LLM-agent - 2025-06-30

The Automated LLM Speedrunning Benchmark: Reproducing NanoGPT Improvements

Authors:Bingchen Zhao, Despoina Magka, Minqi Jiang, Xian Li, Roberta Raileanu, Tatiana Shavrina, Jean-Christophe Gagnon-Audet, Kelvin Niu, Shagun Sodhani, Michael Shvartsman, Andrei Lupu, Alisia Lupidi, Edan Toledo, Karen Hambardzumyan, Martin Josifoski, Thomas Foster, Lucia Cipolina-Kun, Abhishek Charnalia, Derek Dunfield, Alexander H. Miller, Oisin Mac Aodha, Jakob Foerster, Yoram Bachrach
Date:2025-06-27 17:44:32

Rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs) have the potential to assist in scientific progress. A critical capability toward this endeavor is the ability to reproduce existing work. To evaluate the ability of AI agents to reproduce results in an active research area, we introduce the Automated LLM Speedrunning Benchmark, leveraging the research community contributions on the NanoGPT speedrun, a competition to train a GPT-2 model in the shortest time. Each of the 19 speedrun tasks provides the agent with the previous records training script, optionally paired with one of three hint formats, ranging from pseudocode to paper-like descriptions of the new records improvements. Records execute quickly by design and speedrun improvements encompass diverse code-level changes, ranging from high-level algorithmic advancements to hardware-aware optimizations. These features make the benchmark both accessible and realistic for the frontier problem of improving LLM training. We find that recent reasoning LLMs combined with SoTA scaffolds struggle to reimplement already-known innovations in our benchmark, even when given detailed hints. Our benchmark thus provides a simple, non-saturated measure of an LLMs ability to automate scientific reproduction, a necessary (but not sufficient) skill for an autonomous research agent.

Exploring Modularity of Agentic Systems for Drug Discovery

Authors:Laura van Weesep, Samuel Genheden, Ola Engkvist, Jens Sjölund
Date:2025-06-27 12:57:00

Large-language models (LLMs) and agentic systems present exciting opportunities to accelerate drug discovery and design. In this study, we critically examine the modularity of LLM-based agentic systems for drug discovery, i.e., whether parts of the agentic system such as the LLM are interchangeable, a topic that has received limited attention in drug discovery applications. We compare the performance of different large language models (LLMs) and the effectiveness of tool-calling agents versus code-generating agents in this domain. Our case study, comparing performance in orchestrating tools for chemistry and drug discovery using an LLM-as-a-judge score, shows that Claude-3.5-Sonnet, Claude-3.7-Sonnet and GPT-4o outperform alternative language models such as Llama-3.1-8B, Llama-3.1-70B, GPT-3.5-Turbo, and Nova-Micro. Although we confirm that code-generating agents outperform the tool-calling ones on average, we show that this is highly question and model dependent. Furthermore, the impact of replacing system prompts is dependent on the specific question asked and the model used, underscoring that -- even in this particular domain -- one cannot just replace language models without considering prompt re-engineering. Our study highlights the necessity of further research into the modularity of agentic systems to enable the development of stable and scalable solutions for real-world problems.

Don't Trust Generative Agents to Mimic Communication on Social Networks Unless You Benchmarked their Empirical Realism

Authors:Simon Münker, Nils Schwager, Achim Rettinger
Date:2025-06-27 07:32:16

The ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to mimic human behavior triggered a plethora of computational social science research, assuming that empirical studies of humans can be conducted with AI agents instead. Since there have been conflicting research findings on whether and when this hypothesis holds, there is a need to better understand the differences in their experimental designs. We focus on replicating the behavior of social network users with the use of LLMs for the analysis of communication on social networks. First, we provide a formal framework for the simulation of social networks, before focusing on the sub-task of imitating user communication. We empirically test different approaches to imitate user behavior on X in English and German. Our findings suggest that social simulations should be validated by their empirical realism measured in the setting in which the simulation components were fitted. With this paper, we argue for more rigor when applying generative-agent-based modeling for social simulation.

More Vulnerable than You Think: On the Stability of Tool-Integrated LLM Agents

Authors:Weimin Xiong, Ke Wang, Yifan Song, Hanchao Liu, Sai Zhou, Wei Peng, Sujian Li
Date:2025-06-27 07:13:29

Current evaluations of tool-integrated LLM agents typically focus on end-to-end tool-usage evaluation while neglecting their stability. This limits their real-world applicability, as various internal or external factors can cause agents to crash or behave abnormally. Our research addresses this by investigating whether agents are vulnerable to errors throughout the entire tool invocation process, including reading tool documentation, selecting tools and generating parameters, and processing the tool's response. Through extensive experiments, we observe that agents are highly susceptible to errors at each stage and agents based on open-source models are more vulnerable than those based on proprietary models. We also find that increasing the model size does not significantly improve tool invocation reasoning and may make agents more vulnerable to attacks resembling normal user instructions. This highlights the importance of evaluating agent stability and offers valuable insights for future LLM development and evaluation.

CAL-RAG: Retrieval-Augmented Multi-Agent Generation for Content-Aware Layout Design

Authors:Najmeh Forouzandehmehr, Reza Yousefi Maragheh, Sriram Kollipara, Kai Zhao, Topojoy Biswas, Evren Korpeoglu, Kannan Achan
Date:2025-06-27 06:09:56

Automated content-aware layout generation -- the task of arranging visual elements such as text, logos, and underlays on a background canvas -- remains a fundamental yet under-explored problem in intelligent design systems. While recent advances in deep generative models and large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in structured content generation, most existing approaches lack grounding in contextual design exemplars and fall short in handling semantic alignment and visual coherence. In this work we introduce CAL-RAG, a retrieval-augmented, agentic framework for content-aware layout generation that integrates multimodal retrieval, large language models, and collaborative agentic reasoning. Our system retrieves relevant layout examples from a structured knowledge base and invokes an LLM-based layout recommender to propose structured element placements. A vision-language grader agent evaluates the layout with visual metrics, and a feedback agent provides targeted refinements, enabling iterative improvement. We implement our framework using LangGraph and evaluate it on the PKU PosterLayout dataset, a benchmark rich in semantic and structural variability. CAL-RAG achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple layout metrics -- including underlay effectiveness, element alignment, and overlap -- substantially outperforming strong baselines such as LayoutPrompter. These results demonstrate that combining retrieval augmentation with agentic multi-step reasoning yields a scalable, interpretable, and high-fidelity solution for automated layout generation.

ARAG: Agentic Retrieval Augmented Generation for Personalized Recommendation

Authors:Reza Yousefi Maragheh, Pratheek Vadla, Priyank Gupta, Kai Zhao, Aysenur Inan, Kehui Yao, Jianpeng Xu, Praveen Kanumala, Jason Cho, Sushant Kumar
Date:2025-06-27 05:45:59

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has shown promise in enhancing recommendation systems by incorporating external context into large language model prompts. However, existing RAG-based approaches often rely on static retrieval heuristics and fail to capture nuanced user preferences in dynamic recommendation scenarios. In this work, we introduce ARAG, an Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation framework for Personalized Recommendation, which integrates a multi-agent collaboration mechanism into the RAG pipeline. To better understand the long-term and session behavior of the user, ARAG leverages four specialized LLM-based agents: a User Understanding Agent that summarizes user preferences from long-term and session contexts, a Natural Language Inference (NLI) Agent that evaluates semantic alignment between candidate items retrieved by RAG and inferred intent, a context summary agent that summarizes the findings of NLI agent, and an Item Ranker Agent that generates a ranked list of recommendations based on contextual fit. We evaluate ARAG accross three datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that ARAG significantly outperforms standard RAG and recency-based baselines, achieving up to 42.1% improvement in NDCG@5 and 35.5% in Hit@5. We also, conduct an ablation study to analyse the effect by different components of ARAG. Our findings highlight the effectiveness of integrating agentic reasoning into retrieval-augmented recommendation and provide new directions for LLM-based personalization.

SPAZER: Spatial-Semantic Progressive Reasoning Agent for Zero-shot 3D Visual Grounding

Authors:Zhao Jin, Rong-Cheng Tu, Jingyi Liao, Wenhao Sun, Xiao Luo, Shunyu Liu, Dacheng Tao
Date:2025-06-27 05:34:57

3D Visual Grounding (3DVG) aims to localize target objects within a 3D scene based on natural language queries. To alleviate the reliance on costly 3D training data, recent studies have explored zero-shot 3DVG by leveraging the extensive knowledge and powerful reasoning capabilities of pre-trained LLMs and VLMs. However, existing paradigms tend to emphasize either spatial (3D-based) or semantic (2D-based) understanding, limiting their effectiveness in complex real-world applications. In this work, we introduce SPAZER - a VLM-driven agent that combines both modalities in a progressive reasoning framework. It first holistically analyzes the scene and produces a 3D rendering from the optimal viewpoint. Based on this, anchor-guided candidate screening is conducted to perform a coarse-level localization of potential objects. Furthermore, leveraging retrieved relevant 2D camera images, 3D-2D joint decision-making is efficiently performed to determine the best-matching object. By bridging spatial and semantic reasoning neural streams, SPAZER achieves robust zero-shot grounding without training on 3D-labeled data. Extensive experiments on ScanRefer and Nr3D benchmarks demonstrate that SPAZER significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art zero-shot methods, achieving notable gains of 9.0% and 10.9% in accuracy.

CitySim: Modeling Urban Behaviors and City Dynamics with Large-Scale LLM-Driven Agent Simulation

Authors:Nicolas Bougie, Narimasa Watanabe
Date:2025-06-26 23:11:42

Modeling human behavior in urban environments is fundamental for social science, behavioral studies, and urban planning. Prior work often rely on rigid, hand-crafted rules, limiting their ability to simulate nuanced intentions, plans, and adaptive behaviors. Addressing these challenges, we envision an urban simulator (CitySim), capitalizing on breakthroughs in human-level intelligence exhibited by large language models. In CitySim, agents generate realistic daily schedules using a recursive value-driven approach that balances mandatory activities, personal habits, and situational factors. To enable long-term, lifelike simulations, we endow agents with beliefs, long-term goals, and spatial memory for navigation. CitySim exhibits closer alignment with real humans than prior work, both at micro and macro levels. Additionally, we conduct insightful experiments by modeling tens of thousands of agents and evaluating their collective behaviors under various real-world scenarios, including estimating crowd density, predicting place popularity, and assessing well-being. Our results highlight CitySim as a scalable, flexible testbed for understanding and forecasting urban phenomena.

MobiVerse: Scaling Urban Mobility Simulation with Hybrid Lightweight Domain-Specific Generator and Large Language Models

Authors:Yifan Liu, Xishun Liao, Haoxuan Ma, Jonathan Liu, Rohan Jadhav, Jiaqi Ma
Date:2025-06-26 21:46:18

Understanding and modeling human mobility patterns is crucial for effective transportation planning and urban development. Despite significant advances in mobility research, there remains a critical gap in simulation platforms that allow for algorithm development, policy implementation, and comprehensive evaluation at scale. Traditional activity-based models require extensive data collection and manual calibration, machine learning approaches struggle with adaptation to dynamic conditions, and treding agent-based Large Language Models (LLMs) implementations face computational constraints with large-scale simulations. To address these challenges, we propose MobiVerse, a hybrid framework leverages the efficiency of lightweight domain-specific generator for generating base activity chains with the adaptability of LLMs for context-aware modifications. A case study was conducted in Westwood, Los Angeles, where we efficiently generated and dynamically adjusted schedules for the whole population of approximately 53,000 agents on a standard PC. Our experiments demonstrate that MobiVerse successfully enables agents to respond to environmental feedback, including road closures, large gathering events like football games, and congestion, through our hybrid framework. Its modular design facilitates testing various mobility algorithms at both transportation system and agent levels. Results show our approach maintains computational efficiency while enhancing behavioral realism. MobiVerse bridges the gap in mobility simulation by providing a customizable platform for mobility systems planning and operations with benchmark algorithms. Code and videos are available at https://github.com/ucla-mobility/MobiVerse.

SEEA-R1: Tree-Structured Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Self-Evolving Embodied Agents

Authors:Wanxin Tian, Shijie Zhang, Kevin Zhang, Xiaowei Chi, Yulin Luo, Junyu Lu, Chunkai Fan, Qiang Zhou, Yiming Zhao, Ning Liu Siyu Lin, Zhiyuan Qin, Xiaozhu Ju, Shanghang Zhang, Jian Tang
Date:2025-06-26 18:00:07

Self-evolution, the ability of agents to autonomously improve their reasoning and behavior, is essential for the embodied domain with long-horizon, real-world tasks. Despite current advancements in reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) showing strong performance in enhancing reasoning in LLMs, its potential to enable self-evolving embodied intelligence with multi-modal interactions remains largely unexplored. Specifically, reinforcement fine-tuning faces two fundamental obstacles in embodied settings: (i) the lack of accessible intermediate rewards in multi-step reasoning tasks limits effective learning signals, and (ii) reliance on hand-crafted reward functions restricts generalization to novel tasks and environments. To address these challenges, we present Self-Evolving Embodied Agents-R1, SEEA-R1, the first RFT framework designed for enabling the self-evolving capabilities of embodied agents. Specifically, to convert sparse delayed rewards into denser intermediate signals that improve multi-step reasoning, we propose Tree-based group relative policy optimization (Tree-GRPO), which integrates Monte Carlo Tree Search into GRPO. To generalize reward estimation across tasks and scenes, supporting autonomous adaptation and reward-driven self-evolution, we further introduce Multi-modal Generative Reward Model (MGRM). To holistically evaluate the effectiveness of SEEA-R1, we evaluate on the ALFWorld benchmark, surpassing state-of-the-art methods with scores of 85.07% (textual) and 36.19% (multi-modal), outperforming prior models including GPT-4o. SEEA-R1 also achieves scores of 80.3% without environmental reward, surpassing all open-source baselines and highlighting its scalability as a self-evolving embodied agent. Additional experiments and qualitative analysis further support the potential of SEEA-R1 for future research in scalable embodied intelligence.

Beyond Reactive Safety: Risk-Aware LLM Alignment via Long-Horizon Simulation

Authors:Chenkai Sun, Denghui Zhang, ChengXiang Zhai, Heng Ji
Date:2025-06-26 02:28:58

Given the growing influence of language model-based agents on high-stakes societal decisions, from public policy to healthcare, ensuring their beneficial impact requires understanding the far-reaching implications of their suggestions. We propose a proof-of-concept framework that projects how model-generated advice could propagate through societal systems on a macroscopic scale over time, enabling more robust alignment. To assess the long-term safety awareness of language models, we also introduce a dataset of 100 indirect harm scenarios, testing models' ability to foresee adverse, non-obvious outcomes from seemingly harmless user prompts. Our approach achieves not only over 20% improvement on the new dataset but also an average win rate exceeding 70% against strong baselines on existing safety benchmarks (AdvBench, SafeRLHF, WildGuardMix), suggesting a promising direction for safer agents.

ParEval-Repo: A Benchmark Suite for Evaluating LLMs with Repository-level HPC Translation Tasks

Authors:Joshua H. Davis, Daniel Nichols, Ishan Khillan, Abhinav Bhatele
Date:2025-06-26 02:01:11

GPGPU architectures have become significantly diverse in recent years, which has led to an emergence of a variety of specialized programming models and software stacks to support them. While portable execution models exist, they still require significant developer effort to port to and optimize for different hardware architectures. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) can help us reduce some of this programmer burden. In this paper, we present a novel benchmark and testing framework, ParEval-Repo, which can be used to evaluate the efficacy of LLM-based approaches in automatically translating entire codebases across GPGPU execution models. ParEval-Repo includes several scientific computing and AI mini-applications in a range of programming models, and levels of repository complexity. We use ParEval-Repo to evaluate a range of state-of-the-art open-source and commercial LLMs, with both a non-agentic and a top-down agentic approach. We assess code generated by the LLMs and approaches in terms of compilability, functional correctness, categories of build errors, and the cost of translation in terms of the number of inference tokens. Our results demonstrate that LLM translation of scientific applications is feasible for small programs but difficulty with generating functional build systems and cross-file dependencies pose challenges in scaling to larger codebases.

LLM-guided Chemical Process Optimization with a Multi-Agent Approach

Authors:Tong Zeng, Srivathsan Badrinarayanan, Janghoon Ock, Cheng-Kai Lai, Amir Barati Farimani
Date:2025-06-26 01:03:44

Chemical process optimization is crucial to maximize production efficiency and economic performance. Traditional methods, including gradient-based solvers, evolutionary algorithms, and parameter grid searches, become impractical when operating constraints are ill-defined or unavailable, requiring engineers to rely on subjective heuristics to estimate feasible parameter ranges. To address this constraint definition bottleneck, we present a multi-agent framework of large language model (LLM) agents that autonomously infer operating constraints from minimal process descriptions, then collaboratively guide optimization using the inferred constraints. Our AutoGen-based agentic framework employs OpenAI's o3 model, with specialized agents for constraint generation, parameter validation, simulation execution, and optimization guidance. Through two phases - autonomous constraint generation using embedded domain knowledge, followed by iterative multi-agent optimization - the framework eliminates the need for predefined operational bounds. Validated on the hydrodealkylation process across cost, yield, and yield-to-cost ratio metrics, the framework demonstrated competitive performance with conventional optimization methods while achieving better computational efficiency, requiring fewer iterations to converge. Our approach converged in under 20 minutes, achieving a 31-fold speedup over grid search. Beyond computational efficiency, the framework's reasoning-guided search demonstrates sophisticated process understanding, correctly identifying utility trade-offs, and applying domain-informed heuristics. This approach shows significant potential for optimization scenarios where operational constraints are poorly characterized or unavailable, particularly for emerging processes and retrofit applications.

FaSTA$^*$: Fast-Slow Toolpath Agent with Subroutine Mining for Efficient Multi-turn Image Editing

Authors:Advait Gupta, Rishie Raj, Dang Nguyen, Tianyi Zhou
Date:2025-06-26 00:33:43

We develop a cost-efficient neurosymbolic agent to address challenging multi-turn image editing tasks such as "Detect the bench in the image while recoloring it to pink. Also, remove the cat for a clearer view and recolor the wall to yellow.'' It combines the fast, high-level subtask planning by large language models (LLMs) with the slow, accurate, tool-use, and local A$^*$ search per subtask to find a cost-efficient toolpath -- a sequence of calls to AI tools. To save the cost of A$^*$ on similar subtasks, we perform inductive reasoning on previously successful toolpaths via LLMs to continuously extract/refine frequently used subroutines and reuse them as new tools for future tasks in an adaptive fast-slow planning, where the higher-level subroutines are explored first, and only when they fail, the low-level A$^*$ search is activated. The reusable symbolic subroutines considerably save exploration cost on the same types of subtasks applied to similar images, yielding a human-like fast-slow toolpath agent "FaSTA$^*$'': fast subtask planning followed by rule-based subroutine selection per subtask is attempted by LLMs at first, which is expected to cover most tasks, while slow A$^*$ search is only triggered for novel and challenging subtasks. By comparing with recent image editing approaches, we demonstrate FaSTA$^*$ is significantly more computationally efficient while remaining competitive with the state-of-the-art baseline in terms of success rate.

GPU Kernel Scientist: An LLM-Driven Framework for Iterative Kernel Optimization

Authors:Martin Andrews, Sam Witteveen
Date:2025-06-25 19:59:34

Optimizing GPU kernels for high performance is a complex task, often demanding deep architectural knowledge, extensive profiling, and iterative experimentation. This challenge is amplified when targeting newer or less-documented GPU architectures where traditional development aids are scarce. This paper introduces an LLM-powered "GPU Kernel Scientist," an automated methodology for iteratively refining accelerator kernels. Our methodology employs LLMs in a multi-stage, evolutionary process: (a) strategically selecting promising prior code versions as a basis for new iterations; (b) generating hypotheses for optimization experiments, based on existing code and assimilated knowledge from general GPU literature; and (c) autonomously implementing these experiments through code modification and subsequent submission to an external evaluation system, using only observed timing data as performance feedback. We detail how this approach navigates the challenges of the AMD MI300 target architecture and leverages LLMs to compensate for limited domain-specific human expertise. Since quantitative results from an ongoing performance competition were embargoed on paper submission date, we present the architectural design, operational workflow, and qualitative insights, highlighting the potential of LLM-driven agents to democratise and accelerate GPU kernel optimization, especially in resource-constrained or rapidly evolving hardware environments.

Poster: Enhancing GNN Robustness for Network Intrusion Detection via Agent-based Analysis

Authors:Zhonghao Zhan, Huichi Zhou, Hamed Haddadi
Date:2025-06-25 19:49:55

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) show great promise for Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS), particularly in IoT environments, but suffer performance degradation due to distribution drift and lack robustness against realistic adversarial attacks. Current robustness evaluations often rely on unrealistic synthetic perturbations and lack demonstrations on systematic analysis of different kinds of adversarial attack, which encompass both black-box and white-box scenarios. This work proposes a novel approach to enhance GNN robustness and generalization by employing Large Language Models (LLMs) in an agentic pipeline as simulated cybersecurity expert agents. These agents scrutinize graph structures derived from network flow data, identifying and potentially mitigating suspicious or adversarially perturbed elements before GNN processing. Our experiments, using a framework designed for realistic evaluation and testing with a variety of adversarial attacks including a dataset collected from physical testbed experiments, demonstrate that integrating LLM analysis can significantly improve the resilience of GNN-based NIDS against challenges, showcasing the potential of LLM agent as a complementary layer in intrusion detection architectures.

A Survey of AI for Materials Science: Foundation Models, LLM Agents, Datasets, and Tools

Authors:Minh-Hao Van, Prateek Verma, Chen Zhao, Xintao Wu
Date:2025-06-25 18:10:30

Foundation models (FMs) are catalyzing a transformative shift in materials science (MatSci) by enabling scalable, general-purpose, and multimodal AI systems for scientific discovery. Unlike traditional machine learning models, which are typically narrow in scope and require task-specific engineering, FMs offer cross-domain generalization and exhibit emergent capabilities. Their versatility is especially well-suited to materials science, where research challenges span diverse data types and scales. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of foundation models, agentic systems, datasets, and computational tools supporting this growing field. We introduce a task-driven taxonomy encompassing six broad application areas: data extraction, interpretation and Q\&A; atomistic simulation; property prediction; materials structure, design and discovery; process planning, discovery, and optimization; and multiscale modeling. We discuss recent advances in both unimodal and multimodal FMs, as well as emerging large language model (LLM) agents. Furthermore, we review standardized datasets, open-source tools, and autonomous experimental platforms that collectively fuel the development and integration of FMs into research workflows. We assess the early successes of foundation models and identify persistent limitations, including challenges in generalizability, interpretability, data imbalance, safety concerns, and limited multimodal fusion. Finally, we articulate future research directions centered on scalable pretraining, continual learning, data governance, and trustworthiness.

MAGPIE: A dataset for Multi-AGent contextual PrIvacy Evaluation

Authors:Gurusha Juneja, Alon Albalak, Wenyue Hua, William Yang Wang
Date:2025-06-25 18:04:25

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

The Decrypto Benchmark for Multi-Agent Reasoning and Theory of Mind

Authors:Andrei Lupu, Timon Willi, Jakob Foerster
Date:2025-06-25 17:55:27

As Large Language Models (LLMs) gain agentic abilities, they will have to navigate complex multi-agent scenarios, interacting with human users and other agents in cooperative and competitive settings. This will require new reasoning skills, chief amongst them being theory of mind (ToM), or the ability to reason about the "mental" states of other agents. However, ToM and other multi-agent abilities in LLMs are poorly understood, since existing benchmarks suffer from narrow scope, data leakage, saturation, and lack of interactivity. We thus propose Decrypto, a game-based benchmark for multi-agent reasoning and ToM drawing inspiration from cognitive science, computational pragmatics and multi-agent reinforcement learning. It is designed to be as easy as possible in all other dimensions, eliminating confounding factors commonly found in other benchmarks. To our knowledge, it is also the first platform for designing interactive ToM experiments. We validate the benchmark design through comprehensive empirical evaluations of frontier LLMs, robustness studies, and human-AI cross-play experiments. We find that LLM game-playing abilities lag behind humans and simple word-embedding baselines. We then create variants of two classic cognitive science experiments within Decrypto to evaluate three key ToM abilities. Surprisingly, we find that state-of-the-art reasoning models are significantly worse at those tasks than their older counterparts. This demonstrates that Decrypto addresses a crucial gap in current reasoning and ToM evaluations, and paves the path towards better artificial agents.

Memento: Note-Taking for Your Future Self

Authors:Chao Wan, Albert Gong, Mihir Mishra, Carl-Leander Henneking, Claas Beger, Kilian Q. Weinberger
Date:2025-06-25 17:37:59

Large language models (LLMs) excel at reasoning-only tasks, but struggle when reasoning must be tightly coupled with retrieval, as in multi-hop question answering. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a prompting strategy that first decomposes a complex question into smaller steps, then dynamically constructs a database of facts using LLMs, and finally pieces these facts together to solve the question. We show how this three-stage strategy, which we call Memento, can boost the performance of existing prompting strategies across diverse settings. On the 9-step PhantomWiki benchmark, Memento doubles the performance of chain-of-thought (CoT) when all information is provided in context. On the open-domain version of 2WikiMultiHopQA, CoT-RAG with Memento improves over vanilla CoT-RAG by more than 20 F1 percentage points and over the multi-hop RAG baseline, IRCoT, by more than 13 F1 percentage points. On the challenging MuSiQue dataset, Memento improves ReAct by more than 3 F1 percentage points, demonstrating its utility in agentic settings.

Model Editing as a Double-Edged Sword: Steering Agent Ethical Behavior Toward Beneficence or Harm

Authors:Baixiang Huang, Zhen Tan, Haoran Wang, Zijie Liu, Dawei Li, Ali Payani, Huan Liu, Tianlong Chen, Kai Shu
Date:2025-06-25 16:51:51

Agents based on Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities across a wide range of tasks. However, deploying LLM-based agents in high-stakes domains comes with significant safety and ethical risks. Unethical behavior by these agents can directly result in serious real-world consequences, including physical harm and financial loss. To efficiently steer the ethical behavior of agents, we frame agent behavior steering as a model editing task, which we term Behavior Editing. Model editing is an emerging area of research that enables precise and efficient modifications to LLMs while preserving their overall capabilities. To systematically study and evaluate this approach, we introduce BehaviorBench, a multi-tier benchmark grounded in psychological moral theories. This benchmark supports both the evaluation and editing of agent behaviors across a variety of scenarios, with each tier introducing more complex and ambiguous scenarios. We first demonstrate that Behavior Editing can dynamically steer agents toward the target behavior within specific scenarios. Moreover, Behavior Editing enables not only scenario-specific local adjustments but also more extensive shifts in an agent's global moral alignment. We demonstrate that Behavior Editing can be used to promote ethical and benevolent behavior or, conversely, to induce harmful or malicious behavior. Through comprehensive evaluations on agents based on frontier LLMs, BehaviorBench shows the effectiveness of Behavior Editing across different models and scenarios. Our findings offer key insights into a new paradigm for steering agent behavior, highlighting both the promise and perils of Behavior Editing.

Fine-Tuning and Prompt Engineering of LLMs, for the Creation of Multi-Agent AI for Addressing Sustainable Protein Production Challenges

Authors:Alexander D. Kalian, Jaewook Lee, Stefan P. Johannesson, Lennart Otte, Christer Hogstrand, Miao Guo
Date:2025-06-25 16:37:46

The global demand for sustainable protein sources has accelerated the need for intelligent tools that can rapidly process and synthesise domain-specific scientific knowledge. In this study, we present a proof-of-concept multi-agent Artificial Intelligence (AI) framework designed to support sustainable protein production research, with an initial focus on microbial protein sources. Our Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-oriented system consists of two GPT-based LLM agents: (1) a literature search agent that retrieves relevant scientific literature on microbial protein production for a specified microbial strain, and (2) an information extraction agent that processes the retrieved content to extract relevant biological and chemical information. Two parallel methodologies, fine-tuning and prompt engineering, were explored for agent optimisation. Both methods demonstrated effectiveness at improving the performance of the information extraction agent in terms of transformer-based cosine similarity scores between obtained and ideal outputs. Mean cosine similarity scores were increased by up to 25%, while universally reaching mean scores of $\geq 0.89$ against ideal output text. Fine-tuning overall improved the mean scores to a greater extent (consistently of $\geq 0.94$) compared to prompt engineering, although lower statistical uncertainties were observed with the latter approach. A user interface was developed and published for enabling the use of the multi-agent AI system, alongside preliminary exploration of additional chemical safety-based search capabilities

An Agentic System for Rare Disease Diagnosis with Traceable Reasoning

Authors:Weike Zhao, Chaoyi Wu, Yanjie Fan, Xiaoman Zhang, Pengcheng Qiu, Yuze Sun, Xiao Zhou, Yanfeng Wang, Ya Zhang, Yongguo Yu, Kun Sun, Weidi Xie
Date:2025-06-25 13:42:26

Rare diseases collectively affect over 300 million individuals worldwide, yet timely and accurate diagnosis remains a pervasive challenge. This is largely due to their clinical heterogeneity, low individual prevalence, and the limited familiarity most clinicians have with rare conditions. Here, we introduce DeepRare, the first rare disease diagnosis agentic system powered by a large language model (LLM), capable of processing heterogeneous clinical inputs. The system generates ranked diagnostic hypotheses for rare diseases, each accompanied by a transparent chain of reasoning that links intermediate analytic steps to verifiable medical evidence. DeepRare comprises three key components: a central host with a long-term memory module; specialized agent servers responsible for domain-specific analytical tasks integrating over 40 specialized tools and web-scale, up-to-date medical knowledge sources, ensuring access to the most current clinical information. This modular and scalable design enables complex diagnostic reasoning while maintaining traceability and adaptability. We evaluate DeepRare on eight datasets. The system demonstrates exceptional diagnostic performance among 2,919 diseases, achieving 100% accuracy for 1013 diseases. In HPO-based evaluations, DeepRare significantly outperforms other 15 methods, like traditional bioinformatics diagnostic tools, LLMs, and other agentic systems, achieving an average Recall@1 score of 57.18% and surpassing the second-best method (Reasoning LLM) by a substantial margin of 23.79 percentage points. For multi-modal input scenarios, DeepRare achieves 70.60% at Recall@1 compared to Exomiser's 53.20% in 109 cases. Manual verification of reasoning chains by clinical experts achieves 95.40% agreements. Furthermore, the DeepRare system has been implemented as a user-friendly web application http://raredx.cn/doctor.

SV-LLM: An Agentic Approach for SoC Security Verification using Large Language Models

Authors:Dipayan Saha, Shams Tarek, Hasan Al Shaikh, Khan Thamid Hasan, Pavan Sai Nalluri, Md. Ajoad Hasan, Nashmin Alam, Jingbo Zhou, Sujan Kumar Saha, Mark Tehranipoor, Farimah Farahmandi
Date:2025-06-25 13:31:13

Ensuring the security of complex system-on-chips (SoCs) designs is a critical imperative, yet traditional verification techniques struggle to keep pace due to significant challenges in automation, scalability, comprehensiveness, and adaptability. The advent of large language models (LLMs), with their remarkable capabilities in natural language understanding, code generation, and advanced reasoning, presents a new paradigm for tackling these issues. Moving beyond monolithic models, an agentic approach allows for the creation of multi-agent systems where specialized LLMs collaborate to solve complex problems more effectively. Recognizing this opportunity, we introduce SV-LLM, a novel multi-agent assistant system designed to automate and enhance SoC security verification. By integrating specialized agents for tasks like verification question answering, security asset identification, threat modeling, test plan and property generation, vulnerability detection, and simulation-based bug validation, SV-LLM streamlines the workflow. To optimize their performance in these diverse tasks, agents leverage different learning paradigms, such as in-context learning, fine-tuning, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). The system aims to reduce manual intervention, improve accuracy, and accelerate security analysis, supporting proactive identification and mitigation of risks early in the design cycle. We demonstrate its potential to transform hardware security practices through illustrative case studies and experiments that showcase its applicability and efficacy.

TAPS: Tool-Augmented Personalisation via Structured Tagging

Authors:Ekaterina Taktasheva, Jeff Dalton
Date:2025-06-25 13:24:46

Recent advancements in tool-augmented large language models have enabled them to interact with external tools, enhancing their ability to perform complex user tasks. However, existing approaches overlook the role of personalisation in guiding tool use. This work investigates how user preferences can be effectively integrated into goal-oriented dialogue agents. Through extensive analysis, we identify key weaknesses in the ability of LLMs to personalise tool use. To this end, we introduce TAPS, a novel solution that enhances personalised tool use by leveraging a structured tagging tool and an uncertainty-based tool detector. TAPS significantly improves the ability of LLMs to incorporate user preferences, achieving the new state-of-the-art for open source models on the NLSI task.

Language Modeling by Language Models

Authors:Junyan Cheng, Peter Clark, Kyle Richardson
Date:2025-06-25 08:46:10

Can we leverage LLMs to model the process of discovering novel language model (LM) architectures? Inspired by real research, we propose a multi-agent LLM approach that simulates the conventional stages of research, from ideation and literature search (proposal stage) to design implementation (code generation), generative pre-training, and downstream evaluation (verification). Using ideas from scaling laws, our system, Genesys, employs a Ladder of Scales approach; new designs are proposed, adversarially reviewed, implemented, and selectively verified at increasingly larger model scales (14M$\sim$350M parameters) with a narrowing budget (the number of models we can train at each scale). To help make discovery efficient and factorizable, Genesys uses a novel genetic programming backbone, which we show has empirical advantages over commonly used direct prompt generation workflows (e.g., $\sim$86\% percentage point improvement in successful design generation, a key bottleneck). We report experiments involving 1,162 newly discovered designs (1,062 fully verified through pre-training) and find the best designs to be highly competitive with known architectures (e.g., outperform GPT2, Mamba2, etc., on 6/9 common benchmarks). We couple these results with comprehensive system-level ablations and formal results, which give broader insights into the design of effective autonomous discovery systems.

PSALM-V: Automating Symbolic Planning in Interactive Visual Environments with Large Language Models

Authors:Wang Bill Zhu, Miaosen Chai, Ishika Singh, Robin Jia, Jesse Thomason
Date:2025-06-25 02:44:20

We propose PSALM-V, the first autonomous neuro-symbolic learning system able to induce symbolic action semantics (i.e., pre- and post-conditions) in visual environments through interaction. PSALM-V bootstraps reliable symbolic planning without expert action definitions, using LLMs to generate heuristic plans and candidate symbolic semantics. Previous work has explored using large language models to generate action semantics for Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL)-based symbolic planners. However, these approaches have primarily focused on text-based domains or relied on unrealistic assumptions, such as access to a predefined problem file, full observability, or explicit error messages. By contrast, PSALM-V dynamically infers PDDL problem files and domain action semantics by analyzing execution outcomes and synthesizing possible error explanations. The system iteratively generates and executes plans while maintaining a tree-structured belief over possible action semantics for each action, iteratively refining these beliefs until a goal state is reached. Simulated experiments of task completion in ALFRED demonstrate that PSALM-V increases the plan success rate from 37% (Claude-3.7) to 74% in partially observed setups. Results on two 2D game environments, RTFM and Overcooked-AI, show that PSALM-V improves step efficiency and succeeds in domain induction in multi-agent settings. PSALM-V correctly induces PDDL pre- and post-conditions for real-world robot BlocksWorld tasks, despite low-level manipulation failures from the robot.

Learning Instruction-Following Policies through Open-Ended Instruction Relabeling with Large Language Models

Authors:Zhicheng Zhang, Ziyan Wang, Yali Du, Fei Fang
Date:2025-06-24 23:49:28

Developing effective instruction-following policies in reinforcement learning remains challenging due to the reliance on extensive human-labeled instruction datasets and the difficulty of learning from sparse rewards. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that leverages the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to automatically generate open-ended instructions retrospectively from previously collected agent trajectories. Our core idea is to employ LLMs to relabel unsuccessful trajectories by identifying meaningful subtasks the agent has implicitly accomplished, thereby enriching the agent's training data and substantially alleviating reliance on human annotations. Through this open-ended instruction relabeling, we efficiently learn a unified instruction-following policy capable of handling diverse tasks within a single policy. We empirically evaluate our proposed method in the challenging Craftax environment, demonstrating clear improvements in sample efficiency, instruction coverage, and overall policy performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Our results highlight the effectiveness of utilizing LLM-guided open-ended instruction relabeling to enhance instruction-following reinforcement learning.

QHackBench: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Quantum Code Generation Using PennyLane Hackathon Challenges

Authors:Abdul Basit, Minghao Shao, Haider Asif, Nouhaila Innan, Muhammad Kashif, Alberto Marchisio, Muhammad Shafique
Date:2025-06-24 20:54:56

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong potential in code generation, yet their effectiveness in quantum computing remains underexplored. This paper benchmarks LLMs for PennyLane-based quantum code generation using real-world challenges from the Quantum Hackathon (QHack). We introduce QHackBench, a novel benchmark dataset derived from QHack competitions, and evaluate model performance under vanilla prompting and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Our structured evaluation framework assesses functional correctness, syntactic validity, and execution success across varying challenge difficulties. Results indicate that RAG-enhanced models, supplemented with an augmented PennyLane dataset, approximately generate similar results as the standard prompting, particularly in complex quantum algorithms. Additionally, we introduce a multi-agent evaluation pipeline that iteratively refines incorrect solutions, further enhancing execution success rates. To foster further research, we commit to publicly releasing QHackBench, along with our evaluation framework and experimental results, enabling continued advancements in AI-assisted quantum programming.

Prover Agent: An Agent-based Framework for Formal Mathematical Proofs

Authors:Kaito Baba, Chaoran Liu, Shuhei Kurita, Akiyoshi Sannai
Date:2025-06-24 18:01:52

We present Prover Agent, a novel AI agent for automated theorem proving that integrates large language models (LLMs) with a formal proof assistant, Lean. Prover Agent coordinates an informal reasoning LLM, a formal prover model, and feedback from Lean while also generating auxiliary lemmas to assist in discovering the overall proof strategy. It achieves an 86.1% success rate on the MiniF2F benchmark, establishing a new state-of-the-art among methods using small language models (SLMs) with a much lower sample budget than previous approaches. We also present case studies illustrating how these generated lemmas contribute to solving challenging problems.