LLM-agent - 2025-04-25

Towards a HIPAA Compliant Agentic AI System in Healthcare

Authors:Subash Neupane, Shaswata Mitra, Sudip Mittal, Shahram Rahimi
Date:2025-04-24 15:38:20

Agentic AI systems powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) as their foundational reasoning engine, are transforming clinical workflows such as medical report generation and clinical summarization by autonomously analyzing sensitive healthcare data and executing decisions with minimal human oversight. However, their adoption demands strict compliance with regulatory frameworks such as Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), particularly when handling Protected Health Information (PHI). This work-in-progress paper introduces a HIPAA-compliant Agentic AI framework that enforces regulatory compliance through dynamic, context-aware policy enforcement. Our framework integrates three core mechanisms: (1) Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) for granular PHI governance, (2) a hybrid PHI sanitization pipeline combining regex patterns and BERT-based model to minimize leakage, and (3) immutable audit trails for compliance verification.

Comprehend, Divide, and Conquer: Feature Subspace Exploration via Multi-Agent Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning

Authors:Weiliang Zhang, Xiaohan Huang, Yi Du, Ziyue Qiao, Qingqing Long, Zhen Meng, Yuanchun Zhou, Meng Xiao
Date:2025-04-24 08:16:36

Feature selection aims to preprocess the target dataset, find an optimal and most streamlined feature subset, and enhance the downstream machine learning task. Among filter, wrapper, and embedded-based approaches, the reinforcement learning (RL)-based subspace exploration strategy provides a novel objective optimization-directed perspective and promising performance. Nevertheless, even with improved performance, current reinforcement learning approaches face challenges similar to conventional methods when dealing with complex datasets. These challenges stem from the inefficient paradigm of using one agent per feature and the inherent complexities present in the datasets. This observation motivates us to investigate and address the above issue and propose a novel approach, namely HRLFS. Our methodology initially employs a Large Language Model (LLM)-based hybrid state extractor to capture each feature's mathematical and semantic characteristics. Based on this information, features are clustered, facilitating the construction of hierarchical agents for each cluster and sub-cluster. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficiency, scalability, and robustness of our approach. Compared to contemporary or the one-feature-one-agent RL-based approaches, HRLFS improves the downstream ML performance with iterative feature subspace exploration while accelerating total run time by reducing the number of agents involved.

DataScout: Automatic Data Fact Retrieval for Statement Augmentation with an LLM-Based Agent

Authors:Chuer Chen, Yuqi Liu, Danqing Shi, Shixiong Cao, Nan Cao
Date:2025-04-24 07:52:09

A data story typically integrates data facts from multiple perspectives and stances to construct a comprehensive and objective narrative. However, retrieving these facts demands time for data search and challenges the creator's analytical skills. In this work, we introduce DataScout, an interactive system that automatically performs reasoning and stance-based data facts retrieval to augment the user's statement. Particularly, DataScout leverages an LLM-based agent to construct a retrieval tree, enabling collaborative control of its expansion between users and the agent. The interface visualizes the retrieval tree as a mind map that eases users to intuitively steer the retrieval direction and effectively engage in reasoning and analysis. We evaluate the proposed system through case studies and in-depth expert interviews. Our evaluation demonstrates that DataScout can effectively retrieve multifaceted data facts from different stances, helping users verify their statements and enhance the credibility of their stories.

A RAG-Based Multi-Agent LLM System for Natural Hazard Resilience and Adaptation

Authors:Yangxinyu Xie, Bowen Jiang, Tanwi Mallick, Joshua David Bergerson, John K. Hutchison, Duane R. Verner, Jordan Branham, M. Ross Alexander, Robert B. Ross, Yan Feng, Leslie-Anne Levy, Weijie Su, Camillo J. Taylor
Date:2025-04-24 02:25:06

Large language models (LLMs) are a transformational capability at the frontier of artificial intelligence and machine learning that can support decision-makers in addressing pressing societal challenges such as extreme natural hazard events. As generalized models, LLMs often struggle to provide context-specific information, particularly in areas requiring specialized knowledge. In this work we propose a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)-based multi-agent LLM system to support analysis and decision-making in the context of natural hazards and extreme weather events. As a proof of concept, we present WildfireGPT, a specialized system focused on wildfire hazards. The architecture employs a user-centered, multi-agent design to deliver tailored risk insights across diverse stakeholder groups. By integrating natural hazard and extreme weather projection data, observational datasets, and scientific literature through an RAG framework, the system ensures both the accuracy and contextual relevance of the information it provides. Evaluation across ten expert-led case studies demonstrates that WildfireGPT significantly outperforms existing LLM-based solutions for decision support.

Paper2Code: Automating Code Generation from Scientific Papers in Machine Learning

Authors:Minju Seo, Jinheon Baek, Seongyun Lee, Sung Ju Hwang
Date:2025-04-24 01:57:01

Despite the rapid growth of machine learning research, corresponding code implementations are often unavailable, making it slow and labor-intensive for researchers to reproduce results and build upon prior work. In the meantime, recent Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at understanding scientific documents and generating high-quality code. Inspired by this, we introduce PaperCoder, a multi-agent LLM framework that transforms machine learning papers into functional code repositories. PaperCoder operates in three stages: planning, where it constructs a high-level roadmap, designs the system architecture with diagrams, identifies file dependencies, and generates configuration files; analysis, which focuses on interpreting implementation-specific details; and generation, where modular, dependency-aware code is produced. Moreover, each phase is instantiated through a set of specialized agents designed to collaborate effectively across the pipeline. We then evaluate PaperCoder on generating code implementations from machine learning papers based on both model-based and human evaluations, specifically from the original paper authors, with author-released repositories as ground truth if available. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of PaperCoder in creating high-quality, faithful implementations. Furthermore, it consistently shows strengths in the recently released PaperBench benchmark, surpassing strong baselines by substantial margins.

Leveraging LLMs as Meta-Judges: A Multi-Agent Framework for Evaluating LLM Judgments

Authors:Yuran Li, Jama Hussein Mohamud, Chongren Sun, Di Wu, Benoit Boulet
Date:2025-04-23 20:32:12

Large language models (LLMs) are being widely applied across various fields, but as tasks become more complex, evaluating their responses is increasingly challenging. Compared to human evaluators, the use of LLMs to support performance evaluation offers a more efficient alternative. However, most studies focus mainly on aligning LLMs' judgments with human preferences, overlooking the existence of biases and mistakes in human judgment. Furthermore, how to select suitable LLM judgments given multiple potential LLM responses remains underexplored. To address these two aforementioned issues, we propose a three-stage meta-judge selection pipeline: 1) developing a comprehensive rubric with GPT-4 and human experts, 2) using three advanced LLM agents to score judgments, and 3) applying a threshold to filter out low-scoring judgments. Compared to methods using a single LLM as both judge and meta-judge, our pipeline introduces multi-agent collaboration and a more comprehensive rubric. Experimental results on the JudgeBench dataset show about 15.55\% improvement compared to raw judgments and about 8.37\% improvement over the single-agent baseline. Our work demonstrates the potential of LLMs as meta-judges and lays the foundation for future research on constructing preference datasets for LLM-as-a-judge reinforcement learning.

OptimAI: Optimization from Natural Language Using LLM-Powered AI Agents

Authors:Raghav Thind, Youran Sun, Ling Liang, Haizhao Yang
Date:2025-04-23 17:45:05

Optimization plays a vital role in scientific research and practical applications, but formulating a concrete optimization problem described in natural language into a mathematical form and selecting a suitable solver to solve the problem requires substantial domain expertise. We introduce \textbf{OptimAI}, a framework for solving \underline{Optim}ization problems described in natural language by leveraging LLM-powered \underline{AI} agents, achieving superior performance over current state-of-the-art methods. Our framework is built upon four key roles: (1) a \emph{formulator} that translates natural language problem descriptions into precise mathematical formulations; (2) a \emph{planner} that constructs a high-level solution strategy prior to execution; and (3) a \emph{coder} and a \emph{code critic} capable of interacting with the environment and reflecting on outcomes to refine future actions. Ablation studies confirm that all roles are essential; removing the planner or code critic results in $5.8\times$ and $3.1\times$ drops in productivity, respectively. Furthermore, we introduce UCB-based debug scheduling to dynamically switch between alternative plans, yielding an additional $3.3\times$ productivity gain. Our design emphasizes multi-agent collaboration, allowing us to conveniently explore the synergistic effect of combining diverse models within a unified system. Our approach attains 88.1\% accuracy on the NLP4LP dataset and 71.2\% on the Optibench (non-linear w/o table) subset, reducing error rates by 58\% and 50\% respectively over prior best results.

Do Large Language Models know who did what to whom?

Authors:Joseph M. Denning, Xiaohan, Guo, Bryor Snefjella, Idan A. Blank
Date:2025-04-23 17:00:45

Large Language Models (LLMs) are commonly criticized for not understanding language. However, many critiques focus on cognitive abilities that, in humans, are distinct from language processing. Here, we instead study a kind of understanding tightly linked to language: inferring who did what to whom (thematic roles) in a sentence. Does the central training objective of LLMs-word prediction-result in sentence representations that capture thematic roles? In two experiments, we characterized sentence representations in four LLMs. In contrast to human similarity judgments, in LLMs the overall representational similarity of sentence pairs reflected syntactic similarity but not whether their agent and patient assignments were identical vs. reversed. Furthermore, we found little evidence that thematic role information was available in any subset of hidden units. However, some attention heads robustly captured thematic roles, independently of syntax. Therefore, LLMs can extract thematic roles but, relative to humans, this information influences their representations more weakly.

Monte Carlo Planning with Large Language Model for Text-Based Game Agents

Authors:Zijing Shi, Meng Fang, Ling Chen
Date:2025-04-23 16:23:15

Text-based games provide valuable environments for language-based autonomous agents. However, planning-then-learning paradigms, such as those combining Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) and reinforcement learning (RL), are notably time-consuming due to extensive iterations. Additionally, these algorithms perform uncertainty-driven exploration but lack language understanding and reasoning abilities. In this paper, we introduce the Monte Carlo planning with Dynamic Memory-guided Large language model (MC-DML) algorithm. MC-DML leverages the language understanding and reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) alongside the exploratory advantages of tree search algorithms. Specifically, we enhance LLMs with in-trial and cross-trial memory mechanisms, enabling them to learn from past experiences and dynamically adjust action evaluations during planning. We conduct experiments on a series of text-based games from the Jericho benchmark. Our results demonstrate that the MC-DML algorithm significantly enhances performance across various games at the initial planning phase, outperforming strong contemporary methods that require multiple iterations. This demonstrates the effectiveness of our algorithm, paving the way for more efficient language-grounded planning in complex environments.

A Survey of AI Agent Protocols

Authors:Yingxuan Yang, Huacan Chai, Yuanyi Song, Siyuan Qi, Muning Wen, Ning Li, Junwei Liao, Haoyi Hu, Jianghao Lin, Gaowei Chang, Weiwen Liu, Ying Wen, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang
Date:2025-04-23 14:07:26

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 a systematic overview of existing communication protocols for LLM agents. We classify them into four main categories and make an analysis to help users and developers select the most suitable protocols for specific applications. Additionally, we conduct a comparative performance analysis of these protocols across key dimensions such as security, scalability, and latency. Finally, we explore future challenges, such as how protocols can adapt and survive in fast-evolving environments, and what qualities future protocols might need to support the next generation of LLM agent ecosystems. 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.

IRIS: Interactive Research Ideation System for Accelerating Scientific Discovery

Authors:Aniketh Garikaparthi, Manasi Patwardhan, Lovekesh Vig, Arman Cohan
Date:2025-04-23 14:01:36

The rapid advancement in capabilities of large language models (LLMs) raises a pivotal question: How can LLMs accelerate scientific discovery? This work tackles the crucial first stage of research, generating novel hypotheses. While recent work on automated hypothesis generation focuses on multi-agent frameworks and extending test-time compute, none of the approaches effectively incorporate transparency and steerability through a synergistic Human-in-the-loop (HITL) approach. To address this gap, we introduce IRIS: Interactive Research Ideation System, an open-source platform designed for researchers to leverage LLM-assisted scientific ideation. IRIS incorporates innovative features to enhance ideation, including adaptive test-time compute expansion via Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), fine-grained feedback mechanism, and query-based literature synthesis. Designed to empower researchers with greater control and insight throughout the ideation process. We additionally conduct a user study with researchers across diverse disciplines, validating the effectiveness of our system in enhancing ideation. We open-source our code at https://github.com/Anikethh/IRIS-Interactive-Research-Ideation-System

Enhancing LLM-Based Agents via Global Planning and Hierarchical Execution

Authors:Junjie Chen, Haitao Li, Jingli Yang, Yiqun Liu, Qingyao Ai
Date:2025-04-23 09:43:40

Intelligent agent systems based on Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great potential in real-world applications. However, existing agent frameworks still face critical limitations in task planning and execution, restricting their effectiveness and generalizability. Specifically, current planning methods often lack clear global goals, leading agents to get stuck in local branches, or produce non-executable plans. Meanwhile, existing execution mechanisms struggle to balance complexity and stability, and their limited action space restricts their ability to handle diverse real-world tasks. To address these limitations, we propose GoalAct, a novel agent framework that introduces a continuously updated global planning mechanism and integrates a hierarchical execution strategy. GoalAct decomposes task execution into high-level skills, including searching, coding, writing and more, thereby reducing planning complexity while enhancing the agents' adaptability across diverse task scenarios. We evaluate GoalAct on LegalAgentBench, a benchmark with multiple types of legal tasks that require the use of multiple types of tools. Experimental results demonstrate that GoalAct achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, with an average improvement of 12.22% in success rate. These findings highlight GoalAct's potential to drive the development of more advanced intelligent agent systems, making them more effective across complex real-world applications. Our code can be found at https://github.com/cjj826/GoalAct.

Amplified Vulnerabilities: Structured Jailbreak Attacks on LLM-based Multi-Agent Debate

Authors:Senmao Qi, Yifei Zou, Peng Li, Ziyi Lin, Xiuzhen Cheng, Dongxiao Yu
Date:2025-04-23 08:01:50

Multi-Agent Debate (MAD), leveraging collaborative interactions among Large Language Models (LLMs), aim to enhance reasoning capabilities in complex tasks. However, the security implications of their iterative dialogues and role-playing characteristics, particularly susceptibility to jailbreak attacks eliciting harmful content, remain critically underexplored. This paper systematically investigates the jailbreak vulnerabilities of four prominent MAD frameworks built upon leading commercial LLMs (GPT-4o, GPT-4, GPT-3.5-turbo, and DeepSeek) without compromising internal agents. We introduce a novel structured prompt-rewriting framework specifically designed to exploit MAD dynamics via narrative encapsulation, role-driven escalation, iterative refinement, and rhetorical obfuscation. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that MAD systems are inherently more vulnerable than single-agent setups. Crucially, our proposed attack methodology significantly amplifies this fragility, increasing average harmfulness from 28.14% to 80.34% and achieving attack success rates as high as 80% in certain scenarios. These findings reveal intrinsic vulnerabilities in MAD architectures and underscore the urgent need for robust, specialized defenses prior to real-world deployment.

Less is More: Enhancing Structured Multi-Agent Reasoning via Quality-Guided Distillation

Authors:Jiahao Yuan, Xingzhe Sun, Xing Yu, Jingwen Wang, Dehui Du, Zhiqing Cui, Zixiang Di
Date:2025-04-23 04:19:52

The XLLM@ACL2025 Shared Task-III formulates a low-resource structural reasoning task that challenges LLMs to generate interpretable, step-by-step rationales with minimal labeled data. We present Less is More, the third-place winning approach in the XLLM@ACL2025 Shared Task-III, which focuses on structured reasoning from only 24 labeled examples. Our approach leverages a multi-agent framework with reverse-prompt induction, retrieval-augmented reasoning synthesis via GPT-4o, and dual-stage reward-guided filtering to distill high-quality supervision across three subtasks: question parsing, CoT parsing, and step-level verification. All modules are fine-tuned from Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct under a unified LoRA+ setup. By combining structure validation with reward filtering across few-shot and zero-shot prompts, our pipeline consistently improves structure reasoning quality. These results underscore the value of controllable data distillation in enhancing structured inference under low-resource constraints. Our code is available at https://github.com/Jiahao-Yuan/Less-is-More.

ClarifyCoder: Clarification-Aware Fine-Tuning for Programmatic Problem Solving

Authors:Jie JW Wu, Manav Chaudhary, Davit Abrahamyan, Arhaan Khaku, Anjiang Wei, Fatemeh H. Fard
Date:2025-04-23 00:34:39

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in code generation tasks. However, a significant gap remains between their current performance and that of expert software engineers. A key differentiator is that human engineers actively seek clarification when faced with ambiguous requirements, while LLMs typically generate code regardless of uncertainties in the problem description. We present ClarifyCoder, a novel framework with synthetic data generation and instruction-tuning that enables LLMs to identify ambiguities and request clarification before proceeding with code generation. While recent work has focused on LLM-based agents for iterative code generation, we argue that the fundamental ability to recognize and query ambiguous requirements should be intrinsic to the models themselves. Our approach consists of two main components: (1) a data synthesis technique that augments existing programming datasets with scenarios requiring clarification to generate clarification-aware training data, and (2) a fine-tuning strategy that teaches models to prioritize seeking clarification over immediate code generation when faced with incomplete or ambiguous requirements. We further provide an empirical analysis of integrating ClarifyCoder with standard fine-tuning for a joint optimization of both clarify-awareness and coding ability. Experimental results demonstrate that ClarifyCoder significantly improves the communication capabilities of Code LLMs through meaningful clarification dialogues while maintaining code generation capabilities.

MR. Video: "MapReduce" is the Principle for Long Video Understanding

Authors:Ziqi Pang, Yu-Xiong Wang
Date:2025-04-22 17:59:41

We propose MR. Video, an agentic long video understanding framework that demonstrates the simple yet effective MapReduce principle for processing long videos: (1) Map: independently and densely perceiving short video clips, and (2) Reduce: jointly aggregating information from all clips. Compared with sequence-to-sequence vision-language models (VLMs), MR. Video performs detailed short video perception without being limited by context length. Compared with existing video agents that typically rely on sequential key segment selection, the Map operation enables simpler and more scalable sequence parallel perception of short video segments. Its Reduce step allows for more comprehensive context aggregation and reasoning, surpassing explicit key segment retrieval. This MapReduce principle is applicable to both VLMs and video agents, and we use LLM agents to validate its effectiveness. In practice, MR. Video employs two MapReduce stages: (A) Captioning: generating captions for short video clips (map), then standardizing repeated characters and objects into shared names (reduce); (B) Analysis: for each user question, analyzing relevant information from individual short videos (map), and integrating them into a final answer (reduce). MR. Video achieves over 10% accuracy improvement on the challenging LVBench compared to state-of-the-art VLMs and video agents. Code is available at: https://github.com/ziqipang/MR-Video

LLMs are Greedy Agents: Effects of RL Fine-tuning on Decision-Making Abilities

Authors:Thomas Schmied, Jörg Bornschein, Jordi Grau-Moya, Markus Wulfmeier, Razvan Pascanu
Date:2025-04-22 17:57:14

The success of Large Language Models (LLMs) has sparked interest in various agentic applications. A key hypothesis is that LLMs, leveraging common sense and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, can effectively explore and efficiently solve complex domains. However, LLM agents have been found to suffer from sub-optimal exploration and the knowing-doing gap, the inability to effectively act on knowledge present in the model. In this work, we systematically study why LLMs perform sub-optimally in decision-making scenarios. In particular, we closely examine three prevalent failure modes: greediness, frequency bias, and the knowing-doing gap. We propose mitigation of these shortcomings by fine-tuning via Reinforcement Learning (RL) on self-generated CoT rationales. Our experiments across multi-armed bandits, contextual bandits, and Tic-tac-toe, demonstrate that RL fine-tuning enhances the decision-making abilities of LLMs by increasing exploration and narrowing the knowing-doing gap. Finally, we study both classic exploration mechanisms, such as $\epsilon$-greedy, and LLM-specific approaches, such as self-correction and self-consistency, to enable more effective fine-tuning of LLMs for decision-making.

Towards Test Generation from Task Description for Mobile Testing with Multi-modal Reasoning

Authors:Hieu Huynh, Hai Phung, Hao Pham, Tien N. Nguyen, Vu Nguyen
Date:2025-04-22 14:02:57

In Android GUI testing, generating an action sequence for a task that can be replayed as a test script is common. Generating sequences of actions and respective test scripts from task goals described in natural language can eliminate the need for manually writing test scripts. However, existing approaches based on large language models (LLM) often struggle with identifying the final action, and either end prematurely or continue past the final screen. In this paper, we introduce VisiDroid, a multi-modal, LLM-based, multi-agent framework that iteratively determines the next action and leverages visual images of screens to detect the task's completeness. The multi-modal approach enhances our model in two significant ways. First, this approach enables it to avoid prematurely terminating a task when textual content alone provides misleading indications of task completion. Additionally, visual input helps the tool avoid errors when changes in the GUI do not directly affect functionality toward task completion, such as adjustments to font sizes or colors. Second, the multi-modal approach also ensures the tool not progress beyond the final screen, which might lack explicit textual indicators of task completion but could display a visual element indicating task completion, which is common in GUI apps. Our evaluation shows that VisiDroid achieves an accuracy of 87.3%, outperforming the best baseline relatively by 23.5%. We also demonstrate that our multi-modal framework with images and texts enables the LLM to better determine when a task is completed.

A closer look at how large language models trust humans: patterns and biases

Authors:Valeria Lerman, Yaniv Dover
Date:2025-04-22 11:31:50

As large language models (LLMs) and LLM-based agents increasingly interact with humans in decision-making contexts, understanding the trust dynamics between humans and AI agents becomes a central concern. While considerable literature studies how humans trust AI agents, it is much less understood how LLM-based agents develop effective trust in humans. LLM-based agents likely rely on some sort of implicit effective trust in trust-related contexts (e.g., evaluating individual loan applications) to assist and affect decision making. Using established behavioral theories, we develop an approach that studies whether LLMs trust depends on the three major trustworthiness dimensions: competence, benevolence and integrity of the human subject. We also study how demographic variables affect effective trust. Across 43,200 simulated experiments, for five popular language models, across five different scenarios we find that LLM trust development shows an overall similarity to human trust development. We find that in most, but not all cases, LLM trust is strongly predicted by trustworthiness, and in some cases also biased by age, religion and gender, especially in financial scenarios. This is particularly true for scenarios common in the literature and for newer models. While the overall patterns align with human-like mechanisms of effective trust formation, different models exhibit variation in how they estimate trust; in some cases, trustworthiness and demographic factors are weak predictors of effective trust. These findings call for a better understanding of AI-to-human trust dynamics and monitoring of biases and trust development patterns to prevent unintended and potentially harmful outcomes in trust-sensitive applications of AI.

WALL-E 2.0: World Alignment by NeuroSymbolic Learning improves World Model-based LLM Agents

Authors:Siyu Zhou, Tianyi Zhou, Yijun Yang, Guodong Long, Deheng Ye, Jing Jiang, Chengqi Zhang
Date:2025-04-22 10:58:27

Can we build accurate world models out of large language models (LLMs)? How can world models benefit LLM agents? The gap between the prior knowledge of LLMs and the specified environment's dynamics usually bottlenecks LLMs' performance as world models. To bridge the gap, we propose a training-free "world alignment" that learns an environment's symbolic knowledge complementary to LLMs. The symbolic knowledge covers action rules, knowledge graphs, and scene graphs, which are extracted by LLMs from exploration trajectories and encoded into executable codes to regulate LLM agents' policies. We further propose an RL-free, model-based agent "WALL-E 2.0" through the model-predictive control (MPC) framework. Unlike classical MPC requiring costly optimization on the fly, we adopt an LLM agent as an efficient look-ahead optimizer of future steps' actions by interacting with the neurosymbolic world model. While the LLM agent's strong heuristics make it an efficient planner in MPC, the quality of its planned actions is also secured by the accurate predictions of the aligned world model. They together considerably improve learning efficiency in a new environment. On open-world challenges in Mars (Minecraft like) and ALFWorld (embodied indoor environments), WALL-E 2.0 significantly outperforms existing methods, e.g., surpassing baselines in Mars by 16.1%-51.6% of success rate and by at least 61.7% in score. In ALFWorld, it achieves a new record 98% success rate after only 4 iterations.

Implementing Rational Choice Functions with LLMs and Measuring their Alignment with User Preferences

Authors:Anna Karnysheva, Christian Drescher, Dietrich Klakow
Date:2025-04-22 09:08:21

As large language models (LLMs) become integral to intelligent user interfaces (IUIs), their role as decision-making agents raises critical concerns about alignment. Although extensive research has addressed issues such as factuality, bias, and toxicity, comparatively little attention has been paid to measuring alignment to preferences, i.e., the relative desirability of different alternatives, a concept used in decision making, economics, and social choice theory. However, a reliable decision-making agent makes choices that align well with user preferences. In this paper, we generalize existing methods that exploit LLMs for ranking alternative outcomes by addressing alignment with the broader and more flexible concept of user preferences, which includes both strict preferences and indifference among alternatives. To this end, we put forward design principles for using LLMs to implement rational choice functions, and provide the necessary tools to measure preference satisfaction. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach through an empirical study in a practical application of an IUI in the automotive domain.

DianJin-R1: Evaluating and Enhancing Financial Reasoning in Large Language Models

Authors:Jie Zhu, Qian Chen, Huaixia Dou, Junhui Li, Lifan Guo, Feng Chen, Chi Zhang
Date:2025-04-22 09:01:04

Effective reasoning remains a core challenge for large language models (LLMs) in the financial domain, where tasks often require domain-specific knowledge, precise numerical calculations, and strict adherence to compliance rules. We propose DianJin-R1, a reasoning-enhanced framework designed to address these challenges through reasoning-augmented supervision and reinforcement learning. Central to our approach is DianJin-R1-Data, a high-quality dataset constructed from CFLUE, FinQA, and a proprietary compliance corpus (Chinese Compliance Check, CCC), combining diverse financial reasoning scenarios with verified annotations. Our models, DianJin-R1-7B and DianJin-R1-32B, are fine-tuned from Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct and Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct using a structured format that generates both reasoning steps and final answers. To further refine reasoning quality, we apply Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), a reinforcement learning method that incorporates dual reward signals: one encouraging structured outputs and another rewarding answer correctness. We evaluate our models on five benchmarks: three financial datasets (CFLUE, FinQA, and CCC) and two general reasoning benchmarks (MATH-500 and GPQA-Diamond). Experimental results show that DianJin-R1 models consistently outperform their non-reasoning counterparts, especially on complex financial tasks. Moreover, on the real-world CCC dataset, our single-call reasoning models match or even surpass the performance of multi-agent systems that require significantly more computational cost. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of DianJin-R1 in enhancing financial reasoning through structured supervision and reward-aligned learning, offering a scalable and practical solution for real-world applications.

A Comprehensive Survey in LLM(-Agent) Full Stack Safety: Data, Training and Deployment

Authors:Kun Wang, Guibin Zhang, Zhenhong Zhou, Jiahao Wu, Miao Yu, Shiqian Zhao, Chenlong Yin, Jinhu Fu, Yibo Yan, Hanjun Luo, Liang Lin, Zhihao Xu, Haolang Lu, Xinye Cao, Xinyun Zhou, Weifei Jin, Fanci Meng, Junyuan Mao, Hao Wu, Minghe Wang, Fan Zhang, Junfeng Fang, Chengwei Liu, Yifan Zhang, Qiankun Li, Chongye Guo, Yalan Qin, Yi Ding, Donghai Hong, Jiaming Ji, Xinfeng Li, Yifan Jiang, Dongxia Wang, Yihao Huang, Yufei Guo, Jen-tse Huang, Yanwei Yue, Wenke Huang, Guancheng Wan, Tianlin Li, Lei Bai, Jie Zhang, Qing Guo, Jingyi Wang, Tianlong Chen, Joey Tianyi Zhou, Xiaojun Jia, Weisong Sun, Cong Wu, Jing Chen, Xuming Hu, Yiming Li, Xiao Wang, Ningyu Zhang, Luu Anh Tuan, Guowen Xu, Tianwei Zhang, Xingjun Ma, Xiang Wang, Bo An, Jun Sun, Mohit Bansal, Shirui Pan, Yuval Elovici, Bhavya Kailkhura, Bo Li, Yaodong Yang, Hongwei Li, Wenyuan Xu, Yizhou Sun, Wei Wang, Qing Li, Ke Tang, Yu-Gang Jiang, Felix Juefei-Xu, Hui Xiong, Xiaofeng Wang, Shuicheng Yan, Dacheng Tao, Philip S. Yu, Qingsong Wen, Yang Liu
Date:2025-04-22 05:02:49

The remarkable success of Large Language Models (LLMs) has illuminated a promising pathway toward achieving Artificial General Intelligence for both academic and industrial communities, owing to their unprecedented performance across various applications. As LLMs continue to gain prominence in both research and commercial domains, their security and safety implications have become a growing concern, not only for researchers and corporations but also for every nation. Currently, existing surveys on LLM safety primarily focus on specific stages of the LLM lifecycle, e.g., deployment phase or fine-tuning phase, lacking a comprehensive understanding of the entire "lifechain" of LLMs. To address this gap, this paper introduces, for the first time, the concept of "full-stack" safety to systematically consider safety issues throughout the entire process of LLM training, deployment, and eventual commercialization. Compared to the off-the-shelf LLM safety surveys, our work demonstrates several distinctive advantages: (I) Comprehensive Perspective. We define the complete LLM lifecycle as encompassing data preparation, pre-training, post-training, deployment and final commercialization. To our knowledge, this represents the first safety survey to encompass the entire lifecycle of LLMs. (II) Extensive Literature Support. Our research is grounded in an exhaustive review of over 800+ papers, ensuring comprehensive coverage and systematic organization of security issues within a more holistic understanding. (III) Unique Insights. Through systematic literature analysis, we have developed reliable roadmaps and perspectives for each chapter. Our work identifies promising research directions, including safety in data generation, alignment techniques, model editing, and LLM-based agent systems. These insights provide valuable guidance for researchers pursuing future work in this field.

A Multi-Agent Framework for Automated Qinqiang Opera Script Generation Using Large Language Models

Authors:Gengxian Cao, Fengyuan Li, Hong Duan, Ye Yang, Bofeng Wang, Donghe Li
Date:2025-04-22 03:14:29

This paper introduces a novel multi-Agent framework that automates the end to end production of Qinqiang opera by integrating Large Language Models , visual generation, and Text to Speech synthesis. Three specialized agents collaborate in sequence: Agent1 uses an LLM to craft coherent, culturally grounded scripts;Agent2 employs visual generation models to render contextually accurate stage scenes; and Agent3 leverages TTS to produce synchronized, emotionally expressive vocal performances. In a case study on Dou E Yuan, the system achieved expert ratings of 3.8 for script fidelity, 3.5 for visual coherence, and 3.8 for speech accuracy-culminating in an overall score of 3.6, a 0.3 point improvement over a Single Agent baseline. Ablation experiments demonstrate that removing Agent2 or Agent3 leads to drops of 0.4 and 0.5 points, respectively, underscoring the value of modular collaboration. This work showcases how AI driven pipelines can streamline and scale the preservation of traditional performing arts, and points toward future enhancements in cross modal alignment, richer emotional nuance, and support for additional opera genres.

A Framework for Testing and Adapting REST APIs as LLM Tools

Authors:Jayachandu Bandlamudi, Ritwik Chaudhuri, Neelamadhav Gantayat, Kushal Mukherjee, Prerna Agarwal, Renuka Sindhgatta, Sameep Mehta
Date:2025-04-22 02:52:08

Large Language Models (LLMs) are enabling autonomous agents to perform complex workflows using external tools or functions, often provided via REST APIs in enterprise systems. However, directly utilizing these APIs as tools poses challenges due to their complex input schemas, elaborate responses, and often ambiguous documentation. Current benchmarks for tool testing do not adequately address these complexities, leading to a critical gap in evaluating API readiness for agent-driven automation. In this work, we present a novel testing framework aimed at evaluating and enhancing the readiness of REST APIs to function as tools for LLM-based agents. Our framework transforms apis as tools, generates comprehensive test cases for the APIs, translates tests cases into natural language instructions suitable for agents, enriches tool definitions and evaluates the agent's ability t correctly invoke the API and process its inputs and responses. To provide actionable insights, we analyze the outcomes of 750 test cases, presenting a detailed taxonomy of errors, including input misinterpretation, output handling inconsistencies, and schema mismatches. Additionally, we classify these test cases to streamline debugging and refinement of tool integrations. This work offers a foundational step toward enabling enterprise APIs as tools, improving their usability in agent-based applications.

In-context Ranking Preference Optimization

Authors:Junda Wu, Rohan Surana, Zhouhang Xie, Yiran Shen, Yu Xia, Tong Yu, Ryan A. Rossi, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Julian McAuley
Date:2025-04-21 23:06:12

Recent developments in Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) allow large language models (LLMs) to function as implicit ranking models by maximizing the margin between preferred and non-preferred responses. In practice, user feedback on such lists typically involves identifying a few relevant items in context rather than providing detailed pairwise comparisons for every possible item pair. Moreover, many complex information retrieval tasks, such as conversational agents and summarization systems, critically depend on ranking the highest-quality outputs at the top, emphasizing the need to support natural and flexible forms of user feedback. To address the challenge of limited and sparse pairwise feedback in the in-context setting, we propose an In-context Ranking Preference Optimization (IRPO) framework that directly optimizes LLMs based on ranking lists constructed during inference. To further capture flexible forms of feedback, IRPO extends the DPO objective by incorporating both the relevance of items and their positions in the list. Modeling these aspects jointly is non-trivial, as ranking metrics are inherently discrete and non-differentiable, making direct optimization difficult. To overcome this, IRPO introduces a differentiable objective based on positional aggregation of pairwise item preferences, enabling effective gradient-based optimization of discrete ranking metrics. We further provide theoretical insights showing that IRPO (i) automatically emphasizes items with greater disagreement between the model and the reference ranking, and (ii) links its gradient to an importance sampling estimator, yielding an unbiased estimator with reduced variance. Empirical results show IRPO outperforms standard DPO approaches in ranking performance, highlighting its effectiveness in aligning LLMs with direct in-context ranking preferences.

Agent for User: Testing Multi-User Interactive Features in TikTok

Authors:Sidong Feng, Changhao Du, Huaxiao Liu, Qingnan Wang, Zhengwei Lv, Gang Huo, Xu Yang, Chunyang Chen
Date:2025-04-21 22:50:31

TikTok, a widely-used social media app boasting over a billion monthly active users, requires effective app quality assurance for its intricate features. Feature testing is crucial in achieving this goal. However, the multi-user interactive features within the app, such as live streaming, voice calls, etc., pose significant challenges for developers, who must handle simultaneous device management and user interaction coordination. To address this, we introduce a novel multi-agent approach, powered by the Large Language Models (LLMs), to automate the testing of multi-user interactive app features. In detail, we build a virtual device farm that allocates the necessary number of devices for a given multi-user interactive task. For each device, we deploy an LLM-based agent that simulates a user, thereby mimicking user interactions to collaboratively automate the testing process. The evaluations on 24 multi-user interactive tasks within the TikTok app, showcase its capability to cover 75% of tasks with 85.9% action similarity and offer 87% time savings for developers. Additionally, we have also integrated our approach into the real-world TikTok testing platform, aiding in the detection of 26 multi-user interactive bugs.

LLM-Assisted Translation of Legacy FORTRAN Codes to C++: A Cross-Platform Study

Authors:Nishath Rajiv Ranasinghe, Shawn M. Jones, Michal Kucer, Ayan Biswas, Daniel O'Malley, Alexander Buschmann Most, Selma Liliane Wanna, Ajay Sreekumar
Date:2025-04-21 20:34:37

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being leveraged for generating and translating scientific computer codes by both domain-experts and non-domain experts. Fortran has served as one of the go to programming languages in legacy high-performance computing (HPC) for scientific discoveries. Despite growing adoption, LLM-based code translation of legacy code-bases has not been thoroughly assessed or quantified for its usability. Here, we studied the applicability of LLM-based translation of Fortran to C++ as a step towards building an agentic-workflow using open-weight LLMs on two different computational platforms. We statistically quantified the compilation accuracy of the translated C++ codes, measured the similarity of the LLM translated code to the human translated C++ code, and statistically quantified the output similarity of the Fortran to C++ translation.

Interpretable Locomotion Prediction in Construction Using a Memory-Driven LLM Agent With Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Authors:Ehsan Ahmadi, Chao Wang
Date:2025-04-21 17:45:21

Construction tasks are inherently unpredictable, with dynamic environments and safety-critical demands posing significant risks to workers. Exoskeletons offer potential assistance but falter without accurate intent recognition across diverse locomotion modes. This paper presents a locomotion prediction agent leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) augmented with memory systems, aimed at improving exoskeleton assistance in such settings. Using multimodal inputs - spoken commands and visual data from smart glasses - the agent integrates a Perception Module, Short-Term Memory (STM), Long-Term Memory (LTM), and Refinement Module to predict locomotion modes effectively. Evaluation reveals a baseline weighted F1-score of 0.73 without memory, rising to 0.81 with STM, and reaching 0.90 with both STM and LTM, excelling with vague and safety-critical commands. Calibration metrics, including a Brier Score drop from 0.244 to 0.090 and ECE from 0.222 to 0.044, affirm improved reliability. This framework supports safer, high-level human-exoskeleton collaboration, with promise for adaptive assistive systems in dynamic industries.

A Self-Improving Coding Agent

Authors:Maxime Robeyns, Martin Szummer, Laurence Aitchison
Date:2025-04-21 16:58:18

We demonstrate that an LLM coding agent, equipped with basic coding tools, can autonomously edit itself, and thereby improve its performance on benchmark tasks. We find performance gains from 17% to 53% on a random subset of SWE Bench Verified, with additional performance gains on LiveCodeBench, as well as synthetically generated agent benchmarks. Our work represents an advancement in the automated and open-ended design of agentic systems, and provides a reference agent framework for those seeking to post-train LLMs on tool use and other agentic tasks.