. We consistently maintain the related open-source materials at: https://github.com/MLGroupJLU/LLM-eval-survey.

  • 16 authors
·
Jul 6, 2023 1

Clone What You Can't Steal: Black-Box LLM Replication via Logit Leakage and Distillation

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in mission-critical systems, facilitating tasks such as satellite operations, command-and-control, military decision support, and cyber defense. Many of these systems are accessed through application programming interfaces (APIs). When such APIs lack robust access controls, they can expose full or top-k logits, creating a significant and often overlooked attack surface. Prior art has mainly focused on reconstructing the output projection layer or distilling surface-level behaviors. However, regenerating a black-box model under tight query constraints remains underexplored. We address that gap by introducing a constrained replication pipeline that transforms partial logit leakage into a functional deployable substitute model clone. Our two-stage approach (i) reconstructs the output projection matrix by collecting top-k logits from under 10k black-box queries via singular value decomposition (SVD) over the logits, then (ii) distills the remaining architecture into compact student models with varying transformer depths, trained on an open source dataset. A 6-layer student recreates 97.6% of the 6-layer teacher model's hidden-state geometry, with only a 7.31% perplexity increase, and a 7.58 Negative Log-Likelihood (NLL). A 4-layer variant achieves 17.1% faster inference and 18.1% parameter reduction with comparable performance. The entire attack completes in under 24 graphics processing unit (GPU) hours and avoids triggering API rate-limit defenses. These results demonstrate how quickly a cost-limited adversary can clone an LLM, underscoring the urgent need for hardened inference APIs and secure on-premise defense deployments.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 31

EU-Agent-Bench: Measuring Illegal Behavior of LLM Agents Under EU Law

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as agents in various contexts by providing tools at their disposal. However, LLM agents can exhibit unpredictable behaviors, including taking undesirable and/or unsafe actions. In order to measure the latent propensity of LLM agents for taking illegal actions under an EU legislative context, we introduce EU-Agent-Bench, a verifiable human-curated benchmark that evaluates an agent's alignment with EU legal norms in situations where benign user inputs could lead to unlawful actions. Our benchmark spans scenarios across several categories, including data protection, bias/discrimination, and scientific integrity, with each user request allowing for both compliant and non-compliant execution of the requested actions. Comparing the model's function calls against a rubric exhaustively supported by citations of the relevant legislature, we evaluate the legal compliance of frontier LLMs, and furthermore investigate the compliance effect of providing the relevant legislative excerpts in the agent's system prompt along with explicit instructions to comply. We release a public preview set for the research community, while holding out a private test set to prevent data contamination in evaluating upcoming models. We encourage future work extending agentic safety benchmarks to different legal jurisdictions and to multi-turn and multilingual interactions. We release our code on https://github.com/ilijalichkovski/eu-agent-bench{this URL}.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 24

Agent Q: Advanced Reasoning and Learning for Autonomous AI Agents

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in natural language tasks requiring complex reasoning, yet their application in agentic, multi-step reasoning within interactive environments remains a difficult challenge. Traditional supervised pre-training on static datasets falls short in enabling autonomous agent capabilities needed to perform complex decision-making in dynamic settings like web navigation. Previous attempts to bridge this ga-through supervised fine-tuning on curated expert demonstrations-often suffer from compounding errors and limited exploration data, resulting in sub-optimal policy outcomes. To overcome these challenges, we propose a framework that combines guided Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) search with a self-critique mechanism and iterative fine-tuning on agent interactions using an off-policy variant of the Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) algorithm. Our method allows LLM agents to learn effectively from both successful and unsuccessful trajectories, thereby improving their generalization in complex, multi-step reasoning tasks. We validate our approach in the WebShop environment-a simulated e-commerce platform where it consistently outperforms behavior cloning and reinforced fine-tuning baseline, and beats average human performance when equipped with the capability to do online search. In real-world booking scenarios, our methodology boosts Llama-3 70B model's zero-shot performance from 18.6% to 81.7% success rate (a 340% relative increase) after a single day of data collection and further to 95.4% with online search. We believe this represents a substantial leap forward in the capabilities of autonomous agents, paving the way for more sophisticated and reliable decision-making in real-world settings.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 13, 2024

ScienceBoard: Evaluating Multimodal Autonomous Agents in Realistic Scientific Workflows

Large Language Models (LLMs) have extended their impact beyond Natural Language Processing, substantially fostering the development of interdisciplinary research. Recently, various LLM-based agents have been developed to assist scientific discovery progress across multiple aspects and domains. Among these, computer-using agents, capable of interacting with operating systems as humans do, are paving the way to automated scientific problem-solving and addressing routines in researchers' workflows. Recognizing the transformative potential of these agents, we introduce ScienceBoard, which encompasses two complementary contributions: (i) a realistic, multi-domain environment featuring dynamic and visually rich scientific workflows with integrated professional software, where agents can autonomously interact via different interfaces to accelerate complex research tasks and experiments; and (ii) a challenging benchmark of 169 high-quality, rigorously validated real-world tasks curated by humans, spanning scientific-discovery workflows in domains such as biochemistry, astronomy, and geoinformatics. Extensive evaluations of agents with state-of-the-art backbones (e.g., GPT-4o, Claude 3.7, UI-TARS) show that, despite some promising results, they still fall short of reliably assisting scientists in complex workflows, achieving only a 15% overall success rate. In-depth analysis further provides valuable insights for addressing current agent limitations and more effective design principles, paving the way to build more capable agents for scientific discovery. Our code, environment, and benchmark are at https://qiushisun.github.io/ScienceBoard-Home/.

  • 21 authors
·
May 26 3

Experiments with Large Language Models on Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Closed-Source Simulation Software

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly helpful in text generation, even writing code in programming languages based on user prompts written in natural language. They are even applied to generate simulation models for multibody systems from natural language. Research results suggest that LLMs surpass the mere replication of existing code examples, where some LLMs have been trained on an open-source multibody simulation code. However, for closed-source simulation software, such results are not to be expected as their ideas and concepts might differ from other publicly available ones. LLMs can hallucinate for knowledge-intensive tasks, such as model creation, which can lead to wrong responses. This is especially the case for the LLM unknown closed-source simulation software. The same applies to other internal knowledge kept private to protect intellectual property or data privacy. The Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) approach might yield a solution for these knowledge-intensive tasks. This paper explores the application of RAG to closed-source simulation software and presents first experiments. After a brief introduction to LLMs, the RAG approach, and the simulation method applied by the close-source simulation software, several examples are provided to test LLMs' knowledge of the simulation software and the creation of simulation models using two RAG systems. The examples show promising results indicating the benefits of applying RAG systems to closed-source simulation software, helping to access their knowledge. Nevertheless, they also reveal gaps in the applied information and open questions for further research.

  • 2 authors
·
Feb 6

SpeechAgents: Human-Communication Simulation with Multi-Modal Multi-Agent Systems

Human communication is a complex and diverse process that not only involves multiple factors such as language, commonsense, and cultural backgrounds but also requires the participation of multimodal information, such as speech. Large Language Model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems have demonstrated promising performance in simulating human society. Can we leverage LLM-based multi-agent systems to simulate human communication? However, current LLM-based multi-agent systems mainly rely on text as the primary medium. In this paper, we propose SpeechAgents, a multi-modal LLM based multi-agent system designed for simulating human communication. SpeechAgents utilizes multi-modal LLM as the control center for individual agent and employes multi-modal signals as the medium for exchanged messages among agents. Additionally, we propose Multi-Agent Tuning to enhance the multi-agent capabilities of LLM without compromising general abilities. To strengthen and evaluate the effectiveness of human communication simulation, we build the Human-Communication Simulation Benchmark. Experimental results demonstrate that SpeechAgents can simulate human communication dialogues with consistent content, authentic rhythm, and rich emotions and demonstrate excellent scalability even with up to 25 agents, which can apply to tasks such as drama creation and audio novels generation. Code and models will be open-sourced at https://github. com/0nutation/SpeechAgents

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 8, 2024

ALAS: Autonomous Learning Agent for Self-Updating Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) often have a fixed knowledge cutoff, limiting their accuracy on emerging information. We present ALAS (Autonomous Learning Agent System), a modular pipeline that continuously updates an LLM's knowledge with minimal human intervention. ALAS autonomously generates a learning curriculum for a target domain, retrieves up-to-date information from the web (with citations), distills this into question-answer training data, and fine-tunes the model through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and direct preference optimization (DPO). It iteratively evaluates performance and revises the curriculum, enabling long-term continual learning. We demonstrate ALAS's ability to self-improve a model on rapidly evolving domains (e.g., new Python releases, latest security CVEs, academic trends), significantly boosting post-cutoff question answering accuracy (from 15% to 90% on average) without manual dataset curation. The system emphasizes modularity and reproducibility: each component (planning, retrieval, distillation, memory, fine-tuning) is interchangeable and built on standard APIs. We discuss comparative baselines (e.g., retrieval-augmented generation vs. fine-tuning) and show that ALAS achieves 90% accuracy on knowledge-updated queries with minimal engineering overhead. Finally, we outline limitations (cost, dependency on source quality) and future directions for autonomous lifelong learning in LLMs.

  • 1 authors
·
Aug 14

LLM Economist: Large Population Models and Mechanism Design in Multi-Agent Generative Simulacra

We present the LLM Economist, a novel framework that uses agent-based modeling to design and assess economic policies in strategic environments with hierarchical decision-making. At the lower level, bounded rational worker agents -- instantiated as persona-conditioned prompts sampled from U.S. Census-calibrated income and demographic statistics -- choose labor supply to maximize text-based utility functions learned in-context. At the upper level, a planner agent employs in-context reinforcement learning to propose piecewise-linear marginal tax schedules anchored to the current U.S. federal brackets. This construction endows economic simulacra with three capabilities requisite for credible fiscal experimentation: (i) optimization of heterogeneous utilities, (ii) principled generation of large, demographically realistic agent populations, and (iii) mechanism design -- the ultimate nudging problem -- expressed entirely in natural language. Experiments with populations of up to one hundred interacting agents show that the planner converges near Stackelberg equilibria that improve aggregate social welfare relative to Saez solutions, while a periodic, persona-level voting procedure furthers these gains under decentralized governance. These results demonstrate that large language model-based agents can jointly model, simulate, and govern complex economic systems, providing a tractable test bed for policy evaluation at the societal scale to help build better civilizations.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 21 1

Creating an LLM-based AI-agent: A high-level methodology towards enhancing LLMs with APIs

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized various aspects of engineering and science. Their utility is often bottlenecked by the lack of interaction with the external digital environment. To overcome this limitation and achieve integration of LLMs and Artificial Intelligence (AI) into real-world applications, customized AI agents are being constructed. Based on the technological trends and techniques, we extract a high-level approach for constructing these AI agents, focusing on their underlying architecture. This thesis serves as a comprehensive guide that elucidates a multi-faceted approach for empowering LLMs with the capability to leverage Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). We present a 7-step methodology that begins with the selection of suitable LLMs and the task decomposition that is necessary for complex problem-solving. This methodology includes techniques for generating training data for API interactions and heuristics for selecting the appropriate API among a plethora of options. These steps eventually lead to the generation of API calls that are both syntactically and semantically aligned with the LLM's understanding of a given task. Moreover, we review existing frameworks and tools that facilitate these processes and highlight the gaps in current attempts. In this direction, we propose an on-device architecture that aims to exploit the functionality of carry-on devices by using small models from the Hugging Face community. We examine the effectiveness of these approaches on real-world applications of various domains, including the generation of a piano sheet. Through an extensive analysis of the literature and available technologies, this thesis aims to set a compass for researchers and practitioners to harness the full potential of LLMs augmented with external tool capabilities, thus paving the way for more autonomous, robust, and context-aware AI agents.

  • 1 authors
·
Dec 17, 2024

LLM-Powered Hierarchical Language Agent for Real-time Human-AI Coordination

AI agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant advances, enabling them to assist humans in diverse complex tasks and leading to a revolution in human-AI coordination. LLM-powered agents typically require invoking LLM APIs and employing artificially designed complex prompts, which results in high inference latency. While this paradigm works well in scenarios with minimal interactive demands, such as code generation, it is unsuitable for highly interactive and real-time applications, such as gaming. Traditional gaming AI often employs small models or reactive policies, enabling fast inference but offering limited task completion and interaction abilities. In this work, we consider Overcooked as our testbed where players could communicate with natural language and cooperate to serve orders. We propose a Hierarchical Language Agent (HLA) for human-AI coordination that provides both strong reasoning abilities while keeping real-time execution. In particular, HLA adopts a hierarchical framework and comprises three modules: a proficient LLM, referred to as Slow Mind, for intention reasoning and language interaction, a lightweight LLM, referred to as Fast Mind, for generating macro actions, and a reactive policy, referred to as Executor, for transforming macro actions into atomic actions. Human studies show that HLA outperforms other baseline agents, including slow-mind-only agents and fast-mind-only agents, with stronger cooperation abilities, faster responses, and more consistent language communications.

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 23, 2023

Orak: A Foundational Benchmark for Training and Evaluating LLM Agents on Diverse Video Games

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are reshaping the game industry, particularly with more intelligent and human-preferable game characters. However, existing game benchmarks fall short of practical needs: they lack evaluations of diverse LLM capabilities across various game genres, studies of agentic modules crucial for complex gameplay, and fine-tuning datasets for aligning pre-trained LLMs into gaming agents. To fill these gaps, we present \benchname{}, a foundational benchmark designed to train and evaluate LLM agents across diverse real-world video games. Unlike existing benchmarks, Orak includes 12 popular video games spanning all major genres, enabling comprehensive studies of LLM capabilities and agentic modules essential for intricate game scenarios. To support consistent evaluation of LLMs, we introduce a plug-and-play interface based on Model Context Protocol (MCP) that enables LLMs to seamlessly connect with games and manipulate agentic modules. Additionally, we propose a fine-tuning dataset, consisting of LLM gameplay trajectories across diverse game genres. Orak offers a comprehensive evaluation framework, encompassing general game score leaderboards, LLM battle arenas, and in-depth analyses of visual input state, agentic strategies, and fine-tuning effects, establishing a foundation towards building generic gaming agents. Code is available at https://github.com/krafton-ai/Orak.

Prioritizing Safeguarding Over Autonomy: Risks of LLM Agents for Science

Intelligent agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated substantial promise in autonomously conducting experiments and facilitating scientific discoveries across various disciplines. While their capabilities are promising, they also introduce novel vulnerabilities that demand careful consideration for safety. However, there exists a notable gap in the literature, as there has been no comprehensive exploration of these vulnerabilities. This position paper fills this gap by conducting a thorough examination of vulnerabilities in LLM-based agents within scientific domains, shedding light on potential risks associated with their misuse and emphasizing the need for safety measures. We begin by providing a comprehensive overview of the potential risks inherent to scientific LLM agents, taking into account user intent, the specific scientific domain, and their potential impact on the external environment. Then, we delve into the origins of these vulnerabilities and provide a scoping review of the limited existing works. Based on our analysis, we propose a triadic framework involving human regulation, agent alignment, and an understanding of environmental feedback (agent regulation) to mitigate these identified risks. Furthermore, we highlight the limitations and challenges associated with safeguarding scientific agents and advocate for the development of improved models, robust benchmarks, and comprehensive regulations to address these issues effectively.

  • 13 authors
·
Feb 6, 2024

G-Memory: Tracing Hierarchical Memory for Multi-Agent Systems

Large language model (LLM)-powered multi-agent systems (MAS) have demonstrated cognitive and execution capabilities that far exceed those of single LLM agents, yet their capacity for self-evolution remains hampered by underdeveloped memory architectures. Upon close inspection, we are alarmed to discover that prevailing MAS memory mechanisms (1) are overly simplistic, completely disregarding the nuanced inter-agent collaboration trajectories, and (2) lack cross-trial and agent-specific customization, in stark contrast to the expressive memory developed for single agents. To bridge this gap, we introduce G-Memory, a hierarchical, agentic memory system for MAS inspired by organizational memory theory, which manages the lengthy MAS interaction via a three-tier graph hierarchy: insight, query, and interaction graphs. Upon receiving a new user query, G-Memory performs bi-directional memory traversal to retrieve both high-level, generalizable insights that enable the system to leverage cross-trial knowledge, and fine-grained, condensed interaction trajectories that compactly encode prior collaboration experiences. Upon task execution, the entire hierarchy evolves by assimilating new collaborative trajectories, nurturing the progressive evolution of agent teams. Extensive experiments across five benchmarks, three LLM backbones, and three popular MAS frameworks demonstrate that G-Memory improves success rates in embodied action and accuracy in knowledge QA by up to 20.89% and 10.12%, respectively, without any modifications to the original frameworks. Our codes are available at https://github.com/bingreeky/GMemory.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 8

Privacy-Preserving LLM Interaction with Socratic Chain-of-Thought Reasoning and Homomorphically Encrypted Vector Databases

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as personal agents, accessing sensitive user data such as calendars, emails, and medical records. Users currently face a trade-off: They can send private records, many of which are stored in remote databases, to powerful but untrusted LLM providers, increasing their exposure risk. Alternatively, they can run less powerful models locally on trusted devices. We bridge this gap. Our Socratic Chain-of-Thought Reasoning first sends a generic, non-private user query to a powerful, untrusted LLM, which generates a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompt and detailed sub-queries without accessing user data. Next, we embed these sub-queries and perform encrypted sub-second semantic search using our Homomorphically Encrypted Vector Database across one million entries of a single user's private data. This represents a realistic scale of personal documents, emails, and records accumulated over years of digital activity. Finally, we feed the CoT prompt and the decrypted records to a local language model and generate the final response. On the LoCoMo long-context QA benchmark, our hybrid framework, combining GPT-4o with a local Llama-3.2-1B model, outperforms using GPT-4o alone by up to 7.1 percentage points. This demonstrates a first step toward systems where tasks are decomposed and split between untrusted strong LLMs and weak local ones, preserving user privacy.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 19

Large language models for artificial general intelligence (AGI): A survey of foundational principles and approaches

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems based on large-scale pretrained foundation models (PFMs) such as vision-language models, large language models (LLMs), diffusion models and vision-language-action (VLA) models have demonstrated the ability to solve complex and truly non-trivial AI problems in a wide variety of domains and contexts. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs), in particular, learn from vast and diverse data sources, allowing rich and nuanced representations of the world and, thereby, providing extensive capabilities, including the ability to reason, engage in meaningful dialog; collaborate with humans and other agents to jointly solve complex problems; and understand social and emotional aspects of humans. Despite this impressive feat, the cognitive abilities of state-of-the-art LLMs trained on large-scale datasets are still superficial and brittle. Consequently, generic LLMs are severely limited in their generalist capabilities. A number of foundational problems -- embodiment, symbol grounding, causality and memory -- are required to be addressed for LLMs to attain human-level general intelligence. These concepts are more aligned with human cognition and provide LLMs with inherent human-like cognitive properties that support the realization of physically-plausible, semantically meaningful, flexible and more generalizable knowledge and intelligence. In this work, we discuss the aforementioned foundational issues and survey state-of-the art approaches for implementing these concepts in LLMs. Specifically, we discuss how the principles of embodiment, symbol grounding, causality and memory can be leveraged toward the attainment of artificial general intelligence (AGI) in an organic manner.

  • 2 authors
·
Jan 6

Router-R1: Teaching LLMs Multi-Round Routing and Aggregation via Reinforcement Learning

The rapid emergence of diverse large language models (LLMs) has spurred the development of LLM routers that assign user queries to the most suitable model. However, existing LLM routers typically perform a single-round, one-to-one mapping (i.e., assigning each query to a single model in isolation), which limits their capability to tackle complex tasks that demand the complementary strengths of multiple LLMs. In this paper, we present Router-R1, a reinforcement learning (RL)-based framework that formulates multi-LLM routing and aggregation as a sequential decision process. Router-R1 instantiates the router itself as a capable LLM, leveraging its reasoning ability to interleave "think" actions (internal deliberation) with "route" actions (dynamic model invocation), and integrates each response into its evolving context. To guide learning, we employ a lightweight rule-based reward comprising format rewards, final outcome rewards, and a novel cost reward for performance and cost trade-off optimization, opening a pathway toward optimizing performance-cost tradeoffs via RL. Router-R1 also conditions only on simple model descriptors such as pricing, latency, and example performance, enabling strong generalization to unseen model selection. Experiments on seven general and multi-hop QA benchmarks show that Router-R1 outperforms over several strong baselines, achieving superior performance while maintaining robust generalization and cost management.Code is available at https://github.com/ulab-uiuc/Router-R1.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 10 2

WideSearch: Benchmarking Agentic Broad Info-Seeking

From professional research to everyday planning, many tasks are bottlenecked by wide-scale information seeking, which is more repetitive than cognitively complex. With the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs), automated search agents powered by LLMs offer a promising solution to liberate humans from this tedious work. However, the capability of these agents to perform such "wide-context" collection reliably and completely remains largely unevaluated due to a lack of suitable benchmarks. To bridge this gap, we introduce WideSearch, a new benchmark engineered to evaluate agent reliability on these large-scale collection tasks. The benchmark features 200 manually curated questions (100 in English, 100 in Chinese) from over 15 diverse domains, grounded in real user queries. Each task requires agents to collect large-scale atomic information, which could be verified one by one objectively, and arrange it into a well-organized output. A rigorous five-stage quality control pipeline ensures the difficulty, completeness, and verifiability of the dataset. We benchmark over 10 state-of-the-art agentic search systems, including single-agent, multi-agent frameworks, and end-to-end commercial systems. Most systems achieve overall success rates near 0\%, with the best performer reaching just 5\%. However, given sufficient time, cross-validation by multiple human testers can achieve a near 100\% success rate. These results demonstrate that present search agents have critical deficiencies in large-scale information seeking, underscoring urgent areas for future research and development in agentic search. Our dataset, evaluation pipeline, and benchmark results have been publicly released at https://widesearch-seed.github.io/

  • 13 authors
·
Aug 11 3

MM-Agent: LLM as Agents for Real-world Mathematical Modeling Problem

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

  • 6 authors
·
May 20

LLM-PySC2: Starcraft II learning environment for Large Language Models

This paper introduces a new environment LLM-PySC2 (the Large Language Model StarCraft II Learning Environment), a platform derived from DeepMind's StarCraft II Learning Environment that serves to develop Large Language Models (LLMs) based decision-making methodologies. This environment is the first to offer the complete StarCraft II action space, multi-modal observation interfaces, and a structured game knowledge database, which are seamlessly connected with various LLMs to facilitate the research of LLMs-based decision-making. To further support multi-agent research, we developed an LLM collaborative framework that supports multi-agent concurrent queries and multi-agent communication. In our experiments, the LLM-PySC2 environment is adapted to be compatible with the StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenge (SMAC) task group and provided eight new scenarios focused on macro-decision abilities. We evaluated nine mainstream LLMs in the experiments, and results show that sufficient parameters are necessary for LLMs to make decisions, but improving reasoning ability does not directly lead to better decision-making outcomes. Our findings further indicate the importance of enabling large models to learn autonomously in the deployment environment through parameter training or train-free learning techniques. Ultimately, we expect that the LLM-PySC2 environment can promote research on learning methods for LLMs, helping LLM-based methods better adapt to task scenarios.

  • 13 authors
·
Nov 8, 2024

SE-Agent: Self-Evolution Trajectory Optimization in Multi-Step Reasoning with LLM-Based Agents

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents have recently shown impressive capabilities in complex reasoning and tool use via multi-step interactions with their environments. While these agents have the potential to tackle complicated tasks, their problem-solving process, i.e., agents' interaction trajectory leading to task completion, remains underexploited. These trajectories contain rich feedback that can navigate agents toward the right directions for solving problems correctly. Although prevailing approaches, such as Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), can effectively balance exploration and exploitation, they ignore the interdependence among various trajectories and lack the diversity of search spaces, which leads to redundant reasoning and suboptimal outcomes. To address these challenges, we propose SE-Agent, a Self-Evolution framework that enables Agents to optimize their reasoning processes iteratively. Our approach revisits and enhances former pilot trajectories through three key operations: revision, recombination, and refinement. This evolutionary mechanism enables two critical advantages: (1) it expands the search space beyond local optima by intelligently exploring diverse solution paths guided by previous trajectories, and (2) it leverages cross-trajectory inspiration to efficiently enhance performance while mitigating the impact of suboptimal reasoning paths. Through these mechanisms, SE-Agent achieves continuous self-evolution that incrementally improves reasoning quality. We evaluate SE-Agent on SWE-bench Verified to resolve real-world GitHub issues. Experimental results across five strong LLMs show that integrating SE-Agent delivers up to 55% relative improvement, achieving state-of-the-art performance among all open-source agents on SWE-bench Verified. Our code and demonstration materials are publicly available at https://github.com/JARVIS-Xs/SE-Agent.

  • 14 authors
·
Aug 4

SimBench: Benchmarking the Ability of Large Language Models to Simulate Human Behaviors

Large language model (LLM) simulations of human behavior have the potential to revolutionize the social and behavioral sciences, if and only if they faithfully reflect real human behaviors. Current evaluations are fragmented, based on bespoke tasks and metrics, creating a patchwork of incomparable results. To address this, we introduce SimBench, the first large-scale, standardized benchmark for a robust, reproducible science of LLM simulation. By unifying 20 diverse datasets covering tasks from moral decision-making to economic choice across a large global participant pool, SimBench provides the necessary foundation to ask fundamental questions about when, how, and why LLM simulations succeed or fail. We show that, while even the best LLMs today have limited simulation ability (score: 40.80/100), performance scales log-linearly with model size. Simulation performance is not improved by increased inference-time compute. We demonstrate an alignment-simulation trade-off: instruction-tuning improves performance on low-entropy (consensus) questions but degrades it on high-entropy (diverse) ones. Models particularly struggle when simulating specific demographic groups. Finally, we demonstrate that simulation ability correlates most strongly with deep, knowledge-intensive reasoning (MMLU-Pro, r=0.939). By making progress measurable, we aim to accelerate the development of more faithful LLM simulators.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 20

Reproducibility Study of "Cooperate or Collapse: Emergence of Sustainable Cooperation in a Society of LLM Agents"

This study evaluates and extends the findings made by Piatti et al., who introduced GovSim, a simulation framework designed to assess the cooperative decision-making capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in resource-sharing scenarios. By replicating key experiments, we validate claims regarding the performance of large models, such as GPT-4-turbo, compared to smaller models. The impact of the universalization principle is also examined, with results showing that large models can achieve sustainable cooperation, with or without the principle, while smaller models fail without it. In addition, we provide multiple extensions to explore the applicability of the framework to new settings. We evaluate additional models, such as DeepSeek-V3 and GPT-4o-mini, to test whether cooperative behavior generalizes across different architectures and model sizes. Furthermore, we introduce new settings: we create a heterogeneous multi-agent environment, study a scenario using Japanese instructions, and explore an "inverse environment" where agents must cooperate to mitigate harmful resource distributions. Our results confirm that the benchmark can be applied to new models, scenarios, and languages, offering valuable insights into the adaptability of LLMs in complex cooperative tasks. Moreover, the experiment involving heterogeneous multi-agent systems demonstrates that high-performing models can influence lower-performing ones to adopt similar behaviors. This finding has significant implications for other agent-based applications, potentially enabling more efficient use of computational resources and contributing to the development of more effective cooperative AI systems.

  • 4 authors
·
May 14

HASHIRU: Hierarchical Agent System for Hybrid Intelligent Resource Utilization

Rapid Large Language Model (LLM) advancements are fueling autonomous Multi-Agent System (MAS) development. However, current frameworks often lack flexibility, resource awareness, model diversity, and autonomous tool creation. This paper introduces HASHIRU (Hierarchical Agent System for Hybrid Intelligent Resource Utilization), a novel MAS framework enhancing flexibility, resource efficiency, and adaptability. HASHIRU features a "CEO" agent dynamically managing specialized "employee" agents, instantiated based on task needs and resource constraints (cost, memory). Its hybrid intelligence prioritizes smaller, local LLMs (via Ollama) while flexibly using external APIs and larger models when necessary. An economic model with hiring/firing costs promotes team stability and efficient resource allocation. The system also includes autonomous API tool creation and a memory function. Evaluations on tasks like academic paper review (58% success), safety assessments (100% on a JailbreakBench subset), and complex reasoning (outperforming Gemini 2.0 Flash on GSM8K: 96% vs. 61%; JEEBench: 80% vs. 68.3%; SVAMP: 92% vs. 84%) demonstrate HASHIRU's capabilities. Case studies illustrate its self-improvement via autonomous cost model generation, tool integration, and budget management. HASHIRU offers a promising approach for more robust, efficient, and adaptable MAS through dynamic hierarchical control, resource-aware hybrid intelligence, and autonomous functional extension. Source code and benchmarks are available at https://github.com/HASHIRU-AI/HASHIRU and https://github.com/HASHIRU-AI/HASHIRUBench respectively, and a live demo is available at https://hashiruagentx-hashiruai.hf.space upon request.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 1 2

On the Design and Analysis of LLM-Based Algorithms

We initiate a formal investigation into the design and analysis of LLM-based algorithms, i.e. algorithms that contain one or multiple calls of large language models (LLMs) as sub-routines and critically rely on the capabilities of LLMs. While LLM-based algorithms, ranging from basic LLM calls with prompt engineering to complicated LLM-powered agent systems and compound AI systems, have achieved remarkable empirical success, the design and optimization of them have mostly relied on heuristics and trial-and-errors, which is largely due to a lack of formal and analytical study for these algorithms. To fill this gap, we start by identifying the computational-graph representation of LLM-based algorithms, the design principle of task decomposition, and some key abstractions, which then facilitate our formal analysis for the accuracy and efficiency of LLM-based algorithms, despite the black-box nature of LLMs. Through extensive analytical and empirical investigation in a series of case studies, we demonstrate that the proposed framework is broadly applicable to a wide range of scenarios and diverse patterns of LLM-based algorithms, such as parallel, hierarchical and recursive task decomposition. Our proposed framework holds promise for advancing LLM-based algorithms, by revealing the reasons behind curious empirical phenomena, guiding the choices of hyperparameters, predicting the empirical performance of algorithms, and inspiring new algorithm design. To promote further study of LLM-based algorithms, we release our source code at https://github.com/modelscope/agentscope/tree/main/examples/paper_llm_based_algorithm.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 20, 2024

Secrets of RLHF in Large Language Models Part I: PPO

Large language models (LLMs) have formulated a blueprint for the advancement of artificial general intelligence. Its primary objective is to function as a human-centric (helpful, honest, and harmless) assistant. Alignment with humans assumes paramount significance, and reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) emerges as the pivotal technological paradigm underpinning this pursuit. Current technical routes usually include reward models to measure human preferences, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) to optimize policy model outputs, and process supervision to improve step-by-step reasoning capabilities. However, due to the challenges of reward design, environment interaction, and agent training, coupled with huge trial and error cost of large language models, there is a significant barrier for AI researchers to motivate the development of technical alignment and safe landing of LLMs. The stable training of RLHF has still been a puzzle. In the first report, we dissect the framework of RLHF, re-evaluate the inner workings of PPO, and explore how the parts comprising PPO algorithms impact policy agent training. We identify policy constraints being the key factor for the effective implementation of the PPO algorithm. Therefore, we explore the PPO-max, an advanced version of PPO algorithm, to efficiently improve the training stability of the policy model. Based on our main results, we perform a comprehensive analysis of RLHF abilities compared with SFT models and ChatGPT. The absence of open-source implementations has posed significant challenges to the investigation of LLMs alignment. Therefore, we are eager to release technical reports, reward models and PPO codes

  • 27 authors
·
Jul 10, 2023 1

SwarmBrain: Embodied agent for real-time strategy game StarCraft II via large language models

Large language models (LLMs) have recently garnered significant accomplishments in various exploratory tasks, even surpassing the performance of traditional reinforcement learning-based methods that have historically dominated the agent-based field. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the efficacy of LLMs in executing real-time strategy war tasks within the StarCraft II gaming environment. In this paper, we introduce SwarmBrain, an embodied agent leveraging LLM for real-time strategy implementation in the StarCraft II game environment. The SwarmBrain comprises two key components: 1) a Overmind Intelligence Matrix, powered by state-of-the-art LLMs, is designed to orchestrate macro-level strategies from a high-level perspective. This matrix emulates the overarching consciousness of the Zerg intelligence brain, synthesizing strategic foresight with the aim of allocating resources, directing expansion, and coordinating multi-pronged assaults. 2) a Swarm ReflexNet, which is agile counterpart to the calculated deliberation of the Overmind Intelligence Matrix. Due to the inherent latency in LLM reasoning, the Swarm ReflexNet employs a condition-response state machine framework, enabling expedited tactical responses for fundamental Zerg unit maneuvers. In the experimental setup, SwarmBrain is in control of the Zerg race in confrontation with an Computer-controlled Terran adversary. Experimental results show the capacity of SwarmBrain to conduct economic augmentation, territorial expansion, and tactical formulation, and it shows the SwarmBrain is capable of achieving victory against Computer players set at different difficulty levels.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 31, 2024

Benchmarking LLMs' Swarm intelligence

Large Language Models (LLMs) show potential for complex reasoning, yet their capacity for emergent coordination in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) when operating under strict constraints-such as limited local perception and communication, characteristic of natural swarms-remains largely unexplored, particularly concerning the nuances of swarm intelligence. Existing benchmarks often do not fully capture the unique challenges of decentralized coordination that arise when agents operate with incomplete spatio-temporal information. To bridge this gap, we introduce SwarmBench, a novel benchmark designed to systematically evaluate the swarm intelligence capabilities of LLMs acting as decentralized agents. SwarmBench features five foundational MAS coordination tasks within a configurable 2D grid environment, forcing agents to rely primarily on local sensory input (k x k view) and local communication. We propose metrics for coordination effectiveness and analyze emergent group dynamics. Evaluating several leading LLMs in a zero-shot setting, we find significant performance variations across tasks, highlighting the difficulties posed by local information constraints. While some coordination emerges, results indicate limitations in robust planning and strategy formation under uncertainty in these decentralized scenarios. Assessing LLMs under swarm-like conditions is crucial for realizing their potential in future decentralized systems. We release SwarmBench as an open, extensible toolkit-built upon a customizable and scalable physical system with defined mechanical properties. It provides environments, prompts, evaluation scripts, and the comprehensive experimental datasets generated, aiming to foster reproducible research into LLM-based MAS coordination and the theoretical underpinnings of Embodied MAS. Our code repository is available at https://github.com/x66ccff/swarmbench.

  • 4 authors
·
May 7