In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in various artificial intelligence problems. However, they fail to plan reliably, even when prompted with a detailed definition of the planning task. Attempts to improve their planning capabilities, such as chain-of-thought prompting, fine-tuning, and explicit "reasoning" still yield incorrect plans and usually fail to generalize to larger tasks. In this paper, we show how to use LLMs to generate correct plans, even for out-of-distribution tasks of increasing size. For a given planning domain, we ask an LLM to generate several domain-dependent heuristic functions in the form of Python code, evaluate them on a set of training tasks within a greedy best-first search, and choose the strongest one. The resulting LLM-generated heuristics solve many more unseen test tasks than state-of-the-art domain-independent heuristics for classical planning. They are even competitive with the strongest learning algorithm for domain-dependent planning. These findings are especially remarkable given that our proof-of-concept implementation is based on an unoptimized Python planner and the baselines all build upon highly optimized C++ code. In some domains, the LLM-generated heuristics expand fewer states than the baselines, revealing that they are not only efficiently computable, but sometimes even more informative than the state-of-the-art heuristics. Overall, our results show that sampling a set of planning heuristic function programs can significantly improve the planning capabilities of LLMs.
In language-guided visual navigation, agents locate target objects in unseen environments using natural language instructions. For reliable navigation in unfamiliar scenes, agents must possess strong perception, planning, and prediction capabilities. Additionally, when agents revisit previously explored areas during long-term navigation, they may retain irrelevant and redundant historical perceptions, leading to suboptimal results. In this work, we introduce \textbf{P3Nav}, a unified framework that integrates \textbf{P}erception, \textbf{P}lanning, and \textbf{P}rediction capabilities through \textbf{Multitask Collaboration} on navigation and embodied question answering (EQA) tasks, thereby enhancing navigation performance. Furthermore, P3Nav employs an \textbf{Adaptive 3D-aware History Sampling} strategy to effectively and efficiently utilize historical observations. By leveraging the large language models (LLM), P3Nav comprehends diverse commands and complex visual scenes, resulting in appropriate navigation actions. P3Nav achieves a 75\% success rate in object goal navigation on the $\mathrm{CHORES}$-$\mathbb{S}$ benchmark, setting a new state-of-the-art performance.
In robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery, we introduce the Surgical Action Planning (SAP) task, which generates future action plans from visual inputs to address the absence of intraoperative predictive planning in current intelligent applications. SAP shows great potential for enhancing intraoperative guidance and automating procedures. However, it faces challenges such as understanding instrument-action relationships and tracking surgical progress. Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise in understanding surgical video content but remain underexplored for predictive decision-making in SAP, as they focus mainly on retrospective analysis. Challenges like data privacy, computational demands, and modality-specific constraints further highlight significant research gaps. To tackle these challenges, we introduce LLM-SAP, a Large Language Models-based Surgical Action Planning framework that predicts future actions and generates text responses by interpreting natural language prompts of surgical goals. The text responses potentially support surgical education, intraoperative decision-making, procedure documentation, and skill analysis. LLM-SAP integrates two novel modules: the Near-History Focus Memory Module (NHF-MM) for modeling historical states and the prompts factory for action planning. We evaluate LLM-SAP on our constructed CholecT50-SAP dataset using models like Qwen2.5 and Qwen2-VL, demonstrating its effectiveness in next-action prediction. Pre-trained LLMs are tested zero-shot, and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with LoRA is implemented to address data privacy concerns. Our experiments show that Qwen2.5-72B-SFT surpasses Qwen2.5-72B with a 19.3% higher accuracy.
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a pivotal technique in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in enhancing the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by enabling access to external, reliable, and up-to-date knowledge sources. In the context of AI-Generated Content (AIGC), RAG has proven invaluable by augmenting model outputs with supplementary, relevant information, thus improving their quality. Recently, the potential of RAG has extended beyond natural language processing, with emerging methods integrating retrieval-augmented strategies into the computer vision (CV) domain. These approaches aim to address the limitations of relying solely on internal model knowledge by incorporating authoritative external knowledge bases, thereby improving both the understanding and generation capabilities of vision models. This survey provides a comprehensive review of the current state of retrieval-augmented techniques in CV, focusing on two main areas: (I) visual understanding and (II) visual generation. In the realm of visual understanding, we systematically review tasks ranging from basic image recognition to complex applications such as medical report generation and multimodal question answering. For visual content generation, we examine the application of RAG in tasks related to image, video, and 3D generation. Furthermore, we explore recent advancements in RAG for embodied AI, with a particular focus on applications in planning, task execution, multimodal perception, interaction, and specialized domains. Given that the integration of retrieval-augmented techniques in CV is still in its early stages, we also highlight the key limitations of current approaches and propose future research directions to drive the development of this promising area.
Despite recent success in applying large language models (LLMs) to electronic health records (EHR), most systems focus primarily on assessment rather than treatment planning. We identify three critical limitations in current approaches: they generate treatment plans in a single pass rather than following the sequential reasoning process used by clinicians; they rarely incorporate patient-specific historical context; and they fail to effectively distinguish between subjective and objective clinical information. Motivated by the SOAP methodology (Subjective, Objective, Assessment, Plan), we introduce MedPlan, a novel framework that structures LLM reasoning to align with real-life clinician workflows. Our approach employs a two-stage architecture that first generates a clinical assessment based on patient symptoms and objective data, then formulates a structured treatment plan informed by this assessment and enriched with patient-specific information through retrieval-augmented generation. Comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that our method significantly outperforms baseline approaches in both assessment accuracy and treatment plan quality.
For AI agents to emulate human behavior, they must be able to perceive, meaningfully interpret, store, and use large amounts of information about the world, themselves, and other agents. Metacognition is a necessary component of all of these processes. In this paper, we briefly a) introduce content-centric computational cognitive (C4) modeling for next-generation AI agents; b) review the long history of developing C4 agents at RPI's LEIA (Language-Endowed Intelligent Agents) Lab; c) discuss our current work on extending LEIAs' cognitive capabilities to cognitive robotic applications developed using a neuro symbolic processing model; and d) sketch plans for future developments in this paradigm that aim to overcome underappreciated limitations of currently popular, LLM-driven methods in AI.
Additive manufacturing (AM) has transformed the production landscape by enabling the precision creation of complex geometries. However, AM faces limitations when applied to challenging environments, such as elevated surfaces and remote locations. Aerial additive manufacturing, facilitated by drones, presents a solution to these challenges. However, despite advances in methods for the planning, control, and localization of drones, the accuracy of these methods is insufficient to run traditional feedforward extrusion-based additive manufacturing processes (such as Fused Deposition Manufacturing). Recently, the emergence of LLMs has revolutionized various fields by introducing advanced semantic reasoning and real-time planning capabilities. This paper proposes the integration of LLMs with aerial additive manufacturing to assist with the planning and execution of construction tasks, granting greater flexibility and enabling a feed-back based design and construction system. Using the semantic understanding and adaptability of LLMs, we can overcome the limitations of drone based systems by dynamically generating and adapting building plans on site, ensuring efficient and accurate construction even in constrained environments. Our system is able to design and build structures given only a semantic prompt and has shown success in understanding the spatial environment despite tight planning constraints. Our method's feedback system enables replanning using the LLM if the manufacturing process encounters unforeseen errors, without requiring complicated heuristics or evaluation functions. Combining the semantic planning with automatic error correction, our system achieved a 90% build accuracy, converting simple text prompts to build structures.
Radiotherapy treatment planning is a complex and time-intensive process, often impacted by inter-planner variability and subjective decision-making. To address these challenges, we introduce Dose Optimization Language Agent (DOLA), an autonomous large language model (LLM)-based agent designed for optimizing radiotherapy treatment plans while rigorously protecting patient privacy. DOLA integrates the LLaMa3.1 LLM directly with a commercial treatment planning system, utilizing chain-of-thought prompting, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and reinforcement learning (RL). Operating entirely within secure local infrastructure, this agent eliminates external data sharing. We evaluated DOLA using a retrospective cohort of 18 prostate cancer patients prescribed 60 Gy in 20 fractions, comparing model sizes (8 billion vs. 70 billion parameters) and optimization strategies (No-RAG, RAG, and RAG+RL) over 10 planning iterations. The 70B model demonstrated significantly improved performance, achieving approximately 16.4% higher final scores than the 8B model. The RAG approach outperformed the No-RAG baseline by 19.8%, and incorporating RL accelerated convergence, highlighting the synergy of retrieval-based memory and reinforcement learning. Optimal temperature hyperparameter analysis identified 0.4 as providing the best balance between exploration and exploitation. This proof of concept study represents the first successful deployment of locally hosted LLM agents for autonomous optimization of treatment plans within a commercial radiotherapy planning system. By extending human-machine interaction through interpretable natural language reasoning, DOLA offers a scalable and privacy-conscious framework, with significant potential for clinical implementation and workflow improvement.
Bimanual robotic manipulation provides significant versatility, but also presents an inherent challenge due to the complexity involved in the spatial and temporal coordination between two hands. Existing works predominantly focus on attaining human-level manipulation skills for robotic hands, yet little attention has been paid to task planning on long-horizon timescales. With their outstanding in-context learning and zero-shot generation abilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been applied and grounded in diverse robotic embodiments to facilitate task planning. However, LLMs still suffer from errors in long-horizon reasoning and from hallucinations in complex robotic tasks, lacking a guarantee of logical correctness when generating the plan. Previous works, such as LLM+P, extended LLMs with symbolic planners. However, none have been successfully applied to bimanual robots. New challenges inevitably arise in bimanual manipulation, necessitating not only effective task decomposition but also efficient task allocation. To address these challenges, this paper introduces LLM+MAP, a bimanual planning framework that integrates LLM reasoning and multi-agent planning, automating effective and efficient bimanual task planning. We conduct simulated experiments on various long-horizon manipulation tasks of differing complexity. Our method is built using GPT-4o as the backend, and we compare its performance against plans generated directly by LLMs, including GPT-4o, V3 and also recent strong reasoning models o1 and R1. By analyzing metrics such as planning time, success rate, group debits, and planning-step reduction rate, we demonstrate the superior performance of LLM+MAP, while also providing insights into robotic reasoning. Code is available at https://github.com/Kchu/LLM-MAP.
As large language models (LLMs) have shown great success in many tasks, they are used in various applications. While a lot of works have focused on the efficiency of single-LLM application (e.g., offloading, request scheduling, parallelism strategy selection), multi-LLM applications receive less attention, particularly in offline inference scenarios. In this work, we aim to improve the offline end-to-end inference efficiency of multi-LLM applications in the single-node multi-GPU environment. The problem involves two key decisions: (1) determining which LLMs to run concurrently each time (we may not run all the models at the same time), and (2) selecting a parallelism strategy to use for each LLM. This problem is NP-hard. Naive solutions may not work well because the running time for a model to complete a set of requests depends on the request workload and the selected parallelism strategy, and they lack an accurate model of the running time. As the LLM output lengths are unknown before running, to estimate the model running time, we propose a sampling-then-simulation method which first estimates the output lengths by sampling from an empirical cumulative function we obtained from a large dataset in advance, and then simulates the LLM inference process accordingly. Based on the simulation, we estimate the per-iteration latencys to get the total latency. A greedy method is proposed to optimize the scheduling of the LLMs in the application across the GPUs. We then propose a framework SamuLLM which contains two phases: planning, which calls the greedy method for an application and running, which runs the application and dynamically adjust the model scheduling based on the runtime information. Experiments on 3 applications and a mixed application show that SamuLLM can achieve 1.0-2.4$\times$ end-to-end speedups compared to the competitors.
Large Language Models $($LLMs$)$ solve complex problems using training-free methods like prompt engineering and in-context learning, yet ensuring reasoning correctness remains challenging. While self-correction methods such as self-consistency and self-refinement aim to improve reliability, they often reinforce biases due to the lack of effective feedback mechanisms. Multi-Agent Debate $($MAD$)$ has emerged as an alternative, but we identify two key limitations: bias reinforcement, where debate amplifies model biases instead of correcting them, and lack of perspective diversity, as all agents share the same model and reasoning patterns, limiting true debate effectiveness. To systematically evaluate these issues, we introduce $\textit{MetaNIM Arena}$, a benchmark designed to assess LLMs in adversarial strategic decision-making, where dynamic interactions influence optimal decisions. To overcome MAD's limitations, we propose $\textbf{DReaMAD}$ $($$\textbf{D}$iverse $\textbf{Rea}$soning via $\textbf{M}$ulti-$\textbf{A}$gent $\textbf{D}$ebate with Refined Prompt$)$, a novel framework that $(1)$ refines LLM's strategic prior knowledge to improve reasoning quality and $(2)$ promotes diverse viewpoints within a single model by systematically modifying prompts, reducing bias. Empirical results show that $\textbf{DReaMAD}$ significantly improves decision accuracy, reasoning diversity, and bias mitigation across multiple strategic tasks, establishing it as a more effective approach for LLM-based decision-making.
We introduce an open-ended test grounded in algorithmic probability that can avoid benchmark contamination in the quantitative evaluation of frontier models in the context of their Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Superintelligence (ASI) claims. Unlike other tests, this test does not rely on statistical compression methods (such as GZIP or LZW), which are more closely related to Shannon entropy than to Kolmogorov complexity. The test challenges aspects related to features of intelligence of fundamental nature such as synthesis and model creation in the context of inverse problems (generating new knowledge from observation). We argue that metrics based on model abstraction and optimal Bayesian inference for planning can provide a robust framework for testing intelligence, including natural intelligence (human and animal), narrow AI, AGI, and ASI. Our results show no clear evidence of LLM convergence towards a defined level of intelligence, particularly AGI or ASI. We found that LLM model versions tend to be fragile and incremental, as new versions may perform worse than older ones, with progress largely driven by the size of training data. The results were compared with a hybrid neurosymbolic approach that theoretically guarantees model convergence from optimal inference based on the principles of algorithmic probability and Kolmogorov complexity. The method outperforms LLMs in a proof-of-concept on short binary sequences. Our findings confirm suspicions regarding the fundamental limitations of LLMs, exposing them as systems optimised for the perception of mastery over human language. Progress among different LLM versions from the same developers was found to be inconsistent and limited, particularly in the absence of a solid symbolic counterpart.
Recent breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to the emergence of agentic AI systems that extend beyond the capabilities of standalone models. By empowering LLMs to perceive external environments, integrate multimodal information, and interact with various tools, these agentic systems exhibit greater autonomy and adaptability across complex tasks. This evolution brings new opportunities to recommender systems (RS): LLM-based Agentic RS (LLM-ARS) can offer more interactive, context-aware, and proactive recommendations, potentially reshaping the user experience and broadening the application scope of RS. Despite promising early results, fundamental challenges remain, including how to effectively incorporate external knowledge, balance autonomy with controllability, and evaluate performance in dynamic, multimodal settings. In this perspective paper, we first present a systematic analysis of LLM-ARS: (1) clarifying core concepts and architectures; (2) highlighting how agentic capabilities -- such as planning, memory, and multimodal reasoning -- can enhance recommendation quality; and (3) outlining key research questions in areas such as safety, efficiency, and lifelong personalization. We also discuss open problems and future directions, arguing that LLM-ARS will drive the next wave of RS innovation. Ultimately, we foresee a paradigm shift toward intelligent, autonomous, and collaborative recommendation experiences that more closely align with users' evolving needs and complex decision-making processes.
The emergence of LLM-based agents represents a paradigm shift in AI, enabling autonomous systems to plan, reason, use tools, and maintain memory while interacting with dynamic environments. This paper provides the first comprehensive survey of evaluation methodologies for these increasingly capable agents. We systematically analyze evaluation benchmarks and frameworks across four critical dimensions: (1) fundamental agent capabilities, including planning, tool use, self-reflection, and memory; (2) application-specific benchmarks for web, software engineering, scientific, and conversational agents; (3) benchmarks for generalist agents; and (4) frameworks for evaluating agents. Our analysis reveals emerging trends, including a shift toward more realistic, challenging evaluations with continuously updated benchmarks. We also identify critical gaps that future research must address-particularly in assessing cost-efficiency, safety, and robustness, and in developing fine-grained, and scalable evaluation methods. This survey maps the rapidly evolving landscape of agent evaluation, reveals the emerging trends in the field, identifies current limitations, and proposes directions for future research.
Large language models (LLMs) have recently transformed from text-based assistants to autonomous agents capable of planning, reasoning, and iteratively improving their actions. While numerical reward signals and verifiers can effectively rank candidate actions, they often provide limited contextual guidance. In contrast, natural language feedback better aligns with the generative capabilities of LLMs, providing richer and more actionable suggestions. However, parsing and implementing this feedback effectively can be challenging for LLM-based agents. In this work, we introduce Critique-Guided Improvement (CGI), a novel two-player framework, comprising an actor model that explores an environment and a critic model that generates detailed nature language feedback. By training the critic to produce fine-grained assessments and actionable revisions, and the actor to utilize these critiques, our approach promotes more robust exploration of alternative strategies while avoiding local optima. Experiments in three interactive environments show that CGI outperforms existing baselines by a substantial margin. Notably, even a small critic model surpasses GPT-4 in feedback quality. The resulting actor achieves state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating the power of explicit iterative guidance to enhance decision-making in LLM-based agents.
In autonomous driving, open-ended question answering often suffers from unreliable evaluations because freeform responses require either complex metrics or subjective human judgment. To address this challenge, we introduce AutoDrive-QA, an automatic pipeline that converts existing driving QA datasets (including DriveLM, NuScenes-QA, and LingoQA) into a structured multiple-choice question (MCQ) format. This benchmark systematically assesses perception, prediction, and planning tasks, providing a standardized and objective evaluation framework. AutoDrive-QA employs an automated pipeline that leverages large language models (LLMs) to generate high-quality, contextually relevant distractors based on domain-specific error patterns commonly found in autonomous driving scenarios. To evaluate both general capabilities and generalization performance, we test the benchmark on three public datasets and conduct zero-shot experiments on an unseen dataset. The zero-shot evaluations reveal that GPT-4V leads with 69.57% accuracy -- achieving 74.94% in Perception, 65.33% in Prediction, and 68.45% in Planning -- demonstrating that while all models excel in Perception, they struggle in Prediction. Consequently, AutoDrive-QA establishes a rigorous, unbiased standard for integrating and evaluating different vision-language models across various autonomous driving datasets, thereby improving generalization in this field. We release all the codes in the AutoDrive-QA GitHub Repository.
The integration of large language models (LLMs) into robotic task planning has unlocked better reasoning capabilities for complex, long-horizon workflows. However, ensuring safety in LLM-driven plans remains a critical challenge, as these models often prioritize task completion over risk mitigation. This paper introduces SAFER (Safety-Aware Framework for Execution in Robotics), a multi-LLM framework designed to embed safety awareness into robotic task planning. SAFER employs a Safety Agent that operates alongside the primary task planner, providing safety feedback. Additionally, we introduce LLM-as-a-Judge, a novel metric leveraging LLMs as evaluators to quantify safety violations within generated task plans. Our framework integrates safety feedback at multiple stages of execution, enabling real-time risk assessment, proactive error correction, and transparent safety evaluation. We also integrate a control framework using Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) to ensure safety guarantees within SAFER's task planning. We evaluated SAFER against state-of-the-art LLM planners on complex long-horizon tasks involving heterogeneous robotic agents, demonstrating its effectiveness in reducing safety violations while maintaining task efficiency. We also verify the task planner and safety planner through actual hardware experiments involving multiple robots and a human.
Autonomous driving has entered the testing phase, but due to the limited decision-making capabilities of individual vehicle algorithms, safety and efficiency issues have become more apparent in complex scenarios. With the advancement of connected communication technologies, autonomous vehicles equipped with connectivity can leverage vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications, offering a potential solution to the decision-making challenges from individual vehicle's perspective. We propose a multi-level vehicle-infrastructure cooperative decision-making framework for complex conflict scenarios at unsignalized intersections. First, based on vehicle states, we define a method for quantifying vehicle impacts and their propagation relationships, using accumulated impact to group vehicles through motif-based graph clustering. Next, within and between vehicle groups, a pass order negotiation process based on Large Language Models (LLM) is employed to determine the vehicle passage order, resulting in planned vehicle actions. Simulation results from ablation experiments show that our approach reduces negotiation complexity and ensures safer, more efficient vehicle passage at intersections, aligning with natural decision-making logic.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable text generation capabilities, and recent advances in training paradigms have led to breakthroughs in their reasoning performance. In this work, we investigate how the reasoning effort of such models scales with problem complexity. We use the infinitely scalable Tents puzzle, which has a known linear-time solution, to analyze this scaling behavior. Our results show that reasoning effort scales with problem size, but only up to a critical problem complexity. Beyond this threshold, the reasoning effort does not continue to increase, and may even decrease. This observation highlights a critical limitation in the logical coherence of current LLMs as problem complexity increases, and underscores the need for strategies to improve reasoning scalability. Furthermore, our results reveal significant performance differences between current state-of-the-art reasoning models when faced with increasingly complex logical puzzles.
While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at reasoning on text and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are highly effective for visual perception, applying those models for visual instruction-based planning remains a widely open problem. In this paper, we introduce VIPER, a novel framework for multimodal instruction-based planning that integrates VLM-based perception with LLM-based reasoning. Our approach uses a modular pipeline where a frozen VLM generates textual descriptions of image observations, which are then processed by an LLM policy to predict actions based on the task goal. We fine-tune the reasoning module using behavioral cloning and reinforcement learning, improving our agent's decision-making capabilities. Experiments on the ALFWorld benchmark show that VIPER significantly outperforms state-of-the-art visual instruction-based planners while narrowing the gap with purely text-based oracles. By leveraging text as an intermediate representation, VIPER also enhances explainability, paving the way for a fine-grained analysis of perception and reasoning components.
This paper addresses the high demand in advanced intelligent robot navigation for a more holistic understanding of spatial environments, by introducing a novel system that harnesses the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to construct hierarchical 3D Scene Graphs (3DSGs) for indoor scenarios. The proposed framework constructs 3DSGs consisting of a fundamental layer with rich metric-semantic information, an object layer featuring precise point-cloud representation of object nodes as well as visual descriptors, and higher layers of room, floor, and building nodes. Thanks to the innovative application of LLMs, not only object nodes but also nodes of higher layers, e.g., room nodes, are annotated in an intelligent and accurate manner. A polling mechanism for room classification using LLMs is proposed to enhance the accuracy and reliability of the room node annotation. Thorough numerical experiments demonstrate the system's ability to integrate semantic descriptions with geometric data, creating an accurate and comprehensive representation of the environment instrumental for context-aware navigation and task planning.
Mixed-precision computing, a widely applied technique in AI, offers a larger trade-off space between accuracy and efficiency. The recent purposed Mixed-Precision Over-the-Air Federated Learning (MP-OTA-FL) enables clients to operate at appropriate precision levels based on their heterogeneous hardware, taking advantages of the larger trade-off space while covering the quantization overheads in the mixed-precision modulation scheme for the OTA aggregation process. A key to further exploring the potential of the MP-OTA-FL framework is the optimization of client precision levels. The choice of precision level hinges on multifaceted factors including hardware capability, potential client contribution, and user satisfaction, among which factors can be difficult to define or quantify. In this paper, we propose a RAG-based User Profiling for precision planning framework that integrates retrieval-augmented LLMs and dynamic client profiling to optimize satisfaction and contributions. This includes a hybrid interface for gathering device/user insights and an RAG database storing historical quantization decisions with feedback. Experiments show that our method boosts satisfaction, energy savings, and global model accuracy in MP-OTA-FL systems.
A Barrier-Free GeoQA Portal: Enhancing Geospatial Data Accessibility with a Multi-Agent LLM Framework Geoportals are vital for accessing and analyzing geospatial data, promoting open spatial data sharing and online geo-information management. Designed with GIS-like interaction and layered visualization, they often challenge non-expert users with complex functionalities and overlapping layers that obscure spatial relationships. We propose a GeoQA Portal using a multi-agent Large Language Model framework for seamless natural language interaction with geospatial data. Complex queries are broken into subtasks handled by specialized agents, retrieving relevant geographic data efficiently. Task plans are shown to users, boosting transparency. The portal supports default and custom data inputs for flexibility. Semantic search via word vector similarity aids data retrieval despite imperfect terms. Case studies, evaluations, and user tests confirm its effectiveness for non-experts, bridging GIS complexity and public access, and offering an intuitive solution for future geoportals.
Planning a trip into a potentially unsafe area is a difficult task. We conducted a formative study on travelers' information needs, finding that most of them turn to search engines for trip planning. Search engines, however, fail to provide easily interpretable results adapted to the context and personal information needs of a traveler. Large language models (LLMs) create new possibilities for providing personalized travel safety advice. To explore this idea, we developed DangerMaps, a mapping system that assists its users in researching the safety of an urban travel destination, whether it is pre-travel or on-location. DangerMaps plots safety ratings onto a map and provides explanations on demand. This late breaking work specifically emphasizes the challenges of designing real-world applications with large language models. We provide a detailed description of our approach to prompt design and highlight future areas of research.
Compression is at the heart of intelligence. A theoretically optimal way to compress any sequence of data is to find the shortest program that outputs that sequence and then halts. However, such 'Kolmogorov compression' is uncomputable, and code generating LLMs struggle to approximate this theoretical ideal, as it requires reasoning, planning and search capabilities beyond those of current models. In this work, we introduce the KoLMogorov-Test (KT), a compression-as-intelligence test for code generating LLMs. In KT a model is presented with a sequence of data at inference time, and asked to generate the shortest program that produces the sequence. We identify several benefits of KT for both evaluation and training: an essentially infinite number of problem instances of varying difficulty is readily available, strong baselines already exist, the evaluation metric (compression) cannot be gamed, and pretraining data contamination is highly unlikely. To evaluate current models, we use audio, text, and DNA data, as well as sequences produced by random synthetic programs. Current flagship models perform poorly - both GPT4-o and Llama-3.1-405B struggle on our natural and synthetic sequences. On our synthetic distribution, we are able to train code generation models with lower compression rates than previous approaches. Moreover, we show that gains on synthetic data generalize poorly to real data, suggesting that new innovations are necessary for additional gains on KT.
The aspiration of the Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) task has long been to develop an embodied agent with robust adaptability, capable of seamlessly transferring its navigation capabilities across various tasks. Despite remarkable advancements in recent years, most methods necessitate dataset-specific training, thereby lacking the capability to generalize across diverse datasets encompassing distinct types of instructions. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional reasoning and generalization abilities, exhibiting immense potential in robot action planning. In this paper, we propose FlexVLN, an innovative hierarchical approach to VLN that integrates the fundamental navigation ability of a supervised-learning-based Instruction Follower with the robust generalization ability of the LLM Planner, enabling effective generalization across diverse VLN datasets. Moreover, a verification mechanism and a multi-model integration mechanism are proposed to mitigate potential hallucinations by the LLM Planner and enhance execution accuracy of the Instruction Follower. We take REVERIE, SOON, and CVDN-target as out-of-domain datasets for assessing generalization ability. The generalization performance of FlexVLN surpasses that of all the previous methods to a large extent.
With the increasing prevalence of online learning, adapting education to diverse learner needs remains a persistent challenge. Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly large language models (LLMs), promise powerful tools and capabilities to enhance personalized learning in online educational environments. In this work, we explore how LLMs can improve personalized learning experiences by catering to individual user needs toward enhancing the overall quality of online education. We designed personalization guidelines based on the growing literature on personalized learning to ground LLMs in generating tailored learning plans. To operationalize these guidelines, we implemented LearnMate, an LLM-based system that generates personalized learning plans and provides users with real-time learning support. We discuss the implications and future directions of this work, aiming to move beyond the traditional one-size-fits-all approach by integrating LLM-based personalized support into online learning environments.
As requirements drift with rapid iterations, agile development becomes the dominant paradigm. Goal-driven Requirements Elicitation (RE) is a pivotal yet challenging task in agile project development due to its heavy tangling with adaptive planning and efficient collaboration. Recently, AI agents have shown promising ability in supporting requirements analysis by saving significant time and effort for stakeholders. However, current research mainly focuses on functional RE, and research works have not been reported bridging the long journey from goal to user stories. Moreover, considering the cost of LLM facilities and the need for data and idea protection, privately hosted small-sized LLM should be further utilized in RE. To address these challenges, we propose Goal2Story, a multi-agent fleet that adopts the Impact Mapping (IM) framework while merely using cost-effective sLLMs for goal-driven RE. Moreover, we introduce a StorySeek dataset that contains over 1,000 user stories (USs) with corresponding goals and project context information, as well as the semi-automatic dataset construction method. For evaluation, we proposed two metrics: Factuality Hit Rate (FHR) to measure consistency between the generated USs with the dataset and Quality And Consistency Evaluation (QuACE) to evaluate the quality of the generated USs. Experimental results demonstrate that Goal2Story outperforms the baseline performance of the Super-Agent adopting powerful LLMs, while also showcasing the performance improvements in key metrics brought by CoT and Agent Profile to Goal2Story, as well as its exploration in identifying latent needs.
We introduce a novel large language model (LLM)-driven agent framework, which iteratively refines queries and filters contextual evidence by leveraging dynamically evolving knowledge. A defining feature of the system is its decoupling of external sources from an internal knowledge cache that is progressively updated to guide both query generation and evidence selection. This design mitigates bias-reinforcement loops and enables dynamic, trackable search exploration paths, thereby optimizing the trade-off between exploring diverse information and maintaining accuracy through autonomous agent decision-making. Our approach is evaluated on a broad range of open-domain question answering benchmarks, including multi-step tasks that mirror real-world scenarios where integrating information from multiple sources is critical, especially given the vulnerabilities of LLMs that lack explicit reasoning or planning capabilities. The results show that the proposed system not only outperforms single-step baselines regardless of task difficulty but also, compared to conventional iterative retrieval methods, demonstrates pronounced advantages in complex tasks through precise evidence-based reasoning and enhanced efficiency. The proposed system supports both competitive and collaborative sharing of updated context, enabling multi-agent extension. The benefits of multi-agent configurations become especially prominent as task difficulty increases. The number of convergence steps scales with task difficulty, suggesting cost-effective scalability.
Relational database-driven data analysis (RDB-DA) report generation, which aims to generate data analysis reports after querying relational databases, has been widely applied in fields such as finance and healthcare. Typically, these tasks are manually completed by data scientists, making the process very labor-intensive and showing a clear need for automation. Although existing methods (e.g., Table QA or Text-to-SQL) have been proposed to reduce human dependency, they cannot handle complex analytical tasks that require multi-step reasoning, cross-table associations, and synthesizing insights into reports. Moreover, there is no dataset available for developing automatic RDB-DA report generation. To fill this gap, this paper proposes an LLM agent system for RDB-DA report generation tasks, dubbed DAgent; moreover, we construct a benchmark for automatic data analysis report generation, which includes a new dataset DA-Dataset and evaluation metrics. DAgent integrates planning, tools, and memory modules to decompose natural language questions into logically independent sub-queries, accurately retrieve key information from relational databases, and generate analytical reports that meet the requirements of completeness, correctness, and conciseness through multi-step reasoning and effective data integration. Experimental analysis on the DA-Dataset demonstrates that DAgent's superiority in retrieval performance and analysis report generation quality, showcasing its strong potential for tackling complex database analysis report generation tasks.