Despite deep learning's success in chemistry, its impact is hindered by a lack of interpretability and an inability to resolve activity cliffs, where minor structural nuances trigger drastic property shifts. Current representation learning, bound by the similarity principle, often fails to capture these structural-activity discontinuities. To address this, we introduce MolEvolve, an evolutionary framework that reformulates molecular discovery as an autonomous, look-ahead planning problem. Unlike traditional methods that depend on human-engineered features or rigid prior knowledge, MolEvolve leverages a Large Language Model (LLM) to actively explore and evolve a library of executable chemical symbolic operations. By utilizing the LLM to cold start and an Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) engine for test-time planning with external tools (e.g. RDKit), the system self-discovers optimal trajectories autonomously. This process evolves transparent reasoning chains that translate complex structural transformations into actionable, human-readable chemical insights. Experimental results demonstrate that MolEvolve's autonomous search not only evolves transparent, human-readable chemical insights, but also outperforms baselines in both property prediction and molecule optimization tasks.
Participatory urban sensing leverages human mobility for large-scale urban data collection, yet existing methods typically rely on centralized optimization and assume homogeneous participants, resulting in rigid assignments that overlook personal preferences and heterogeneous urban contexts. We propose MAPUS, an LLM-based multi-agent framework for personalized and fair participatory urban sensing. In our framework, participants are modeled as autonomous agents with individual profiles and schedules, while a coordinator agent performs fairness-aware selection and refines sensing routes through language-based negotiation. Experiments on real-world datasets show that MAPUS achieves competitive sensing coverage while substantially improving participant satisfaction and fairness, promoting more human-centric and sustainable urban sensing systems.
While Large Language Models (LLMs) provide semantic flexibility for robotic task planning, their susceptibility to hallucination and logical inconsistency limits their reliability in long-horizon domains. To bridge the gap between unstructured environments and rigorous plan synthesis, we propose DUPLEX, an agentic dual-system neuro-symbolic architecture that strictly confines the LLM to schema-guided information extraction rather than end-to-end planning or code generation. In our framework, a feed-forward Fast System utilizes a lightweight LLM to extract entities, relations etc. from natural language, deterministically mapping them into a Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL) problem file for a classical symbolic planner. To resolve complex or underspecified scenarios, a Slow System is activated exclusively upon planning failure, leveraging solver diagnostics to drive a high-capacity LLM in iterative reflection and repair. Extensive evaluations across 12 classical and household planning domains demonstrate that DUPLEX significantly outperforms existing end-to-end and hybrid LLM baselines in both success rate and reliability. These results confirm that The key is not to make the LLM plan better, but to restrict the LLM to the part it is good at - structured semantic grounding - and leave logical plan synthesis to a symbolic planner.
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional potential in complex reasoning,pioneering a new paradigm for autonomous agent decision making in dynamic settings. However, in Real-Time Strategy (RTS) scenarios, LLMs suffer from a critical speed-quality trade-off. Specifically expansive state spaces and time limits render inference delays prohibitive, while stochastic planning errors undermine logical consistency. To address these challenges, we present SEMA (Self-Evolving Multi-Agent), a novel framework designed for high-performance, low-latency decision-making in RTS environments. This collaborative multi-agent framework facilitates self-evolution by adaptively calibrating model bias through in-episode assessment and cross-episode analysis. We further incorporate dynamic observation pruning based on structural entropy to model game states topologically. By distilling high dimensional data into core semantic information, this approach significantly reduces inference time. We also develop a hybrid knowledge-memory mechanism that integrates micro-trajectories, macro-experience, and hierarchical domain knowledge, thereby enhancing both strategic adaptability and decision consistency. Experiments across multiple StarCraft II maps demonstrate that SEMA achieves superior win rates while reducing average decision latency by over 50%, validating its efficiency and robustness in complex RTS scenarios.
Recent work shows overwhelming evidence that LLMs, even those trained to scale their reasoning trace, perform unsatisfactorily when solving planning problems too complex. Whether the same conclusion holds for LLM formalizers that generate solver-oriented programs remains unknown. We systematically show that LLM formalizers greatly out-scale LLM planners, some retaining perfect accuracy in the classic BlocksWorld domain with a huge state space of size up to $10^{165}$. While performance of smaller LLM formalizers degrades with problem complexity, we show that a divide-and-conquer formalizing technique can greatly improve its robustness. Finally, we introduce unraveling problems where one line of problem description realistically corresponds to exponentially many lines of formal language such as the Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL), greatly challenging LLM formalizers. We tackle this challenge by introducing a new paradigm, namely LLM-as-higher-order-formalizer, where an LLM generates a program generator. This decouples token output from the combinatorial explosion of the underlying formalization and search space.
We present a novel LLM-informed model-based planning framework, and a novel prompt selection method, for object search in partially-known environments. Our approach uses an LLM to estimate statistics about the likelihood of finding the target object when searching various locations throughout the scene that, combined with travel costs extracted from the environment map, are used to instantiate a model, thus using the LLM to inform planning and achieve effective search performance. Moreover, the abstraction upon which our approach relies is amenable to deployment-time model selection via the recent offline replay approach, an insight we leverage to enable fast prompt and LLM selection during deployment. Simulation experiments demonstrate that our LLM-informed model-based planning approach outperforms the baseline planning strategy that fully relies on LLM and optimistic strategy with as much as 11.8% and 39.2% improvements respectively, and our bandit-like selection approach enables quick selection of best prompts and LLMs resulting in 6.5% lower average cost and 33.8% lower average cumulative regret over baseline UCB bandit selection. Real-robot experiments in an apartment demonstrate similar improvements and so further validate our approach.
We introduce GTO Wizard Benchmark, a public API and standardized evaluation framework for benchmarking algorithms in Heads-Up No-Limit Texas Hold'em (HUNL). The benchmark evaluates agents against GTO Wizard AI, a state-of-the-art superhuman poker agent that approximates Nash Equilibria, and defeated Slumbot, the 2018 Annual Computer Poker Competition champion and previous strongest publicly accessible HUNL benchmark, by $19.4$ $\pm$ $4.1$ bb/100. Variance is a fundamental challenge in poker evaluation; we address this by integrating AIVAT, a provably unbiased variance reduction technique that achieves equivalent statistical significance with ten times fewer hands than naive Monte Carlo evaluation. We conduct a comprehensive benchmarking study of state-of-the-art large language models under zero-shot conditions, including GPT-5.4, Claude Opus 4.6, Gemini 3.1 Pro, Grok 4, and others. Initial results and analysis reveal dramatic progress in LLM reasoning over recent years, yet all models remain far below the baseline established by our benchmark. Qualitative analysis reveals clear opportunities for improvement, including representation and the ability to reason over hidden states. This benchmark provides researchers with a precise and quantifiable setting to evaluate advances in planning and reasoning in multi-agent systems with partial observability.
Large language models (LLMs) have enabled agentic systems that can reason, plan, and act across complex tasks, but it remains unclear whether they can allocate resources effectively under uncertainty. Unlike short-horizon reactive decisions, allocation requires committing scarce resources over time while balancing competing objectives and preserving flexibility for future needs. We introduce EnterpriseArena, the first benchmark for evaluating agents on long-horizon enterprise resource allocation. It instantiates CFO-style decision-making in a 132-month enterprise simulator combining firm-level financial data, anonymized business documents, macroeconomic and industry signals, and expert-validated operating rules. The environment is partially observable and reveals the state only through budgeted organizational tools, forcing agents to trade off information acquisition against conserving scarce resources. Experiments on eleven advanced LLMs show that this setting remains highly challenging: only 16% of runs survive the full horizon, and larger models do not reliably outperform smaller ones. These results identify long-horizon resource allocation under uncertainty as a distinct capability gap for current LLM agents.
Although large language models (LLMs) have advanced rapidly, robust automation of complex software workflows remains an open problem. In long-horizon settings, agents frequently suffer from cascading errors and environmental stochasticity; a single misstep in a dynamic interface can lead to task failure, resulting in hallucinations or trial-and-error. This paper introduces $\textit{Environment Maps}$: a persistent, agent-agnostic representation that mitigates these failures by consolidating heterogeneous evidence, such as screen recordings and execution traces, into a structured graph. The representation consists of four core components: (1) Contexts (abstracted locations), (2) Actions (parameterized affordances), (3) Workflows (observed trajectories), and (4) Tacit Knowledge (domain definitions and reusable procedures). We evaluate this framework on the WebArena benchmark across five domains. Agents equipped with environment maps achieve a 28.2% success rate, nearly doubling the performance of baselines limited to session-bound context (14.2%) and outperforming agents that have access to the raw trajectory data used to generate the environment maps (23.3%). By providing a structured interface between the model and the environment, Environment Maps establish a persistent foundation for long-horizon planning that is human-interpretable, editable, and incrementally refinable.
Agentic multimodal large language models (MLLMs) (e.g., OpenAI o3 and Gemini Agentic Vision) achieve remarkable reasoning capabilities through iterative visual tool invocation. However, the cascaded perception, reasoning, and tool-calling loops introduce significant sequential overhead. This overhead, termed agentic depth, incurs prohibitive latency and seriously limits system-level concurrency. To this end, we propose SpecEyes, an agentic-level speculative acceleration framework that breaks this sequential bottleneck. Our key insight is that a lightweight, tool-free MLLM can serve as a speculative planner to predict the execution trajectory, enabling early termination of expensive tool chains without sacrificing accuracy. To regulate this speculative planning, we introduce a cognitive gating mechanism based on answer separability, which quantifies the model's confidence for self-verification without requiring oracle labels. Furthermore, we design a heterogeneous parallel funnel that exploits the stateless concurrency of the small model to mask the stateful serial execution of the large model, maximizing system throughput. Extensive experiments on V* Bench, HR-Bench, and POPE demonstrate that SpecEyes achieves 1.1-3.35x speedup over the agentic baseline while preserving or even improving accuracy (up to +6.7%), thereby boosting serving throughput under concurrent workloads.
While multi-modality large language models excel in object-centric or indoor scenarios, scaling them to 3D city-scale environments remains a formidable challenge. To bridge this gap, we propose 3DCity-LLM, a unified framework designed for 3D city-scale vision-language perception and understanding. 3DCity-LLM employs a coarse-to-fine feature encoding strategy comprising three parallel branches for target object, inter-object relationship, and global scene. To facilitate large-scale training, we introduce 3DCity-LLM-1.2M dataset that comprises approximately 1.2 million high-quality samples across seven representative task categories, ranging from fine-grained object analysis to multi-faceted scene planning. This strictly quality-controlled dataset integrates explicit 3D numerical information and diverse user-oriented simulations, enriching the question-answering diversity and realism of urban scenarios. Furthermore, we apply a multi-dimensional protocol based on text-similarity metrics and LLM-based semantic assessment to ensure faithful and comprehensive evaluations for all methods. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks demonstrate that 3DCity-LLM significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, offering a promising and meaningful direction for advancing spatial reasoning and urban intelligence. The source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/SYSU-3DSTAILab/3D-City-LLM.
Human-robot interaction is increasingly moving toward multi-robot, socially grounded environments. Existing systems struggle to integrate multimodal perception, embodied expression, and coordinated decision-making in a unified framework. This limits natural and scalable interaction in shared physical spaces. We address this gap by introducing a multimodal framework for human-multi-agent interaction in which each robot operates as an autonomous cognitive agent with integrated multimodal perception and Large Language Model (LLM)-driven planning grounded in embodiment. At the team level, a centralized coordination mechanism regulates turn-taking and agent participation to prevent overlapping speech and conflicting actions. Implemented on two humanoid robots, our framework enables coherent multi-agent interaction through interaction policies that combine speech, gesture, gaze, and locomotion. Representative interaction runs demonstrate coordinated multimodal reasoning across agents and grounded embodied responses. Future work will focus on larger-scale user studies and deeper exploration of socially grounded multi-agent interaction dynamics.
Tool use enables large language models (LLMs) to access external information, invoke software systems, and act in digital environments beyond what can be solved from model parameters alone. Early research mainly studied whether a model could select and execute a correct single tool call. As agent systems evolve, however, the central problem has shifted from isolated invocation to multi-tool orchestration over long trajectories with intermediate state, execution feedback, changing environments, and practical constraints such as safety, cost, and verifiability. We comprehensively review recent progress in multi-tool LLM agents and analyzes the state of the art in this rapidly developing area. First, we unify task formulations and distinguish single-call tool use from long-horizon orchestration. Then, we organize the literature around six core dimensions: inference-time planning and execution, training and trajectory construction, safety and control, efficiency under resource constraints, capability completeness in open environments, and benchmark design and evaluation. We further summarize representative applications in software engineering, enterprise workflows, graphical user interfaces, and mobile systems. Finally, we discuss major challenges and outline future directions for building reliable, scalable, and verifiable multi-tool agents.
The adoption of large language models (LLMs) for structured information extraction from financial documents has accelerated rapidly, yet production deployments face fundamental architectural decisions with limited empirical guidance. We present a systematic benchmark comparing four multi-agent orchestration architectures: sequential pipeline, parallel fan-out with merge, hierarchical supervisor-worker and reflexive self-correcting loop. These are evaluated across five frontier and open-weight LLMs on a corpus of 10,000 SEC filings (10-K, 10-Q and 8-K forms). Our evaluation spans 25 extraction field types covering governance structures, executive compensation and financial metrics, measured along five axes: field-level F1, document-level accuracy, end-to-end latency, cost per document and token efficiency. We find that reflexive architectures achieve the highest field-level F1 (0.943) but at 2.3x the cost of sequential baselines, while hierarchical architectures occupy the most favorable position on the cost-accuracy Pareto frontier (F1 0.921 at 1.4x cost). We further present ablation studies on semantic caching, model routing and adaptive retry strategies, demonstrating that hybrid configurations can recover 89\% of the reflexive architecture's accuracy gains at only 1.15x baseline cost. Our scaling analysis from 1K to 100K documents per day reveals non-obvious throughput-accuracy degradation curves that inform capacity planning. These findings provide actionable guidance for practitioners deploying multi-agent LLM systems in regulated financial environments.
Multimodal AI agents are increasingly automating complex real-world workflows that involve online web execution. However, current web-agent benchmarks suffer from a critical limitation: they focus entirely on web-based interaction and perception, lacking grounding in the user's real-world physical surroundings. This limitation prevents evaluation in crucial scenarios, such as when an agent must use egocentric visual perception (e.g., via AR glasses) to recognize an object in the user's surroundings and then complete a related task online. To address this gap, we introduce Ego2Web, the first benchmark designed to bridge egocentric video perception and web agent execution. Ego2Web pairs real-world first-person video recordings with web tasks that require visual understanding, web task planning, and interaction in an online environment for successful completion. We utilize an automatic data-generation pipeline combined with human verification and refinement to curate well-constructed, high-quality video-task pairs across diverse web task types, including e-commerce, media retrieval, knowledge lookup, etc. To facilitate accurate and scalable evaluation for our benchmark, we also develop a novel LLM-as-a-Judge automatic evaluation method, Ego2WebJudge, which achieves approximately 84% agreement with human judgment, substantially higher than existing evaluation methods. Experiments with diverse SoTA agents on our Ego2Web show that their performance is weak, with substantial headroom across all task categories. We also conduct a comprehensive ablation study on task design, highlighting the necessity of accurate video understanding in the proposed task and the limitations of current agents. We hope Ego2Web can be a critical new resource for developing truly capable AI assistants that can seamlessly see, understand, and act across the physical and digital worlds.
Reinforcement Learning (RL) is essential for evolving Large Language Models (LLMs) into autonomous agents capable of long-horizon planning, yet a practical recipe for scaling RL in complex, multi-turn environments remains elusive. This paper presents a systematic empirical study using TravelPlanner, a challenging testbed requiring tool orchestration to satisfy multifaceted constraints. We decompose the agentic RL design space along 5 axes: reward shaping, model scaling, data composition, algorithm selection, and environmental stability. Our controlled experiments yield 7 key takeaways, e.g., (1) reward and algorithm choices are scale-dependent as smaller models benefit from staged rewards and enhanced exploration, whereas larger models converge efficiently with simpler dense rewards, (2) ~ 1K training samples with a balanced difficulty mixture mark a sweet spot for both in-domain and out-of-domain performance, and (3) environmental stability is critical to prevent policy degradation. Based on our distilled recipe, our RL-trained models achieve state-of-the-art performance on TravelPlanner, significantly outperforming leading LLMs.
While Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) research has advanced, its efficacy in coordinating complex stakeholder interests such as travel planning remains largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose MIND (Multi-agent Inference for Negotiation Dialogue), a framework designed to simulate realistic consensus-building among travelers with heterogeneous preferences. Grounded in the Theory of Mind (ToM), MIND introduces a Strategic Appraisal phase that infers opponent willingness (w) from linguistic nuances with 90.2% accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that MIND outperforms traditional MAD frameworks, achieving a 20.5% improvement in High-w Hit and a 30.7% increase in Debate Hit-Rate, effectively prioritizing high-stakes constraints. Furthermore, qualitative evaluations via LLM-as-a-Judge confirm that MIND surpasses baselines in Rationality (68.8%) and Fluency (72.4%), securing an overall win rate of 68.3%. These findings validate that MIND effectively models human negotiation dynamics to derive persuasive consensus.
Large Language Models (LLMs), deep learning architectures with typically over 10 billion parameters, have recently begun to be integrated into various cyber-physical systems (CPS) such as robotics, industrial automation, and autopilot systems. The abstract knowledge and reasoning capabilities of LLMs are employed for tasks like planning and navigation. However, a significant challenge arises from the tendency of LLMs to produce "hallucinations" - outputs that are coherent yet factually incorrect or contextually unsuitable. This characteristic can lead to undesirable or unsafe actions in the CPS. Therefore, our research focuses on assuring the LLM-enabled CPS by enhancing their critical properties. We propose SafePilot, a novel hierarchical neuro-symbolic framework that provides end-to-end assurance for LLM-enabled CPS according to attribute-based and temporal specifications. Given a task and its specification, SafePilot first invokes a hierarchical planner with a discriminator that assesses task complexity. If the task is deemed manageable, it is passed directly to an LLM-based task planner with built-in verification. Otherwise, the hierarchical planner applies a divide-and-conquer strategy, decomposing the task into sub-tasks, each of which is individually planned and later merged into a final solution. The LLM-based task planner translates natural language constraints into formal specifications and verifies the LLM's output against them. If violations are detected, it identifies the flaw, adjusts the prompt accordingly, and re-invokes the LLM. This iterative process continues until a valid plan is produced or a predefined limit is reached. Our framework supports LLM-enabled CPS with both attribute-based and temporal constraints. Its effectiveness and adaptability are demonstrated through two illustrative case studies.
Large language models (LLMs) show potential for ophthalmic clinical reasoning, yet individual models risk introducing harm. We evaluated whether multi-agent LLM deliberative councils improve diagnostic performance and mitigate harm compared to individual LLMs. In a comparative cross-sectional study, we assessed 12 individual LLMs and three multi-agent councils on 100 ophthalmology clinical vignettes. Each council comprised four models assembled by type: proprietary flagship, proprietary fast, and open-source. Models independently answered a vignette, anonymously ranked one another's responses, and a designated chair synthesized all responses and peer reviews into a final answer. Councils consistently outperformed pooled individual models across all three tiers. Accuracy improved for proprietary flagship (95.0% vs 90.8%; risk difference [RD]: 4.25 [95% CI: 0.45, 8.05]), proprietary fast (96.0% vs 86.5%; RD: 9.50 [5.31, 13.59]), and open-source councils (91.0% vs 83.2%; RD: 7.75 [4.17, 11.33]). Harm rates declined for proprietary flagship (10.0% vs 22.5%; RD: -12.50 [-16.86, -8.14]), proprietary fast (16.0% vs 31.8%; RD: -15.75 [-21.49, -10.01]), and open-source councils (22.0% vs 38.5%; RD: -16.50 [-22.27, -10.73]). Coverage analysis revealed net positive gains for accuracy (ΔCoverage: 4.4-9.8 percentage points) and safety (ΔCoverage: 13.6-20.6), indicating councils recovered correct diagnoses and averted harm. Councils elevated correct diagnoses to higher rank positions; and produced more complete differentials and management plans (all P<.05). Harmful council responses showed reduced combined commission-and-omission errors and tended to be less severe. Structured deliberation via multi-agent LLM councils may enhance the reliability of LLM-assisted ophthalmic clinical reasoning.
We propose a new architectural change, and post-training pipeline, for making LLMs more verbose reasoners by teaching a model to truncate forward passes early. We augment an existing transformer architecture with an early-exit mechanism at intermediate layers and train the model to exit at shallower layers when the next token can be predicted without deep computation. After a calibration stage, we incentivise the model to exit as early as possible while maintaining task performance using reinforcement learning. We provide preliminary results to this effect for small reasoning models, showing that they learn to adaptively reduce computations across tokens. We predict that, applied at the right scale, our approach can minimise the amount of excess computation that reasoning models have at their disposal to perform non-myopic planning using their internal activations, reserving this only for difficult-to-predict tokens.
Tool-augmented Large Language Models (TaLLMs) extend LLMs with the ability to invoke external tools, enabling them to interact with real-world environments. However, a major limitation in deploying TaLLMs in sensitive applications such as customer service and business process automation is a lack of reliable compliance with domain-specific operational policies regarding tool-use and agent behavior. Current approaches merely steer LLMs to adhere to policies by including policy descriptions in the LLM context, but these provide no guarantees that policy violations will be prevented. In this paper, we introduce an SMT solver-aided framework to enforce tool-use policy compliance in TaLLM agents. Specifically, we use an LLM-assisted, human-guided approach to translate natural-language-specified tool-use policies into formal logic (SMT-LIB-2.0) constraints over agent-observable state and tool arguments. At runtime, planned tool calls are intercepted and checked against the constraints using the Z3 solver as a pre-condition to the tool call. Tool invocations that violate the policy are blocked. We evaluated on the TauBench benchmark and demonstrate that solver-aided policy checking reduces policy violations while maintaining overall task accuracy. These results suggest that integrating formal reasoning into TaLLM execution can improve tool-call policy compliance and overall reliability.
Although robot-to-robot (R2R) communication improves indoor scene understanding beyond what a single robot can achieve, R2R alone cannot overcome partial observability without substantial exploration overhead or scaling team size. In contrast, many indoor environments already include low-cost Internet of Things (IoT) sensors (e.g., cameras) that provide persistent, building-wide context beyond onboard perception. We therefore introduce IndoorR2X, the first benchmark and simulation framework for Large Language Model (LLM)-driven multi-robot task planning with Robot-to-Everything (R2X) perception and communication in indoor environments. IndoorR2X integrates observations from mobile robots and static IoT devices to construct a global semantic state that supports scalable scene understanding, reduces redundant exploration, and enables high-level coordination through LLM-based planning. IndoorR2X provides configurable simulation environments, sensor layouts, robot teams, and task suites to systematically evaluate high-level semantic coordination strategies. Extensive experiments across diverse settings demonstrate that IoT-augmented world modeling improves multi-robot efficiency and reliability, and we highlight key insights and failure modes for advancing LLM-based collaboration between robot teams and indoor IoT sensors.
Large manufacturing companies face challenges in information retrieval due to data silos maintained by different departments, leading to inconsistencies and misalignment across databases. This paper presents an experience in integrating and retrieving qualification data for electronic components used in satellite board design. Due to data silos, designers cannot immediately determine the qualification status of individual components. However, this process is critical during the planning phase, when assembly drawings are issued before production, to optimize new qualifications and avoid redundant efforts. To address this, we propose a pipeline that uses Virtual Knowledge Graphs for a unified view over heterogeneous data sources and LLMs to enhance retrieval and reduce manual effort in data cleansing. The retrieval of qualifications is then performed through an Ontology-based Data Access approach for structured queries and a vector search mechanism for retrieving qualifications based on similar textual properties. We perform a comparative cost-benefit analysis, demonstrating that the proposed pipeline also outperforms approaches relying solely on LLMs, such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), in terms of long-term efficiency.
Many people browse online communities to learn from others' experiences and opinions, e.g., for constructing travel plans. Conversational search powered by large language models (LLMs) could ease this information-seeking task, but it remains under-investigated within the online community. In this paper, we first conducted an exploratory study (N=10) that indicated the helpfulness of a classic conversational search tool and identified room for improvement. Then, we proposed ConSearcher, an LLM-powered tool with dynamically generated member personas based on user queries to facilitate conversational search in the community. In ConSearcher, users can clarify their interests by checking what a simulated member similar to them may ask and get responses from diverse members' perspectives. A within-subjects study (N=27) showed that compared to two conversational search baselines, ConSearcher led to significantly higher information-seeking outcome and user engagement but raised concerns about over-personalization. We discuss implications for supporting conversational information seeking in online communities.
Large language model (LLM)-based agents have emerged as powerful autonomous controllers for digital environments, including mobile interfaces, operating systems, and web browsers. Web navigation, for example, requires handling dynamic content and long sequences of actions, making it particularly challenging. Existing LLM-based agents struggle with long-horizon planning in two main ways. During online execution, they often lose track as new information arrives, lacking a clear and adaptive path toward the final goal. This issue is further exacerbated during reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning, where sparse and delayed rewards make it difficult for agents to identify which actions lead to success, preventing them from maintaining coherent reasoning over extended tasks. To address these challenges, we propose two contributions. First, we introduce an agent framework that leverages proprietary models for online planning through subgoal decomposition. Second, we present MiRA (Milestoning your Reinforcement Learning Enhanced Agent), an RL training framework that uses dense, milestone-based reward signals. The real-time planning mechanism improves proprietary models such as Gemini by approximately a 10% absolute increase in success rate (SR) on the WebArena-Lite benchmark. Meanwhile, applying MiRA to the open Gemma3-12B model increases its success rate from 6.4% to 43.0%. This performance surpasses proprietary systems such as GPT-4-Turbo (17.6%) and GPT-4o (13.9%), as well as the previous open-model state of the art, WebRL (38.4%). Overall, our findings demonstrate that combining explicit inference-time planning with milestone-based rewards significantly improves an agent's long-horizon capabilities, paving the way for more robust and general-purpose autonomous systems.
Large language models (LLMs) with advanced cognitive capabilities are emerging as agents for various reasoning and planning tasks. Traditional evaluations often focus on specific reasoning or planning questions within controlled environments. Recent studies have explored travel planning as a medium to integrate various verbal reasoning tasks into real-world contexts. However, reasoning tasks extend beyond verbal reasoning alone, and a comprehensive evaluation of LLMs requires a testbed that incorporates tasks from multiple cognitive domains. To address this gap, we introduce ItinBench, a benchmark that features one task of spatial reasoning, i.e., route optimization, into trip itinerary planning while keeping the traditional verbal reasoning tasks. ItinBench evaluates various LLMs across diverse tasks simultaneously, including Llama 3.1 8B, Mistral Large, Gemini 1.5 Pro, and GPT family. Our findings reveal that LLMs struggle to maintain high and consistent performance when concurrently handling multiple cognitive dimensions. By incorporating tasks from distinct human-level cognitive domains, ItinBench provides new insights into building more comprehensive reasoning testbeds that better reflect real-world challenges. The code and dataset: https://ethanwtl.github.io/IBweb/
Robotic path planning problems are often NP-hard, and practical solutions typically rely on approximation algorithms with provable performance guarantees for general cases. While designing such algorithms is challenging, formally proving their approximation optimality is even more demanding, which requires domain-specific geometric insights and multi-step mathematical reasoning over complex operational constraints. Recent Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on mathematical reasoning benchmarks, yet their ability to assist with research-level optimality proofs in robotic path planning remains under-explored. In this work, we introduce the first benchmark for evaluating LLMs on approximation-ratio proofs of robotic path planning algorithms. The benchmark consists of 34 research-grade proof tasks spanning diverse planning problem types and complexity levels, each requiring structured reasoning over algorithm descriptions, problem constraints, and theoretical guarantees. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art proprietary and open-source LLMs reveals that even the strongest models struggle to produce fully valid proofs without external domain knowledge. However, providing LLMs with task-specific in-context lemmas substantially improves reasoning quality, a factor that is more effective than generic chain-of-thought prompting or supplying the ground-truth approximation ratio as posterior knowledge. We further provide fine-grained error analysis to characterize common logical failures and hallucinations, and demonstrate how each error type can be mitigated through targeted context augmentation.
Generating rare compositional concepts in text-to-image synthesis remains a challenge for diffusion models, particularly for attributes that are uncommon in the training data. While recent approaches, such as R2F, address this challenge by utilizing LLM for prompt scheduling, they suffer from inherent variance due to the randomness of language models and suboptimal guidance from iterative text embedding switching. To address these problems, we propose the ADAPT framework, a training-free framework that deterministically plans and semantically aligns prompt schedules, providing consistent guidance to enhance the composition of rare concepts. By leveraging attention scores and orthogonal components, ADAPT significantly enhances compositional generation of rare concepts in the RareBench benchmark without additional training or fine-tuning. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that ADAPT achieves superior performance in RareBench and accurately reflects the semantic information of rare attributes, providing deterministic and precise control over the generation of rare compositions without compromising visual integrity.
Natural language prompts often suffer from intent transmission loss: the gap between what users actually need and what they communicate to AI systems. We evaluate PPS (Prompt Protocol Specification), a 5W3H-based framework for structured intent representation in human-AI interaction. In a controlled three-condition study across 60 tasks in three domains (business, technical, and travel), three large language models (DeepSeek-V3, Qwen-Max, and Kimi), and three prompt conditions - (A) simple prompts, (B) raw PPS JSON, and (C) natural-language-rendered PPS - we collect 540 AI-generated outputs evaluated by an LLM judge. We introduce goal_alignment, a user-intent-centered evaluation dimension, and find that rendered PPS outperforms both simple prompts and raw JSON on this metric. PPS gains are task-dependent: gains are large in high-ambiguity business analysis tasks but reverse in low-ambiguity travel planning. We also identify a measurement asymmetry in standard LLM evaluation, where unconstrained prompts can inflate constraint adherence scores and mask the practical value of structured prompting. A preliminary retrospective survey (N = 20) further suggests a 66.1% reduction in follow-up prompts required, from 3.33 to 1.13 rounds. These findings suggest that structured intent representations can improve alignment and usability in human-AI interaction, especially in tasks where user intent is inherently ambiguous.
Zero-shot object-goal navigation (ZSON) requires navigating unknown environments to find a target object without task-specific training. Prior hierarchical training-free solutions invest in scene understanding (\textit{belief}) and high-level decision-making (\textit{policy}), yet overlook the design of \textit{option}, i.e., a subgoal candidate proposed from evolving belief and presented to policy for selection. In practice, options are reduced to isolated waypoints scored independently: single destinations hide the value gathered along the journey; an unstructured collection obscures the relationships among candidates. Our insight is that the option space should be a \textit{tree of paths}. Full paths expose en-route information gain that destination-only scoring systematically neglects; a tree of shared segments enables coarse-to-fine LLM reasoning that dismisses or pursues entire branches before examining individual leaves, compressing the combinatorial path space into an efficient hierarchy. We instantiate this insight in \textbf{REST} (Receding Horizon Explorative Steiner Tree), a training-free framework that (1) builds an explicit open-vocabulary 3D map from online RGB-D streams; (2) grows an agent-centric tree of safe and informative paths as the option space via sampling-based planning; and (3) textualizes each branch into a spatial narrative and selects the next-best path through chain-of-thought LLM reasoning. Across the Gibson, HM3D, and HSSD benchmarks, REST consistently ranks among the top methods in success rate while achieving the best or second-best path efficiency, demonstrating a favorable efficiency-success balance.