LLM-planning - 2025-07-17

Assessing the Value of Visual Input: A Benchmark of Multimodal Large Language Models for Robotic Path Planning

Authors:Jacinto Colan, Ana Davila, Yasuhisa Hasegawa
Date:2025-07-16 16:37:13

Large Language Models (LLMs) show potential for enhancing robotic path planning. This paper assesses visual input's utility for multimodal LLMs in such tasks via a comprehensive benchmark. We evaluated 15 multimodal LLMs on generating valid and optimal paths in 2D grid environments, simulating simplified robotic planning, comparing text-only versus text-plus-visual inputs across varying model sizes and grid complexities. Our results indicate moderate success rates on simpler small grids, where visual input or few-shot text prompting offered some benefits. However, performance significantly degraded on larger grids, highlighting a scalability challenge. While larger models generally achieved higher average success, the visual modality was not universally dominant over well-structured text for these multimodal systems, and successful paths on simpler grids were generally of high quality. These results indicate current limitations in robust spatial reasoning, constraint adherence, and scalable multimodal integration, identifying areas for future LLM development in robotic path planning.

From Static to Intelligent: Evolving SaaS Pricing with LLMs

Authors:Francisco Javier Cavero, Juan C. Alonso, Antonio Ruiz-Cortés
Date:2025-07-16 10:20:14

The SaaS paradigm has revolutionized software distribution by offering flexible pricing options to meet diverse customer needs. However, the rapid expansion of the SaaS market has introduced significant complexity for DevOps teams, who must manually manage and evolve pricing structures, an approach that is both time-consuming and prone to errors. The absence of automated tools for pricing analysis restricts the ability to efficiently evaluate, optimize, and scale these models. This paper proposes leveraging intelligent pricing (iPricing), dynamic, machine-readable pricing models, as a solution to these challenges. Intelligent pricing enables competitive analysis, streamlines operational decision-making, and supports continuous pricing evolution in response to market dynamics, leading to improved efficiency and accuracy. We present an LLM-driven approach that automates the transformation of static HTML pricing into iPricing, significantly improving efficiency and consistency while minimizing human error. Our implementation, AI4Pricing2Yaml, features a basic Information Extractor that uses web scraping and LLMs technologies to extract essential pricing components, plans, features, usage limits, and add-ons, from SaaS websites. Validation against a dataset of 30 distinct commercial SaaS, encompassing over 150 intelligent pricings, demonstrates the system's effectiveness in extracting the desired elements across all steps. However, challenges remain in addressing hallucinations, complex structures, and dynamic content. This work highlights the potential of automating intelligent pricing transformation to streamline SaaS pricing management, offering implications for improved consistency and scalability in an increasingly intricate pricing landscape. Future research will focus on refining extraction capabilities and enhancing the system's adaptability to a wider range of SaaS websites.

Aime: Towards Fully-Autonomous Multi-Agent Framework

Authors:Yexuan Shi, Mingyu Wang, Yunxiang Cao, Hongjie Lai, Junjian Lan, Xin Han, Yu Wang, Jie Geng, Zhenan Li, Zihao Xia, Xiang Chen, Chen Li, Jian Xu, Wenbo Duan, Yuanshuo Zhu
Date:2025-07-16 07:38:28

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) are emerging as a powerful paradigm for solving complex, multifaceted problems. However, the potential of these systems is often constrained by the prevalent plan-and-execute framework, which suffers from critical limitations: rigid plan execution, static agent capabilities, and inefficient communication. These weaknesses hinder their adaptability and robustness in dynamic environments. This paper introduces Aime, a novel multi-agent framework designed to overcome these challenges through dynamic, reactive planning and execution. Aime replaces the conventional static workflow with a fluid and adaptive architecture. Its core innovations include: (1) a Dynamic Planner that continuously refines the overall strategy based on real-time execution feedback; (2) an Actor Factory that implements Dynamic Actor instantiation, assembling specialized agents on-demand with tailored tools and knowledge; and (3) a centralized Progress Management Module that serves as a single source of truth for coherent, system-wide state awareness. We empirically evaluated Aime on a diverse suite of benchmarks spanning general reasoning (GAIA), software engineering (SWE-bench Verified), and live web navigation (WebVoyager). The results demonstrate that Aime consistently outperforms even highly specialized state-of-the-art agents in their respective domains. Its superior adaptability and task success rate establish Aime as a more resilient and effective foundation for multi-agent collaboration.

Foundation Models for Logistics: Toward Certifiable, Conversational Planning Interfaces

Authors:Yunhao Yang, Neel P. Bhatt, Christian Ellis, Alvaro Velasquez, Zhangyang Wang, Ufuk Topcu
Date:2025-07-15 14:24:01

Logistics operators, from battlefield coordinators rerouting airlifts ahead of a storm to warehouse managers juggling late trucks, often face life-critical decisions that demand both domain expertise and rapid and continuous replanning. While popular methods like integer programming yield logistics plans that satisfy user-defined logical constraints, they are slow and assume an idealized mathematical model of the environment that does not account for uncertainty. On the other hand, large language models (LLMs) can handle uncertainty and promise to accelerate replanning while lowering the barrier to entry by translating free-form utterances into executable plans, yet they remain prone to misinterpretations and hallucinations that jeopardize safety and cost. We introduce a neurosymbolic framework that pairs the accessibility of natural-language dialogue with verifiable guarantees on goal interpretation. It converts user requests into structured planning specifications, quantifies its own uncertainty at the field and token level, and invokes an interactive clarification loop whenever confidence falls below an adaptive threshold. A lightweight model, fine-tuned on just 100 uncertainty-filtered examples, surpasses the zero-shot performance of GPT-4.1 while cutting inference latency by nearly 50%. These preliminary results highlight a practical path toward certifiable, real-time, and user-aligned decision-making for complex logistics.

Taming Uncertainty via Automation: Observing, Analyzing, and Optimizing Agentic AI Systems

Authors:Dany Moshkovich, Sergey Zeltyn
Date:2025-07-15 12:54:43

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed within agentic systems-collections of interacting, LLM-powered agents that execute complex, adaptive workflows using memory, tools, and dynamic planning. While enabling powerful new capabilities, these systems also introduce unique forms of uncertainty stemming from probabilistic reasoning, evolving memory states, and fluid execution paths. Traditional software observability and operations practices fall short in addressing these challenges. This paper introduces AgentOps: a comprehensive framework for observing, analyzing, optimizing, and automating operation of agentic AI systems. We identify distinct needs across four key roles-developers, testers, site reliability engineers (SREs), and business users-each of whom engages with the system at different points in its lifecycle. We present the AgentOps Automation Pipeline, a six-stage process encompassing behavior observation, metric collection, issue detection, root cause analysis, optimized recommendations, and runtime automation. Throughout, we emphasize the critical role of automation in managing uncertainty and enabling self-improving AI systems-not by eliminating uncertainty, but by taming it to ensure safe, adaptive, and effective operation.

Lessons Learned from Evaluation of LLM based Multi-agents in Safer Therapy Recommendation

Authors:Yicong Wu, Ting Chen, Irit Hochberg, Zhoujian Sun, Ruth Edry, Zhengxing Huang, Mor Peleg
Date:2025-07-15 02:01:38

Therapy recommendation for chronic patients with multimorbidity is challenging due to risks of treatment conflicts. Existing decision support systems face scalability limitations. Inspired by the way in which general practitioners (GP) manage multimorbidity patients, occasionally convening multidisciplinary team (MDT) collaboration, this study investigated the feasibility and value of using a Large Language Model (LLM)-based multi-agent system (MAS) for safer therapy recommendations. We designed a single agent and a MAS framework simulating MDT decision-making by enabling discussion among LLM agents to resolve medical conflicts. The systems were evaluated on therapy planning tasks for multimorbidity patients using benchmark cases. We compared MAS performance with single-agent approaches and real-world benchmarks. An important contribution of our study is the definition of evaluation metrics that go beyond the technical precision and recall and allow the inspection of clinical goals met and medication burden of the proposed advices to a gold standard benchmark. Our results show that with current LLMs, a single agent GP performs as well as MDTs. The best-scoring models provide correct recommendations that address all clinical goals, yet the advices are incomplete. Some models also present unnecessary medications, resulting in unnecessary conflicts between medication and conditions or drug-drug interactions.

Prompt Informed Reinforcement Learning for Visual Coverage Path Planning

Authors:Venkat Margapuri
Date:2025-07-14 13:51:28

Visual coverage path planning with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) requires agents to strategically coordinate UAV motion and camera control to maximize coverage, minimize redundancy, and maintain battery efficiency. Traditional reinforcement learning (RL) methods rely on environment-specific reward formulations that lack semantic adaptability. This study proposes Prompt-Informed Reinforcement Learning (PIRL), a novel approach that integrates the zero-shot reasoning ability and in-context learning capability of large language models with curiosity-driven RL. PIRL leverages semantic feedback from an LLM, GPT-3.5, to dynamically shape the reward function of the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) RL policy guiding the agent in position and camera adjustments for optimal visual coverage. The PIRL agent is trained using OpenAI Gym and evaluated in various environments. Furthermore, the sim-to-real-like ability and zero-shot generalization of the agent are tested by operating the agent in Webots simulator which introduces realistic physical dynamics. Results show that PIRL outperforms multiple learning-based baselines such as PPO with static rewards, PPO with exploratory weight initialization, imitation learning, and an LLM-only controller. Across different environments, PIRL outperforms the best-performing baseline by achieving up to 14% higher visual coverage in OpenAI Gym and 27% higher in Webots, up to 25% higher battery efficiency, and up to 18\% lower redundancy, depending on the environment. The results highlight the effectiveness of LLM-guided reward shaping in complex spatial exploration tasks and suggest a promising direction for integrating natural language priors into RL for robotics.

Foundation Model Driven Robotics: A Comprehensive Review

Authors:Muhammad Tayyab Khan, Ammar Waheed
Date:2025-07-14 09:13:07

The rapid emergence of foundation models, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs), has introduced a transformative paradigm in robotics. These models offer powerful capabilities in semantic understanding, high-level reasoning, and cross-modal generalization, enabling significant advances in perception, planning, control, and human-robot interaction. This critical review provides a structured synthesis of recent developments, categorizing applications across simulation-driven design, open-world execution, sim-to-real transfer, and adaptable robotics. Unlike existing surveys that emphasize isolated capabilities, this work highlights integrated, system-level strategies and evaluates their practical feasibility in real-world environments. Key enabling trends such as procedural scene generation, policy generalization, and multimodal reasoning are discussed alongside core bottlenecks, including limited embodiment, lack of multimodal data, safety risks, and computational constraints. Through this lens, this paper identifies both the architectural strengths and critical limitations of foundation model-based robotics, highlighting open challenges in real-time operation, grounding, resilience, and trust. The review concludes with a roadmap for future research aimed at bridging semantic reasoning and physical intelligence through more robust, interpretable, and embodied models.

HedraRAG: Coordinating LLM Generation and Database Retrieval in Heterogeneous RAG Serving

Authors:Zhengding Hu, Vibha Murthy, Zaifeng Pan, Wanlu Li, Xiaoyi Fang, Yufei Ding, Yuke Wang
Date:2025-07-12 04:42:43

This paper addresses emerging system-level challenges in heterogeneous retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) serving, where complex multi-stage workflows and diverse request patterns complicate efficient execution. We present HedraRAG, a runtime system built on a graph-based abstraction that exposes optimization opportunities across stage-level parallelism, intra-request similarity, and inter-request skewness. These opportunities are realized through dynamic graph transformations, such as node splitting, reordering, edge addition, and dependency rewiring, applied to wavefronts of subgraphs spanning concurrent requests. The resulting execution plans are mapped onto hybrid CPU-GPU pipelines to improve resource utilization and reduce latency. Evaluations across a wide range of RAG workflows demonstrate speedups exceeding 1.5x and reaching up to 5x over existing frameworks, showcasing the effectiveness of coordinated generation and retrieval in serving environments.

GraphRunner: A Multi-Stage Framework for Efficient and Accurate Graph-Based Retrieval

Authors:Savini Kashmira, Jayanaka L. Dantanarayana, Krisztián Flautner, Lingjia Tang, Jason Mars
Date:2025-07-11 18:10:01

Conventional Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) approaches are common in text-based applications. However, they struggle with structured, interconnected datasets like knowledge graphs, where understanding underlying relationships is crucial for accurate retrieval. A common direction in graph-based retrieval employs iterative, rule-based traversal guided by Large Language Models (LLMs). Such existing iterative methods typically combine reasoning with single hop traversal at each step, making them vulnerable to LLM reasoning errors and hallucinations that ultimately hinder the retrieval of relevant information. To address these limitations, we propose GraphRunner, a novel graph-based retrieval framework that operates in three distinct stages: planning, verification, and execution. This introduces high-level traversal actions that enable multi-hop exploration in a single step. It also generates a holistic traversal plan, which is verified against the graph structure and pre-defined traversal actions, reducing reasoning errors and detecting hallucinations before execution. GraphRunner significantly reduces LLM reasoning errors and detects hallucinations through validation. Our evaluation using the GRBench dataset shows that GraphRunner consistently outperforms existing approaches, achieving 10-50% performance improvements over the strongest baseline while reducing inference cost by 3.0-12.9x and response generation time by 2.5-7.1x, making it significantly more robust and efficient for graph-based retrieval tasks.

Optimizing Sequential Multi-Step Tasks with Parallel LLM Agents

Authors:Enhao Zhang, Erkang Zhu, Gagan Bansal, Adam Fourney, Hussein Mozannar, Jack Gerrits
Date:2025-07-11 18:09:22

Large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems have demonstrated remarkable promise for tackling complex tasks by breaking them down into subtasks that are iteratively planned, executed, observed, and refined. Despite their effectiveness, these systems often incur high latency because real-world problems frequently demand multiple iterative cycles of reasoning steps. To address this challenge, we propose M1-Parallel, a framework that concurrently runs multiple multi-agent teams in parallel to uncover distinct solution paths. By leveraging an event-driven communication model with asynchronous messaging, M1-Parallel efficiently capitalizes on the inherent diversity of valid plans to either reduce end-to-end latency or boost task completion rates. Our experiments on complex tasks show that M1-Parallel with early termination achieves up to $2.2\times$ speedup while preserving accuracy, and that M1-Parallel with aggregation yields higher task completion rates. We further investigate strategies aimed at encouraging diverse execution plans but observe no additional performance gains over repeated sampling. Overall, these findings underscore the potential of parallel plan execution for optimizing multi-agent systems for real-world, high-complexity reasoning tasks.

FreeAudio: Training-Free Timing Planning for Controllable Long-Form Text-to-Audio Generation

Authors:Yuxuan Jiang, Zehua Chen, Zeqian Ju, Chang Li, Weibei Dou, Jun Zhu
Date:2025-07-11 12:57:51

Text-to-audio (T2A) generation has achieved promising results with the recent advances in generative models. However, because of the limited quality and quantity of temporally-aligned audio-text pairs, existing T2A methods struggle to handle the complex text prompts that contain precise timing control, e.g., "owl hooted at 2.4s-5.2s". Recent works have explored data augmentation techniques or introduced timing conditions as model inputs to enable timing-conditioned 10-second T2A generation, while their synthesis quality is still limited. In this work, we propose a novel training-free timing-controlled T2A framework, FreeAudio, making the first attempt to enable timing-controlled long-form T2A generation, e.g., "owl hooted at 2.4s-5.2s and crickets chirping at 0s-24s". Specifically, we first employ an LLM to plan non-overlapping time windows and recaption each with a refined natural language description, based on the input text and timing prompts. Then we introduce: 1) Decoupling and Aggregating Attention Control for precise timing control; 2) Contextual Latent Composition for local smoothness and Reference Guidance for global consistency. Extensive experiments show that: 1) FreeAudio achieves state-of-the-art timing-conditioned T2A synthesis quality among training-free methods and is comparable to leading training-based methods; 2) FreeAudio demonstrates comparable long-form generation quality with training-based Stable Audio and paves the way for timing-controlled long-form T2A synthesis. Demo samples are available at: https://freeaudio.github.io/FreeAudio/

LLaPa: A Vision-Language Model Framework for Counterfactual-Aware Procedural Planning

Authors:Shibo Sun, Xue Li, Donglin Di, Mingjie Wei, Lanshun Nie, Wei-Nan Zhang, Dechen Zhan, Yang Song, Lei Fan
Date:2025-07-11 11:18:49

While large language models (LLMs) have advanced procedural planning for embodied AI systems through strong reasoning abilities, the integration of multimodal inputs and counterfactual reasoning remains underexplored. To tackle these challenges, we introduce LLaPa, a vision-language model framework designed for multimodal procedural planning. LLaPa generates executable action sequences from textual task descriptions and visual environmental images using vision-language models (VLMs). Furthermore, we enhance LLaPa with two auxiliary modules to improve procedural planning. The first module, the Task-Environment Reranker (TER), leverages task-oriented segmentation to create a task-sensitive feature space, aligning textual descriptions with visual environments and emphasizing critical regions for procedural execution. The second module, the Counterfactual Activities Retriever (CAR), identifies and emphasizes potential counterfactual conditions, enhancing the model's reasoning capability in counterfactual scenarios. Extensive experiments on ActPlan-1K and ALFRED benchmarks demonstrate that LLaPa generates higher-quality plans with superior LCS and correctness, outperforming advanced models. The code and models are available https://github.com/sunshibo1234/LLaPa.

Making VLMs More Robot-Friendly: Self-Critical Distillation of Low-Level Procedural Reasoning

Authors:Chan Young Park, Jillian Fisher, Marius Memmel, Dipika Khullar, Andy Yun, Abhishek Gupta, Yejin Choi
Date:2025-07-11 00:17:08

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in robotic procedural planning, yet their human-centric reasoning often omits the low-level, grounded details needed for robotic execution. Vision-language models (VLMs) offer a path toward more perceptually grounded plans, but current methods either rely on expensive, large-scale models or are constrained to narrow simulation settings. We introduce SelfReVision, a lightweight and scalable self-improvement framework for vision-language procedural planning. SelfReVision enables small VLMs to iteratively critique, revise, and verify their own plans-without external supervision or teacher models-drawing inspiration from chain-of-thought prompting and self-instruct paradigms. Through this self-distillation loop, models generate higher-quality, execution-ready plans that can be used both at inference and for continued fine-tuning. Using models varying from 3B to 72B, our results show that SelfReVision not only boosts performance over weak base VLMs but also outperforms models 100X the size, yielding improved control in downstream embodied tasks.

PyVision: Agentic Vision with Dynamic Tooling

Authors:Shitian Zhao, Haoquan Zhang, Shaoheng Lin, Ming Li, Qilong Wu, Kaipeng Zhang, Chen Wei
Date:2025-07-10 17:59:55

LLMs are increasingly deployed as agents, systems capable of planning, reasoning, and dynamically calling external tools. However, in visual reasoning, prior approaches largely remain limited by predefined workflows and static toolsets. In this report, we present PyVision, an interactive, multi-turn framework that enables MLLMs to autonomously generate, execute, and refine Python-based tools tailored to the task at hand, unlocking flexible and interpretable problem-solving. We develop a taxonomy of the tools created by PyVision and analyze their usage across a diverse set of benchmarks. Quantitatively, PyVision achieves consistent performance gains, boosting GPT-4.1 by +7.8% on V* and Claude-4.0-Sonnet by +31.1% on VLMsAreBlind-mini. These results point to a broader shift: dynamic tooling allows models not just to use tools, but to invent them, advancing toward more agentic visual reasoning.

MoSE: Skill-by-Skill Mixture-of-Expert Learning for Autonomous Driving

Authors:Lu Xu, Jiaqian Yu, Xiongfeng Peng, Yiwei Chen, Weiming Li, Jaewook Yoo, Sunghyun Chunag, Dongwook Lee, Daehyun Ji, Chao Zhang
Date:2025-07-10 14:48:08

Recent studies show large language models (LLMs) and vision language models (VLMs) trained using web-scale data can empower end-to-end autonomous driving systems for a better generalization and interpretation. Specifically, by dynamically routing inputs to specialized subsets of parameters, the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) technique enables general LLMs or VLMs to achieve substantial performance improvements while maintaining computational efficiency. However, general MoE models usually demands extensive training data and complex optimization. In this work, inspired by the learning process of human drivers, we propose a skill-oriented MoE, called MoSE, which mimics human drivers' learning process and reasoning process, skill-by-skill and step-by-step. We propose a skill-oriented routing mechanism that begins with defining and annotating specific skills, enabling experts to identify the necessary driving competencies for various scenarios and reasoning tasks, thereby facilitating skill-by-skill learning. Further align the driving process to multi-step planning in human reasoning and end-to-end driving models, we build a hierarchical skill dataset and pretrain the router to encourage the model to think step-by-step. Unlike multi-round dialogs, MoSE integrates valuable auxiliary tasks (e.g.\ description, reasoning, planning) in one single forward process without introducing any extra computational cost. With less than 3B sparsely activated parameters, our model outperforms several 8B+ parameters on CODA AD corner case reasoning task. Compared to existing methods based on open-source models and data, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance with significantly reduced activated model size (at least by $62.5\%$) with a single-turn conversation.

SURPRISE3D: A Dataset for Spatial Understanding and Reasoning in Complex 3D Scenes

Authors:Jiaxin Huang, Ziwen Li, Hanlve Zhang, Runnan Chen, Xiao He, Yandong Guo, Wenping Wang, Tongliang Liu, Mingming Gong
Date:2025-07-10 14:01:24

The integration of language and 3D perception is critical for embodied AI and robotic systems to perceive, understand, and interact with the physical world. Spatial reasoning, a key capability for understanding spatial relationships between objects, remains underexplored in current 3D vision-language research. Existing datasets often mix semantic cues (e.g., object name) with spatial context, leading models to rely on superficial shortcuts rather than genuinely interpreting spatial relationships. To address this gap, we introduce S\textsc{urprise}3D, a novel dataset designed to evaluate language-guided spatial reasoning segmentation in complex 3D scenes. S\textsc{urprise}3D consists of more than 200k vision language pairs across 900+ detailed indoor scenes from ScanNet++ v2, including more than 2.8k unique object classes. The dataset contains 89k+ human-annotated spatial queries deliberately crafted without object name, thereby mitigating shortcut biases in spatial understanding. These queries comprehensively cover various spatial reasoning skills, such as relative position, narrative perspective, parametric perspective, and absolute distance reasoning. Initial benchmarks demonstrate significant challenges for current state-of-the-art expert 3D visual grounding methods and 3D-LLMs, underscoring the necessity of our dataset and the accompanying 3D Spatial Reasoning Segmentation (3D-SRS) benchmark suite. S\textsc{urprise}3D and 3D-SRS aim to facilitate advancements in spatially aware AI, paving the way for effective embodied interaction and robotic planning. The code and datasets can be found in https://github.com/liziwennba/SUPRISE.

PLAN-TUNING: Post-Training Language Models to Learn Step-by-Step Planning for Complex Problem Solving

Authors:Mihir Parmar, Palash Goyal, Xin Liu, Yiwen Song, Mingyang Ling, Chitta Baral, Hamid Palangi, Tomas Pfister
Date:2025-07-10 07:30:44

Recently, decomposing complex problems into simple subtasks--a crucial part of human-like natural planning--to solve the given problem has significantly boosted the performance of large language models (LLMs). However, leveraging such planning structures during post-training to boost the performance of smaller open-source LLMs remains underexplored. Motivated by this, we introduce PLAN-TUNING, a unified post-training framework that (i) distills synthetic task decompositions (termed "planning trajectories") from large-scale LLMs and (ii) fine-tunes smaller models via supervised and reinforcement-learning objectives designed to mimic these planning processes to improve complex reasoning. On GSM8k and the MATH benchmarks, plan-tuned models outperform strong baselines by an average $\sim7\%$. Furthermore, plan-tuned models show better generalization capabilities on out-of-domain datasets, with average $\sim10\%$ and $\sim12\%$ performance improvements on OlympiadBench and AIME 2024, respectively. Our detailed analysis demonstrates how planning trajectories improves complex reasoning capabilities, showing that PLAN-TUNING is an effective strategy for improving task-specific performance of smaller LLMs.

TableReasoner: Advancing Table Reasoning Framework with Large Language Models

Authors:Sishi Xiong, Dakai Wang, Yu Zhao, Jie Zhang, Changzai Pan, Haowei He, Xiangyu Li, Wenhan Chang, Zhongjiang He, Shuangyong Song, Yongxiang Li
Date:2025-07-10 06:16:51

The paper presents our system developed for table question answering (TQA). TQA tasks face challenges due to the characteristics of real-world tabular data, such as large size, incomplete column semantics, and entity ambiguity. To address these issues, we propose a large language model (LLM)-powered and programming-based table reasoning framework, named TableReasoner. It models a table using the schema that combines structural and semantic representations, enabling holistic understanding and efficient processing of large tables. We design a multi-step schema linking plan to derive a focused table schema that retains only query-relevant information, eliminating ambiguity and alleviating hallucinations. This focused table schema provides precise and sufficient table details for query refinement and programming. Furthermore, we integrate the reasoning workflow into an iterative thinking architecture, allowing incremental cycles of thinking, reasoning and reflection. Our system achieves first place in both subtasks of SemEval-2025 Task 8.

Frontier LLMs Still Struggle with Simple Reasoning Tasks

Authors:Alan Malek, Jiawei Ge, Nevena Lazic, Chi Jin, András György, Csaba Szepesvári
Date:2025-07-09 22:22:49

While state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) demonstrate advanced reasoning capabilities-achieving remarkable performance on challenging competitive math and coding benchmarks-they also frequently fail on tasks that are easy for humans. This work studies the performance of frontier LLMs on a broad set of such "easy" reasoning problems. By extending previous work in the literature, we create a suite of procedurally generated simple reasoning tasks, including counting, first-order logic, proof trees, and travel planning, with changeable parameters (such as document length. or the number of variables in a math problem) that can arbitrarily increase the amount of computation required to produce the answer while preserving the fundamental difficulty. While previous work showed that traditional, non-thinking models can be made to fail on such problems, we demonstrate that even state-of-the-art thinking models consistently fail on such problems and for similar reasons (e.g. statistical shortcuts, errors in intermediate steps, and difficulties in processing long contexts). To further understand the behavior of the models, we introduce the unpuzzles dataset, a different "easy" benchmark consisting of trivialized versions of well-known math and logic puzzles. Interestingly, while modern LLMs excel at solving the original puzzles, they tend to fail on the trivialized versions, exhibiting several systematic failure patterns related to memorizing the originals. We show that this happens even if the models are otherwise able to solve problems with different descriptions but requiring the same logic. Our results highlight that out-of-distribution generalization is still problematic for frontier language models and the new generation of thinking models, even for simple reasoning tasks, and making tasks easier does not necessarily imply improved performance.

Application of LLMs to Multi-Robot Path Planning and Task Allocation

Authors:Ashish Kumar
Date:2025-07-09 22:01:32

Efficient exploration is a well known problem in deep reinforcement learning and this problem is exacerbated in multi-agent reinforcement learning due the intrinsic complexities of such algorithms. There are several approaches to efficiently explore an environment to learn to solve tasks by multi-agent operating in that environment, of which, the idea of expert exploration is investigated in this work. More specifically, this work investigates the application of large-language models as expert planners for efficient exploration in planning based tasks for multiple agents.

Open Source Planning & Control System with Language Agents for Autonomous Scientific Discovery

Authors:Licong Xu, Milind Sarkar, Anto I. Lonappan, Íñigo Zubeldia, Pablo Villanueva-Domingo, Santiago Casas, Christian Fidler, Chetana Amancharla, Ujjwal Tiwari, Adrian Bayer, Chadi Ait Ekioui, Miles Cranmer, Adrian Dimitrov, James Fergusson, Kahaan Gandhi, Sven Krippendorf, Andrew Laverick, Julien Lesgourgues, Antony Lewis, Thomas Meier, Blake Sherwin, Kristen Surrao, Francisco Villaescusa-Navarro, Chi Wang, Xueqing Xu, Boris Bolliet
Date:2025-07-09 20:03:30

We present a multi-agent system for automation of scientific research tasks, cmbagent (https://github.com/CMBAgents/cmbagent). The system is formed by about 30 Large Language Model (LLM) agents and implements a Planning & Control strategy to orchestrate the agentic workflow, with no human-in-the-loop at any point. Each agent specializes in a different task (performing retrieval on scientific papers and codebases, writing code, interpreting results, critiquing the output of other agents) and the system is able to execute code locally. We successfully apply cmbagent to carry out a PhD level cosmology task (the measurement of cosmological parameters using supernova data) and evaluate its performance on two benchmark sets, finding superior performance over state-of-the-art LLMs. The source code is available on GitHub, demonstration videos are also available, and the system is deployed on HuggingFace and will be available on the cloud.

The User-Centric Geo-Experience: An LLM-Powered Framework for Enhanced Planning, Navigation, and Dynamic Adaptation

Authors:Jieren Deng, Aleksandar Cvetkovic, Pak Kiu Chung, Dragomir Yankov, Chiqun Zhang
Date:2025-07-09 16:18:09

Traditional travel-planning systems are often static and fragmented, leaving them ill-equipped to handle real-world complexities such as evolving environmental conditions and unexpected itinerary disruptions. In this paper, we identify three gaps between existing service providers causing frustrating user experience: intelligent trip planning, precision "last-100-meter" navigation, and dynamic itinerary adaptation. We propose three cooperative agents: a Travel Planning Agent that employs grid-based spatial grounding and map analysis to help resolve complex multi-modal user queries; a Destination Assistant Agent that provides fine-grained guidance for the final navigation leg of each journey; and a Local Discovery Agent that leverages image embeddings and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to detect and respond to trip plan disruptions. With evaluations and experiments, our system demonstrates substantial improvements in query interpretation, navigation accuracy, and disruption resilience, underscoring its promise for applications from urban exploration to emergency response.

CRISP: Complex Reasoning with Interpretable Step-based Plans

Authors:Matan Vetzler, Koren Lazar, Guy Uziel, Eran Hirsch, Ateret Anaby-Tavor, Leshem Choshen
Date:2025-07-09 11:40:24

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) underscore the need for stronger reasoning capabilities to solve complex problems effectively. While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has been a step forward, it remains insufficient for many domains. A promising alternative is explicit high-level plan generation, but existing approaches largely assume that LLMs can produce effective plans through few-shot prompting alone, without additional training. In this work, we challenge this assumption and introduce CRISP (Complex Reasoning with Interpretable Step-based Plans), a multi-domain dataset of high-level plans for mathematical reasoning and code generation. The plans in CRISP are automatically generated and rigorously validated--both intrinsically, using an LLM as a judge, and extrinsically, by evaluating their impact on downstream task performance. We demonstrate that fine-tuning a small model on CRISP enables it to generate higher-quality plans than much larger models using few-shot prompting, while significantly outperforming Chain-of-Thought reasoning. Furthermore, our out-of-domain evaluation reveals that fine-tuning on one domain improves plan generation in the other, highlighting the generalizability of learned planning capabilities.

LOVON: Legged Open-Vocabulary Object Navigator

Authors:Daojie Peng, Jiahang Cao, Qiang Zhang, Jun Ma
Date:2025-07-09 11:02:46

Object navigation in open-world environments remains a formidable and pervasive challenge for robotic systems, particularly when it comes to executing long-horizon tasks that require both open-world object detection and high-level task planning. Traditional methods often struggle to integrate these components effectively, and this limits their capability to deal with complex, long-range navigation missions. In this paper, we propose LOVON, a novel framework that integrates large language models (LLMs) for hierarchical task planning with open-vocabulary visual detection models, tailored for effective long-range object navigation in dynamic, unstructured environments. To tackle real-world challenges including visual jittering, blind zones, and temporary target loss, we design dedicated solutions such as Laplacian Variance Filtering for visual stabilization. We also develop a functional execution logic for the robot that guarantees LOVON's capabilities in autonomous navigation, task adaptation, and robust task completion. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the successful completion of long-sequence tasks involving real-time detection, search, and navigation toward open-vocabulary dynamic targets. Furthermore, real-world experiments across different legged robots (Unitree Go2, B2, and H1-2) showcase the compatibility and appealing plug-and-play feature of LOVON.

Gradientsys: A Multi-Agent LLM Scheduler with ReAct Orchestration

Authors:Xinyuan Song, Zeyu Wang, Siyi Wu, Tianyu Shi, Lynn Ai
Date:2025-07-09 03:40:56

We present Gradientsys, a next-generation multi-agent scheduling framework that coordinates diverse specialized AI agents using a typed Model-Context Protocol (MCP) and a ReAct-based dynamic planning loop. At its core, Gradientsys employs an LLM-powered scheduler for intelligent one-to-many task dispatch, enabling parallel execution of heterogeneous agents such as PDF parsers, web search modules, GUI controllers, and web builders. The framework supports hybrid synchronous/asynchronous execution, respects agent capacity constraints, and incorporates a robust retry-and-replan mechanism to handle failures gracefully. To promote transparency and trust, Gradientsys includes an observability layer streaming real-time agent activity and intermediate reasoning via Server-Sent Events (SSE). We offer an architectural overview and evaluate Gradientsys against existing frameworks in terms of extensibility, scheduling topology, tool reusability, parallelism, and observability. Experiments on the GAIA general-assistant benchmark show that Gradientsys achieves higher task success rates with reduced latency and lower API costs compared to a MinionS-style baseline, demonstrating the strength of its LLM-driven multi-agent orchestration.

QUEST: Query Optimization in Unstructured Document Analysis

Authors:Zhaoze Sun, Qiyan Deng, Chengliang Chai, Kaisen Jin, Xinyu Guo, Han Han, Ye Yuan, Guoren Wang, Lei Cao
Date:2025-07-09 03:30:09

Most recently, researchers have started building large language models (LLMs) powered data systems that allow users to analyze unstructured text documents like working with a database because LLMs are very effective in extracting attributes from documents. In such systems, LLM-based extraction operations constitute the performance bottleneck of query execution due to the high monetary cost and slow LLM inference. Existing systems typically borrow the query optimization principles popular in relational databases to produce query execution plans, which unfortunately are ineffective in minimizing LLM cost. To fill this gap, we propose QUEST, which features a bunch of novel optimization strategies for unstructured document analysis. First, we introduce an index-based strategy to minimize the cost of each extraction operation. With this index, QUEST quickly retrieves the text segments relevant to the target attributes and only feeds them to LLMs. Furthermore, we design an evidence-augmented retrieval strategy to reduce the possibility of missing relevant segments. Moreover, we develop an instance-optimized query execution strategy: because the attribute extraction cost could vary significantly document by document, QUEST produces different plans for different documents. For each document, QUEST produces a plan to minimize the frequency of attribute extraction. The innovations include LLM cost-aware operator ordering strategies and an optimized join execution approach that transforms joins into filters. Extensive experiments on 3 real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of QUEST, achieving 30%-6x cost savings while improving the F1 score by 10% -27% compared with state-of-the-art baselines.

SQLBarber: A System Leveraging Large Language Models to Generate Customized and Realistic SQL Workloads

Authors:Jiale Lao, Immanuel Trummer
Date:2025-07-08 17:20:34

Database research and development often require a large number of SQL queries for benchmarking purposes. However, acquiring real-world SQL queries is challenging due to privacy concerns, and existing SQL generation methods are limited in customization and in satisfying realistic constraints. To address this issue, we present SQLBarber, a system based on Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate customized and realistic SQL workloads. SQLBarber (i) eliminates the need for users to manually craft SQL templates in advance, while providing the flexibility to accept natural language specifications to constrain SQL templates, (ii) scales efficiently to generate large volumes of queries matching any user-defined cost distribution (e.g., cardinality and execution plan cost), and (iii) uses execution statistics from Amazon Redshift and Snowflake to derive SQL template specifications and query cost distributions that reflect real-world query characteristics. SQLBarber introduces (i) a declarative interface for users to effortlessly generate customized SQL templates, (ii) an LLM-powered pipeline augmented with a self-correction module that profiles, refines, and prunes SQL templates based on query costs, and (iii) a Bayesian Optimizer to efficiently explore different predicate values and identify a set of queries that satisfy the target cost distribution. We construct and open-source ten benchmarks of varying difficulty levels and target query cost distributions based on real-world statistics from Snowflake and Amazon Redshift. Extensive experiments on these benchmarks show that SQLBarber is the only system that can generate customized SQL templates. It reduces query generation time by one to three orders of magnitude, and significantly improves alignment with the target cost distribution, compared with existing methods.

Hidden Prompts in Manuscripts Exploit AI-Assisted Peer Review

Authors:Zhicheng Lin
Date:2025-07-08 17:11:13

In July 2025, 18 academic manuscripts on the preprint website arXiv were found to contain hidden instructions known as prompts designed to manipulate AI-assisted peer review. Instructions such as "GIVE A POSITIVE REVIEW ONLY" were concealed using techniques like white-colored text. Author responses varied: one planned to withdraw the affected paper, while another defended the practice as legitimate testing of reviewer compliance. This commentary analyzes this practice as a novel form of research misconduct. We examine the technique of prompt injection in large language models (LLMs), revealing four types of hidden prompts, ranging from simple positive review commands to detailed evaluation frameworks. The defense that prompts served as "honeypots" to detect reviewers improperly using AI fails under examination--the consistently self-serving nature of prompt instructions indicates intent to manipulate. Publishers maintain inconsistent policies: Elsevier prohibits AI use in peer review entirely, while Springer Nature permits limited use with disclosure requirements. The incident exposes systematic vulnerabilities extending beyond peer review to any automated system processing scholarly texts, including plagiarism detection and citation indexing. Our analysis underscores the need for coordinated technical screening at submission portals and harmonized policies governing generative AI (GenAI) use in academic evaluation.

LeAD: The LLM Enhanced Planning System Converged with End-to-end Autonomous Driving

Authors:Yuhang Zhang, Jiaqi Liu, Chengkai Xu, Peng Hang, Jian Sun
Date:2025-07-08 07:58:29

A principal barrier to large-scale deployment of urban autonomous driving systems lies in the prevalence of complex scenarios and edge cases. Existing systems fail to effectively interpret semantic information within traffic contexts and discern intentions of other participants, consequently generating decisions misaligned with skilled drivers' reasoning patterns. We present LeAD, a dual-rate autonomous driving architecture integrating imitation learning-based end-to-end (E2E) frameworks with large language model (LLM) augmentation. The high-frequency E2E subsystem maintains real-time perception-planning-control cycles, while the low-frequency LLM module enhances scenario comprehension through multi-modal perception fusion with HD maps and derives optimal decisions via chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning when baseline planners encounter capability limitations. Our experimental evaluation in the CARLA Simulator demonstrates LeAD's superior handling of unconventional scenarios, achieving 71 points on Leaderboard V1 benchmark, with a route completion of 93%.