This paper studies the limitations of (retrieval-augmented) large language models (LLMs) in generating diverse and comprehensive responses, and introduces the Plan-and-Refine (P&R) framework based on a two phase system design. In the global exploration phase, P&R generates a diverse set of plans for the given input, where each plan consists of a list of diverse query aspects with corresponding additional descriptions. This phase is followed by a local exploitation phase that generates a response proposal for the input query conditioned on each plan and iteratively refines the proposal for improving the proposal quality. Finally, a reward model is employed to select the proposal with the highest factuality and coverage. We conduct our experiments based on the ICAT evaluation methodology--a recent approach for answer factuality and comprehensiveness evaluation. Experiments on the two diverse information seeking benchmarks adopted from non-factoid question answering and TREC search result diversification tasks demonstrate that P&R significantly outperforms baselines, achieving up to a 13.1% improvement on the ANTIQUE dataset and a 15.41% improvement on the TREC dataset. Furthermore, a smaller scale user study confirms the substantial efficacy of the P&R framework.
Reinforcement learning (RL) agents have shown remarkable performances in various environments, where they can discover effective policies directly from sensory inputs. However, these agents often exploit spurious correlations in the training data, resulting in brittle behaviours that fail to generalize to new or slightly modified environments. To address this, we introduce the Causal Object-centric Model Extraction Tool (COMET), a novel algorithm designed to learn the exact interpretable causal world models (CWMs). COMET first extracts object-centric state descriptions from observations and identifies the environment's internal states related to the depicted objects' properties. Using symbolic regression, it models object-centric transitions and derives causal relationships governing object dynamics. COMET further incorporates large language models (LLMs) for semantic inference, annotating causal variables to enhance interpretability. By leveraging these capabilities, COMET constructs CWMs that align with the true causal structure of the environment, enabling agents to focus on task-relevant features. The extracted CWMs mitigate the danger of shortcuts, permitting the development of RL systems capable of better planning and decision-making across dynamic scenarios. Our results, validated in Atari environments such as Pong and Freeway, demonstrate the accuracy and robustness of COMET, highlighting its potential to bridge the gap between object-centric reasoning and causal inference in reinforcement learning.
Applications of generative Large Language Models LLMs are rapidly expanding across various domains, promising significant improvements in workflow efficiency and information retrieval. However, their implementation in specialized, high-stakes domains such as hazardous materials transportation is challenging due to accuracy and reliability concerns. This study evaluates the performance of three fine-tuned generative models, ChatGPT, Google's Vertex AI, and ORNL Retrieval Augmented Generation augmented LLaMA 2 and LLaMA in retrieving regulatory information essential for hazardous material transportation compliance in the United States. Utilizing approximately 40 publicly available federal and state regulatory documents, we developed 100 realistic queries relevant to route planning and permitting requirements. Responses were qualitatively rated based on accuracy, detail, and relevance, complemented by quantitative assessments of semantic similarity between model outputs. Results demonstrated that the RAG-augmented LLaMA models significantly outperformed Vertex AI and ChatGPT, providing more detailed and generally accurate information, despite occasional inconsistencies. This research introduces the first known application of RAG in transportation safety, emphasizing the need for domain-specific fine-tuning and rigorous evaluation methodologies to ensure reliability and minimize the risk of inaccuracies in high-stakes environments.
Agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated impressive capabilities in various tasks. Still, they face limitations in tasks requiring specific, structured knowledge, flexibility, or accountable decision-making. While agents are capable of perceiving their environments, forming inferences, planning, and executing actions towards goals, they often face issues such as hallucinations and lack of contextual memory across interactions. This paper explores how Case-Based Reasoning (CBR), a strategy that solves new problems by referencing past experiences, can be integrated into LLM agent frameworks. This integration allows LLMs to leverage explicit knowledge, enhancing their effectiveness. We systematically review the theoretical foundations of these enhanced agents, identify critical framework components, and formulate a mathematical model for the CBR processes of case retrieval, adaptation, and learning. We also evaluate CBR-enhanced agents against other methods like Chain-of-Thought reasoning and standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation, analyzing their relative strengths. Moreover, we explore how leveraging CBR's cognitive dimensions (including self-reflection, introspection, and curiosity) via goal-driven autonomy mechanisms can further enhance the LLM agent capabilities. Contributing to the ongoing research on neuro-symbolic hybrid systems, this work posits CBR as a viable technique for enhancing the reasoning skills and cognitive aspects of autonomous LLM agents.
The growing presence of service robots in human-centric environments, such as warehouses, demands seamless and intuitive human-robot collaboration. In this paper, we propose a collaborative shelf-picking framework that combines multimodal interaction, physics-based reasoning, and task division for enhanced human-robot teamwork. The framework enables the robot to recognize human pointing gestures, interpret verbal cues and voice commands, and communicate through visual and auditory feedback. Moreover, it is powered by a Large Language Model (LLM) which utilizes Chain of Thought (CoT) and a physics-based simulation engine for safely retrieving cluttered stacks of boxes on shelves, relationship graph for sub-task generation, extraction sequence planning and decision making. Furthermore, we validate the framework through real-world shelf picking experiments such as 1) Gesture-Guided Box Extraction, 2) Collaborative Shelf Clearing and 3) Collaborative Stability Assistance.
Exploration, the act of broadening user experiences beyond their established preferences, is challenging in large-scale recommendation systems due to feedback loops and limited signals on user exploration patterns. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer potential by leveraging their world knowledge to recommend novel content outside these loops. A key challenge is aligning LLMs with user preferences while preserving their knowledge and reasoning. While using LLMs to plan for the next novel user interest, this paper introduces a novel approach combining hierarchical planning with LLM inference-time scaling to improve recommendation relevancy without compromising novelty. We decouple novelty and user-alignment, training separate LLMs for each objective. We then scale up the novelty-focused LLM's inference and select the best-of-n predictions using the user-aligned LLM. Live experiments demonstrate efficacy, showing significant gains in both user satisfaction (measured by watch activity and active user counts) and exploration diversity.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced smart education in the Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) era. A promising application lies in the automatic generalization of instructional design for curriculum and learning activities, focusing on two key aspects: (1) Customized Generation: generating niche-targeted teaching content based on students' varying learning abilities and states, and (2) Intelligent Optimization: iteratively optimizing content based on feedback from learning effectiveness or test scores. Currently, a single large LLM cannot effectively manage the entire process, posing a challenge for designing intelligent teaching plans. To address these issues, we developed EduPlanner, an LLM-based multi-agent system comprising an evaluator agent, an optimizer agent, and a question analyst, working in adversarial collaboration to generate customized and intelligent instructional design for curriculum and learning activities. Taking mathematics lessons as our example, EduPlanner employs a novel Skill-Tree structure to accurately model the background mathematics knowledge of student groups, personalizing instructional design for curriculum and learning activities according to students' knowledge levels and learning abilities. Additionally, we introduce the CIDDP, an LLM-based five-dimensional evaluation module encompassing clarity, Integrity, Depth, Practicality, and Pertinence, to comprehensively assess mathematics lesson plan quality and bootstrap intelligent optimization. Experiments conducted on the GSM8K and Algebra datasets demonstrate that EduPlanner excels in evaluating and optimizing instructional design for curriculum and learning activities. Ablation studies further validate the significance and effectiveness of each component within the framework. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Zc0812/Edu_Planner
While many EDA tasks already involve graph-based data, existing LLMs in EDA primarily either represent graphs as sequential text, or simply ignore graph-structured data that might be beneficial like dataflow graphs of RTL code. Recent studies have found that LLM performance suffers when graphs are represented as sequential text, and using additional graph information significantly boosts performance. To address these challenges, we introduce BRIDGES, a framework designed to incorporate graph modality into LLMs for EDA tasks. BRIDGES integrates an automated data generation workflow, a solution that combines graph modality with LLM, and a comprehensive evaluation suite. First, we establish an LLM-driven workflow to generate RTL and netlist-level data, converting them into dataflow and netlist graphs with function descriptions. This workflow yields a large-scale dataset comprising over 500,000 graph instances and more than 1.5 billion tokens. Second, we propose a lightweight cross-modal projector that encodes graph representations into text-compatible prompts, enabling LLMs to effectively utilize graph data without architectural modifications. Experimental results demonstrate 2x to 10x improvements across multiple tasks compared to text-only baselines, including accuracy in design retrieval, type prediction and perplexity in function description, with negligible computational overhead (<1% model weights increase and <30% additional runtime overhead). Even without additional LLM finetuning, our results outperform text-only by a large margin. We plan to release BRIDGES, including the dataset, models, and training flow.
Meat reduction benefits human and planetary health, but social norms keep meat central in shared meals. To date, the development of communication strategies that promote meat reduction while minimizing social costs has required the costly involvement of human participants at each stage of the process. We present work in progress on simulating multi-round dialogues on meat reduction between Generative Agents based on large language models (LLMs). We measure our main outcome using established psychological questionnaires based on the Theory of Planned Behavior and additionally investigate Social Costs. We find evidence that our preliminary simulations produce outcomes that are (i) consistent with theoretical expectations; and (ii) valid when compared to data from previous studies with human participants. Generative agent-based models are a promising tool for identifying novel communication strategies on meat reduction-tailored to highly specific participant groups-to then be tested in subsequent studies with human participants.
Detecting biases in structured data is a complex and time-consuming task. Existing automated techniques are limited in diversity of data types and heavily reliant on human case-by-case handling, resulting in a lack of generalizability. Currently, large language model (LLM)-based agents have made significant progress in data science, but their ability to detect data biases is still insufficiently explored. To address this gap, we introduce the first end-to-end, multi-agent synergy framework, BIASINSPECTOR, designed for automatic bias detection in structured data based on specific user requirements. It first develops a multi-stage plan to analyze user-specified bias detection tasks and then implements it with a diverse and well-suited set of tools. It delivers detailed results that include explanations and visualizations. To address the lack of a standardized framework for evaluating the capability of LLM agents to detect biases in data, we further propose a comprehensive benchmark that includes multiple evaluation metrics and a large set of test cases. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves exceptional overall performance in structured data bias detection, setting a new milestone for fairer data applications.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise as robotic planners but often struggle with long-horizon and complex tasks, especially in specialized environments requiring external knowledge. While hierarchical planning and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) address some of these challenges, they remain insufficient on their own and a deeper integration is required for achieving more reliable systems. To this end, we propose a neuro-symbolic approach that enhances LLMs-based planners with Knowledge Graph-based RAG for hierarchical plan generation. This method decomposes complex tasks into manageable subtasks, further expanded into executable atomic action sequences. To ensure formal correctness and proper decomposition, we integrate a Symbolic Validator, which also functions as a failure detector by aligning expected and observed world states. Our evaluation against baseline methods demonstrates the consistent significant advantages of integrating hierarchical planning, symbolic verification, and RAG across tasks of varying complexity and different LLMs. Additionally, our experimental setup and novel metrics not only validate our approach for complex planning but also serve as a tool for assessing LLMs' reasoning and compositional capabilities.
Foundation models have demonstrated strong reasoning and generalization capabilities in driving-related tasks, including scene understanding, planning, and control. However, they still face challenges in hallucinations, uncertainty, and long inference latency. While existing foundation models have general knowledge of avoiding collisions, they often lack transportation-specific safety knowledge. To overcome these limitations, we introduce LetsPi, a physics-informed, dual-phase, knowledge-driven framework for safe, human-like trajectory planning. To prevent hallucinations and minimize uncertainty, this hybrid framework integrates Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning with physics-informed social force dynamics. LetsPi leverages the LLM to analyze driving scenes and historical information, providing appropriate parameters and target destinations (goals) for the social force model, which then generates the future trajectory. Moreover, the dual-phase architecture balances reasoning and computational efficiency through its Memory Collection phase and Fast Inference phase. The Memory Collection phase leverages the physics-informed LLM to process and refine planning results through reasoning, reflection, and memory modules, storing safe, high-quality driving experiences in a memory bank. Surrogate safety measures and physics-informed prompt techniques are introduced to enhance the LLM's knowledge of transportation safety and physical force, respectively. The Fast Inference phase extracts similar driving experiences as few-shot examples for new scenarios, while simplifying input-output requirements to enable rapid trajectory planning without compromising safety. Extensive experiments using the HighD dataset demonstrate that LetsPi outperforms baseline models across five safety metrics.See PDF for project Github link.
Long video understanding has emerged as an increasingly important yet challenging task in computer vision. Agent-based approaches are gaining popularity for processing long videos, as they can handle extended sequences and integrate various tools to capture fine-grained information. However, existing methods still face several challenges: (1) they often rely solely on the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) without dedicated mechanisms to enhance reasoning in long video scenarios; and (2) they remain vulnerable to errors or noise from external tools. To address these issues, we propose a specialized chain-of-thought (CoT) process tailored for long video analysis. Our proposed CoT with plan-adjust mode enables the LLM to incrementally plan and adapt its information-gathering strategy. We further incorporate heuristic uncertainty estimation of both the LLM and external tools to guide the CoT process. This allows the LLM to assess the reliability of newly collected information, refine its collection strategy, and make more robust decisions when synthesizing final answers. Empirical experiments show that our uncertainty-aware CoT effectively mitigates noise from external tools, leading to more reliable outputs. We implement our approach in a system called VideoAgent2, which also includes additional modules such as general context acquisition and specialized tool design. Evaluation on three dedicated long video benchmarks (and their subsets) demonstrates that VideoAgent2 outperforms the previous state-of-the-art agent-based method, VideoAgent, by an average of 13.1% and achieves leading performance among all zero-shot approaches
Driving scenario data play an increasingly vital role in the development of intelligent vehicles and autonomous driving. Accurate and efficient scenario data search is critical for both online vehicle decision-making and planning, and offline scenario generation and simulations, as it allows for leveraging the scenario experiences to improve the overall performance. Especially with the application of large language models (LLMs) and Retrieval-Augmented-Generation (RAG) systems in autonomous driving, urgent requirements are put forward. In this paper, we introduce the Driving-RAG framework to address the challenges of efficient scenario data embedding, search, and applications for RAG systems. Our embedding model aligns fundamental scenario information and scenario distance metrics in the vector space. The typical scenario sampling method combined with hierarchical navigable small world can perform efficient scenario vector search to achieve high efficiency without sacrificing accuracy. In addition, the reorganization mechanism by graph knowledge enhances the relevance to the prompt scenarios and augment LLM generation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework on typical trajectory planning task for complex interactive scenarios such as ramps and intersections, showcasing its advantages for RAG applications.
The advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have led to a growing interest in autonomous driving to leverage their strong reasoning capabilities. However, extending these capabilities from 2D to full 3D understanding is crucial for real-world applications. To address this challenge, we propose OmniDrive, a holistic vision-language dataset that aligns agent models with 3D driving tasks through counterfactual reasoning. This approach enhances decision-making by evaluating potential scenarios and their outcomes, similar to human drivers considering alternative actions. Our counterfactual-based synthetic data annotation process generates large-scale, high-quality datasets, providing denser supervision signals that bridge planning trajectories and language-based reasoning. Futher, we explore two advanced OmniDrive-Agent frameworks, namely Omni-L and Omni-Q, to assess the importance of vision-language alignment versus 3D perception, revealing critical insights into designing effective LLM-agents. Significant improvements on the DriveLM Q\&A benchmark and nuScenes open-loop planning demonstrate the effectiveness of our dataset and methods.
Recently, researchers have proposed many multi-agent frameworks for function-level code generation, which aim to improve software development productivity by automatically generating function-level source code based on task descriptions. A typical multi-agent framework consists of Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents that are responsible for task planning, code generation, testing, debugging, etc. Studies have shown that existing multi-agent code generation frameworks perform well on ChatGPT. However, their generalizability across other foundation LLMs remains unexplored systematically. In this paper, we report an empirical study on the generalizability of four state-of-the-art multi-agent code generation frameworks across six open-source LLMs with varying parameter sizes, architectures, and performance levels. Our study reveals the unstable generalizability of existing frameworks on diverse foundation LLMs. Based on the findings obtained from the empirical study, we propose AdaCoder, a novel adaptive planning, multi-agent framework for function-level code generation. AdaCoder has two phases. Phase-1 is an initial code generation step without planning, which uses an LLM-based coding agent and a script-based testing agent to unleash LLM's native power, identify cases beyond LLM's power, and determine the errors hindering execution. Phase-2 adds a rule-based debugging agent and an LLM-based planning agent for iterative code generation with planning. Our evaluation shows that AdaCoder achieves higher generalizability on diverse LLMs. Compared to the best baseline MapCoder, AdaCoder is on average 27.69% higher in Pass@1, 16 times faster in inference, and 12 times lower in token consumption.
Generating long, coherent text remains a challenge for large language models (LLMs), as they lack hierarchical planning and structured organization in discourse generation. We introduce Structural Alignment, a novel method that aligns LLMs with human-like discourse structures to enhance long-form text generation. By integrating linguistically grounded discourse frameworks into reinforcement learning, our approach guides models to produce coherent and well-organized outputs. We employ a dense reward scheme within a Proximal Policy Optimization framework, assigning fine-grained, token-level rewards based on the discourse distinctiveness relative to human writing. Two complementary reward models are evaluated: the first improves readability by scoring surface-level textual features to provide explicit structuring, while the second reinforces deeper coherence and rhetorical sophistication by analyzing global discourse patterns through hierarchical discourse motifs, outperforming both standard and RLHF-enhanced models in tasks such as essay generation and long-document summarization. All training data and code will be publicly shared at https://github.com/minnesotanlp/struct_align.
In the interaction between agents and their environments, agents expand their capabilities by planning and executing actions. However, LLM-based agents face substantial challenges when deployed in novel environments or required to navigate unconventional action spaces. To empower agents to autonomously explore environments, optimize workflows, and enhance their understanding of actions, we propose SynWorld, a framework that allows agents to synthesize possible scenarios with multi-step action invocation within the action space and perform Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) exploration to effectively refine their action knowledge in the current environment. Our experiments demonstrate that SynWorld is an effective and general approach to learning action knowledge in new environments. Code is available at https://github.com/zjunlp/SynWorld.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved considerable performance across various agentic planning tasks. However, traditional agent planning approaches adopt a "flood irrigation" methodology that indiscriminately injects gold trajectories, external feedback, and domain knowledge into agent models. This practice overlooks the fundamental human cognitive principle of situational self-awareness during decision-making-the ability to dynamically assess situational demands and strategically employ resources during decision-making. We propose agentic knowledgeable self-awareness to address this gap, a novel paradigm enabling LLM-based agents to autonomously regulate knowledge utilization. Specifically, we propose KnowSelf, a data-centric approach that applies agents with knowledgeable self-awareness like humans. Concretely, we devise a heuristic situation judgement criterion to mark special tokens on the agent's self-explored trajectories for collecting training data. Through a two-stage training process, the agent model can switch between different situations by generating specific special tokens, achieving optimal planning effects with minimal costs. Our experiments demonstrate that KnowSelf can outperform various strong baselines on different tasks and models with minimal use of external knowledge. Code is available at https://github.com/zjunlp/KnowSelf.
Large Language Models (LLMs) equipped with web search capabilities have demonstrated impressive potential for deep research tasks. However, current approaches predominantly rely on either manually engineered prompts (prompt engineering-based) with brittle performance or reinforcement learning within controlled Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) environments (RAG-based) that fail to capture the complexities of real-world interaction. In this paper, we introduce DeepResearcher, the first comprehensive framework for end-to-end training of LLM-based deep research agents through scaling reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world environments with authentic web search interactions. Unlike RAG-based approaches that assume all necessary information exists within a fixed corpus, our method trains agents to navigate the noisy, unstructured, and dynamic nature of the open web. We implement a specialized multi-agent architecture where browsing agents extract relevant information from various webpage structures and overcoming significant technical challenges. Extensive experiments on open-domain research tasks demonstrate that DeepResearcher achieves substantial improvements of up to 28.9 points over prompt engineering-based baselines and up to 7.2 points over RAG-based RL agents. Our qualitative analysis reveals emergent cognitive behaviors from end-to-end RL training, including the ability to formulate plans, cross-validate information from multiple sources, engage in self-reflection to redirect research, and maintain honesty when unable to find definitive answers. Our results highlight that end-to-end training in real-world web environments is not merely an implementation detail but a fundamental requirement for developing robust research capabilities aligned with real-world applications. We release DeepResearcher at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/DeepResearcher.
Large Language Model (LLM) agents are autonomous systems powered by LLMs, capable of reasoning and planning to solve problems by leveraging a set of tools. However, the integration of multi-tool capabilities in LLM agents introduces challenges in securely managing tools, ensuring their compatibility, handling dependency relationships, and protecting control flows within LLM agent workflows. In this paper, we present the first systematic security analysis of task control flows in multi-tool-enabled LLM agents. We identify a novel threat, Cross-Tool Harvesting and Polluting (XTHP), which includes multiple attack vectors to first hijack the normal control flows of agent tasks, and then collect and pollute confidential or private information within LLM agent systems. To understand the impact of this threat, we developed Chord, a dynamic scanning tool designed to automatically detect real-world agent tools susceptible to XTHP attacks. Our evaluation of 73 real-world tools from the repositories of two major LLM agent development frameworks, LangChain and LlamaIndex, revealed a significant security concern: 80% of the tools are vulnerable to hijacking attacks, 78% to XTH attacks, and 41% to XTP attacks, highlighting the prevalence of this threat.
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown significant promise in various domains, especially robotics. However, most prior LLM-based work in robotic applications either directly predicts waypoints or applies LLMs within fixed tool integration frameworks, offering limited flexibility in exploring and configuring solutions best suited to different tasks. In this work, we propose a framework that leverages LLMs to select appropriate planning and control strategies based on task descriptions, environmental constraints, and system dynamics. These strategies are then executed by calling the available comprehensive planning and control APIs. Our approach employs iterative LLM-based reasoning with performance feedback to refine the algorithm selection. We validate our approach through extensive experiments across tasks of varying complexity, from simple tracking to complex planning scenarios involving spatiotemporal constraints. The results demonstrate that using LLMs to determine planning and control strategies from natural language descriptions significantly enhances robotic autonomy while reducing the need for extensive manual tuning and expert knowledge. Furthermore, our framework maintains generalizability across different tasks and notably outperforms baseline methods that rely on LLMs for direct trajectory, control sequence, or code generation.
Competitor analysis is essential in modern business due to the influence of industry rivals on strategic planning. It involves assessing multiple aspects and balancing trade-offs to make informed decisions. Recent Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities to reason about such trade-offs but grapple with inherent limitations such as a lack of knowledge about contemporary or future realities and an incomplete understanding of a market's competitive landscape. In this paper, we address this gap by incorporating business aspects into LLMs to enhance their understanding of a competitive market. Through quantitative and qualitative experiments, we illustrate how integrating such aspects consistently improves model performance, thereby enhancing analytical efficacy in competitor analysis.
Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong potential as agents for tool invocation due to their advanced comprehension and planning capabilities. Users increasingly rely on LLM-based agents to solve complex missions through iterative interactions. However, existing benchmarks predominantly access agents in single-mission scenarios, failing to capture real-world complexity. To bridge this gap, we propose the Multi-Mission Tool Bench. In the benchmark, each test case comprises multiple interrelated missions. This design requires agents to dynamically adapt to evolving demands. Moreover, the proposed benchmark explores all possible mission-switching patterns within a fixed mission number. Specifically, we propose a multi-agent data generation framework to construct the benchmark. We also propose a novel method to evaluate the accuracy and efficiency of agent decisions with dynamic decision trees. Experiments on diverse open-source and closed-source LLMs reveal critical factors influencing agent robustness and provide actionable insights to the tool invocation society.
Interactive storytelling benefits from planning and exploring multiple 'what if' scenarios. Modern LLMs are useful tools for ideation and exploration, but current chat-based user interfaces restrict users to a single linear flow. To address this limitation, we propose Narrative Studio -- a novel in-browser narrative exploration environment featuring a tree-like interface that allows branching exploration from user-defined points in a story. Each branch is extended via iterative LLM inference guided by system and user-defined prompts. Additionally, we employ Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to automatically expand promising narrative paths based on user-specified criteria, enabling more diverse and robust story development. We also allow users to enhance narrative coherence by grounding the generated text in an entity graph that represents the actors and environment of the story.
While AI agents have shown remarkable performance at various tasks, they still struggle with complex multi-modal applications, structured generation and strategic planning. Improvements via standard fine-tuning is often impractical, as solving agentic tasks usually relies on black box API access without control over model parameters. Inference-time methods such as Best-of-N (BON) sampling offer a simple yet effective alternative to improve performance. However, BON lacks iterative feedback integration mechanism. Hence, we propose Iterative Agent Decoding (IAD) which combines iterative refinement with dynamic candidate evaluation and selection guided by a verifier. IAD differs in how feedback is designed and integrated, specifically optimized to extract maximal signal from reward scores. We conduct a detailed comparison of baselines across key metrics on Sketch2Code, Text2SQL, and Webshop where IAD consistently outperforms baselines, achieving 3--6% absolute gains on Sketch2Code and Text2SQL (with and without LLM judges) and 8--10% gains on Webshop across multiple metrics. To better understand the source of IAD's gains, we perform controlled experiments to disentangle the effect of adaptive feedback from stochastic sampling, and find that IAD's improvements are primarily driven by verifier-guided refinement, not merely sampling diversity. We also show that both IAD and BON exhibit inference-time scaling with increased compute when guided by an optimal verifier. Our analysis highlights the critical role of verifier quality in effective inference-time optimization and examines the impact of noisy and sparse rewards on scaling behavior. Together, these findings offer key insights into the trade-offs and principles of effective inference-time optimization.
We present the first mechanistic evidence that model-free reinforcement learning agents can learn to plan. This is achieved by applying a methodology based on concept-based interpretability to a model-free agent in Sokoban -- a commonly used benchmark for studying planning. Specifically, we demonstrate that DRC, a generic model-free agent introduced by Guez et al. (2019), uses learned concept representations to internally formulate plans that both predict the long-term effects of actions on the environment and influence action selection. Our methodology involves: (1) probing for planning-relevant concepts, (2) investigating plan formation within the agent's representations, and (3) verifying that discovered plans (in the agent's representations) have a causal effect on the agent's behavior through interventions. We also show that the emergence of these plans coincides with the emergence of a planning-like property: the ability to benefit from additional test-time compute. Finally, we perform a qualitative analysis of the planning algorithm learned by the agent and discover a strong resemblance to parallelized bidirectional search. Our findings advance understanding of the internal mechanisms underlying planning behavior in agents, which is important given the recent trend of emergent planning and reasoning capabilities in LLMs through RL
Planning methods with high adaptability to dynamic environments are crucial for the development of autonomous and versatile robots. We propose a method for leveraging a large language model (GPT-4o) to automatically generate networks capable of adapting to dynamic environments. The proposed method collects environmental "status," representing conditions and goals, and uses them to generate agents. These agents are interconnected on the basis of specific conditions, resulting in networks that combine flexibility and generality. We conducted evaluation experiments to compare the networks automatically generated with the proposed method with manually constructed ones, confirming the comprehensiveness of the proposed method's networks and their higher generality. This research marks a significant advancement toward the development of versatile planning methods applicable to robotics, autonomous vehicles, smart systems, and other complex environments.
Recent large language models (LLMs) are capable of planning robot actions. In this paper, we explore how LLMs can be used for planning actions with tasks involving situational human-robot interaction (HRI). A key problem of applying LLMs in situational HRI is balancing between "respecting the current human's activity" and "prioritizing the robot's task," as well as understanding the timing of when to use the LLM to generate an action plan. In this paper, we propose a necessary plan-and-act skill design to solve the above problems. We show that a critical factor for enabling a robot to switch between passive / active interaction behavior is to provide the LLM with an action text about the current robot's action. We also show that a second-stage question to the LLM (about the next timing to call the LLM) is necessary for planning actions at an appropriate timing. The skill design is applied to an Engage skill and is tested on four distinct interaction scenarios. We show that by using the skill design, LLMs can be leveraged to easily scale to different HRI scenarios with a reasonable success rate reaching 90% on the test scenarios.
Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) have significantly advanced audio understanding but introduce critical security risks, particularly through audio jailbreaks. While prior work has focused on English-centric attacks, we expose a far more severe vulnerability: adversarial multilingual and multi-accent audio jailbreaks, where linguistic and acoustic variations dramatically amplify attack success. In this paper, we introduce Multi-AudioJail, the first systematic framework to exploit these vulnerabilities through (1) a novel dataset of adversarially perturbed multilingual/multi-accent audio jailbreaking prompts, and (2) a hierarchical evaluation pipeline revealing that how acoustic perturbations (e.g., reverberation, echo, and whisper effects) interacts with cross-lingual phonetics to cause jailbreak success rates (JSRs) to surge by up to +57.25 percentage points (e.g., reverberated Kenyan-accented attack on MERaLiON). Crucially, our work further reveals that multimodal LLMs are inherently more vulnerable than unimodal systems: attackers need only exploit the weakest link (e.g., non-English audio inputs) to compromise the entire model, which we empirically show by multilingual audio-only attacks achieving 3.1x higher success rates than text-only attacks. We plan to release our dataset to spur research into cross-modal defenses, urging the community to address this expanding attack surface in multimodality as LALMs evolve.