Large language model (LLM) agents need to perform multi-turn interactions in real-world tasks. However, existing multi-turn RL algorithms for optimizing LLM agents fail to perform effective credit assignment over multiple turns while leveraging the generalization capabilities of LLMs and it remains unclear how to develop such algorithms. To study this, we first introduce a new benchmark, ColBench, where an LLM agent interacts with a human collaborator over multiple turns to solve realistic tasks in backend programming and frontend design. Building on this benchmark, we propose a novel RL algorithm, SWEET-RL (RL with Step-WisE Evaluation from Training-time information), that uses a carefully designed optimization objective to train a critic model with access to additional training-time information. The critic provides step-level rewards for improving the policy model. Our experiments demonstrate that SWEET-RL achieves a 6% absolute improvement in success and win rates on ColBench compared to other state-of-the-art multi-turn RL algorithms, enabling Llama-3.1-8B to match or exceed the performance of GPT4-o in realistic collaborative content creation.
Multi-agent collaboration among models has shown promise in reasoning tasks but is underexplored in long-form generation tasks like summarization and question-answering. We extend multi-agent multi-model reasoning to generation, specifically to improving faithfulness through refinement, i.e., revising model-generated outputs to remove factual inconsistencies. We investigate how iterative collaboration among multiple instances and types of large language models (LLMs) enhances subtasks in the refinement process, such as error detection, critiquing unfaithful sentences, and making corrections based on critiques. We design intrinsic evaluations for each subtask, with our findings indicating that both multi-agent (multiple instances) and multi-model (diverse LLM types) approaches benefit error detection and critiquing. Additionally, reframing critiquing and refinement as reranking rather than generation tasks improves multi-agent performance. We consolidate these insights into a final "recipe" called Multi-Agent Multi-Model Refinement (MAMM-Refine), where multi-agent and multi-model collaboration significantly boosts performance on three summarization datasets as well as on long-form question answering, demonstrating the effectiveness and generalizability of our recipe.
Word games hold significant research value for natural language processing (NLP), game theory, and related fields due to their rule-based and situational nature. This study explores how large language models (LLMs) can be effectively involved in word games and proposes a training-free framework. "Shei Shi Wo Di" or "Who is the Spy" in English, is a classic word game. Using this game as an example, we introduce a Chain-of-Thought (CoT)-based scheduling framework to enable LLMs to achieve excellent performance in tasks such as inferring role words and disguising their identities. We evaluate the framework's performance based on game success rates and the accuracy of the LLM agents' analytical results. Experimental results affirm the framework's effectiveness, demonstrating notable improvements in LLM performance across multiple datasets. This work highlights the potential of LLMs in mastering situational reasoning and social interactions within structured game environments. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ct-wei/Who-is-The-Spy.
This paper studies how AI-assisted programming and large language models (LLM) improve software developers' ability via AI tools (LLM agents) like Github Copilot and Amazon CodeWhisperer, while integrating human feedback to enhance reinforcement learning (RLHF) with crowd-sourced computation to enhance text-to-code generation. Additionally, we demonstrate that our Bayesian optimization framework supports AI alignment in code generation by distributing the feedback collection burden, highlighting the value of collecting human feedback of good quality. Our empirical evaluations demonstrate the efficacy of this approach, showcasing how LLM agents can be effectively trained for improved text-to-code generation. Our Bayesian optimization framework can be designed for general domain-specific languages, promoting the alignment of large language model capabilities with human feedback in AI-assisted programming for code generation.
While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at reasoning on text and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are highly effective for visual perception, applying those models for visual instruction-based planning remains a widely open problem. In this paper, we introduce VIPER, a novel framework for multimodal instruction-based planning that integrates VLM-based perception with LLM-based reasoning. Our approach uses a modular pipeline where a frozen VLM generates textual descriptions of image observations, which are then processed by an LLM policy to predict actions based on the task goal. We fine-tune the reasoning module using behavioral cloning and reinforcement learning, improving our agent's decision-making capabilities. Experiments on the ALFWorld benchmark show that VIPER significantly outperforms state-of-the-art visual instruction-based planners while narrowing the gap with purely text-based oracles. By leveraging text as an intermediate representation, VIPER also enhances explainability, paving the way for a fine-grained analysis of perception and reasoning components.
Automated testing for REST APIs has become essential for ensuring the correctness and reliability of modern web services. While existing approaches primarily focus on detecting server crashes and error codes, they often overlook logical issues that arise due to evolving business logic and domain-specific requirements. To address this limitation, we propose LogiAgent, a novel approach for logical testing of REST systems. Built upon a large language model (LLM)-driven multi-agent framework, LogiAgent integrates a Test Scenario Generator, API Request Executor, and API Response Validator to collaboratively generate, execute, and validate API test scenarios. Unlike traditional testing methods that focus on status codes like 5xx, LogiAgent incorporates logical oracles that assess responses based on business logic, ensuring more comprehensive testing. The system is further enhanced by an Execution Memory component that stores historical API execution data for contextual consistency. We conduct extensive experiments across 12 real-world REST systems, demonstrating that LogiAgent effectively identifies 234 logical issues with an accuracy of 66.19%. Additionally, it basically excels in detecting server crashes and achieves superior test coverage compared to four state-of-the-art REST API testing tools. An ablation study confirms the significant contribution of LogiAgent's memory components to improving test coverage.
The increasing capability of large language models (LLMs) to generate synthetic content has heightened concerns about their misuse, driving the development of Machine-Generated Text (MGT) detection models. However, these detectors face significant challenges due to the lack of systematically generated, high-quality datasets for training. To address this issue, we propose five novel data augmentation frameworks for synthetic user dialogue generation through a structured prompting approach, reducing the costs associated with traditional data collection methods. Our proposed method yields 14 new dialogue datasets, which we benchmark against seven MGT detection models. The results demonstrate improved generalization performance when utilizing a mixed dataset produced by our proposed augmentation framework. Furthermore, considering that real-world agents lack knowledge of future opponent utterances, we simulate online dialogue detection and examine the relationship between chat history length and detection accuracy. We also benchmark online detection performance with limited chat history on our frameworks. Our open-source datasets can be downloaded from https://github.com/AngieYYF/SPADE-customer-service-dialogue.
Collaborative perception has garnered significant attention for its ability to enhance the perception capabilities of individual vehicles through the exchange of information with surrounding vehicle-agents. However, existing collaborative perception systems are limited by inefficiencies in user interaction and the challenge of multi-camera photorealistic visualization. To address these challenges, this paper introduces ChatStitch, the first collaborative perception system capable of unveiling obscured blind spot information through natural language commands integrated with external digital assets. To adeptly handle complex or abstract commands, ChatStitch employs a multi-agent collaborative framework based on Large Language Models. For achieving the most intuitive perception for humans, ChatStitch proposes SV-UDIS, the first surround-view unsupervised deep image stitching method under the non-global-overlapping condition. We conducted extensive experiments on the UDIS-D, MCOV-SLAM open datasets, and our real-world dataset. Specifically, our SV-UDIS method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the UDIS-D dataset for 3, 4, and 5 image stitching tasks, with PSNR improvements of 9%, 17%, and 21%, and SSIM improvements of 8%, 18%, and 26%, respectively.
The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), reasoning models, and agentic AI approaches coincides with a growing global mental health crisis, where increasing demand has not translated into adequate access to professional support, particularly for underserved populations. This presents a unique opportunity for AI to complement human-led interventions, offering scalable and context-aware support while preserving human connection in this sensitive domain. We explore various AI applications in peer support, self-help interventions, proactive monitoring, and data-driven insights, using a human-centred approach that ensures AI supports rather than replaces human interaction. However, AI deployment in mental health fields presents challenges such as ethical concerns, transparency, privacy risks, and risks of over-reliance. We propose a hybrid ecosystem where where AI assists but does not replace human providers, emphasising responsible deployment and evaluation. We also present some of our early work and findings in several of these AI applications. Finally, we outline future research directions for refining AI-enhanced interventions while adhering to ethical and culturally sensitive guidelines.
Automated test generation holds great promise for alleviating the burdens of manual test creation. However, existing search-based techniques compromise on test readability, while LLM-based approaches are prohibitively expensive in practice. We present TestForge, an agentic unit testing framework designed to cost-effectively generate high-quality test suites for real-world code. Our key insight is to reframe LLM-based test generation as an iterative process. TestForge thus begins with tests generated via zero-shot prompting, and then continuously refines those tests based on feedback from test executions and coverage reports. We evaluate TestForge on TestGenEval, a real world unit test generation benchmark sourced from 11 large scale open source repositories; we show that TestForge achieves a pass@1 rate of 84.3%, 44.4% line coverage and 33.8% mutation score on average, outperforming prior classical approaches and a one-iteration LLM-based baseline. TestForge produces more natural and understandable tests compared to state-of-the-art search-based techniques, and offers substantial cost savings over LLM-based techniques (at $0.63 per file). Finally, we release a version of TestGenEval integrated with the OpenHands platform, a popular open-source framework featuring a diverse set of software engineering agents and agentic benchmarks, for future extension and development.
In the 2023 edition of the White Paper on Information and Communications, it is estimated that the population of social networking services in Japan will exceed 100 million by 2022, and the influence of social networking services in Japan is growing significantly. In addition, marketing using SNS and research on the propagation of emotions and information on SNS are being actively conducted, creating the need for a system for predicting trends in SNS interactions. We have already created a system that simulates the behavior of various communities on SNS by building a virtual SNS environment in which agents post and reply to each other in a chat community created by agents using a LLMs. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of the search extension generation mechanism used to create posts and replies in a virtual SNS environment using a simulation system on the ability to generate posts and replies. As a result of the evaluation, we confirmed that the proposed search extension generation mechanism, which mimics human search behavior, generates the most natural exchange.
Effective human-AI collaboration hinges not only on the AI agent's ability to follow explicit instructions but also on its capacity to navigate ambiguity, incompleteness, invalidity, and irrelevance in communication. Gricean conversational and inference norms facilitate collaboration by aligning unclear instructions with cooperative principles. We propose a normative framework that integrates Gricean norms and cognitive frameworks -- common ground, relevance theory, and theory of mind -- into large language model (LLM) based agents. The normative framework adopts the Gricean maxims of quantity, quality, relation, and manner, along with inference, as Gricean norms to interpret unclear instructions, which are: ambiguous, incomplete, invalid, or irrelevant. Within this framework, we introduce Lamoids, GPT-4 powered agents designed to collaborate with humans. To assess the influence of Gricean norms in human-AI collaboration, we evaluate two versions of a Lamoid: one with norms and one without. In our experiments, a Lamoid collaborates with a human to achieve shared goals in a grid world (Doors, Keys, and Gems) by interpreting both clear and unclear natural language instructions. Our results reveal that the Lamoid with Gricean norms achieves higher task accuracy and generates clearer, more accurate, and contextually relevant responses than the Lamoid without norms. This improvement stems from the normative framework, which enhances the agent's pragmatic reasoning, fostering effective human-AI collaboration and enabling context-aware communication in LLM-based agents.
Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled researchers to focus on practical repository-level tasks in software engineering domain. In this work, we consider a cornerstone task for automating work with software repositories-environment setup, i.e., a task of configuring a repository-specific development environment on a system. Existing studies on environment setup introduce innovative agentic strategies, but their evaluation is often based on small datasets that may not capture the full range of configuration challenges encountered in practice. To address this gap, we introduce a comprehensive environment setup benchmark EnvBench. It encompasses 329 Python and 665 JVM-based (Java, Kotlin) repositories, with a focus on repositories that present genuine configuration challenges, excluding projects that can be fully configured by simple deterministic scripts. To enable further benchmark extension and usage for model tuning, we implement two automatic metrics: a static analysis check for missing imports in Python and a compilation check for JVM languages. We demonstrate the applicability of our benchmark by evaluating three environment setup approaches, including a simple zero-shot baseline and two agentic workflows, that we test with two powerful LLM backbones, GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini. The best approach manages to successfully configure 6.69% repositories for Python and 29.47% repositories for JVM, suggesting that EnvBench remains challenging for current approaches. Our benchmark suite is publicly available at https://github.com/JetBrains-Research/EnvBench. The dataset and experiment trajectories are available at https://jb.gg/envbench.
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated with specialized external tools, yet many tasks demand zero-shot tool usage with minimal or noisy documentation. Existing solutions rely on manual rewriting or labeled data for validation, making them inapplicable in true zero-shot settings. To address these challenges, we propose PLAY2PROMPT, an automated framework that systematically "plays" with each tool to explore its input-output behaviors. Through this iterative trial-and-error process, PLAY2PROMPT refines tool documentation and generates usage examples without any labeled data. These examples not only guide LLM inference but also serve as validation to further enhance tool utilization. Extensive experiments on real-world tasks demonstrate that PLAY2PROMPT significantly improves zero-shot tool performance across both open and closed models, offering a scalable and effective solution for domain-specific tool integration.
Maintaining and scaling software systems relies heavily on effective code refactoring, yet this process remains labor-intensive, requiring developers to carefully analyze existing codebases and prevent the introduction of new defects. Although recent advancements have leveraged Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate refactoring tasks, current solutions are constrained in scope and lack mechanisms to guarantee code compilability and successful test execution. In this work, we introduce MANTRA, a comprehensive LLM agent-based framework that automates method-level refactoring. MANTRA integrates Context-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Generation, coordinated Multi-Agent Collaboration, and Verbal Reinforcement Learning to emulate human decision-making during refactoring while preserving code correctness and readability. Our empirical study, conducted on 703 instances of "pure refactorings" (i.e., code changes exclusively involving structural improvements), drawn from 10 representative Java projects, covers the six most prevalent refactoring operations. Experimental results demonstrate that MANTRA substantially surpasses a baseline LLM model (RawGPT ), achieving an 82.8% success rate (582/703) in producing code that compiles and passes all tests, compared to just 8.7% (61/703) with RawGPT. Moreover, in comparison to IntelliJ's LLM-powered refactoring tool (EM-Assist), MANTRA exhibits a 50% improvement in generating Extract Method transformations. A usability study involving 37 professional developers further shows that refactorings performed by MANTRA are perceived to be as readable and reusable as human-written code, and in certain cases, even more favorable. These results highlight the practical advantages of MANTRA and emphasize the growing potential of LLM-based systems in advancing the automation of software refactoring tasks.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized various domains, including natural language processing, data analysis, and software development, by enabling automation. In software engineering, LLM-powered coding agents have garnered significant attention due to their potential to automate complex development tasks, assist in debugging, and enhance productivity. However, existing approaches often struggle with sub-optimal decision-making, requiring either extensive manual intervention or inefficient compute scaling strategies. To improve coding agent performance, we present Dynamic Action Re-Sampling (DARS), a novel inference time compute scaling approach for coding agents, that is faster and more effective at recovering from sub-optimal decisions compared to baselines. While traditional agents either follow linear trajectories or rely on random sampling for scaling compute, our approach DARS works by branching out a trajectory at certain key decision points by taking an alternative action given the history of the trajectory and execution feedback of the previous attempt from that point. We evaluate our approach on SWE-Bench Lite benchmark, demonstrating that this scaling strategy achieves a pass@k score of 55% with Claude 3.5 Sonnet V2. Our framework achieves a pass@1 rate of 47%, outperforming state-of-the-art (SOTA) open-source frameworks.
Group decision-making processes frequently suffer when social influence and power dynamics suppress minority viewpoints, leading to compliance and groupthink. Conversational agents can counteract these harmful dynamics by encouraging critical thinking. This study investigates how LLM-powered devil's advocate systems affect psychological safety, opinion expression, and satisfaction in power-imbalanced group dynamics. We conducted an experiment with 48 participants in 12 four-person groups, each containing three high-power (senior) and one low-power (junior) member. Each group completed decision tasks in both baseline and AI intervention conditions. Results show AI counterarguments fostered a more flexible atmosphere and significantly enhanced both process and outcome satisfaction for all participants, with particularly notable improvements for minority members. Cognitive workload increased slightly, though not significantly. This research contributes empirical evidence on how AI systems can effectively navigate power hierarchies to foster more inclusive decision-making environments, highlighting the importance of balancing intervention frequency, maintaining conversational flow, and preserving group cohesion.
A Barrier-Free GeoQA Portal: Enhancing Geospatial Data Accessibility with a Multi-Agent LLM Framework Geoportals are vital for accessing and analyzing geospatial data, promoting open spatial data sharing and online geo-information management. Designed with GIS-like interaction and layered visualization, they often challenge non-expert users with complex functionalities and overlapping layers that obscure spatial relationships. We propose a GeoQA Portal using a multi-agent Large Language Model framework for seamless natural language interaction with geospatial data. Complex queries are broken into subtasks handled by specialized agents, retrieving relevant geographic data efficiently. Task plans are shown to users, boosting transparency. The portal supports default and custom data inputs for flexibility. Semantic search via word vector similarity aids data retrieval despite imperfect terms. Case studies, evaluations, and user tests confirm its effectiveness for non-experts, bridging GIS complexity and public access, and offering an intuitive solution for future geoportals.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited impressive capabilities across numerous domains, yet they often struggle with complex reasoning and decision-making tasks. Decision-making games, which inherently require multifaceted reasoning logic, serve as ideal sandboxes for evaluating and enhancing the reasoning abilities of LLMs. In this work, we first explore whether LLMs can master complex decision-making games through targeted post-training. To this end, we design data synthesis strategies and curate extensive offline datasets from two classic games, Doudizhu and Go. We further develop a suite of techniques to effectively incorporate this data into LLM training, resulting in two novel agents: Mastermind-Dou and Mastermind-Go. Our experimental results demonstrate that these Mastermind LLMs achieve competitive performance in their respective games. Additionally, we explore whether integrating decision-making data can enhance the general reasoning abilities of LLMs. Our findings suggest that such post-training improves certain aspects of reasoning, providing valuable insights for optimizing LLM data collection and synthesis strategies.
The aspiration of the Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) task has long been to develop an embodied agent with robust adaptability, capable of seamlessly transferring its navigation capabilities across various tasks. Despite remarkable advancements in recent years, most methods necessitate dataset-specific training, thereby lacking the capability to generalize across diverse datasets encompassing distinct types of instructions. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional reasoning and generalization abilities, exhibiting immense potential in robot action planning. In this paper, we propose FlexVLN, an innovative hierarchical approach to VLN that integrates the fundamental navigation ability of a supervised-learning-based Instruction Follower with the robust generalization ability of the LLM Planner, enabling effective generalization across diverse VLN datasets. Moreover, a verification mechanism and a multi-model integration mechanism are proposed to mitigate potential hallucinations by the LLM Planner and enhance execution accuracy of the Instruction Follower. We take REVERIE, SOON, and CVDN-target as out-of-domain datasets for assessing generalization ability. The generalization performance of FlexVLN surpasses that of all the previous methods to a large extent.
Document Question Answering (DocQA) is a very common task. Existing methods using Large Language Models (LLMs) or Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) often prioritize information from a single modal, failing to effectively integrate textual and visual cues. These approaches struggle with complex multi-modal reasoning, limiting their performance on real-world documents. We present MDocAgent (A Multi-Modal Multi-Agent Framework for Document Understanding), a novel RAG and multi-agent framework that leverages both text and image. Our system employs five specialized agents: a general agent, a critical agent, a text agent, an image agent and a summarizing agent. These agents engage in multi-modal context retrieval, combining their individual insights to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the document's content. This collaborative approach enables the system to synthesize information from both textual and visual components, leading to improved accuracy in question answering. Preliminary experiments on five benchmarks like MMLongBench, LongDocURL demonstrate the effectiveness of our MDocAgent, achieve an average improvement of 12.1% compared to current state-of-the-art method. This work contributes to the development of more robust and comprehensive DocQA systems capable of handling the complexities of real-world documents containing rich textual and visual information. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/MDocAgent.
While human cognition inherently retrieves information from diverse and specialized knowledge sources during decision-making processes, current Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems typically operate through single-source knowledge retrieval, leading to a cognitive-algorithmic discrepancy. To bridge this gap, we introduce MoK-RAG, a novel multi-source RAG framework that implements a mixture of knowledge paths enhanced retrieval mechanism through functional partitioning of a large language model (LLM) corpus into distinct sections, enabling retrieval from multiple specialized knowledge paths. Applied to the generation of 3D simulated environments, our proposed MoK-RAG3D enhances this paradigm by partitioning 3D assets into distinct sections and organizing them based on a hierarchical knowledge tree structure. Different from previous methods that only use manual evaluation, we pioneered the introduction of automated evaluation methods for 3D scenes. Both automatic and human evaluations in our experiments demonstrate that MoK-RAG3D can assist Embodied AI agents in generating diverse scenes.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant progress in various fields. However, challenges remain in Multi-Disciplinary Team (MDT) medical consultations. Current research enhances reasoning through role assignment, task decomposition, and accumulation of medical experience. Multi-role collaboration in MDT consultations often results in excessively long dialogue histories. This increases the model's cognitive burden and degrades both efficiency and accuracy. Some methods only store treatment histories. They do not extract effective experience or reflect on errors. This limits knowledge generalization and system evolution. We propose a multi-agent MDT medical consultation framework based on LLMs to address these issues. Our framework uses consensus aggregation and a residual discussion structure for multi-round consultations. It also employs a Correct Answer Knowledge Base (CorrectKB) and a Chain-of-Thought Knowledge Base (ChainKB) to accumulate consultation experience. These mechanisms enable the framework to evolve and continually improve diagnosis rationality and accuracy. Experimental results on the MedQA and PubMedQA datasets demonstrate that our framework achieves accuracies of 90.1% and 83.9%, respectively, and that the constructed knowledge bases generalize effectively across test sets from both datasets.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for software development tasks such as code completion, translation, and optimization. However, their ability to generate efficient and correct code, particularly in complex High-Performance Computing (HPC) contexts, has remained underexplored. To address this gap, this paper presents a comprehensive benchmark suite encompassing multiple critical HPC computational motifs to evaluate the performance of code optimized by state-of-the-art LLMs, including OpenAI o1, Claude-3.5, and Llama-3.2. In addition to analyzing basic computational kernels, we developed an agent system that integrates LLMs to assess their effectiveness in real HPC applications. Our evaluation focused on key criteria such as execution time, correctness, and understanding of HPC-specific concepts. We also compared the results with those achieved using traditional HPC optimization tools. Based on the findings, we recognized the strengths of LLMs in understanding human instructions and performing automated code transformations. However, we also identified significant limitations, including their tendency to generate incorrect code and their challenges in comprehending complex control and data flows in sophisticated HPC code.
Despite growing enthusiasm for Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), where multiple LLM agents collaborate to accomplish tasks, their performance gains across popular benchmarks remain minimal compared to single-agent frameworks. This gap highlights the need to analyze the challenges hindering MAS effectiveness. In this paper, we present the first comprehensive study of MAS challenges. We analyze five popular MAS frameworks across over 150 tasks, involving six expert human annotators. We identify 14 unique failure modes and propose a comprehensive taxonomy applicable to various MAS frameworks. This taxonomy emerges iteratively from agreements among three expert annotators per study, achieving a Cohen's Kappa score of 0.88. These fine-grained failure modes are organized into 3 categories, (i) specification and system design failures, (ii) inter-agent misalignment, and (iii) task verification and termination. To support scalable evaluation, we integrate MASFT with LLM-as-a-Judge. We also explore if identified failures could be easily prevented by proposing two interventions: improved specification of agent roles and enhanced orchestration strategies. Our findings reveal that identified failures require more complex solutions, highlighting a clear roadmap for future research. We open-source our dataset and LLM annotator.
With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, intelligent decision-making techniques have gradually surpassed human levels in various human-machine competitions, especially in complex multi-agent cooperative task scenarios. Multi-agent cooperative decision-making involves multiple agents working together to complete established tasks and achieve specific objectives. These techniques are widely applicable in real-world scenarios such as autonomous driving, drone navigation, disaster rescue, and simulated military confrontations. This paper begins with a comprehensive survey of the leading simulation environments and platforms used for multi-agent cooperative decision-making. Specifically, we provide an in-depth analysis for these simulation environments from various perspectives, including task formats, reward allocation, and the underlying technologies employed. Subsequently, we provide a comprehensive overview of the mainstream intelligent decision-making approaches, algorithms and models for multi-agent systems (MAS). Theseapproaches can be broadly categorized into five types: rule-based (primarily fuzzy logic), game theory-based, evolutionary algorithms-based, deep multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL)-based, and large language models(LLMs)reasoning-based. Given the significant advantages of MARL andLLMs-baseddecision-making methods over the traditional rule, game theory, and evolutionary algorithms, this paper focuses on these multi-agent methods utilizing MARL and LLMs-based techniques. We provide an in-depth discussion of these approaches, highlighting their methodology taxonomies, advantages, and drawbacks. Further, several prominent research directions in the future and potential challenges of multi-agent cooperative decision-making are also detailed.
The move toward open Sixth-Generation (6G) networks necessitates a novel approach to full-stack simulation environments for evaluating complex technology developments before prototyping and real-world implementation. This paper introduces an innovative approach\footnote{A lightweight, mock version of the code is available on GitHub at that combines a multi-agent framework with the Network Simulator 3 (ns-3) to automate and optimize the generation, debugging, execution, and analysis of complex 5G network scenarios. Our framework orchestrates a suite of specialized agents -- namely, the Simulation Generation Agent, Test Designer Agent, Test Executor Agent, and Result Interpretation Agent -- using advanced LangChain coordination. The Simulation Generation Agent employs a structured chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning process, leveraging LLMs and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to translate natural language simulation specifications into precise ns-3 scripts. Concurrently, the Test Designer Agent generates comprehensive automated test suites by integrating knowledge retrieval techniques with dynamic test case synthesis. The Test Executor Agent dynamically deploys and runs simulations, managing dependencies and parsing detailed performance metrics. At the same time, the Result Interpretation Agent utilizes LLM-driven analysis to extract actionable insights from the simulation outputs. By integrating external resources such as library documentation and ns-3 testing frameworks, our experimental approach can enhance simulation accuracy and adaptability, reducing reliance on extensive programming expertise. A detailed case study using the ns-3 5G-LENA module validates the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The code generation process converges in an average of 1.8 iterations, has a syntax error rate of 17.0%, a mean response time of 7.3 seconds, and receives a human evaluation score of 7.5.
Scientific research demands sophisticated reasoning over multimodal data, a challenge especially prevalent in biology. Despite recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for AI-assisted research, existing multimodal reasoning benchmarks only target up to college-level difficulty, while research-level benchmarks emphasize lower-level perception, falling short of the complex multimodal reasoning needed for scientific discovery. To bridge this gap, we introduce MicroVQA, a visual-question answering (VQA) benchmark designed to assess three reasoning capabilities vital in research workflows: expert image understanding, hypothesis generation, and experiment proposal. MicroVQA consists of 1,042 multiple-choice questions (MCQs) curated by biology experts across diverse microscopy modalities, ensuring VQA samples represent real scientific practice. In constructing the benchmark, we find that standard MCQ generation methods induce language shortcuts, motivating a new two-stage pipeline: an optimized LLM prompt structures question-answer pairs into MCQs; then, an agent-based `RefineBot' updates them to remove shortcuts. Benchmarking on state-of-the-art MLLMs reveal a peak performance of 53\%; models with smaller LLMs only slightly underperform top models, suggesting that language-based reasoning is less challenging than multimodal reasoning; and tuning with scientific articles enhances performance. Expert analysis of chain-of-thought responses shows that perception errors are the most frequent, followed by knowledge errors and then overgeneralization errors. These insights highlight the challenges in multimodal scientific reasoning, showing MicroVQA is a valuable resource advancing AI-driven biomedical research. MicroVQA is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/jmhb/microvqa, and project page at https://jmhb0.github.io/microvqa.
We present PORTAL, a novel framework for developing artificial intelligence agents capable of playing thousands of 3D video games through language-guided policy generation. By transforming decision-making problems into language modeling tasks, our approach leverages large language models (LLMs) to generate behavior trees represented in domain-specific language (DSL). This method eliminates the computational burden associated with traditional reinforcement learning approaches while preserving strategic depth and rapid adaptability. Our framework introduces a hybrid policy structure that combines rule-based nodes with neural network components, enabling both high-level strategic reasoning and precise low-level control. A dual-feedback mechanism incorporating quantitative game metrics and vision-language model analysis facilitates iterative policy improvement at both tactical and strategic levels. The resulting policies are instantaneously deployable, human-interpretable, and capable of generalizing across diverse gaming environments. Experimental results demonstrate PORTAL's effectiveness across thousands of first-person shooter (FPS) games, showcasing significant improvements in development efficiency, policy generalization, and behavior diversity compared to traditional approaches. PORTAL represents a significant advancement in game AI development, offering a practical solution for creating sophisticated agents that can operate across thousands of commercial video games with minimal development overhead. Experiment results on the 3D video games are best viewed on https://zhongwen.one/projects/portal .
As requirements drift with rapid iterations, agile development becomes the dominant paradigm. Goal-driven Requirements Elicitation (RE) is a pivotal yet challenging task in agile project development due to its heavy tangling with adaptive planning and efficient collaboration. Recently, AI agents have shown promising ability in supporting requirements analysis by saving significant time and effort for stakeholders. However, current research mainly focuses on functional RE, and research works have not been reported bridging the long journey from goal to user stories. Moreover, considering the cost of LLM facilities and the need for data and idea protection, privately hosted small-sized LLM should be further utilized in RE. To address these challenges, we propose Goal2Story, a multi-agent fleet that adopts the Impact Mapping (IM) framework while merely using cost-effective sLLMs for goal-driven RE. Moreover, we introduce a StorySeek dataset that contains over 1,000 user stories (USs) with corresponding goals and project context information, as well as the semi-automatic dataset construction method. For evaluation, we proposed two metrics: Factuality Hit Rate (FHR) to measure consistency between the generated USs with the dataset and Quality And Consistency Evaluation (QuACE) to evaluate the quality of the generated USs. Experimental results demonstrate that Goal2Story outperforms the baseline performance of the Super-Agent adopting powerful LLMs, while also showcasing the performance improvements in key metrics brought by CoT and Agent Profile to Goal2Story, as well as its exploration in identifying latent needs.