LLM-planning - 2025-11-15

Beyond ReAct: A Planner-Centric Framework for Complex Tool-Augmented LLM Reasoning

Authors:Xiaolong Wei, Yuehu Dong, Xingliang Wang, Xingyu Zhang, Zhejun Zhao, Dongdong Shen, Long Xia, Dawei Yin
Date:2025-11-13 07:22:27

Existing tool-augmented large language models (LLMs) encounter significant challenges when processing complex queries. Current frameworks such as ReAct are prone to local optimization traps due to their reliance on incremental decision-making processes. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Planner-centric Plan-Execute paradigm that fundamentally resolves local optimization bottlenecks through architectural innovation. Central to our approach is a novel Planner model that performs global Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) planning for complex queries, enabling optimized execution beyond conventional tool coordination. We also introduce ComplexTool-Plan, a large-scale benchmark dataset featuring complex queries that demand sophisticated multi-tool composition and coordination capabilities. Additionally, we develop a two-stage training methodology that integrates Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), systematically enhancing the Planner's tool selection accuracy and global planning awareness through structured DAG-based planning. When integrated with a capable executor, our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on the StableToolBench benchmark for complex user queries, demonstrating superior end-to-end execution capabilities and robust handling of intricate multi-tool workflows.

REAP: Enhancing RAG with Recursive Evaluation and Adaptive Planning for Multi-Hop Question Answering

Authors:Yijie Zhu, Haojie Zhou, Wanting Hong, Tailin Liu, Ning Wang
Date:2025-11-13 04:58:51

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has been extensively employed to mitigate hallucinations in large language models (LLMs). However, existing methods for multi-hop reasoning tasks often lack global planning, increasing the risk of falling into local reasoning impasses. Insufficient exploitation of retrieved content and the neglect of latent clues fail to ensure the accuracy of reasoning outcomes. To overcome these limitations, we propose Recursive Evaluation and Adaptive Planning (REAP), whose core idea is to explicitly maintain structured sub-tasks and facts related to the current task through the Sub-task Planner (SP) and Fact Extractor (FE) modules. SP maintains a global perspective, guiding the overall reasoning direction and evaluating the task state based on the outcomes of FE, enabling dynamic optimization of the task-solving trajectory. FE performs fine-grained analysis over retrieved content to extract reliable answers and clues. These two modules incrementally enrich a logically coherent representation of global knowledge, enhancing the reliability and the traceability of the reasoning process. Furthermore, we propose a unified task paradigm design that enables effective multi-task fine-tuning, significantly enhancing SP's performance on complex, data-scarce tasks. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple public multi-hop datasets, and the results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing RAG methods in both in-domain and out-of-domain settings, validating its effectiveness in complex multi-hop reasoning tasks.

EEGAgent: A Unified Framework for Automated EEG Analysis Using Large Language Models

Authors:Sha Zhao, Mingyi Peng, Haiteng Jiang, Tao Li, Shijian Li, Gang Pan
Date:2025-11-13 04:27:06

Scalable and generalizable analysis of brain activity is essential for advancing both clinical diagnostics and cognitive research. Electroencephalography (EEG), a non-invasive modality with high temporal resolution, has been widely used for brain states analysis. However, most existing EEG models are usually tailored for individual specific tasks, limiting their utility in realistic scenarios where EEG analysis often involves multi-task and continuous reasoning. In this work, we introduce EEGAgent, a general-purpose framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to schedule and plan multiple tools to automatically complete EEG-related tasks. EEGAgent is capable of performing the key functions: EEG basic information perception, spatiotemporal EEG exploration, EEG event detection, interaction with users, and EEG report generation. To realize these capabilities, we design a toolbox composed of different tools for EEG preprocessing, feature extraction, event detection, etc. These capabilities were evaluated on public datasets, and our EEGAgent can support flexible and interpretable EEG analysis, highlighting its potential for real-world clinical applications.

From Street to Orbit: Training-Free Cross-View Retrieval via Location Semantics and LLM Guidance

Authors:Jeongho Min, Dongyoung Kim, Jaehyup Lee
Date:2025-11-12 23:51:46

Cross-view image retrieval, particularly street-to-satellite matching, is a critical task for applications such as autonomous navigation, urban planning, and localization in GPS-denied environments. However, existing approaches often require supervised training on curated datasets and rely on panoramic or UAV-based images, which limits real-world deployment. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective cross-view image retrieval framework that leverages a pretrained vision encoder and a large language model (LLM), requiring no additional training. Given a monocular street-view image, our method extracts geographic cues through web-based image search and LLM-based location inference, generates a satellite query via geocoding API, and retrieves matching tiles using a pretrained vision encoder (e.g., DINOv2) with PCA-based whitening feature refinement. Despite using no ground-truth supervision or finetuning, our proposed method outperforms prior learning-based approaches on the benchmark dataset under zero-shot settings. Moreover, our pipeline enables automatic construction of semantically aligned street-to-satellite datasets, which is offering a scalable and cost-efficient alternative to manual annotation. All source codes will be made publicly available at https://jeonghomin.github.io/street2orbit.github.io/.

SlideBot: A Multi-Agent Framework for Generating Informative, Reliable, Multi-Modal Presentations

Authors:Eric Xie, Danielle Waterfield, Michael Kennedy, Aidong Zhang
Date:2025-11-12 23:12:05

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown immense potential in education, automating tasks like quiz generation and content summarization. However, generating effective presentation slides introduces unique challenges due to the complexity of multimodal content creation and the need for precise, domain-specific information. Existing LLM-based solutions often fail to produce reliable and informative outputs, limiting their educational value. To address these limitations, we introduce SlideBot - a modular, multi-agent slide generation framework that integrates LLMs with retrieval, structured planning, and code generation. SlideBot is organized around three pillars: informativeness, ensuring deep and contextually grounded content; reliability, achieved by incorporating external sources through retrieval; and practicality, which enables customization and iterative feedback through instructor collaboration. It incorporates evidence-based instructional design principles from Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) and the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning (CTML), using structured planning to manage intrinsic load and consistent visual macros to reduce extraneous load and enhance dual-channel learning. Within the system, specialized agents collaboratively retrieve information, summarize content, generate figures, and format slides using LaTeX, aligning outputs with instructor preferences through interactive refinement. Evaluations from domain experts and students in AI and biomedical education show that SlideBot consistently enhances conceptual accuracy, clarity, and instructional value. These findings demonstrate SlideBot's potential to streamline slide preparation while ensuring accuracy, relevance, and adaptability in higher education.

Self-Correcting Large Language Models: Generation vs. Multiple Choice

Authors:Hossein A. Rahmani, Satyapriya Krishna, Xi Wang, Mohammadmehdi Naghiaei, Emine Yilmaz
Date:2025-11-12 14:46:40

Large language models have recently demonstrated remarkable abilities to self-correct their responses through iterative refinement, often referred to as self-consistency or self-reflection. However, the dynamics of this self-correction mechanism may differ substantially depending on whether the model is tasked with open-ended text generation or with selecting the most appropriate response from multiple predefined options. In this paper, we conduct a systematic investigation of these two paradigms by comparing performance trends and error-correction behaviors across various natural language understanding and reasoning tasks, covering language models of different scales and families. Our experimental results reveal distinct patterns of improvement and failure modes: \textit{While open-ended generation often benefits from the flexibility of re-interpretation and compositional refinement, multiple-choice selection can leverage clearer solution boundaries but may be limited by the provided options}. This contrast also reflects the dual demands faced by emerging agentic LLM applications: effective agents must not only generate and refine open-ended plans or explanations, but also make reliable discrete choices when operating within constrained action spaces. Our findings, therefore, highlight that the design of self-correction mechanisms should take into account the interaction between task structure and output space, with implications for both knowledge-intensive reasoning and decision-oriented applications of LLMs.

The 2025 Planning Performance of Frontier Large Language Models

Authors:Augusto B. CorrĂȘa, AndrĂ© G. Pereira, Jendrik Seipp
Date:2025-11-12 14:45:07

The capacity of Large Language Models (LLMs) for reasoning remains an active area of research, with the capabilities of frontier models continually advancing. We provide an updated evaluation of the end-to-end planning performance of three frontier LLMs as of 2025, where models are prompted to generate a plan from PDDL domain and task descriptions. We evaluate DeepSeek R1, Gemini 2.5 Pro, GPT-5 and as reference the planner LAMA on a subset of domains from the most recent Learning Track of the International Planning Competition. Our results show that on standard PDDL domains, the performance of GPT-5 in terms of solved tasks is competitive with LAMA. When the PDDL domains and tasks are obfuscated to test for pure reasoning, the performance of all LLMs degrades, though less severely than previously reported for other models. These results show substantial improvements over prior generations of LLMs, reducing the performance gap to planners on a challenging benchmark.

A Hybrid Search for Complex Table Question Answering in Securities Report

Authors:Daiki Shirafuji, Koji Tanaka, Tatsuhiko Saito
Date:2025-11-12 10:19:27

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) are gaining increased attention in the domain of Table Question Answering (TQA), particularly for extracting information from tables in documents. However, directly entering entire tables as long text into LLMs often leads to incorrect answers because most LLMs cannot inherently capture complex table structures. In this paper, we propose a cell extraction method for TQA without manual identification, even for complex table headers. Our approach estimates table headers by computing similarities between a given question and individual cells via a hybrid retrieval mechanism that integrates a language model and TF-IDF. We then select as the answer the cells at the intersection of the most relevant row and column. Furthermore, the language model is trained using contrastive learning on a small dataset of question-header pairs to enhance performance. We evaluated our approach in the TQA dataset from the U4 shared task at NTCIR-18. The experimental results show that our pipeline achieves an accuracy of 74.6\%, outperforming existing LLMs such as GPT-4o mini~(63.9\%). In the future, although we used traditional encoder models for retrieval in this study, we plan to incorporate more efficient text-search models to improve performance and narrow the gap with human evaluation results.

PAN: A World Model for General, Interactable, and Long-Horizon World Simulation

Authors:PAN Team, Jiannan Xiang, Yi Gu, Zihan Liu, Zeyu Feng, Qiyue Gao, Yiyan Hu, Benhao Huang, Guangyi Liu, Yichi Yang, Kun Zhou, Davit Abrahamyan, Arif Ahmad, Ganesh Bannur, Junrong Chen, Kimi Chen, Mingkai Deng, Ruobing Han, Xinqi Huang, Haoqiang Kang, Zheqi Li, Enze Ma, Hector Ren, Yashowardhan Shinde, Rohan Shingre, Ramsundar Tanikella, Kaiming Tao, Dequan Yang, Xinle Yu, Cong Zeng, Binglin Zhou, Zhengzhong Liu, Zhiting Hu, Eric P. Xing
Date:2025-11-12 07:20:35

A world model enables an intelligent agent to imagine, predict, and reason about how the world evolves in response to its actions, and accordingly to plan and strategize. While recent video generation models produce realistic visual sequences, they typically operate in the prompt-to-full-video manner without causal control, interactivity, or long-horizon consistency required for purposeful reasoning. Existing world modeling efforts, on the other hand, often focus on restricted domains (e.g., physical, game, or 3D-scene dynamics) with limited depth and controllability, and struggle to generalize across diverse environments and interaction formats. In this work, we introduce PAN, a general, interactable, and long-horizon world model that predicts future world states through high-quality video simulation conditioned on history and natural language actions. PAN employs the Generative Latent Prediction (GLP) architecture that combines an autoregressive latent dynamics backbone based on a large language model (LLM), which grounds simulation in extensive text-based knowledge and enables conditioning on language-specified actions, with a video diffusion decoder that reconstructs perceptually detailed and temporally coherent visual observations, to achieve a unification between latent space reasoning (imagination) and realizable world dynamics (reality). Trained on large-scale video-action pairs spanning diverse domains, PAN supports open-domain, action-conditioned simulation with coherent, long-term dynamics. Extensive experiments show that PAN achieves strong performance in action-conditioned world simulation, long-horizon forecasting, and simulative reasoning compared to other video generators and world models, taking a step towards general world models that enable predictive simulation of future world states for reasoning and acting.

HalluClean: A Unified Framework to Combat Hallucinations in LLMs

Authors:Yaxin Zhao, Yu Zhang
Date:2025-11-12 02:50:56

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance across a wide range of natural language processing tasks, yet they often produce hallucinated content that undermines factual reliability. To address this challenge, we introduce HalluClean, a lightweight and task-agnostic framework for detecting and correcting hallucinations in LLM-generated text. HalluClean adopts a reasoning-enhanced paradigm, explicitly decomposing the process into planning, execution, and revision stages to identify and refine unsupported claims. It employs minimal task-routing prompts to enable zero-shot generalization across diverse domains, without relying on external knowledge sources or supervised detectors. We conduct extensive evaluations on five representative tasks-question answering, dialogue, summarization, math word problems, and contradiction detection. Experimental results show that HalluClean significantly improves factual consistency and outperforms competitive baselines, demonstrating its potential to enhance the trustworthiness of LLM outputs in real-world applications.

Designing LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems for Software Engineering Tasks: Quality Attributes, Design Patterns and Rationale

Authors:Yangxiao Cai, Ruiyin Li, Peng Liang, Mojtaba Shahin, Zengyang Li
Date:2025-11-11 17:19:30

As the complexity of Software Engineering (SE) tasks continues to escalate, Multi-Agent Systems (MASs) have emerged as a focal point of research and practice due to their autonomy and scalability. Furthermore, through leveraging the reasoning and planning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), the application of LLM-based MASs in the field of SE is garnering increasing attention. However, there is no dedicated study that systematically explores the design of LLM-based MASs, including the Quality Attributes (QAs) on which the designers mainly focus, the design patterns used by the designers, and the rationale guiding the design of LLM-based MASs for SE tasks. To this end, we conducted a study to identify the QAs that LLM-based MASs for SE tasks focus on, the design patterns used in the MASs, and the design rationale for the MASs. We collected 94 papers on LLM-based MASs for SE tasks as the source. Our study shows that: (1) Code Generation is the most common SE task solved by LLM-based MASs among ten identified SE tasks, (2) Functional Suitability is the QA on which designers of LLM-based MASs pay the most attention, (3) Role-Based Cooperation is the design pattern most frequently employed among 16 patterns used to construct LLM-based MASs, and (4) Improving the Quality of Generated Code is the most common rationale behind the design of LLM-based MASs. Based on the study results, we presented the implications for the design of LLM-based MASs to support SE tasks.

FaithAct: Faithfulness Planning and Acting in MLLMs

Authors:Junxian Li, Xinyue Xu, Sai Ma, Sichao Li
Date:2025-11-11 16:22:49

Unfaithfulness remains a persistent challenge for large language models (LLMs), which often produce plausible yet ungrounded reasoning chains that diverge from perceptual evidence or final conclusions. We distinguish between behavioral faithfulness (alignment between reasoning and output) and perceptual faithfulness (alignment between reasoning and input), and introduce FaithEval for quantifying step-level and chain-level faithfulness by evaluating whether each claimed object is visually supported by the image. Building on these insights, we propose FaithAct, a faithfulness-first planning and acting framework that enforces evidential grounding at every reasoning step. Experiments across multiple reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that FaithAct improves perceptual faithfulness by up to 26% without degrading task accuracy compared to prompt-based and tool-augmented baselines. Our analysis shows that treating faithfulness as a guiding principle not only mitigates hallucination but also leads to more stable reasoning trajectories. This work thereby establishes a unified framework for both evaluating and enforcing faithfulness in multimodal reasoning.

National Institute on Aging PREPARE Challenge: Early Detection of Cognitive Impairment Using Speech -- The SpeechCARE Solution

Authors:Maryam Zolnoori, Hossein Azadmaleki, Yasaman Haghbin, Ali Zolnour, Mohammad Javad Momeni Nezhad, Sina Rashidi, Mehdi Naserian, Elyas Esmaeili, Sepehr Karimi Arpanahi
Date:2025-11-11 11:39:20

Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD) affect one in five adults over 60, yet more than half of individuals with cognitive decline remain undiagnosed. Speech-based assessments show promise for early detection, as phonetic motor planning deficits alter acoustic features (e.g., pitch, tone), while memory and language impairments lead to syntactic and semantic errors. However, conventional speech-processing pipelines with hand-crafted features or general-purpose audio classifiers often exhibit limited performance and generalizability. To address these limitations, we introduce SpeechCARE, a multimodal speech processing pipeline that leverages pretrained, multilingual acoustic and linguistic transformer models to capture subtle speech-related cues associated with cognitive impairment. Inspired by the Mixture of Experts (MoE) paradigm, SpeechCARE employs a dynamic fusion architecture that weights transformer-based acoustic, linguistic, and demographic inputs, allowing integration of additional modalities (e.g., social factors, imaging) and enhancing robustness across diverse tasks. Its robust preprocessing includes automatic transcription, large language model (LLM)-based anomaly detection, and task identification. A SHAP-based explainability module and LLM reasoning highlight each modality's contribution to decision-making. SpeechCARE achieved AUC = 0.88 and F1 = 0.72 for classifying cognitively healthy, MCI, and AD individuals, with AUC = 0.90 and F1 = 0.62 for MCI detection. Bias analysis showed minimal disparities, except for adults over 80. Mitigation techniques included oversampling and weighted loss. Future work includes deployment in real-world care settings (e.g., VNS Health, Columbia ADRC) and EHR-integrated explainability for underrepresented populations in New York City.

LLM-Powered Fully Automated Chaos Engineering: Towards Enabling Anyone to Build Resilient Software Systems at Low Cost

Authors:Daisuke Kikuta, Hiroki Ikeuchi, Kengo Tajiri
Date:2025-11-11 06:03:24

Chaos Engineering (CE) is an engineering technique aimed at improving the resilience of distributed systems. It involves intentionally injecting faults into a system to test its resilience, uncover weaknesses, and address them before they cause failures in production. Recent CE tools automate the execution of predefined CE experiments. However, planning such experiments and improving the system based on the experimental results still remain manual. These processes are labor-intensive and require multi-domain expertise. To address these challenges and enable anyone to build resilient systems at low cost, this paper proposes ChaosEater, a system that automates the entire CE cycle with Large Language Models (LLMs). It predefines an agentic workflow according to a systematic CE cycle and assigns subdivided processes within the workflow to LLMs. ChaosEater targets CE for software systems built on Kubernetes. Therefore, the LLMs in ChaosEater complete CE cycles through software engineering tasks, including requirement definition, code generation, testing, and debugging. We evaluate ChaosEater through case studies on small- and large-scale Kubernetes systems. The results demonstrate that it consistently completes reasonable CE cycles with significantly low time and monetary costs. Its cycles are also qualitatively validated by human engineers and LLMs.

LLM-GROP: Visually Grounded Robot Task and Motion Planning with Large Language Models

Authors:Xiaohan Zhang, Yan Ding, Yohei Hayamizu, Zainab Altaweel, Yifeng Zhu, Yuke Zhu, Peter Stone, Chris Paxton, Shiqi Zhang
Date:2025-11-11 01:11:20

Task planning and motion planning are two of the most important problems in robotics, where task planning methods help robots achieve high-level goals and motion planning methods maintain low-level feasibility. Task and motion planning (TAMP) methods interleave the two processes of task planning and motion planning to ensure goal achievement and motion feasibility. Within the TAMP context, we are concerned with the mobile manipulation (MoMa) of multiple objects, where it is necessary to interleave actions for navigation and manipulation. In particular, we aim to compute where and how each object should be placed given underspecified goals, such as ``set up dinner table with a fork, knife and plate.'' We leverage the rich common sense knowledge from large language models (LLMs), e.g., about how tableware is organized, to facilitate both task-level and motion-level planning. In addition, we use computer vision methods to learn a strategy for selecting base positions to facilitate MoMa behaviors, where the base position corresponds to the robot's ``footprint'' and orientation in its operating space. Altogether, this article provides a principled TAMP framework for MoMa tasks that accounts for common sense about object rearrangement and is adaptive to novel situations that include many objects that need to be moved. We performed quantitative experiments in both real-world settings and simulated environments. We evaluated the success rate and efficiency in completing long-horizon object rearrangement tasks. While the robot completed 84.4\% real-world object rearrangement trials, subjective human evaluations indicated that the robot's performance is still lower than experienced human waiters.

Cortex AISQL: A Production SQL Engine for Unstructured Data

Authors:Paritosh Aggarwal, Bowei Chen, Anupam Datta, Benjamin Han, Boxin Jiang, Nitish Jindal, Zihan Li, Aaron Lin, Pawel Liskowski, Jay Tayade, Dimitris Tsirogiannis, Nathan Wiegand, Weicheng Zhao
Date:2025-11-10 22:14:13

Snowflake's Cortex AISQL is a production SQL engine that integrates native semantic operations directly into SQL. This integration allows users to write declarative queries that combine relational operations with semantic reasoning, enabling them to query both structured and unstructured data effortlessly. However, making semantic operations efficient at production scale poses fundamental challenges. Semantic operations are more expensive than traditional SQL operations, possess distinct latency and throughput characteristics, and their cost and selectivity are unknown during query compilation. Furthermore, existing query engines are not designed to optimize semantic operations. The AISQL query execution engine addresses these challenges through three novel techniques informed by production deployment data from Snowflake customers. First, AI-aware query optimization treats AI inference cost as a first-class optimization objective, reasoning about large language model (LLM) cost directly during query planning to achieve 2-8$\times$ speedups. Second, adaptive model cascades reduce inference costs by routing most rows through a fast proxy model while escalating uncertain cases to a powerful oracle model, achieving 2-6$\times$ speedups while maintaining 90-95% of oracle model quality. Third, semantic join query rewriting lowers the quadratic time complexity of join operations to linear through reformulation as multi-label classification tasks, achieving 15-70$\times$ speedups with often improved prediction quality. AISQL is deployed in production at Snowflake, where it powers diverse customer workloads across analytics, search, and content understanding.

Procedural Knowledge Improves Agentic LLM Workflows

Authors:Vincent Hsiao, Mark Roberts, Leslie Smith
Date:2025-11-10 19:27:57

Large language models (LLMs) often struggle when performing agentic tasks without substantial tool support, prom-pt engineering, or fine tuning. Despite research showing that domain-dependent, procedural knowledge can dramatically increase planning efficiency, little work evaluates its potential for improving LLM performance on agentic tasks that may require implicit planning. We formalize, implement, and evaluate an agentic LLM workflow that leverages procedural knowledge in the form of a hierarchical task network (HTN). Empirical results of our implementation show that hand-coded HTNs can dramatically improve LLM performance on agentic tasks, and using HTNs can boost a 20b or 70b parameter LLM to outperform a much larger 120b parameter LLM baseline. Furthermore, LLM-created HTNs improve overall performance, though less so. The results suggest that leveraging expertise--from humans, documents, or LLMs--to curate procedural knowledge will become another important tool for improving LLM workflows.

Using Vision Language Models as Closed-Loop Symbolic Planners for Robotic Applications: A Control-Theoretic Perspective

Authors:Hao Wang, Sathwik Karnik, Bea Lim, Somil Bansal
Date:2025-11-10 18:56:56

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) have been widely used for embodied symbolic planning. Yet, how to effectively use these models for closed-loop symbolic planning remains largely unexplored. Because they operate as black boxes, LLMs and VLMs can produce unpredictable or costly errors, making their use in high-level robotic planning especially challenging. In this work, we investigate how to use VLMs as closed-loop symbolic planners for robotic applications from a control-theoretic perspective. Concretely, we study how the control horizon and warm-starting impact the performance of VLM symbolic planners. We design and conduct controlled experiments to gain insights that are broadly applicable to utilizing VLMs as closed-loop symbolic planners, and we discuss recommendations that can help improve the performance of VLM symbolic planners.

Surgical Agent Orchestration Platform for Voice-directed Patient Data Interaction

Authors:Hyeryun Park, Byung Mo Gu, Jun Hee Lee, Byeong Hyeon Choi, Sekeun Kim, Hyun Koo Kim, Kyungsang Kim
Date:2025-11-10 18:47:24

In da Vinci robotic surgery, surgeons' hands and eyes are fully engaged in the procedure, making it difficult to access and manipulate multimodal patient data without interruption. We propose a voice-directed Surgical Agent Orchestrator Platform (SAOP) built on a hierarchical multi-agent framework, consisting of an orchestration agent and three task-specific agents driven by Large Language Models (LLMs). These LLM-based agents autonomously plan, refine, validate, and reason to map voice commands into specific tasks such as retrieving clinical information, manipulating CT scans, or navigating 3D anatomical models on the surgical video. We also introduce a Multi-level Orchestration Evaluation Metric (MOEM) to comprehensively assess the performance and robustness from command-level and category-level perspectives. The SAOP achieves high accuracy and success rates across 240 voice commands, while LLM-based agents improve robustness against speech recognition errors and diverse or ambiguous free-form commands, demonstrating strong potential to support minimally invasive da Vinci robotic surgery.

Llama-Embed-Nemotron-8B: A Universal Text Embedding Model for Multilingual and Cross-Lingual Tasks

Authors:Yauhen Babakhin, Radek Osmulski, Ronay Ak, Gabriel Moreira, Mengyao Xu, Benedikt Schifferer, Bo Liu, Even Oldridge
Date:2025-11-10 12:13:16

We introduce llama-embed-nemotron-8b, an open-weights text embedding model that achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Multilingual Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MMTEB) leaderboard as of October 21, 2025. While recent models show strong performance, their training data or methodologies are often not fully disclosed. We aim to address this by developing a fully open-source model, publicly releasing its weights and detailed ablation studies, and planning to share the curated training datasets. Our model demonstrates superior performance across all major embedding tasks -- including retrieval, classification and semantic textual similarity (STS) -- and excels in challenging multilingual scenarios, such as low-resource languages and cross-lingual setups. This state-of-the-art performance is driven by a novel data mix of 16.1 million query-document pairs, split between 7.7 million samples from public datasets and 8.4 million synthetically generated examples from various open-weight LLMs. One of our key contributions is a detailed ablation study analyzing core design choices, including a comparison of contrastive loss implementations, an evaluation of synthetic data generation (SDG) strategies, and the impact of model merging. The llama-embed-nemotron-8b is an instruction-aware model, supporting user-defined instructions to enhance performance for specific use-cases. This combination of top-tier performance, broad applicability, and user-driven flexibility enables it to serve as a universal text embedding solution.

A Two-Stage System for Layout-Controlled Image Generation using Large Language Models and Diffusion Models

Authors:Jan-Hendrik Koch, Jonas Krumme, Konrad Gadzicki
Date:2025-11-10 09:40:48

Text-to-image diffusion models exhibit remarkable generative capabilities, but lack precise control over object counts and spatial arrangements. This work introduces a two-stage system to address these compositional limitations. The first stage employs a Large Language Model (LLM) to generate a structured layout from a list of objects. The second stage uses a layout-conditioned diffusion model to synthesize a photorealistic image adhering to this layout. We find that task decomposition is critical for LLM-based spatial planning; by simplifying the initial generation to core objects and completing the layout with rule-based insertion, we improve object recall from 57.2% to 99.9% for complex scenes. For image synthesis, we compare two leading conditioning methods: ControlNet and GLIGEN. After domain-specific finetuning on table-setting datasets, we identify a key trade-off: ControlNet preserves text-based stylistic control but suffers from object hallucination, while GLIGEN provides superior layout fidelity at the cost of reduced prompt-based controllability. Our end-to-end system successfully generates images with specified object counts and plausible spatial arrangements, demonstrating the viability of a decoupled approach for compositionally controlled synthesis.

CoFineLLM: Conformal Finetuning of LLMs for Language-Instructed Robot Planning

Authors:Jun Wang, Yevgeniy Vorobeychik, Yiannis Kantaros
Date:2025-11-09 23:38:25

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently emerged as planners for language-instructed agents, generating sequences of actions to accomplish natural language tasks. However, their reliability remains a challenge, especially in long-horizon tasks, since they often produce overconfident yet wrong outputs. Conformal Prediction (CP) has been leveraged to address this issue by wrapping LLM outputs into prediction sets that contain the correct action with a user-defined confidence. When the prediction set is a singleton, the planner executes that action; otherwise, it requests help from a user. This has led to LLM-based planners that can ensure plan correctness with a user-defined probability. However, as LLMs are trained in an uncertainty-agnostic manner, without awareness of prediction sets, they tend to produce unnecessarily large sets, particularly at higher confidence levels, resulting in frequent human interventions limiting autonomous deployment. To address this, we introduce CoFineLLM (Conformal Finetuning for LLMs), the first CP-aware finetuning framework for LLM-based planners that explicitly reduces prediction-set size and, in turn, the need for user interventions. We evaluate our approach on multiple language-instructed robot planning problems and show consistent improvements over uncertainty-aware and uncertainty-agnostic finetuning baselines in terms of prediction-set size, and help rates. Finally, we demonstrate robustness of our method to out-of-distribution scenarios in hardware experiments.

Optimizing Long-context LLM Serving via Fine-grained Sequence Parallelism

Authors:Cong Li, Yuzhe Yang, Xuegui Zheng, Qifan Yang, Yijin Guan, Size Zheng, Li-Wen Chang, Shufan Liu, Xin Liu, Guangyu Sun
Date:2025-11-09 06:14:23

With the advancement of large language models (LLMs), their context windows have rapidly expanded. To meet diverse demands from varying-length requests in online services, existing state-of-the-art systems tune the sequence parallelism (SP) allocation. However, current dynamic SP allocation lacks flexibility to (1) support stage-specific parallelism requirements in LLM inference, (2) mitigate the global latency degradation from excessive SP allocation, and (3) exploit resource fragments arising from SP size variation. To tackle this problem, we propose Chunkwise Dynamic Sequence Parallelism (CDSP), a fine-grained parallelism strategy that assigns SP sizes across \textit{intra-request} token segments. Based on CDSP, we build Tetris, an LLM serving system that (1) efficiently integrates CDSP into disaggregated cluster to satisfy parallelism heterogeneity, (2) dynamically regulates SP size expansion based on real-time load conditions, and (3) adaptively explores chunking plans to utilize fragmented resources while meeting per-request demands. Compared with state-of-the-art systems, Tetris achieves up to 4.35$\times$ lower time-to-first-token (TTFT) under max sustainable loads, reduces median time-between-tokens (TBT) by up to 40.1\%, and increases the max request capacity by up to 45\%.

Overview of CHIP 2025 Shared Task 2: Discharge Medication Recommendation for Metabolic Diseases Based on Chinese Electronic Health Records

Authors:Juntao Li, Haobin Yuan, Ling Luo, Tengxiao Lv, Yan Jiang, Fan Wang, Ping Zhang, Huiyi Lv, Jian Wang, Yuanyuan Sun, Hongfei Lin
Date:2025-11-09 05:11:27

Discharge medication recommendation plays a critical role in ensuring treatment continuity, preventing readmission, and improving long-term management for patients with chronic metabolic diseases. This paper present an overview of the CHIP 2025 Shared Task 2 competition, which aimed to develop state-of-the-art approaches for automatically recommending appro-priate discharge medications using real-world Chinese EHR data. For this task, we constructed CDrugRed, a high-quality dataset consisting of 5,894 de-identified hospitalization records from 3,190 patients in China. This task is challenging due to multi-label nature of medication recommendation, het-erogeneous clinical text, and patient-specific variability in treatment plans. A total of 526 teams registered, with 167 and 95 teams submitting valid results to the Phase A and Phase B leaderboards, respectively. The top-performing team achieved the highest overall performance on the final test set, with a Jaccard score of 0.5102, F1 score of 0.6267, demonstrating the potential of advanced large language model (LLM)-based ensemble systems. These re-sults highlight both the promise and remaining challenges of applying LLMs to medication recommendation in Chinese EHRs. The post-evaluation phase remains open at https://tianchi.aliyun.com/competition/entrance/532411/.

Reasoning with Confidence: Efficient Verification of LLM Reasoning Steps via Uncertainty Heads

Authors:Jingwei Ni, Ekaterina Fadeeva, Tianyi Wu, Mubashara Akhtar, Jiaheng Zhang, Elliott Ash, Markus Leippold, Timothy Baldwin, See-Kiong Ng, Artem Shelmanov, Mrinmaya Sachan
Date:2025-11-09 03:38:29

Solving complex tasks usually requires LLMs to generate long multi-step reasoning chains. Previous work has shown that verifying the correctness of individual reasoning steps can further improve the performance and efficiency of LLMs on such tasks and enhance solution interpretability. However, existing verification approaches, such as Process Reward Models (PRMs), are either computationally expensive, limited to specific domains, or require large-scale human or model-generated annotations. Thus, we propose a lightweight alternative for step-level reasoning verification based on data-driven uncertainty scores. We train transformer-based uncertainty quantification heads (UHeads) that use the internal states of a frozen LLM to estimate the uncertainty of its reasoning steps during generation. The approach is fully automatic: target labels are generated either by another larger LLM (e.g., DeepSeek R1) or in a self-supervised manner by the original model itself. UHeads are both effective and lightweight, containing less than 10M parameters. Across multiple domains, including mathematics, planning, and general knowledge question answering, they match or even surpass the performance of PRMs that are up to 810x larger. Our findings suggest that the internal states of LLMs encode their uncertainty and can serve as reliable signals for reasoning verification, offering a promising direction toward scalable and generalizable introspective LLMs.

Confidence-Guided Stepwise Model Routing for Cost-Efficient Reasoning

Authors:Sangmook Lee, Dohyung Kim, Hyukhun Koh, Nakyeong Yang, Kyomin Jung
Date:2025-11-09 02:33:08

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) - particularly model scaling and test-time techniques - have greatly enhanced the reasoning capabilities of language models at the expense of higher inference costs. To lower inference costs, prior works train router models or deferral mechanisms that allocate easy queries to a small, efficient model, while forwarding harder queries to larger, more expensive models. However, these trained router models often lack robustness under domain shifts and require expensive data synthesis techniques such as Monte Carlo rollouts to obtain sufficient ground-truth routing labels for training. In this work, we propose Confidence-Guided Stepwise Model Routing for Cost-Efficient Reasoning (STEER), a domain-agnostic framework that performs fine-grained, step-level routing between smaller and larger LLMs without utilizing external models. STEER leverages confidence scores from the smaller model's logits prior to generating a reasoning step, so that the large model is invoked only when necessary. Extensive evaluations using different LLMs on a diverse set of challenging benchmarks across multiple domains such as Mathematical Reasoning, Multi-Hop QA, and Planning tasks indicate that STEER achieves competitive or enhanced accuracy while reducing inference costs (up to +20% accuracy with 48% less FLOPs compared to solely using the larger model on AIME), outperforming baselines that rely on trained external modules. Our results establish model-internal confidence as a robust, domain-agnostic signal for model routing, offering a scalable pathway for efficient LLM deployment.

Self-Abstraction from Grounded Experience for Plan-Guided Policy Refinement

Authors:Hiroaki Hayashi, Bo Pang, Wenting Zhao, Ye Liu, Akash Gokul, Srijan Bansal, Caiming Xiong, Semih Yavuz, Yingbo Zhou
Date:2025-11-08 08:49:38

Large language model (LLM) based agents are increasingly used to tackle software engineering tasks that require multi-step reasoning and code modification, demonstrating promising yet limited performance. However, most existing LLM agents typically operate within static execution frameworks, lacking a principled mechanism to learn and self-improve from their own experience and past rollouts. As a result, their performance remains bounded by the initial framework design and the underlying LLM's capabilities. We propose Self-Abstraction from Grounded Experience (SAGE), a framework that enables agents to learn from their own task executions and refine their behavior through self-abstraction. After an initial rollout, the agent induces a concise plan abstraction from its grounded experience, distilling key steps, dependencies, and constraints. This learned abstraction is then fed back as contextual guidance, refining the agent's policy and supporting more structured, informed subsequent executions. Empirically, SAGE delivers consistent performance gains across diverse LLM backbones and agent architectures. Notably, it yields a 7.2% relative performance improvement over the strong Mini-SWE-Agent baseline when paired with the GPT-5 (high) backbone. SAGE further achieves strong overall performance on SWE-Bench Verified benchmark, reaching 73.2% and 74% Pass@1 resolve rates with the Mini-SWE-Agent and OpenHands CodeAct agent framework, respectively.

Can a Small Model Learn to Look Before It Leaps? Dynamic Learning and Proactive Correction for Hallucination Detection

Authors:Zepeng Bao, Shen Zhou, Qiankun Pi, Jianhao Chen, Mayi Xu, Ming Zhong, Yuanyuan Zhu, Tieyun Qian
Date:2025-11-08 05:05:38

Hallucination in large language models (LLMs) remains a critical barrier to their safe deployment. Existing tool-augmented hallucination detection methods require pre-defined fixed verification strategies, which are crucial to the quality and effectiveness of tool calls. Some methods directly employ powerful closed-source LLMs such as GPT-4 as detectors, which are effective but too costly. To mitigate the cost issue, some methods adopt the teacher-student architecture and finetune open-source small models as detectors via agent tuning. However, these methods are limited by fixed strategies. When faced with a dynamically changing execution environment, they may lack adaptability and inappropriately call tools, ultimately leading to detection failure. To address the problem of insufficient strategy adaptability, we propose the innovative ``Learning to Evaluate and Adaptively Plan''(LEAP) framework, which endows an efficient student model with the dynamic learning and proactive correction capabilities of the teacher model. Specifically, our method formulates the hallucination detection problem as a dynamic strategy learning problem. We first employ a teacher model to generate trajectories within the dynamic learning loop and dynamically adjust the strategy based on execution failures. We then distill this dynamic planning capability into an efficient student model via agent tuning. Finally, during strategy execution, the student model adopts a proactive correction mechanism, enabling it to propose, review, and optimize its own verification strategies before execution. We demonstrate through experiments on three challenging benchmarks that our LEAP-tuned model outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

TAMAS: Benchmarking Adversarial Risks in Multi-Agent LLM Systems

Authors:Ishan Kavathekar, Hemang Jain, Ameya Rathod, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, Tanuja Ganu
Date:2025-11-07 14:30:26

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities as autonomous agents through tool use, planning, and decision-making abilities, leading to their widespread adoption across diverse tasks. As task complexity grows, multi-agent LLM systems are increasingly used to solve problems collaboratively. However, safety and security of these systems remains largely under-explored. Existing benchmarks and datasets predominantly focus on single-agent settings, failing to capture the unique vulnerabilities of multi-agent dynamics and co-ordination. To address this gap, we introduce $\textbf{T}$hreats and $\textbf{A}$ttacks in $\textbf{M}$ulti-$\textbf{A}$gent $\textbf{S}$ystems ($\textbf{TAMAS}$), a benchmark designed to evaluate the robustness and safety of multi-agent LLM systems. TAMAS includes five distinct scenarios comprising 300 adversarial instances across six attack types and 211 tools, along with 100 harmless tasks. We assess system performance across ten backbone LLMs and three agent interaction configurations from Autogen and CrewAI frameworks, highlighting critical challenges and failure modes in current multi-agent deployments. Furthermore, we introduce Effective Robustness Score (ERS) to assess the tradeoff between safety and task effectiveness of these frameworks. Our findings show that multi-agent systems are highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks, underscoring the urgent need for stronger defenses. TAMAS provides a foundation for systematically studying and improving the safety of multi-agent LLM systems.

FM4Com: Foundation Model for Scene-Adaptive Communication Strategy Optimization

Authors:Zhaoyang Li, Shangzhuo Xie, Qianqian Yang
Date:2025-11-07 09:21:22

The emergence of sixth-generation (6G) networks heralds an intelligent communication ecosystem driven by AI-native air interfaces. However, current physical-layer designs-typically following modular and isolated optimization paradigms-fail to achieve global end-to-end optimality due to neglected inter-module dependencies. Although large language models (LLMs) have recently been applied to communication tasks such as beam prediction and resource allocation, existing studies remain limited to single-task or single-modality scenarios and lack the ability to jointly reason over communication states and user intents for personalized strategy adaptation. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a novel multimodal communication decision-making model based on reinforcement learning. The proposed model semantically aligns channel state information (CSI) and textual user instructions, enabling comprehensive understanding of both physical-layer conditions and communication intents. It then generates physically realizable, user-customized link construction strategies that dynamically adapt to changing environments and preference tendencies. A two-stage reinforcement learning framework is employed: the first stage expands the experience pool via heuristic exploration and behavior cloning to obtain a near-optimal initialization, while the second stage fine-tunes the model through multi-objective reinforcement learning considering bit error rate, throughput, and complexity. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model significantly outperforms conventional planning-based algorithms under challenging channel conditions, achieving robust, efficient, and personalized 6G link construction.