Daily Papers

Emerging AR-LLM-based Social Engineering attack (e.g., SEAR) is at the edge of posing great threats to real-world social life. In such AR-LLM-SE attack, the attacker can leverage AR (Augmented Reality) glass to capture the image and vocal information of the target, using the LLM to identify the target and generate the social profile, using the LLM agents to apply social engineering strategies for conversation suggestion to win the target trust and perform phishing afterwards. Current defensive approaches, such as role-based access control or data flow tracking, are not directly applicable to the convergent AR-LLM ecosystem (considering embedded AR device and opaque LLM inference), leaving an emerging and potent social engineering threat that existing privacy paradigms are ill-equipped to address. This necessitates a shift beyond solely human-centric measures like legislation and user education toward enforceable vendor policies and platform-level restrictions. Realizing this vision, however, faces significant technical challenges: securing resource-constrained AR-embedded devices, implementing fine-grained access control within opaque LLM inferences, and governing adaptive interactive agents. To address these challenges, we present UNSEEN, a coordinated cross-stack defense that combines an AR ACL (Access Control Layer) for identity-gated sensing, F-RMU-based LLM unlearning for sensitive profile suppression, and runtime agent guardrails for adaptive interaction control. We evaluate UNSEEN in an IRB-approved user study with 60 participants and a dataset of 360 annotated conversations across realistic social scenarios.

Large language models (LLMs) require well-crafted prompts for effective use. Prompt engineering, the process of designing prompts, is challenging, particularly for non-experts who are less familiar with AI technologies. While researchers have proposed techniques and tools to assist LLM users in prompt design, these works primarily target AI application developers rather than non-experts. To address this research gap, we propose social prompt engineering, a novel paradigm that leverages social computing techniques to facilitate collaborative prompt design. To investigate social prompt engineering, we introduce Wordflow, an open-source and social text editor that enables everyday users to easily create, run, share, and discover LLM prompts. Additionally, by leveraging modern web technologies, Wordflow allows users to run LLMs locally and privately in their browsers. Two usage scenarios highlight how social prompt engineering and our tool can enhance laypeople's interaction with LLMs. Wordflow is publicly accessible at https://poloclub.github.io/wordflow.

The recent developments in Large Language Models (LLM), mark a significant moment in the research and development of social interactions with artificial agents. These agents are widely deployed in a variety of settings, with potential impact on users. However, the study of social interactions with agents powered by LLM is still emerging, limited by access to the technology and to data, the absence of standardised interfaces, and challenges to establishing controlled experimental setups using the currently available business-oriented platforms. To answer these gaps, we developed LEXI, LLMs Experimentation Interface, an open-source tool enabling the deployment of artificial agents powered by LLM in social interaction behavioural experiments. Using a graphical interface, LEXI allows researchers to build agents, and deploy them in experimental setups along with forms and questionnaires while collecting interaction logs and self-reported data. The outcomes of usability testing indicate LEXI's broad utility, high usability and minimum mental workload requirement, with distinctive benefits observed across disciplines. A proof-of-concept study exploring the tool's efficacy in evaluating social HAIs was conducted, resulting in high-quality data. A comparison of empathetic versus neutral agents indicated that people perceive empathetic agents as more social, and write longer and more positive messages towards them.

In autoregressive (AR) image generation, models based on the 'next-token prediction' paradigm of LLMs have shown comparable performance to diffusion models by reducing inductive biases. However, directly applying LLMs to complex image generation can struggle with reconstructing the image's structure and details, impacting the generation's accuracy and stability. Additionally, the 'next-token prediction' paradigm in the AR model does not align with the contextual scanning and logical reasoning processes involved in human visual perception, limiting effective image generation. Prompt engineering, as a key technique for guiding LLMs, leverages specifically designed prompts to improve model performance on complex natural language processing (NLP) tasks, enhancing accuracy and stability of generation while maintaining contextual coherence and logical consistency, similar to human reasoning. Inspired by prompt engineering from the field of NLP, we propose Vision Full-view prompt (VF prompt) to enhance autoregressive image generation. Specifically, we design specialized image-related VF prompts for AR image generation to simulate the process of human image creation. This enhances contextual logic ability by allowing the model to first perceive overall distribution information before generating the image, and improve generation stability by increasing the inference steps. Compared to the AR method without VF prompts, our method shows outstanding performance and achieves an approximate improvement of 20%.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized various aspects of engineering and science. Their utility is often bottlenecked by the lack of interaction with the external digital environment. To overcome this limitation and achieve integration of LLMs and Artificial Intelligence (AI) into real-world applications, customized AI agents are being constructed. Based on the technological trends and techniques, we extract a high-level approach for constructing these AI agents, focusing on their underlying architecture. This thesis serves as a comprehensive guide that elucidates a multi-faceted approach for empowering LLMs with the capability to leverage Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). We present a 7-step methodology that begins with the selection of suitable LLMs and the task decomposition that is necessary for complex problem-solving. This methodology includes techniques for generating training data for API interactions and heuristics for selecting the appropriate API among a plethora of options. These steps eventually lead to the generation of API calls that are both syntactically and semantically aligned with the LLM's understanding of a given task. Moreover, we review existing frameworks and tools that facilitate these processes and highlight the gaps in current attempts. In this direction, we propose an on-device architecture that aims to exploit the functionality of carry-on devices by using small models from the Hugging Face community. We examine the effectiveness of these approaches on real-world applications of various domains, including the generation of a piano sheet. Through an extensive analysis of the literature and available technologies, this thesis aims to set a compass for researchers and practitioners to harness the full potential of LLMs augmented with external tool capabilities, thus paving the way for more autonomous, robust, and context-aware AI agents.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly evaluated in interactive environments to test their social intelligence. However, existing benchmarks often assume idealized communication between agents, limiting our ability to diagnose whether LLMs can maintain and repair interactions in more realistic, imperfect settings. To close this gap, we present SocialVeil, a social learning environment that can simulate social interaction under cognitive-difference-induced communication barriers. Grounded in a systematic literature review of communication challenges in human interaction, SocialVeil introduces three representative types of such disruption, semantic vagueness, sociocultural mismatch, and emotional interference. We also introduce two barrier-aware evaluation metrics, unresolved confusion and mutual understanding, to evaluate interaction quality under impaired communication. Experiments across 720 scenarios and four frontier LLMs show that barriers consistently impair performance, with mutual understanding reduced by over 45\% on average, and confusion elevated by nearly 50\%. Human evaluations validate the fidelity of these simulated barriers (ICCapprox0.78, Pearson rapprox0.80). We further demonstrate that adaptation strategies (Repair Instruction and Interactive learning) only have a modest effect far from barrier-free performance. This work takes a step toward bringing social interaction environments closer to real-world communication, opening opportunities for exploring the social intelligence of LLM agents.

There has been a growing interest in enhancing rule-based agent-based models (ABMs) for social media platforms (i.e., X, Reddit) with more realistic large language model (LLM) agents, thereby allowing for a more nuanced study of complex systems. As a result, several LLM-based ABMs have been proposed in the past year. While they hold promise, each simulator is specifically designed to study a particular scenario, making it time-consuming and resource-intensive to explore other phenomena using the same ABM. Additionally, these models simulate only a limited number of agents, whereas real-world social media platforms involve millions of users. To this end, we propose OASIS, a generalizable and scalable social media simulator. OASIS is designed based on real-world social media platforms, incorporating dynamically updated environments (i.e., dynamic social networks and post information), diverse action spaces (i.e., following, commenting), and recommendation systems (i.e., interest-based and hot-score-based). Additionally, OASIS supports large-scale user simulations, capable of modeling up to one million users. With these features, OASIS can be easily extended to different social media platforms to study large-scale group phenomena and behaviors. We replicate various social phenomena, including information spreading, group polarization, and herd effects across X and Reddit platforms. Moreover, we provide observations of social phenomena at different agent group scales. We observe that the larger agent group scale leads to more enhanced group dynamics and more diverse and helpful agents' opinions. These findings demonstrate OASIS's potential as a powerful tool for studying complex systems in digital environments.

Recent breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to the emergence of agentic AI systems that extend beyond the capabilities of standalone models. By empowering LLMs to perceive external environments, integrate multimodal information, and interact with various tools, these agentic systems exhibit greater autonomy and adaptability across complex tasks. This evolution brings new opportunities to recommender systems (RS): LLM-based Agentic RS (LLM-ARS) can offer more interactive, context-aware, and proactive recommendations, potentially reshaping the user experience and broadening the application scope of RS. Despite promising early results, fundamental challenges remain, including how to effectively incorporate external knowledge, balance autonomy with controllability, and evaluate performance in dynamic, multimodal settings. In this perspective paper, we first present a systematic analysis of LLM-ARS: (1) clarifying core concepts and architectures; (2) highlighting how agentic capabilities -- such as planning, memory, and multimodal reasoning -- can enhance recommendation quality; and (3) outlining key research questions in areas such as safety, efficiency, and lifelong personalization. We also discuss open problems and future directions, arguing that LLM-ARS will drive the next wave of RS innovation. Ultimately, we foresee a paradigm shift toward intelligent, autonomous, and collaborative recommendation experiences that more closely align with users' evolving needs and complex decision-making processes.

Tool-augmented LLMs are a promising approach to create AI agents that can have realistic conversations, follow procedures, and call appropriate functions. However, evaluating them is challenging due to the diversity of possible conversations, and existing datasets focus only on single interactions and function-calling. We present a test generation pipeline to evaluate LLMs as conversational AI agents. Our framework uses LLMs to generate diverse tests grounded on user-defined procedures. For that, we use intermediate graphs to limit the LLM test generator's tendency to hallucinate content that is not grounded on input procedures, and enforces high coverage of the possible conversations. Additionally, we put forward ALMITA, a manually curated dataset for evaluating AI agents in customer support, and use it to evaluate existing LLMs. Our results show that while tool-augmented LLMs perform well in single interactions, they often struggle to handle complete conversations. While our focus is on customer support, our method is general and capable of AI agents for different domains.

With the rise of large language models (LLMs), researchers are increasingly exploring their applications in var ious vertical domains, such as software engineering. LLMs have achieved remarkable success in areas including code generation and vulnerability detection. However, they also exhibit numerous limitations and shortcomings. LLM-based agents, a novel tech nology with the potential for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), combine LLMs as the core for decision-making and action-taking, addressing some of the inherent limitations of LLMs such as lack of autonomy and self-improvement. Despite numerous studies and surveys exploring the possibility of using LLMs in software engineering, it lacks a clear distinction between LLMs and LLM based agents. It is still in its early stage for a unified standard and benchmarking to qualify an LLM solution as an LLM-based agent in its domain. In this survey, we broadly investigate the current practice and solutions for LLMs and LLM-based agents for software engineering. In particular we summarise six key topics: requirement engineering, code generation, autonomous decision-making, software design, test generation, and software maintenance. We review and differentiate the work of LLMs and LLM-based agents from these six topics, examining their differences and similarities in tasks, benchmarks, and evaluation metrics. Finally, we discuss the models and benchmarks used, providing a comprehensive analysis of their applications and effectiveness in software engineering. We anticipate this work will shed some lights on pushing the boundaries of LLM-based agents in software engineering for future research.

LLMs are increasingly being used in workflows involving generating content to be consumed by humans (e.g., marketing) and also in directly interacting with humans (e.g., through chatbots). The development of such systems that are capable of generating verifiably persuasive messages presents both opportunities and challenges for society. On the one hand, such systems could positively impact domains like advertising and social good, such as addressing drug addiction, and on the other, they could be misused for spreading misinformation and shaping political opinions. To channel LLMs' impact on society, we need to develop systems to measure and benchmark their persuasiveness. With this motivation, we introduce PersuasionBench and PersuasionArena, the first large-scale benchmark and arena containing a battery of tasks to measure the persuasion ability of generative models automatically. We investigate to what extent LLMs know and leverage linguistic patterns that can help them generate more persuasive language. Our findings indicate that the persuasiveness of LLMs correlates positively with model size, but smaller models can also be made to have a higher persuasiveness than much larger models. Notably, targeted training using synthetic and natural datasets significantly enhances smaller models' persuasive capabilities, challenging scale-dependent assumptions. Our findings carry key implications for both model developers and policymakers. For instance, while the EU AI Act and California's SB-1047 aim to regulate AI models based on the number of floating point operations, we demonstrate that simple metrics like this alone fail to capture the full scope of AI's societal impact. We invite the community to explore and contribute to PersuasionArena and PersuasionBench, available at https://bit.ly/measure-persuasion, to advance our understanding of AI-driven persuasion and its societal implications.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently emerged as promising tools for recommendation thanks to their advanced textual understanding ability and context-awareness. Despite the current practice of training and evaluating LLM-based recommendation (LLM4Rec) models under a sequential recommendation scenario, we found that whether these models understand the sequential information inherent in users' item interaction sequences has been largely overlooked. In this paper, we first demonstrate through a series of experiments that existing LLM4Rec models do not fully capture sequential information both during training and inference. Then, we propose a simple yet effective LLM-based sequential recommender, called LLM-SRec, a method that enhances the integration of sequential information into LLMs by distilling the user representations extracted from a pre-trained CF-SRec model into LLMs. Our extensive experiments show that LLM-SRec enhances LLMs' ability to understand users' item interaction sequences, ultimately leading to improved recommendation performance. Furthermore, unlike existing LLM4Rec models that require fine-tuning of LLMs, LLM-SRec achieves state-of-the-art performance by training only a few lightweight MLPs, highlighting its practicality in real-world applications. Our code is available at https://github.com/Sein-Kim/LLM-SRec.

Social media enables dynamic user engagement with trending topics, and recent research has explored the potential of large language models (LLMs) for response generation. While some studies investigate LLMs as agents for simulating user behavior on social media, their focus remains on practical viability and scalability rather than a deeper understanding of how well LLM aligns with human behavior. This paper analyzes LLMs' ability to simulate social media engagement through action guided response generation, where a model first predicts a user's most likely engagement action-retweet, quote, or rewrite-towards a trending post before generating a personalized response conditioned on the predicted action. We benchmark GPT-4o-mini, O1-mini, and DeepSeek-R1 in social media engagement simulation regarding a major societal event discussed on X. Our findings reveal that zero-shot LLMs underperform BERT in action prediction, while few-shot prompting initially degrades the prediction accuracy of LLMs with limited examples. However, in response generation, few-shot LLMs achieve stronger semantic alignment with ground truth posts.

Human models play a crucial role in human-robot interaction (HRI), enabling robots to consider the impact of their actions on people and plan their behavior accordingly. However, crafting good human models is challenging; capturing context-dependent human behavior requires significant prior knowledge and/or large amounts of interaction data, both of which are difficult to obtain. In this work, we explore the potential of large-language models (LLMs) -- which have consumed vast amounts of human-generated text data -- to act as zero-shot human models for HRI. Our experiments on three social datasets yield promising results; the LLMs are able to achieve performance comparable to purpose-built models. That said, we also discuss current limitations, such as sensitivity to prompts and spatial/numerical reasoning mishaps. Based on our findings, we demonstrate how LLM-based human models can be integrated into a social robot's planning process and applied in HRI scenarios. Specifically, we present one case study on a simulated trust-based table-clearing task and replicate past results that relied on custom models. Next, we conduct a new robot utensil-passing experiment (n = 65) where preliminary results show that planning with a LLM-based human model can achieve gains over a basic myopic plan. In summary, our results show that LLMs offer a promising (but incomplete) approach to human modeling for HRI.

Large-language models (LLMs) hold significant promise in improving human-robot interaction, offering advanced conversational skills and versatility in managing diverse, open-ended user requests in various tasks and domains. Despite the potential to transform human-robot interaction, very little is known about the distinctive design requirements for utilizing LLMs in robots, which may differ from text and voice interaction and vary by task and context. To better understand these requirements, we conducted a user study (n = 32) comparing an LLM-powered social robot against text- and voice-based agents, analyzing task-based requirements in conversational tasks, including choose, generate, execute, and negotiate. Our findings show that LLM-powered robots elevate expectations for sophisticated non-verbal cues and excel in connection-building and deliberation, but fall short in logical communication and may induce anxiety. We provide design implications both for robots integrating LLMs and for fine-tuning LLMs for use with robots.

Using Large Language Models (LLMs) to address critical societal problems requires adopting this novel technology into socio-technical systems. However, the complexity of such systems and the nature of LLMs challenge such a vision. It is unlikely that the solution to such challenges will come from the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community itself. Instead, the Systems Engineering approach is better equipped to facilitate the adoption of LLMs by prioritising the problems and their context before any other aspects. This paper introduces the challenges LLMs generate and surveys systems research efforts for engineering AI-based systems. We reveal how the systems engineering principles have supported addressing similar issues to the ones LLMs pose and discuss our findings to provide future directions for adopting LLMs.

Retrieval-augmented generation enhances large language models (LLMs) by incorporating relevant information from external knowledge sources. This enables LLMs to adapt to specific domains and mitigate hallucinations in knowledge-intensive tasks. However, existing retrievers are often misaligned with LLMs due to their separate training processes and the black-box nature of LLMs. To address this challenge, we propose ARL2, a retriever learning technique that harnesses LLMs as labelers. ARL2 leverages LLMs to annotate and score relevant evidence, enabling learning the retriever from robust LLM supervision. Furthermore, ARL2 uses an adaptive self-training strategy for curating high-quality and diverse relevance data, which can effectively reduce the annotation cost. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of ARL2, achieving accuracy improvements of 5.4% on NQ and 4.6% on MMLU compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, ARL2 exhibits robust transfer learning capabilities and strong zero-shot generalization abilities. Our code will be published at https://github.com/zhanglingxi-cs/ARL2.

Most multi-agent systems rely exclusively on autoregressive language models (ARMs) that are based on sequential generation. Although effective for fluent text, ARMs limit global reasoning and plan revision. On the other hand, Discrete Diffusion Language Models (DDLMs) enable non-sequential, globally revisable generation and have shown strong planning capabilities, but their limited text fluency hinders direct collaboration with ARMs. We introduce Latent-DARM, a latent-space communication framework bridging DDLM (planners) and ARM (executors), maximizing collaborative benefits. Across mathematical, scientific, and commonsense reasoning benchmarks, Latent-DARM outperforms text-based interfaces on average, improving accuracy from 27.0% to 36.0% on DART-5 and from 0.0% to 14.0% on AIME2024. Latent-DARM approaches the results of state-of-the-art reasoning models while using less than 2.2% of its token budget. This work advances multi-agent collaboration among agents with heterogeneous models.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in simulating human-like social behaviors. Social graphs provide high-quality supervision signals that encode both local interactions and global network structure, yet they remain underutilized for LLM training. To address this gap, we propose Graphia, the first general LLM-based social graph simulation framework that leverages graph data as supervision for LLM post-training via reinforcement learning. With GNN-based structural rewards, Graphia trains specialized agents to predict whom to interact with (destination selection) and how to interact (edge generation), followed by designed graph generation pipelines. We evaluate Graphia under two settings: Transductive Dynamic Graph Generation (TDGG), a micro-level task with our proposed node-wise interaction alignment metrics; and Inductive Dynamic Graph Generation (IDGG), a macro-level task with our proposed metrics for aligning emergent network properties. On three real-world networks, Graphia improves micro-level alignment by 6.1% in the composite destination selection score, 12% in edge classification accuracy, and 27.9% in edge content BERTScore over the strongest baseline. For macro-level alignment, it achieves 41.11% higher structural similarity and 32.98% better replication of social phenomena such as power laws and echo chambers. Graphia also supports counterfactual simulation, generating plausible behavioral shifts under platform incentives. Our results show that social graphs can serve as high-quality supervision signals for LLM post-training, closing the gap between agent behaviors and network dynamics for LLM-based simulation. Code is available at https://github.com/Ji-Cather/Graphia.git.

This paper presents TAMUSA-Chat, a research-oriented framework for building domain-adapted large language model conversational systems. The work addresses critical challenges in adapting general-purpose foundation models to institutional contexts through supervised fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented generation, and systematic evaluation methodologies. We describe the complete architecture encompassing data acquisition from institutional sources, preprocessing pipelines, embedding construction, model training workflows, and deployment strategies. The system integrates modular components enabling reproducible experimentation with training configurations, hyper-parameters, and evaluation protocols. Our implementation demonstrates how academic institutions can develop contextually grounded conversational agents while maintaining transparency, governance compliance, and responsible AI practices. Through empirical analysis of fine-tuning behavior across model sizes and training iterations, we provide insights into domain adaptation efficiency, computational resource requirements, and quality-cost trade-offs. The publicly available codebase at https://github.com/alsmadi/TAMUSA_LLM_Based_Chat_app supports continued research into institutional LLM deployment, evaluation methodologies, and ethical considerations for educational AI systems.

Large-scale reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has demonstrated its effectiveness in harnessing the potential of large language models (LLMs) for single-turn reasoning tasks. In realistic reasoning scenarios, LLMs can often utilize external tools to assist in task-solving processes. However, current RL algorithms inadequately balance the models' intrinsic long-horizon reasoning capabilities and their proficiency in multi-turn tool interactions. To bridge this gap, we propose Agentic Reinforced Policy Optimization (ARPO), a novel agentic RL algorithm tailored for training multi-turn LLM-based agents. Through preliminary experiments, we observe that LLMs tend to exhibit highly uncertain behavior, characterized by an increase in the entropy distribution of generated tokens, immediately following interactions with external tools. Motivated by this observation, ARPO incorporates an entropy-based adaptive rollout mechanism, dynamically balancing global trajectory sampling and step-level sampling, thereby promoting exploration at steps with high uncertainty after tool usage. By integrating an advantage attribution estimation, ARPO enables LLMs to internalize advantage differences in stepwise tool-use interactions. Our experiments across 13 challenging benchmarks in computational reasoning, knowledge reasoning, and deep search domains demonstrate ARPO's superiority over trajectory-level RL algorithms. Remarkably, ARPO achieves improved performance using only half of the tool-use budget required by existing methods, offering a scalable solution for aligning LLM-based agents with real-time dynamic environments. Our code and datasets are released at https://github.com/dongguanting/ARPO

Social network simulation plays a crucial role in addressing various challenges within social science. It offers extensive applications such as state prediction, phenomena explanation, and policy-making support, among others. In this work, we harness the formidable human-like capabilities exhibited by large language models (LLMs) in sensing, reasoning, and behaving, and utilize these qualities to construct the S^3 system (short for Social network Simulation System). Adhering to the widely employed agent-based simulation paradigm, we employ prompt engineering and prompt tuning techniques to ensure that the agent's behavior closely emulates that of a genuine human within the social network. Specifically, we simulate three pivotal aspects: emotion, attitude, and interaction behaviors. By endowing the agent in the system with the ability to perceive the informational environment and emulate human actions, we observe the emergence of population-level phenomena, including the propagation of information, attitudes, and emotions. We conduct an evaluation encompassing two levels of simulation, employing real-world social network data. Encouragingly, the results demonstrate promising accuracy. This work represents an initial step in the realm of social network simulation empowered by LLM-based agents. We anticipate that our endeavors will serve as a source of inspiration for the development of simulation systems within, but not limited to, social science.

Integrating robotics into everyday scenarios like tutoring or physical training requires robots capable of adaptive, socially engaging, and goal-oriented interactions. While Large Language Models show promise in human-like communication, their standalone use is hindered by memory constraints and contextual incoherence. This work presents a multimodal, cognitively inspired framework that enhances LLM-based autonomous decision-making in social and task-oriented Human-Robot Interaction. Specifically, we develop an LLM-based agent for a robot trainer, balancing social conversation with task guidance and goal-driven motivation. To further enhance autonomy and personalization, we introduce a memory system for selecting, storing and retrieving experiences, facilitating generalized reasoning based on knowledge built across different interactions. A preliminary HRI user study and offline experiments with a synthetic dataset validate our approach, demonstrating the system's ability to manage complex interactions, autonomously drive training tasks, and build and retrieve contextual memories, advancing socially intelligent robotics.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities across various fields. These developments have led to more direct communication between humans and LLMs in various situations, such as social companionship and psychological support. However, LLMs often exhibit limitations in emotional perception and social competence during real-world conversations. These limitations partly originate from their inability to adapt their communication style and emotional expression to different social and task contexts. In this work, we introduce PersonaFuse, a novel LLM post-training framework that enables LLMs to adapt and express different personalities for varying situations. Inspired by Trait Activation Theory and the Big Five personality model, PersonaFuse employs a Mixture-of-Expert architecture that combines persona adapters with a dynamic routing network, enabling contextual trait expression. Experimental results show that PersonaFuse substantially outperforms baseline models across multiple dimensions of social-emotional intelligence. Importantly, these gains are achieved without sacrificing general reasoning ability or model safety, which remain common limitations of direct prompting and supervised fine-tuning approaches. PersonaFuse also delivers consistent improvements in downstream human-centered applications, such as mental health counseling and review-based customer service. Finally, human preference evaluations against leading LLMs, including GPT-4o and DeepSeek, demonstrate that PersonaFuse achieves competitive response quality despite its comparatively smaller model size. These findings demonstrate that PersonaFuse~offers a theoretically grounded and practical approach for developing social-emotional enhanced LLMs, marking a significant advancement toward more human-centric AI systems.

With the advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLM), LLM-driven visual agents are increasingly impacting software interfaces, particularly those with graphical user interfaces. This work introduces a novel LLM-based multimodal agent framework for mobile devices. This framework, capable of navigating mobile devices, emulates human-like interactions. Our agent constructs a flexible action space that enhances adaptability across various applications including parser, text and vision descriptions. The agent operates through two main phases: exploration and deployment. During the exploration phase, functionalities of user interface elements are documented either through agent-driven or manual explorations into a customized structured knowledge base. In the deployment phase, RAG technology enables efficient retrieval and update from this knowledge base, thereby empowering the agent to perform tasks effectively and accurately. This includes performing complex, multi-step operations across various applications, thereby demonstrating the framework's adaptability and precision in handling customized task workflows. Our experimental results across various benchmarks demonstrate the framework's superior performance, confirming its effectiveness in real-world scenarios. Our code will be open source soon.

Augmented Language Models (ALMs) blend the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) with tools that allow for knowledge retrieval and action execution. Existing ALM systems trigger LLM thought processes while pulling observations from these tools in an interleaved fashion. Specifically, an LLM reasons to call an external tool, gets halted to fetch the tool's response, and then decides the next action based on all preceding response tokens. Such a paradigm, though straightforward and easy to implement, often leads to huge computation complexity from redundant prompts and repeated execution. This study addresses such challenges for the first time, proposing a modular paradigm ReWOO (Reasoning WithOut Observation) that detaches the reasoning process from external observations, thus significantly reducing token consumption. Comprehensive evaluations across six public NLP benchmarks and a curated dataset reveal consistent performance enhancements with our proposed methodology. Notably, ReWOO achieves 5x token efficiency and 4% accuracy improvement on HotpotQA, a multi-step reasoning benchmark. Furthermore, ReWOO demonstrates robustness under tool-failure scenarios. Beyond prompt efficiency, decoupling parametric modules from non-parametric tool calls enables instruction fine-tuning to offload LLMs into smaller language models, thus substantially reducing model parameters. Our illustrative work offloads reasoning ability from 175B GPT3.5 into 7B LLaMA, demonstrating the significant potential for truly efficient and scalable ALM systems.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable potential as autonomous agents, particularly in web-based tasks. However, existing LLM web agents heavily rely on expensive proprietary LLM APIs, while open LLMs lack the necessary decision-making capabilities. This paper introduces WebRL, a self-evolving online curriculum reinforcement learning framework designed to train high-performance web agents using open LLMs. WebRL addresses three key challenges in building LLM web agents, including the scarcity of training tasks, sparse feedback signals, and policy distribution drift in online learning. Specifically, WebRL incorporates 1) a self-evolving curriculum that generates new tasks from unsuccessful attempts, 2) a robust outcome-supervised reward model (ORM), and 3) adaptive reinforcement learning strategies to ensure consistent improvements. We apply WebRL to transform open Llama-3.1 and GLM-4 models into proficient web agents. On WebArena-Lite, WebRL improves the success rate of Llama-3.1-8B from 4.8% to 42.4%, and from 6.1% to 43% for GLM-4-9B. These open models significantly surpass the performance of GPT-4-Turbo (17.6%) and GPT-4o (13.9%) and outperform previous state-of-the-art web agents trained on open LLMs (AutoWebGLM, 18.2%). Our findings demonstrate WebRL's effectiveness in bridging the gap between open and proprietary LLM-based web agents, paving the way for more accessible and powerful autonomous web interaction systems.

Social cues, which convey others' presence, behaviors, or identities, play a crucial role in human information seeking by helping individuals judge relevance and trustworthiness. However, existing LLM-based search systems primarily rely on semantic features, creating a misalignment with the socialized cognition underlying natural information seeking. To address this gap, we explore how the integration of social cues into LLM-based search influences users' perceptions, experiences, and behaviors. Focusing on social media platforms that are beginning to adopt LLM-based search, we integrate design workshops, the implementation of the prototype system (SoulSeek), a between-subjects study, and mixed-method analyses to examine both outcome- and process-level findings. The workshop informs the prototype's cue-integrated design. The study shows that social cues improve perceived outcomes and experiences, promote reflective information behaviors, and reveal limits of current LLM-based search. We propose design implications emphasizing better social-knowledge understanding, personalized cue settings, and controllable interactions.

LLMs are used predominantly in synchronous communication, where a human user and a model communicate in alternating turns. In contrast, many real-world settings are inherently asynchronous. For example, in group chats, online team meetings, or social games, there is no inherent notion of turns; therefore, the decision of when to speak forms a crucial part of the participant's decision making. In this work, we develop an adaptive asynchronous LLM-agent which, in addition to determining what to say, also decides when to say it. To evaluate our agent, we collect a unique dataset of online Mafia games, including both human participants, as well as our asynchronous agent. Overall, our agent performs on par with human players, both in game performance, as well as in its ability to blend in with the other human players. Our analysis shows that the agent's behavior in deciding when to speak closely mirrors human patterns, although differences emerge in message content. We release all our data and code to support and encourage further research for more realistic asynchronous communication between LLM agents. This work paves the way for integration of LLMs into realistic human group settings, from assistance in team discussions to educational and professional environments where complex social dynamics must be navigated.

The rise of Agent AI and Large Language Model-powered Multi-Agent Systems (LLM-MAS) has underscored the need for responsible and dependable system operation. Tools like LangChain and Retrieval-Augmented Generation have expanded LLM capabilities, enabling deeper integration into MAS through enhanced knowledge retrieval and reasoning. However, these advancements introduce critical challenges: LLM agents exhibit inherent unpredictability, and uncertainties in their outputs can compound across interactions, threatening system stability. To address these risks, a human-centered design approach with active dynamic moderation is essential. Such an approach enhances traditional passive oversight by facilitating coherent inter-agent communication and effective system governance, allowing MAS to achieve desired outcomes more efficiently.

In recent years, the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has spurred a growing demand for plug-and-play AI systems. Among the various AI techniques, prompt engineering stands out as particularly significant. However, users often face challenges in writing prompts due to the steep learning curve and significant time investment, and existing automatic prompt engineering (APE) models can be difficult to use. To address this issue, we propose PAS, an LLM-based plug-and-play APE system. PAS utilizes LLMs trained on high-quality, automatically generated prompt complementary datasets, resulting in exceptional performance. In comprehensive benchmarks, PAS achieves state-of-the-art (SoTA) results compared to previous APE models, with an average improvement of 6.09 points. Moreover, PAS is highly efficient, achieving SoTA performance with only 9000 data points. Additionally, PAS can autonomously generate prompt augmentation data without requiring additional human labor. Its flexibility also allows it to be compatible with all existing LLMs and applicable to a wide range of tasks. PAS excels in human evaluations, underscoring its suitability as a plug-in for users. This combination of high performance, efficiency, and flexibility makes PAS a valuable system for enhancing the usability and effectiveness of LLMs through improved prompt engineering.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become more integrated into our daily lives, it is crucial to identify and mitigate their risks, especially when the risks can have profound impacts on human users and societies. Guardrails, which filter the inputs or outputs of LLMs, have emerged as a core safeguarding technology. This position paper takes a deep look at current open-source solutions (Llama Guard, Nvidia NeMo, Guardrails AI), and discusses the challenges and the road towards building more complete solutions. Drawing on robust evidence from previous research, we advocate for a systematic approach to construct guardrails for LLMs, based on comprehensive consideration of diverse contexts across various LLMs applications. We propose employing socio-technical methods through collaboration with a multi-disciplinary team to pinpoint precise technical requirements, exploring advanced neural-symbolic implementations to embrace the complexity of the requirements, and developing verification and testing to ensure the utmost quality of the final product.

Intelligent agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated impressive capabilities and gained increasing popularity on social media platforms. While LLM agents are reshaping the ecology of social media, there exists a current gap in conducting a comprehensive evaluation of their ability to comprehend media content, understand user behaviors, and make intricate decisions. To address this challenge, we introduce SoMe, a pioneering benchmark designed to evaluate social media agents equipped with various agent tools for accessing and analyzing social media data. SoMe comprises a diverse collection of 8 social media agent tasks, 9,164,284 posts, 6,591 user profiles, and 25,686 reports from various social media platforms and external websites, with 17,869 meticulously annotated task queries. Compared with the existing datasets and benchmarks for social media tasks, SoMe is the first to provide a versatile and realistic platform for LLM-based social media agents to handle diverse social media tasks. By extensive quantitative and qualitative analysis, we provide the first overview insight into the performance of mainstream agentic LLMs in realistic social media environments and identify several limitations. Our evaluation reveals that both the current closed-source and open-source LLMs cannot handle social media agent tasks satisfactorily. SoMe provides a challenging yet meaningful testbed for future social media agents. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/LivXue/SoMe

The ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to mimic human behavior triggered a plethora of computational social science research, assuming that empirical studies of humans can be conducted with AI agents instead. Since there have been conflicting research findings on whether and when this hypothesis holds, there is a need to better understand the differences in their experimental designs. We focus on replicating the behavior of social network users with the use of LLMs for the analysis of communication on social networks. First, we provide a formal framework for the simulation of social networks, before focusing on the sub-task of imitating user communication. We empirically test different approaches to imitate user behavior on X in English and German. Our findings suggest that social simulations should be validated by their empirical realism measured in the setting in which the simulation components were fitted. With this paper, we argue for more rigor when applying generative-agent-based modeling for social simulation.

Conventional recommender systems (RSs) face challenges in precisely capturing users' fine-grained preferences. Large language models (LLMs) have shown capabilities in commonsense reasoning and leveraging external tools that may help address these challenges. However, existing LLM-based RSs suffer from hallucinations, misalignment between the semantic space of items and the behavior space of users, or overly simplistic control strategies (e.g., whether to rank or directly present existing results). To bridge these gap, we introduce ToolRec, a framework for LLM-empowered recommendations via tool learning that uses LLMs as surrogate users, thereby guiding the recommendation process and invoking external tools to generate a recommendation list that aligns closely with users' nuanced preferences. We formulate the recommendation process as a process aimed at exploring user interests in attribute granularity. The process factors in the nuances of the context and user preferences. The LLM then invokes external tools based on a user's attribute instructions and probes different segments of the item pool. We consider two types of attribute-oriented tools: rank tools and retrieval tools. Through the integration of LLMs, ToolRec enables conventional recommender systems to become external tools with a natural language interface. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of ToolRec, particularly in scenarios that are rich in semantic content.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly leveraged to empower autonomous agents to simulate human beings in various fields of behavioral research. However, evaluating their capacity to navigate complex social interactions remains a challenge. Previous studies face limitations due to insufficient scenario diversity, complexity, and a single-perspective focus. To this end, we introduce AgentSense: Benchmarking Social Intelligence of Language Agents through Interactive Scenarios. Drawing on Dramaturgical Theory, AgentSense employs a bottom-up approach to create 1,225 diverse social scenarios constructed from extensive scripts. We evaluate LLM-driven agents through multi-turn interactions, emphasizing both goal completion and implicit reasoning. We analyze goals using ERG theory and conduct comprehensive experiments. Our findings highlight that LLMs struggle with goals in complex social scenarios, especially high-level growth needs, and even GPT-4o requires improvement in private information reasoning. Code and data are available at https://github.com/ljcleo/agent_sense.

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values is imperative to mitigate potential adverse effects resulting from their misuse. Drawing from the sociological insight that acknowledging all parties' concerns is a key factor in shaping human values, this paper proposes a novel direction to align LLMs by themselves: social scene simulation. To achieve this, we present MATRIX, a novel social scene simulator that emulates realistic scenes around a user's input query, enabling the LLM to take social consequences into account before responding. MATRIX serves as a virtual rehearsal space, akin to a Monopolylogue, where the LLM performs diverse roles related to the query and practice by itself. To inject this alignment, we fine-tune the LLM with MATRIX-simulated data, ensuring adherence to human values without compromising inference speed. We theoretically show that the LLM with MATRIX outperforms Constitutional AI under mild assumptions. Finally, extensive experiments validate that our method outperforms over 10 baselines across 4 benchmarks. As evidenced by 875 user ratings, our tuned 13B-size LLM exceeds GPT-4 in aligning with human values. Code is available at https://github.com/pangxianghe/MATRIX.

Recent interest in human-AI interactions in agent-based modeling and simulation (ABMS) has grown rapidly due to the widespread utilization of large language models (LLMs). ABMS is an intelligent approach that simulates autonomous agents' behaviors within a defined environment to research emergent phenomena. Integrating LLMs into ABMS enables natural language interaction between humans and models. Meanwhile, it introduces new challenges that rely on human interaction to address. Human involvement can assist ABMS in adapting to flexible and complex research demands. However, systematic reviews of interactions that examine how humans and AI interact in ABMS are lacking. In this paper, we investigate existing works and propose a novel taxonomy to categorize the interactions derived from them. Specifically, human users refer to researchers who utilize ABMS tools to conduct their studies in our survey. We decompose interactions into five dimensions: the goals that users want to achieve (Why), the phases that users are involved (When), the components of the system (What), the roles of users (Who), and the means of interactions (How). Our analysis summarizes the findings that reveal existing interaction patterns. They provide researchers who develop interactions with comprehensive guidance on how humans and AI interact. We further discuss the unexplored interactions and suggest future research directions.

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly persuasive, there is concern that people's opinions and decisions may be influenced across various contexts at scale. Prior mitigation (e.g., AI detectors and disclaimers) largely treats people as passive recipients of AI-generated information. To provide a more proactive intervention against persuasive AI, we introduce LLMimic, a role-play-based, interactive, gamified AI literacy tutorial, where participants assume the role of an LLM and progress through three key stages of the training pipeline (pretraining, SFT, and RLHF). We conducted a 2 times 3 between-subjects study (N = 274) where participants either (1) watched an AI history video (control) or (2) interacted with LLMimic (treatment), and then engaged in one of three realistic AI persuasion scenarios: (a) charity donation persuasion, (b) malicious money solicitation, or (c) hotel recommendation. Our results show that LLMimic significantly improved participants' AI literacy (p < .001), reduced persuasion success across scenarios (p < .05), and enhanced truthfulness and social responsibility levels (p<0.01) in the hotel scenario. These findings suggest that LLMimic offers a scalable, human-centered approach to improving AI literacy and supporting more informed interactions with persuasive AI.

Retrieval-augmented large language models (R-LLMs) combine pre-trained large language models (LLMs) with information retrieval systems to improve the accuracy of factual question-answering. However, current libraries for building R-LLMs provide high-level abstractions without sufficient transparency for evaluating and optimizing prompts within specific inference processes such as retrieval and generation. To address this gap, we present RaLLe, an open-source framework designed to facilitate the development, evaluation, and optimization of R-LLMs for knowledge-intensive tasks. With RaLLe, developers can easily develop and evaluate R-LLMs, improving hand-crafted prompts, assessing individual inference processes, and objectively measuring overall system performance quantitatively. By leveraging these features, developers can enhance the performance and accuracy of their R-LLMs in knowledge-intensive generation tasks. We open-source our code at https://github.com/yhoshi3/RaLLe.

The increasing adoption and commercialization of generalized Large Language Models (LLMs) have profoundly impacted various aspects of our daily lives. Initially embraced by the computer science community, the versatility of LLMs has found its way into diverse domains. In particular, the software engineering realm has witnessed the most transformative changes. With LLMs increasingly serving as AI Pair Programming Assistants spurred the development of specialized models aimed at aiding software engineers. Although this new paradigm offers numerous advantages, it also presents critical challenges and open problems. To identify the potential and prevailing obstacles, we systematically reviewed contemporary scholarly publications, emphasizing the perspectives of software developers and usability concerns. Preliminary findings underscore pressing concerns about data privacy, bias, and misinformation. Additionally, we identified several usability challenges, including prompt engineering, increased cognitive demands, and mistrust. Finally, we introduce 12 open problems that we have identified through our survey, covering these various domains.

The growth of social media, characterized by its multimodal nature, has led to the emergence of diverse phenomena and challenges, which calls for an effective approach to uniformly solve automated tasks. The powerful Large Vision Language Models make it possible to handle a variety of tasks simultaneously, but even with carefully designed prompting methods, the general domain models often fall short in aligning with the unique speaking style and context of social media tasks. In this paper, we introduce a Large Vision Language Model for Social Media Processing (SoMeLVLM), which is a cognitive framework equipped with five key capabilities including knowledge & comprehension, application, analysis, evaluation, and creation. SoMeLVLM is designed to understand and generate realistic social media behavior. We have developed a 654k multimodal social media instruction-tuning dataset to support our cognitive framework and fine-tune our model. Our experiments demonstrate that SoMeLVLM achieves state-of-the-art performance in multiple social media tasks. Further analysis shows its significant advantages over baselines in terms of cognitive abilities.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates hallucination in LLMs by incorporating external knowledge, but relies on chunk-based retrieval that lacks structural semantics. GraphRAG methods improve RAG by modeling knowledge as entity-relation graphs, but still face challenges in high construction cost, fixed one-time retrieval, and reliance on long-context reasoning and prompt design. To address these challenges, we propose Graph-R1, an agentic GraphRAG framework via end-to-end reinforcement learning (RL). It introduces lightweight knowledge hypergraph construction, models retrieval as a multi-turn agent-environment interaction, and optimizes the agent process via an end-to-end reward mechanism. Experiments on standard RAG datasets show that Graph-R1 outperforms traditional GraphRAG and RL-enhanced RAG methods in reasoning accuracy, retrieval efficiency, and generation quality.

This study presents an innovative enhancement to retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems by seamlessly integrating fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) with vector databases. This integration capitalizes on the combined strengths of structured data retrieval and the nuanced comprehension provided by advanced LLMs. Central to our approach are the LoRA and QLoRA methodologies, which stand at the forefront of model refinement through parameter-efficient fine-tuning and memory optimization. A novel feature of our research is the incorporation of user feedback directly into the training process, ensuring the model's continuous adaptation to user expectations and thus, improving its performance and applicability. Additionally, we introduce a Quantized Influence Measure (QIM) as an innovative "AI Judge" mechanism to enhance the precision of result selection, further refining the system's accuracy. Accompanied by an executive diagram and a detailed algorithm for fine-tuning QLoRA, our work provides a comprehensive framework for implementing these advancements within chatbot technologies. This research contributes significant insights into LLM optimization for specific uses and heralds new directions for further development in retrieval-augmented models. Through extensive experimentation and analysis, our findings lay a robust foundation for future advancements in chatbot technology and retrieval systems, marking a significant step forward in the creation of more sophisticated, precise, and user-centric conversational AI systems.

Information graphics are pivotal in effective information dissemination and storytelling. However, creating such graphics is extremely challenging for non-professionals, since the design process requires multifaceted skills and comprehensive knowledge. Thus, despite the many available authoring tools, a significant gap remains in enabling non-experts to produce compelling information graphics seamlessly, especially from scratch. Recent breakthroughs show that Large Language Models (LLMs), especially when tool-augmented, can autonomously engage with external tools, making them promising candidates for enabling innovative graphic design applications. In this work, we propose a LLM-centric interface with the agent GraphiMind for automatic generation, recommendation, and composition of information graphics design resources, based on user intent expressed through natural language. Our GraphiMind integrates a Textual Conversational Interface, powered by tool-augmented LLM, with a traditional Graphical Manipulation Interface, streamlining the entire design process from raw resource curation to composition and refinement. Extensive evaluations highlight our tool's proficiency in simplifying the design process, opening avenues for its use by non-professional users. Moreover, we spotlight the potential of LLMs in reshaping the domain of information graphics design, offering a blend of automation, versatility, and user-centric interactivity.

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has enabled LLM-based applications (a.k.a. AI agents or co-pilots), a new software paradigm that combines the strength of LLM and conventional software. Diverse LLM applications from different tenants could design complex workflows using multiple LLM requests to accomplish one task. However, they have to use the over-simplified request-level API provided by today's public LLM services, losing essential application-level information. Public LLM services have to blindly optimize individual LLM requests, leading to sub-optimal end-to-end performance of LLM applications. This paper introduces Parrot, an LLM service system that focuses on the end-to-end experience of LLM-based applications. Parrot proposes Semantic Variable, a unified abstraction to expose application-level knowledge to public LLM services. A Semantic Variable annotates an input/output variable in the prompt of a request, and creates the data pipeline when connecting multiple LLM requests, providing a natural way to program LLM applications. Exposing Semantic Variables to the public LLM service allows it to perform conventional data flow analysis to uncover the correlation across multiple LLM requests. This correlation opens a brand-new optimization space for the end-to-end performance of LLM-based applications. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that Parrot can achieve up to an order-of-magnitude improvement for popular and practical use cases of LLM applications.

Recommendation systems (RS) help users find interested content and connect authors with their target audience. Most research in RS tends to focus either on predicting users' immediate feedback (like click-through rate) accurately or improving users' long-term engagement. However, they ignore the influence for authors and the lifelong interaction value (LIV) of user-author pairs, which is particularly crucial for improving the prosperity of social community in short-video platforms. Currently, reinforcement learning (RL) can optimize long-term benefits and has been widely applied in RS. In this paper, we introduce RL to Reinforce Lifelong Interaction Value of User-Author pairs (RLIV-UA) based on each interaction of UA pairs. To address the long intervals between UA interactions and the large scale of the UA space, we propose a novel Sparse Cross-Request Interaction Markov Decision Process (SCRI-MDP) and introduce an Adjacent State Approximation (ASA) method to construct RL training samples. Additionally, we introduce Multi-Task Critic Learning (MTCL) to capture the progressive nature of UA interactions (click -> follow -> gift), where denser interaction signals are leveraged to compensate for the learning of sparse labels. Finally, an auxiliary supervised learning task is designed to enhance the convergence of the RLIV-UA model. In offline experiments and online A/B tests, the RLIV-UA model achieves both higher user satisfaction and higher platform profits than compared methods.

In this paper, we explore a new way for user targeting, where non-expert marketers could select their target users solely given demands in natural language form. The key to this issue is how to transform natural languages into practical structured logical languages, i.e., the structured understanding of marketer demands. Considering the impressive natural language processing ability of large language models (LLMs), we try to leverage LLMs to solve this issue. Past research indicates that the reasoning ability of LLMs can be effectively enhanced through chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. But existing methods still have some limitations: (1) Previous methods either use simple "Let's think step by step" spells or provide fixed examples in demonstrations without considering compatibility between prompts and questions, making LLMs ineffective in some complex reasoning tasks such as structured language transformation. (2) Previous methods are often implemented in closed-source models or excessively large models, which is not suitable in industrial practical scenarios. Based on these, we propose ARALLM (i.e., Analogical Reasoning Augmented Large Language Models) consisting of two modules: Analogical Reasoning based Prompting and Reasoning-Augmented Multi-Task Model Distillation.

As LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) become more autonomous, their free-form interactions increasingly dominate system behavior. However, scaling the number of agents often amplifies context pressure, coordination errors, and system drift. It is well known that building robust MAS requires more than prompt tuning or increased model intelligence. It necessitates engineering discipline focused on architecture to manage complexity under uncertainty. We characterize agentic software by a core property: runtime generation and evolution under uncertainty. Drawing upon and extending software engineering experience, especially object-oriented programming, this paper introduces Loosely-Structured Software (LSS), a new class of software systems that shifts the engineering focus from constructing deterministic logic to managing the runtime entropy generated by View-constructed programming, semantic-driven self-organization, and endogenous evolution. To make this entropy governable, we introduce design principles under a three-layer engineering framework: View/Context Engineering to manage the execution environment and maintain task-relevant Views, Structure Engineering to organize dynamic binding over artifacts and agents, and Evolution Engineering to govern the lifecycle of self-rewriting artifacts. Building on this framework, we develop LSS design patterns as semantic control blocks that stabilize fluid, inference-mediated interactions while preserving agent adaptability. Together, these abstractions improve the designability, scalability, and evolvability of agentic infrastructure. We provide basic experimental validation of key mechanisms, demonstrating the effectiveness of LSS.

Large language model (LLM)-based AI agents extend LLM capabilities by enabling access to tools such as data sources, APIs, search engines, code sandboxes, and even other agents. While this empowers agents to perform complex tasks, LLMs may invoke unintended tool interactions and introduce risks, such as leaking sensitive data or overwriting critical records, which are unacceptable in enterprise contexts. Current approaches to mitigate these risks, such as model-based safeguards, enhance agents' reliability but cannot guarantee system safety. Methods like information flow control (IFC) and temporal constraints aim to provide guarantees but often require extensive human annotation. We propose a process that starts with applying System-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) to identify hazards in agent workflows, derive safety requirements, and formalize them as enforceable specifications on data flows and tool sequences. To enable this, we introduce a capability-enhanced Model Context Protocol (MCP) framework that requires structured labels on capabilities, confidentiality, and trust level. Together, these contributions aim to shift LLM-based agent safety from ad hoc reliability fixes to proactive guardrails with formal guarantees, while reducing dependence on user confirmation and making autonomy a deliberate design choice.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have attracted considerable interest among researchers to leverage these models to enhance Recommender Systems (RSs). Existing work predominantly utilizes LLMs to generate knowledge-rich texts or utilizes LLM-derived embeddings as features to improve RSs. Although the extensive world knowledge embedded in LLMs generally benefits RSs, the application can only take limited number of users and items as inputs, without adequately exploiting collaborative filtering information. Considering its crucial role in RSs, one key challenge in enhancing RSs with LLMs lies in providing better collaborative filtering information through LLMs. In this paper, drawing inspiration from the in-context learning and chain of thought reasoning in LLMs, we propose the Large Language Models enhanced Collaborative Filtering (LLM-CF) framework, which distils the world knowledge and reasoning capabilities of LLMs into collaborative filtering. We also explored a concise and efficient instruction-tuning method, which improves the recommendation capabilities of LLMs while preserving their general functionalities (e.g., not decreasing on the LLM benchmark). Comprehensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that LLM-CF significantly enhances several backbone recommendation models and consistently outperforms competitive baselines, showcasing its effectiveness in distilling the world knowledge and reasoning capabilities of LLM into collaborative filtering.

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to perform well at a variety of syntactic, discourse, and reasoning tasks. While LLMs are increasingly deployed in many forms including conversational agents that interact with humans, we lack a grounded benchmark to measure how well LLMs understand social language. Here, we introduce a new theory-driven benchmark, SocKET, that contains 58 NLP tasks testing social knowledge which we group into five categories: humor & sarcasm, offensiveness, sentiment & emotion, and trustworthiness. In tests on the benchmark, we demonstrate that current models attain only moderate performance but reveal significant potential for task transfer among different types and categories of tasks, which were predicted from theory. Through zero-shot evaluations, we show that pretrained models already possess some innate but limited capabilities of social language understanding and training on one category of tasks can improve zero-shot testing on others. Our benchmark provides a systematic way to analyze model performance on an important dimension of language and points to clear room for improvement to build more socially-aware LLMs. The associated resources are released at https://github.com/minjechoi/SOCKET.

This paper introduces ArGen (Auto-Regulation of Generative AI systems), a framework for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with complex sets of configurable, machine-readable rules spanning ethical principles, operational safety protocols, and regulatory compliance standards. Moving beyond just preference-based alignment, ArGen is designed to ensure LLMs adhere to these multifaceted policies through a novel synthesis of principle-based automated reward scoring, Group Relative Policy Optimisation (GRPO), and an Open Policy Agent (OPA) inspired governance layer. This approach provides the technical foundation for achieving and demonstrating compliance with diverse and nuanced governance requirements. To showcase the framework's capability to operationalize a deeply nuanced and culturally-specific value system, we present an in-depth case study: the development of a medical AI assistant guided by principles from Dharmic ethics (such as Ahimsa and Dharma), as derived from texts like the Bhagavad Gita. This challenging application demonstrates ArGen's adaptability, achieving a 70.9% improvement in domain-scope adherence over the baseline. Through our open-source repository, we show that ArGen's methodology offers a path to 'Governable Al' systems that are technically proficient, ethically robust, and verifiably compliant for safe deployment in diverse global contexts.

Autonomous agents have long been a prominent research focus in both academic and industry communities. Previous research in this field often focuses on training agents with limited knowledge within isolated environments, which diverges significantly from human learning processes, and thus makes the agents hard to achieve human-like decisions. Recently, through the acquisition of vast amounts of web knowledge, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in achieving human-level intelligence. This has sparked an upsurge in studies investigating LLM-based autonomous agents. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of these studies, delivering a systematic review of the field of LLM-based autonomous agents from a holistic perspective. More specifically, we first discuss the construction of LLM-based autonomous agents, for which we propose a unified framework that encompasses a majority of the previous work. Then, we present a comprehensive overview of the diverse applications of LLM-based autonomous agents in the fields of social science, natural science, and engineering. Finally, we delve into the evaluation strategies commonly used for LLM-based autonomous agents. Based on the previous studies, we also present several challenges and future directions in this field. To keep track of this field and continuously update our survey, we maintain a repository of relevant references at https://github.com/Paitesanshi/LLM-Agent-Survey.

The release of ChatGPT in 2022 triggered a rapid surge in generative artificial intelligence mobile apps (i.e., Gen-AI apps). Despite widespread adoption, little is known about how end users perceive and evaluate these Gen-AI functionalities in practice. In this work, we conduct a user-centered analysis of 676,066 reviews from 173 Gen-AI apps on the Google Play Store. We introduce a four-phase methodology, SARA (Selection, Acquisition, Refinement, and Analysis), that enables the systematic extraction of user insights using prompt-based LLM techniques. First, we demonstrate the reliability of LLMs in topic extraction, achieving 91% accuracy through five-shot prompting and non-informative review filtering. Then, we apply this method to the informative reviews, identify the top 10 user-discussed topics (e.g., AI Performance, Content Quality, and Content Policy & Censorship) and analyze the key challenges and emerging opportunities. Finally, we examine how these topics evolve over time, offering insight into shifting user expectations and engagement patterns with Gen-AI apps. Based on our findings and observations, we present actionable implications for developers and researchers.

A Conversational Recommender System (CRS) offers increased transparency and control to users by enabling them to engage with the system through a real-time multi-turn dialogue. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited an unprecedented ability to converse naturally and incorporate world knowledge and common-sense reasoning into language understanding, unlocking the potential of this paradigm. However, effectively leveraging LLMs within a CRS introduces new technical challenges, including properly understanding and controlling a complex conversation and retrieving from external sources of information. These issues are exacerbated by a large, evolving item corpus and a lack of conversational data for training. In this paper, we provide a roadmap for building an end-to-end large-scale CRS using LLMs. In particular, we propose new implementations for user preference understanding, flexible dialogue management and explainable recommendations as part of an integrated architecture powered by LLMs. For improved personalization, we describe how an LLM can consume interpretable natural language user profiles and use them to modulate session-level context. To overcome conversational data limitations in the absence of an existing production CRS, we propose techniques for building a controllable LLM-based user simulator to generate synthetic conversations. As a proof of concept we introduce RecLLM, a large-scale CRS for YouTube videos built on LaMDA, and demonstrate its fluency and diverse functionality through some illustrative example conversations.

Large language models (LLMs) have evolved beyond simple text generation to power software agents that directly translate natural language commands into tangible actions. While API-based LLM agents initially rose to prominence for their robust automation capabilities and seamless integration with programmatic endpoints, recent progress in multimodal LLM research has enabled GUI-based LLM agents that interact with graphical user interfaces in a human-like manner. Although these two paradigms share the goal of enabling LLM-driven task automation, they diverge significantly in architectural complexity, development workflows, and user interaction models. This paper presents the first comprehensive comparative study of API-based and GUI-based LLM agents, systematically analyzing their divergence and potential convergence. We examine key dimensions and highlight scenarios in which hybrid approaches can harness their complementary strengths. By proposing clear decision criteria and illustrating practical use cases, we aim to guide practitioners and researchers in selecting, combining, or transitioning between these paradigms. Ultimately, we indicate that continuing innovations in LLM-based automation are poised to blur the lines between API- and GUI-driven agents, paving the way for more flexible, adaptive solutions in a wide range of real-world applications.

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in function-level code generation, yet repository-level software engineering tasks remain challenging. Current solutions predominantly rely on proprietary LLM agents, which introduce unpredictability and limit accessibility, raising concerns about data privacy and model customization. This paper investigates whether open-source LLMs can effectively address repository-level tasks without requiring agent-based approaches. We demonstrate this is possible by enabling LLMs to comprehend functions and files within codebases through their semantic information and structural dependencies. To this end, we introduce Code Graph Models (CGMs), which integrate repository code graph structures into the LLM's attention mechanism and map node attributes to the LLM's input space using a specialized adapter. When combined with an agentless graph RAG framework, our approach achieves a 43.00% resolution rate on the SWE-bench Lite benchmark using the open-source Qwen2.5-72B model. This performance ranks first among open weight models, second among methods with open-source systems, and eighth overall, surpassing the previous best open-source model-based method by 12.33%.

Large language models (LLMs) represent a significant advancement in integrating physical robots with AI-driven systems. We showcase the capabilities of our framework within the context of the real-world household competition. This research introduces a framework that utilizes RDMM (Robotics Decision-Making Models), which possess the capacity for decision-making within domain-specific contexts, as well as an awareness of their personal knowledge and capabilities. The framework leverages information to enhance the autonomous decision-making of the system. In contrast to other approaches, our focus is on real-time, on-device solutions, successfully operating on hardware with as little as 8GB of memory. Our framework incorporates visual perception models equipping robots with understanding of their environment. Additionally, the framework has integrated real-time speech recognition capabilities, thus enhancing the human-robot interaction experience. Experimental results demonstrate that the RDMM framework can plan with an 93\% accuracy. Furthermore, we introduce a new dataset consisting of 27k planning instances, as well as 1.3k text-image annotated samples derived from the competition. The framework, benchmarks, datasets, and models developed in this work are publicly available on our GitHub repository at https://github.com/shadynasrat/RDMM.

Self-Attentive Sequential Recommendation (SASRec) effectively captures long-term user preferences by applying attention mechanisms to historical interactions. Concurrently, the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has motivated research into LLM-based recommendation, which leverages their powerful generalization and language understanding capabilities. However, LLMs often lack the domain-specific knowledge and collaborative signals essential for high-quality recommendations when relying solely on textual prompts. To address this limitation, this study proposes SASRecLLM, a novel framework that integrates SASRec as a collaborative encoder with an LLM fine-tuned using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). The components are connected via a mapping layer to align their dimensional spaces, and three targeted training strategies are designed to optimize the hybrid architecture. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that SASRecLLM achieves robust and consistent improvements over strong baselines in both cold-start and warm-start scenarios. This work advances the field of LLM-based recommendation by presenting a modular and effective paradigm for fusing structured collaborative filtering with the semantic power of fine-tuned LLMs. The implementation is available on GitHub: https://github.com/kechenkristin/RecLLM

Intelligent agents stand out as a potential path toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). Thus, researchers have dedicated significant effort to diverse implementations for them. Benefiting from recent progress in large language models (LLMs), LLM-based agents that use universal natural language as an interface exhibit robust generalization capabilities across various applications -- from serving as autonomous general-purpose task assistants to applications in coding, social, and economic domains, LLM-based agents offer extensive exploration opportunities. This paper surveys current research to provide an in-depth overview of LLM-based intelligent agents within single-agent and multi-agent systems. It covers their definitions, research frameworks, and foundational components such as their composition, cognitive and planning methods, tool utilization, and responses to environmental feedback. We also delve into the mechanisms of deploying LLM-based agents in multi-agent systems, including multi-role collaboration, message passing, and strategies to alleviate communication issues between agents. The discussions also shed light on popular datasets and application scenarios. We conclude by envisioning prospects for LLM-based agents, considering the evolving landscape of AI and natural language processing.

The final frontier for simulation is the accurate representation of complex, real-world social systems. While agent-based modeling (ABM) seeks to study the behavior and interactions of agents within a larger system, it is unable to faithfully capture the full complexity of human-driven behavior. Large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, have emerged as a potential solution to this bottleneck by enabling researchers to explore human-driven interactions in previously unimaginable ways. Our research investigates simulations of human interactions using LLMs. Through prompt engineering, inspired by Park et al. (2023), we present two simulations of believable proxies of human behavior: a two-agent negotiation and a six-agent murder mystery game.

Contemporary approaches to agent-based modeling (ABM) of social systems have traditionally emphasized rule-based behaviors, limiting their ability to capture nuanced dynamics by moving beyond predefined rules and leveraging contextual understanding from LMs of human social interaction. This paper presents SALM (Social Agent LM Framework), a novel approach for integrating language models (LMs) into social network simulation that achieves unprecedented temporal stability in multi-agent scenarios. Our primary contributions include: (1) a hierarchical prompting architecture enabling stable simulation beyond 4,000 timesteps while reducing token usage by 73%, (2) an attention-based memory system achieving 80% cache hit rates (95% CI [78%, 82%]) with sub-linear memory growth of 9.5%, and (3) formal bounds on personality stability. Through extensive validation against SNAP ego networks, we demonstrate the first LLM-based framework capable of modeling long-term social phenomena while maintaining empirically validated behavioral fidelity.

Tool-augmented large language models (LLMs) are emerging as deep research agents, systems that decompose complex queries, retrieve external evidence, and synthesize grounded responses. Yet current agents remain limited by shallow retrieval, weak alignment metrics, and brittle tool-use behavior. We introduce PokeeResearch-7B, a 7B-parameter deep research agent built under a unified reinforcement learning framework for robustness, alignment, and scalability. PokeeResearch-7B is trained by an annotation-free Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback (RLAIF) framework to optimize policies using LLM-based reward signals that capture factual accuracy, citation faithfulness, and instruction adherence. A chain-of-thought-driven multi-call reasoning scaffold further enhances robustness through self-verification and adaptive recovery from tool failures. Among 10 popular deep research benchmarks, PokeeResearch-7B achieves state-of-the-art performance among 7B-scale deep research agents. This highlights that careful reinforcement learning and reasoning design can produce efficient, resilient, and research-grade AI agents. The model and inference code is open-sourced under MIT license at https://github.com/Pokee-AI/PokeeResearchOSS.

Large Language Model (LLM)-powered multi-agent systems (MAS) have rapidly advanced collaborative reasoning, tool use, and role-specialized coordination in complex tasks. However, reliability-critical deployment remains hindered by a systemic failure mode: hierarchical compliance under instruction conflicts (system-user, peer-peer), where agents misprioritize system-level rules in the presence of competing demands. Moreover, widely used macro-level metrics (e.g., pass@k) obscure these micro-level violations and offer little actionable guidance for remedy. In this work, we present a full-stack, three-stage framework: (1) Diagnose - Contextualized Role Adherence Score (CRAS), a query-wise, context-aware scoring metric that decomposes role adherence into four measurable dimensions; (2) Localize - attention drift analysis revealing that instruction conflicts are resolved by attention heads that are largely concentrated in middle layers; (3) Align - Surgical Alignment of Instruction Layers (SAIL), which installs LoRA only on the localized focal layers and optimizes a token-weighted DPO-style preference objective that credits tokens by their focal attentional contribution. Across standard benchmarks and MAS frameworks, our surgical approach improves instruction hierarchy compliance (e.g., +5.60% with AutoGen on MedQA) without full-model finetuning.

Critical domain knowledge typically resides with few experts, creating organizational bottlenecks in scalability and decision-making. Non-experts struggle to create effective visualizations, leading to suboptimal insights and diverting expert time. This paper investigates how to capture and embed human domain knowledge into AI agent systems through an industrial case study. We propose a software engineering framework to capture human domain knowledge for engineering AI agents in simulation data visualization by augmenting a Large Language Model (LLM) with a request classifier, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system for code generation, codified expert rules, and visualization design principles unified in an agent demonstrating autonomous, reactive, proactive, and social behavior. Evaluation across five scenarios spanning multiple engineering domains with 12 evaluators demonstrates 206% improvement in output quality, with our agent achieving expert-level ratings in all cases versus baseline's poor performance, while maintaining superior code quality with lower variance. Our contributions are: an automated agent-based system for visualization generation and a validated framework for systematically capturing human domain knowledge and codifying tacit expert knowledge into AI agents, demonstrating that non-experts can achieve expert-level outcomes in specialized domains.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently emerged as a focal point of research and application, driven by their unprecedented ability to understand and generate text with human-like quality. Even more recently, LLMs have been extended into multi-modal large language models (MM-LLMs) which extends their capabilities to deal with image, video and audio information, in addition to text. This opens up applications like text-to-video generation, image captioning, text-to-speech, and more and is achieved either by retro-fitting an LLM with multi-modal capabilities, or building a MM-LLM from scratch. This paper provides an extensive review of the current state of those LLMs with multi-modal capabilities as well as the very recent MM-LLMs. It covers the historical development of LLMs especially the advances enabled by transformer-based architectures like OpenAI's GPT series and Google's BERT, as well as the role of attention mechanisms in enhancing model performance. The paper includes coverage of the major and most important of the LLMs and MM-LLMs and also covers the techniques of model tuning, including fine-tuning and prompt engineering, which tailor pre-trained models to specific tasks or domains. Ethical considerations and challenges, such as data bias and model misuse, are also analysed to underscore the importance of responsible AI development and deployment. Finally, we discuss the implications of open-source versus proprietary models in AI research. Through this review, we provide insights into the transformative potential of MM-LLMs in various applications.

As organizations scale adoption of generative AI, model cost optimization and operational efficiency have emerged as critical factors determining sustainability and accessibility. While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities across diverse tasks, their extensive computational requirements make them cost-prohibitive for routine enterprise use. This limitation motivates the exploration of Small Language Models (SLMs), which can deliver comparable performance in targeted applications while drastically reducing infrastructure overhead (Irugalbandara et al., 2023). In this work, we investigate the feasibility of replacing LLM-driven workflows with optimized SLMs. We trained a domain-adapted SLM to execute representative tasks traditionally handled by LLMs, such as document summarization, query answering, and structured data interpretation. As part of the experiment, we investigated the fine-tuning of facebook/opt-350m model (single epoch only) using the Hugging Face TRL (Transformer Reinforcement Learning), specifically the Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) trainer. The OPT-350M model was released by Meta AI in 2022 as part of the OPT (Open Pretrained Transformer) family of models. Similar studies demonstrate that even models at the 350M parameter scale can meaningfully contribute to instruction-tuning pipelines (Mekala et al., 2024). Experimental results demonstrated that our fine-tuned SLM achieves exceptional performance with a 77.55\% pass rate on ToolBench evaluation, significantly outperforming all baseline models including ChatGPT-CoT (26.00\%), ToolLLaMA-DFS (30.18\%), and ToolLLaMA-CoT (16.27\%). These findings emphasize that thoughtful design and targeted training of SLMs can significantly lower barriers to adoption, enabling cost-effective, large-scale integration of generative AI into production systems.

As humans delegate more tasks and decisions to artificial intelligence (AI), we risk losing control of our individual and collective futures. Relatively simple algorithmic systems already steer human decision-making, such as social media feed algorithms that lead people to unintentionally and absent-mindedly scroll through engagement-optimized content. In this paper, we develop the idea of human agency by integrating philosophical and scientific theories of agency with AI-assisted evaluation methods: using large language models (LLMs) to simulate and validate user queries and to evaluate AI responses. We develop HumanAgencyBench (HAB), a scalable and adaptive benchmark with six dimensions of human agency based on typical AI use cases. HAB measures the tendency of an AI assistant or agent to Ask Clarifying Questions, Avoid Value Manipulation, Correct Misinformation, Defer Important Decisions, Encourage Learning, and Maintain Social Boundaries. We find low-to-moderate agency support in contemporary LLM-based assistants and substantial variation across system developers and dimensions. For example, while Anthropic LLMs most support human agency overall, they are the least supportive LLMs in terms of Avoid Value Manipulation. Agency support does not appear to consistently result from increasing LLM capabilities or instruction-following behavior (e.g., RLHF), and we encourage a shift towards more robust safety and alignment targets.

Despite the growing interest in replicating the scaled success of large language models (LLMs) in industrial search and recommender systems, most existing industrial efforts remain limited to transplanting Transformer architectures, which bring only incremental improvements over strong Deep Learning Recommendation Models (DLRMs). From a first principle perspective, the breakthroughs of LLMs stem not only from their architectures but also from two complementary mechanisms: context engineering, which enriches raw input queries with contextual cues to better elicit model capabilities, and multi-step reasoning, which iteratively refines model outputs through intermediate reasoning paths. However, these two mechanisms and their potential to unlock substantial improvements remain largely underexplored in industrial ranking systems. In this paper, we propose OnePiece, a unified framework that seamlessly integrates LLM-style context engineering and reasoning into both retrieval and ranking models of industrial cascaded pipelines. OnePiece is built on a pure Transformer backbone and further introduces three key innovations: (1) structured context engineering, which augments interaction history with preference and scenario signals and unifies them into a structured tokenized input sequence for both retrieval and ranking; (2) block-wise latent reasoning, which equips the model with multi-step refinement of representations and scales reasoning bandwidth via block size; (3) progressive multi-task training, which leverages user feedback chains to effectively supervise reasoning steps during training. OnePiece has been deployed in the main personalized search scenario of Shopee and achieves consistent online gains across different key business metrics, including over +2% GMV/UU and a +2.90% increase in advertising revenue.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on simple text classification tasks, frequently under zero-shot settings. However, their efficacy declines when tackling complex social media challenges such as propaganda detection, hateful meme classification, and toxicity identification. Much of the existing work has focused on using LLMs to generate synthetic training data, overlooking the potential of LLM-based text preprocessing and semantic augmentation. In this paper, we introduce an approach that prompts LLMs to clean noisy text and provide context-rich explanations, thereby enhancing training sets without substantial increases in data volume. We systematically evaluate on the SemEval 2024 multi-label Persuasive Meme dataset and further validate on the Google Jigsaw toxic comments and Facebook hateful memes datasets to assess generalizability. Our results reveal that zero-shot LLM classification underperforms on these high-context tasks compared to supervised models. In contrast, integrating LLM-based semantic augmentation yields performance on par with approaches that rely on human-annotated data, at a fraction of the cost. These findings underscore the importance of strategically incorporating LLMs into machine learning (ML) pipeline for social media classification tasks, offering broad implications for combating harmful content online.

The performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) is fundamentally determined by the contextual information provided during inference. This survey introduces Context Engineering, a formal discipline that transcends simple prompt design to encompass the systematic optimization of information payloads for LLMs. We present a comprehensive taxonomy decomposing Context Engineering into its foundational components and the sophisticated implementations that integrate them into intelligent systems. We first examine the foundational components: context retrieval and generation, context processing and context management. We then explore how these components are architecturally integrated to create sophisticated system implementations: retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), memory systems and tool-integrated reasoning, and multi-agent systems. Through this systematic analysis of over 1300 research papers, our survey not only establishes a technical roadmap for the field but also reveals a critical research gap: a fundamental asymmetry exists between model capabilities. While current models, augmented by advanced context engineering, demonstrate remarkable proficiency in understanding complex contexts, they exhibit pronounced limitations in generating equally sophisticated, long-form outputs. Addressing this gap is a defining priority for future research. Ultimately, this survey provides a unified framework for both researchers and engineers advancing context-aware AI.

As Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems are increasingly employed in intricate social environments, a pressing query emerges: Can these NLP systems mirror human-esque collaborative intelligence, in a multi-agent society consisting of multiple large language models (LLMs)? This paper probes the collaboration mechanisms among contemporary NLP systems by melding practical experiments with theoretical insights. We fabricate four unique `societies' comprised of LLM agents, where each agent is characterized by a specific `trait' (easy-going or overconfident) and engages in collaboration with a distinct `thinking pattern' (debate or reflection). Evaluating these multi-agent societies on three benchmark datasets, we discern that LLM agents navigate tasks by leveraging diverse social behaviors, from active debates to introspective reflections. Notably, certain collaborative strategies only optimize efficiency (using fewer API tokens), but also outshine previous top-tier approaches. Moreover, our results further illustrate that LLM agents manifest human-like social behaviors, such as conformity or majority rule, mirroring foundational Social Psychology theories. In conclusion, we integrate insights from Social Psychology to contextualize the collaboration of LLM agents, inspiring further investigations into the collaboration mechanism for LLMs. We commit to sharing our code and datasets (already submitted in supplementary materials), hoping to catalyze further research in this promising avenue (All code and data are available at https://github.com/zjunlp/MachineSoM.).

Advancements in large language models (LLMs) have unlocked remarkable capabilities. While deploying these models typically requires server-grade GPUs and cloud-based inference, the recent emergence of smaller open-source models and increasingly powerful consumer devices have made on-device deployment practical. The web browser as a platform for on-device deployment is universally accessible, provides a natural agentic environment, and conveniently abstracts out the different backends from diverse device vendors. To address this opportunity, we introduce WebLLM, an open-source JavaScript framework that enables high-performance LLM inference entirely within web browsers. WebLLM provides an OpenAI-style API for seamless integration into web applications, and leverages WebGPU for efficient local GPU acceleration and WebAssembly for performant CPU computation. With machine learning compilers MLC-LLM and Apache TVM, WebLLM leverages optimized WebGPU kernels, overcoming the absence of performant WebGPU kernel libraries. Evaluations show that WebLLM can retain up to 80% native performance on the same device, with room to further close the gap. WebLLM paves the way for universally accessible, privacy-preserving, personalized, and locally powered LLM applications in web browsers. The code is available at: https://github.com/mlc-ai/web-llm.

Reasoning language models (RLMs), also known as Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), such as OpenAI's o1 and o3, DeepSeek-V3, and Alibaba's QwQ, have redefined AI's problem-solving capabilities by extending large language models (LLMs) with advanced reasoning mechanisms. Yet, their high costs, proprietary nature, and complex architectures - uniquely combining Reinforcement Learning (RL), search heuristics, and LLMs - present accessibility and scalability challenges. To address these, we propose a comprehensive blueprint that organizes RLM components into a modular framework, based on a survey and analysis of all RLM works. This blueprint incorporates diverse reasoning structures (chains, trees, graphs, and nested forms), reasoning strategies (e.g., Monte Carlo Tree Search, Beam Search), RL concepts (policy, value models and others), and supervision schemes (Output-Based and Process-Based Supervision). We also provide detailed mathematical formulations and algorithmic specifications to simplify RLM implementation. By showing how schemes like LLaMA-Berry, QwQ, Journey Learning, and Graph of Thoughts fit as special cases, we demonstrate the blueprint's versatility and unifying potential. To illustrate its utility, we introduce x1, a modular implementation for rapid RLM prototyping and experimentation. Using x1 and a literature review, we provide key insights, such as multi-phase training for policy and value models, and the importance of familiar training distributions. Finally, we outline how RLMs can integrate with a broader LLM ecosystem, including tools and databases. Our work demystifies RLM construction, democratizes advanced reasoning capabilities, and fosters innovation, aiming to mitigate the gap between "rich AI" and "poor AI" by lowering barriers to RLM development and experimentation.

For centuries, researchers have sought out ways to connect disparate areas of knowledge. While early scholars (Galileo, da Vinci, etc.) were experts across fields, specialization has taken hold later. With the advent of Artificial Intelligence, we can now explore relationships across areas (e.g., mechanics-biology) or disparate domains (e.g., failure mechanics-art). To achieve this, we use a fine-tuned Large Language Model (LLM), here for a subset of knowledge in multiscale materials failure. The approach includes the use of a general-purpose LLM to distill question-answer pairs from raw sources followed by LLM fine-tuning. The resulting MechGPT LLM foundation model is used in a series of computational experiments to explore its capacity for knowledge retrieval, various language tasks, hypothesis generation, and connecting knowledge across disparate areas. While the model has some ability to recall knowledge from training, we find that LLMs are particularly useful to extract structural insights through Ontological Knowledge Graphs. These interpretable graph structures provide explanatory insights, frameworks for new research questions, and visual representations of knowledge that also can be used in retrieval-augmented generation. Three versions of MechGPT are discussed, featuring different sizes from 13 billion to 70 billion parameters, and reaching context lengths of more than 10,000 tokens. This provides ample capacity for sophisticated retrieval augmented strategies, as well as agent-based modeling where multiple LLMs interact collaboratively and/or adversarially, the incorporation of new data from the literature or web searches, as well as multimodality.

Motivated by the remarkable progress of large language models (LLMs) in objective tasks like mathematics and coding, there is growing interest in their potential to simulate human behavior--a capability with profound implications for transforming social science research and customer-centric business insights. However, LLMs often lack a nuanced understanding of human cognition and behavior, limiting their effectiveness in social simulation and personalized applications. We posit that this limitation stems from a fundamental misalignment: standard LLM pretraining on vast, uncontextualized web data does not capture the continuous, situated context of an individual's decisions, thoughts, and behaviors over time. To bridge this gap, we introduce HumanLLM, a foundation model designed for personalized understanding and simulation of individuals. We first construct the Cognitive Genome Dataset, a large-scale corpus curated from real-world user data on platforms like Reddit, Twitter, Blogger, and Amazon. Through a rigorous, multi-stage pipeline involving data filtering, synthesis, and quality control, we automatically extract over 5.5 million user logs to distill rich profiles, behaviors, and thinking patterns. We then formulate diverse learning tasks and perform supervised fine-tuning to empower the model to predict a wide range of individualized human behaviors, thoughts, and experiences. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that HumanLLM achieves superior performance in predicting user actions and inner thoughts, more accurately mimics user writing styles and preferences, and generates more authentic user profiles compared to base models. Furthermore, HumanLLM shows significant gains on out-of-domain social intelligence benchmarks, indicating enhanced generalization.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in role-playing tasks. However, there is limited research on whether LLMs can accurately simulate user behavior in real-world scenarios, such as social media. This requires models to effectively analyze a user's history and simulate their role. In this paper, we introduce FineRob, a novel fine-grained behavior simulation dataset. We collect the complete behavioral history of 1,866 distinct users across three social media platforms. Each behavior is decomposed into three fine-grained elements: object, type, and content, resulting in 78.6k QA records. Based on FineRob, we identify two dominant reasoning patterns in LLMs' behavior simulation processes and propose the OM-CoT fine-tuning method to enhance the capability. Through comprehensive experiments, we conduct an in-depth analysis of key factors of behavior simulation and also demonstrate the effectiveness of OM-CoT approachCode and dataset are available at \url{https://github.com/linkseed18612254945/FineRob}

The problem of data sparsity has long been a challenge in recommendation systems, and previous studies have attempted to address this issue by incorporating side information. However, this approach often introduces side effects such as noise, availability issues, and low data quality, which in turn hinder the accurate modeling of user preferences and adversely impact recommendation performance. In light of the recent advancements in large language models (LLMs), which possess extensive knowledge bases and strong reasoning capabilities, we propose a novel framework called LLMRec that enhances recommender systems by employing three simple yet effective LLM-based graph augmentation strategies. Our approach leverages the rich content available within online platforms (e.g., Netflix, MovieLens) to augment the interaction graph in three ways: (i) reinforcing user-item interaction egde, (ii) enhancing the understanding of item node attributes, and (iii) conducting user node profiling, intuitively from the natural language perspective. By employing these strategies, we address the challenges posed by sparse implicit feedback and low-quality side information in recommenders. Besides, to ensure the quality of the augmentation, we develop a denoised data robustification mechanism that includes techniques of noisy implicit feedback pruning and MAE-based feature enhancement that help refine the augmented data and improve its reliability. Furthermore, we provide theoretical analysis to support the effectiveness of LLMRec and clarify the benefits of our method in facilitating model optimization. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our LLM-based augmentation approach over state-of-the-art techniques. To ensure reproducibility, we have made our code and augmented data publicly available at: https://github.com/HKUDS/LLMRec.git

In recent developments within the research community, the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) in creating fully autonomous agents has garnered significant interest. Despite this, LLM-based agents frequently demonstrate notable shortcomings in adjusting to dynamic environments and fully grasping human needs. In this work, we introduce the problem of LLM-based human-agent collaboration for complex task-solving, exploring their synergistic potential. In addition, we propose a Reinforcement Learning-based Human-Agent Collaboration method, ReHAC. This approach includes a policy model designed to determine the most opportune stages for human intervention within the task-solving process. We construct a human-agent collaboration dataset to train this policy model in an offline reinforcement learning environment. Our validation tests confirm the model's effectiveness. The results demonstrate that the synergistic efforts of humans and LLM-based agents significantly improve performance in complex tasks, primarily through well-planned, limited human intervention. Datasets and code are available at: https://github.com/XueyangFeng/ReHAC.

We study LLM policy synthesis: using a large language model to iteratively generate programmatic agent policies for multi-agent environments. Rather than training neural policies via reinforcement learning, our framework prompts an LLM to produce Python policy functions, evaluates them in self-play, and refines them using performance feedback across iterations. We investigate feedback engineering (the design of what evaluation information is shown to the LLM during refinement) comparing sparse feedback (scalar reward only) against dense feedback (reward plus social metrics: efficiency, equality, sustainability, peace). Across two canonical Sequential Social Dilemmas (Gathering and Cleanup) and two frontier LLMs (Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 3.1 Pro), dense feedback consistently matches or exceeds sparse feedback on all metrics. The advantage is largest in the Cleanup public goods game, where providing social metrics helps the LLM calibrate the costly cleaning-harvesting tradeoff. Rather than triggering over-optimization of fairness, social metrics serve as a coordination signal that guides the LLM toward more effective cooperative strategies, including territory partitioning, adaptive role assignment, and the avoidance of wasteful aggression. We further perform an adversarial experiment to determine whether LLMs can reward hack these environments. We characterize five attack classes and discuss mitigations, highlighting an inherent tension in LLM policy synthesis between expressiveness and safety. Code at https://github.com/vicgalle/llm-policies-social-dilemmas.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have led to the creation of intelligent agents capable of performing complex tasks. This paper introduces a novel LLM-based multimodal agent framework designed to operate smartphone applications. Our framework enables the agent to operate smartphone applications through a simplified action space, mimicking human-like interactions such as tapping and swiping. This novel approach bypasses the need for system back-end access, thereby broadening its applicability across diverse apps. Central to our agent's functionality is its innovative learning method. The agent learns to navigate and use new apps either through autonomous exploration or by observing human demonstrations. This process generates a knowledge base that the agent refers to for executing complex tasks across different applications. To demonstrate the practicality of our agent, we conducted extensive testing over 50 tasks in 10 different applications, including social media, email, maps, shopping, and sophisticated image editing tools. The results affirm our agent's proficiency in handling a diverse array of high-level tasks.

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized the generation of emotional support conversations (ESC), offering scalable solutions with reduced costs and enhanced data privacy. This paper explores the role of personas in the creation of ESC by LLMs. Our research utilizes established psychological frameworks to measure and infuse persona traits into LLMs, which then generate dialogues in the emotional support scenario. We conduct extensive evaluations to understand the stability of persona traits in dialogues, examining shifts in traits post-generation and their impact on dialogue quality and strategy distribution. Experimental results reveal several notable findings: 1) LLMs can infer core persona traits, 2) subtle shifts in emotionality and extraversion occur, influencing the dialogue dynamics, and 3) the application of persona traits modifies the distribution of emotional support strategies, enhancing the relevance and empathetic quality of the responses. These findings highlight the potential of persona-driven LLMs in crafting more personalized, empathetic, and effective emotional support dialogues, which has significant implications for the future design of AI-driven emotional support systems.

Social relation reasoning aims to identify relation categories such as friends, spouses, and colleagues from images. While current methods adopt the paradigm of training a dedicated network end-to-end using labeled image data, they are limited in terms of generalizability and interpretability. To address these issues, we first present a simple yet well-crafted framework named {\name}, which combines the perception capability of Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) and the reasoning capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) within a modular framework, providing a strong baseline for social relation recognition. Specifically, we instruct VFMs to translate image content into a textual social story, and then utilize LLMs for text-based reasoning. {\name} introduces systematic design principles to adapt VFMs and LLMs separately and bridge their gaps. Without additional model training, it achieves competitive zero-shot results on two databases while offering interpretable answers, as LLMs can generate language-based explanations for the decisions. The manual prompt design process for LLMs at the reasoning phase is tedious and an automated prompt optimization method is desired. As we essentially convert a visual classification task into a generative task of LLMs, automatic prompt optimization encounters a unique long prompt optimization issue. To address this issue, we further propose the Greedy Segment Prompt Optimization (GSPO), which performs a greedy search by utilizing gradient information at the segment level. Experimental results show that GSPO significantly improves performance, and our method also generalizes to different image styles. The code is available at https://github.com/Mengzibin/SocialGPT.

The performance gap between closed-source and open-source large language models (LLMs) is largely attributed to disparities in access to high-quality training data. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel framework for the automated synthesis of sophisticated, research-grade instructional data. Our approach centers on a multi-agent workflow where collaborative AI agents simulate complex tool-integrated reasoning to generate diverse and high-fidelity data end-to-end. Leveraging this synthesized data, we develop a two-stage training strategy that integrates supervised fine-tuning with a novel reinforcement learning method, designed to maximize model alignment and capability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework empowers open-source models across multiple scales, enabling them to achieve new state-of-the-art performance on the major deep research benchmark. This work provides a scalable and effective pathway for advancing open-source LLMs without relying on proprietary data or models.

Large language models (LLMs) are being increasingly used for planning in orchestrated multi-agent systems. However, existing LLM-based approaches often fall short of human expectations and, critically, lack effective mechanisms for users to inspect, understand, and control their behaviors. These limitations call for enhanced transparency, controllability, and human oversight. To address this, we introduce AIPOM, a system supporting human-in-the-loop planning through conversational and graph-based interfaces. AIPOM enables users to transparently inspect, refine, and collaboratively guide LLM-generated plans, significantly enhancing user control and trust in multi-agent workflows. Our code and demo video are available at https://github.com/megagonlabs/aipom.

Large language models (LLMs) and LLM-based agents are increasingly deployed as assistants in planning and decision making, yet most existing systems are implicitly optimized for a single-principal interaction paradigm, in which the model is designed to satisfy the objectives of one dominant user whose instructions are treated as the sole source of authority and utility. However, as they are integrated into team workflows and organizational tools, they are increasingly required to serve multiple users simultaneously, each with distinct roles, preferences, and authority levels, leading to multi-user, multi-principal settings with unavoidable conflicts, information asymmetry, and privacy constraints. In this work, we present the first systematic study of multi-user LLM agents. We begin by formalizing multi-user interaction with LLM agents as a multi-principal decision problem, where a single agent must account for multiple users with potentially conflicting interests and associated challenges. We then introduce a unified multi-user interaction protocol and design three targeted stress-testing scenarios to evaluate current LLMs' capabilities in instruction following, privacy preservation, and coordination. Our results reveal systematic gaps: frontier LLMs frequently fail to maintain stable prioritization under conflicting user objectives, exhibit increasing privacy violations over multi-turn interactions, and suffer from efficiency bottlenecks when coordination requires iterative information gathering.

Recommender system has deeply revolutionized people's daily life and production, bringing a large amount of business value. In the recommendation domain, simulation and real data-based studies are two typical research paradigms, with each having different advantages. Previously, real data-based studies occupy more important positions, since accurately simulating the user preference is quite difficult. Recently, large language models (LLM) have shown great potential to achieve human-like intelligence, which provides new opportunities to overcome the shortcomings of simulation-based studies and thus highlight their advantages, such as much more application scenarios and cheaper data acquisition strategies. To shed lights on this direction, in this paper, we introduce an LLM-based recommender simulator called RecAgent. Our simulator is composed of two modules: (1) the user module and (2) the recommender module. The user module can browse the recommendation website, communicate with other users and broadcast messages on the social media. The recommender module is designed to provide search or recommendation lists to the users, and one can design different models to implement the recommender. All the users take actions based on LLMs, and can freely evolve like in the real world. We present several case studies to demonstrate that the users in our simulator can indeed behave in a reasonable manner as expected. Our project has been released at https://github.com/RUC-GSAI/YuLan-Rec.

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionised many fields, with LLM-as-a-service (LLMSaaS) offering accessible, general-purpose solutions without costly task-specific training. In contrast to the widely studied prompt engineering for directly solving tasks (in vivo), this paper explores LLMs' potential for in-vitro applications: using LLM-generated labels to improve supervised training of mainstream models. We examine two strategies - (1) noisy label correction and (2) training data augmentation - in empathy computing, an emerging task to predict psychology-based questionnaire outcomes from inputs like textual narratives. Crowdsourced datasets in this domain often suffer from noisy labels that misrepresent underlying empathy. We show that replacing or supplementing these crowdsourced labels with LLM-generated labels, developed using psychology-based scale-aware prompts, achieves statistically significant accuracy improvements. Notably, the RoBERTa pre-trained language model (PLM) trained with noise-reduced labels yields a state-of-the-art Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.648 on the public NewsEmp benchmarks. This paper further analyses evaluation metric selection and demographic biases to help guide the future development of more equitable empathy computing models. Code and LLM-generated labels are available at https://github.com/hasan-rakibul/LLMPathy.

Simulation powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) has become a promising method for exploring complex human social behaviors. However, the application of LLMs in simulations presents significant challenges, particularly regarding their capacity to accurately replicate the complexities of human behaviors and societal dynamics, as evidenced by recent studies highlighting discrepancies between simulated and real-world interactions. We rethink LLM-based simulations by emphasizing both their limitations and the necessities for advancing LLM simulations. By critically examining these challenges, we aim to offer actionable insights and strategies for enhancing the applicability of LLM simulations in human society in the future.

The growing importance of textual and relational systems has driven interest in enhancing large language models (LLMs) for graph-structured data, particularly Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs), where samples are represented by textual descriptions interconnected by edges. While research has largely focused on developing specialized graph LLMs through task-specific instruction tuning, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating LLMs solely through prompt design remains surprisingly absent. Without such a carefully crafted evaluation benchmark, most if not all, tailored graph LLMs are compared against general LLMs using simplistic queries (e.g., zero-shot reasoning with LLaMA), which can potentially camouflage many advantages as well as unexpected predicaments of them. To achieve more general evaluations and unveil the true potential of LLMs for graph tasks, we introduce Graph In-context Learning (GraphICL) Benchmark, a comprehensive benchmark comprising novel prompt templates designed to capture graph structure and handle limited label knowledge. Our systematic evaluation shows that general-purpose LLMs equipped with our GraphICL outperform state-of-the-art specialized graph LLMs and graph neural network models in resource-constrained settings and out-of-domain tasks. These findings highlight the significant potential of prompt engineering to enhance LLM performance on graph learning tasks without training and offer a strong baseline for advancing research in graph LLMs.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly boosted the rise of Role-Playing Language Agents (RPLAs), i.e., specialized AI systems designed to simulate assigned personas. By harnessing multiple advanced abilities of LLMs, including in-context learning, instruction following, and social intelligence, RPLAs achieve a remarkable sense of human likeness and vivid role-playing performance. RPLAs can mimic a wide range of personas, ranging from historical figures and fictional characters to real-life individuals. Consequently, they have catalyzed numerous AI applications, such as emotional companions, interactive video games, personalized assistants and copilots, and digital clones. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey of this field, illustrating the evolution and recent progress in RPLAs integrating with cutting-edge LLM technologies. We categorize personas into three types: 1) Demographic Persona, which leverages statistical stereotypes; 2) Character Persona, focused on well-established figures; and 3) Individualized Persona, customized through ongoing user interactions for personalized services. We begin by presenting a comprehensive overview of current methodologies for RPLAs, followed by the details for each persona type, covering corresponding data sourcing, agent construction, and evaluation. Afterward, we discuss the fundamental risks, existing limitations, and future prospects of RPLAs. Additionally, we provide a brief review of RPLAs in AI applications, which reflects practical user demands that shape and drive RPLA research. Through this work, we aim to establish a clear taxonomy of RPLA research and applications, and facilitate future research in this critical and ever-evolving field, and pave the way for a future where humans and RPLAs coexist in harmony.

The rapid development of large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, has resulted in the widespread presence of LLM-generated content on social media platforms, raising concerns about misinformation, data biases, and privacy violations, which can undermine trust in online discourse. While detecting LLM-generated content is crucial for mitigating these risks, current methods often focus on binary classification, failing to address the complexities of real-world scenarios like human-LLM collaboration. To move beyond binary classification and address these challenges, we propose a new paradigm for detecting LLM-generated content. This approach introduces two novel tasks: LLM Role Recognition (LLM-RR), a multi-class classification task that identifies specific roles of LLM in content generation, and LLM Influence Measurement (LLM-IM), a regression task that quantifies the extent of LLM involvement in content creation. To support these tasks, we propose LLMDetect, a benchmark designed to evaluate detectors' performance on these new tasks. LLMDetect includes the Hybrid News Detection Corpus (HNDC) for training detectors, as well as DetectEval, a comprehensive evaluation suite that considers five distinct cross-context variations and two multi-intensity variations within the same LLM role. This allows for a thorough assessment of detectors' generalization and robustness across diverse contexts. Our empirical validation of 10 baseline detection methods demonstrates that fine-tuned PLM-based models consistently outperform others on both tasks, while advanced LLMs face challenges in accurately detecting their own generated content. Our experimental results and analysis offer insights for developing more effective detection models for LLM-generated content. This research enhances the understanding of LLM-generated content and establishes a foundation for more nuanced detection methodologies.

With the rise of personalized, persistent LLM agent frameworks such as OpenClaw, human-centered agentic social networks in which teams of collaborative AI agents serve individual users in a social network across multiple domains are becoming a reality. This setting creates novel privacy challenges: agents must coordinate across domain boundaries, mediate between humans, and interact with other users' agents, all while protecting sensitive personal information. While prior work has evaluated multi-agent coordination and privacy preservation, the dynamics and privacy risks of human-centered agentic social networks remain unexplored. To this end, we introduce AgentSocialBench, the first benchmark to systematically evaluate privacy risk in this setting, comprising scenarios across seven categories spanning dyadic and multi-party interactions, grounded in realistic user profiles with hierarchical sensitivity labels and directed social graphs. Our experiments reveal that privacy in agentic social networks is fundamentally harder than in single-agent settings: (1) cross-domain and cross-user coordination creates persistent leakage pressure even when agents are explicitly instructed to protect information, (2) privacy instructions that teach agents how to abstract sensitive information paradoxically cause them to discuss it more (we call it abstraction paradox). These findings underscore that current LLM agents lack robust mechanisms for privacy preservation in human-centered agentic social networks, and that new approaches beyond prompt engineering are needed to make agent-mediated social coordination safe for real-world deployment.

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their integration into autonomous agent systems has created unprecedented opportunities for document analysis, decision support, and knowledge retrieval. However, the complexity of developing, evaluating, and iterating on LLM-based agent workflows presents significant barriers to researchers, particularly those without extensive software engineering expertise. We present FROAV (Framework for RAG Observation and Agent Verification), an open-source research platform that democratizes LLM agent research by providing a plug-and-play architecture combining visual workflow orchestration, a comprehensive evaluation framework, and extensible Python integration. FROAV implements a multi-stage Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline coupled with a rigorous "LLM-as-a-Judge" evaluation system, all accessible through intuitive graphical interfaces. Our framework integrates n8n for no-code workflow design, PostgreSQL for granular data management, FastAPI for flexible backend logic, and Streamlit for human-in-the-loop interaction. Through this integrated ecosystem, researchers can rapidly prototype RAG strategies, conduct prompt engineering experiments, validate agent performance against human judgments, and collect structured feedback-all without writing infrastructure code. We demonstrate the framework's utility through its application to financial document analysis, while emphasizing its material-agnostic architecture that adapts to any domain requiring semantic analysis. FROAV represents a significant step toward making LLM agent research accessible to a broader scientific community, enabling researchers to focus on hypothesis testing and algorithmic innovation rather than system integration challenges.

This report describes ARIS (Auto-Research-in-sleep), an open-source research harness for autonomous research, including its architecture, assurance mechanisms, and early deployment experience. The performance of agent systems built on LLMs depends on both the model weights and the harness around them, which governs what information to store, retrieve, and present to the model. For long-horizon research workflows, the central failure mode is not a visible breakdown but a plausible unsupported success: a long-running agent can produce claims whose evidential support is incomplete, misreported, or silently inherited from the executor's framing. Therefore, we present ARIS as a research harness that coordinates machine-learning research workflows through cross-model adversarial collaboration as a default configuration: an executor model drives forward progress while a reviewer from a different model family is recommended to critique intermediate artifacts and request revisions. ARIS has three architectural layers. The execution layer provides more than 65 reusable Markdown-defined skills, model integrations via MCP, a persistent research wiki for iterative reuse of prior findings, and deterministic figure generation. The orchestration layer coordinates five end-to-end workflows with adjustable effort settings and configurable routing to reviewer models. The assurance layer includes a three-stage process for checking whether experimental claims are supported by evidence: integrity verification, result-to-claim mapping, and claim auditing that cross-checks manuscript statements against the claim ledger and raw evidence, as well as a five-pass scientific-editing pipeline, mathematical-proof checks, and visual inspection of the rendered PDF. A prototype self-improvement loop records research traces and proposes harness improvements that are adopted only after reviewer approval.

Recent studies on software tool manipulation with large language models (LLMs) mostly rely on closed model APIs. The industrial adoption of these models is substantially constrained due to the security and robustness risks in exposing information to closed LLM API services. In this paper, we ask can we enhance open-source LLMs to be competitive to leading closed LLM APIs in tool manipulation, with practical amount of human supervision. By analyzing common tool manipulation failures, we first demonstrate that open-source LLMs may require training with usage examples, in-context demonstration and generation style regulation to resolve failures. These insights motivate us to revisit classical methods in LLM literature, and demonstrate that we can adapt them as model alignment with programmatic data generation, system prompts and in-context demonstration retrievers to enhance open-source LLMs for tool manipulation. To evaluate these techniques, we create the ToolBench, a tool manipulation benchmark consisting of diverse software tools for real-world tasks. We demonstrate that our techniques can boost leading open-source LLMs by up to 90% success rate, showing capabilities competitive to OpenAI GPT-4 in 4 out of 8 ToolBench tasks. We show that such enhancement typically requires about one developer day to curate data for each tool, rendering a recipe with practical amount of human supervision.

The widespread availability of large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, has significantly impacted education, raising both opportunities and challenges. Students can frequently interact with LLM-powered, interactive learning tools, but their usage patterns need to be analyzed to ensure ethical usage of these tools. To better understand how students interact with LLMs in an academic setting, we introduce StudyChat, a publicly available dataset capturing real-world student interactions with an LLM-powered tutoring chatbot in a semester-long, university-level artificial intelligence (AI) course. We deploy a web application that replicates ChatGPT's core functionalities, and use it to log student interactions with the LLM while working on programming assignments. We collect 1,197 conversations, which we annotate using a dialogue act labeling schema inspired by observed interaction patterns and prior research. Additionally, we analyze these interactions, highlight behavioral trends, and analyze how specific usage patterns relate to course outcomes. StudyChat provides a rich resource for the learning sciences and AI in education communities, enabling further research into the evolving role of LLMs in education.

The integration of external knowledge through Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become foundational in enhancing large language models (LLMs) for knowledge-intensive tasks. However, existing RAG paradigms often overlook the cognitive step of applying knowledge, leaving a gap between retrieved facts and task-specific reasoning. In this work, we introduce RAG+, a principled and modular extension that explicitly incorporates application-aware reasoning into the RAG pipeline. RAG+ constructs a dual corpus consisting of knowledge and aligned application examples, created either manually or automatically, and retrieves both jointly during inference. This design enables LLMs not only to access relevant information but also to apply it within structured, goal-oriented reasoning processes. Experiments across mathematical, legal, and medical domains, conducted on multiple models, demonstrate that RAG+ consistently outperforms standard RAG variants, achieving average improvements of 3-5%, and peak gains up to 7.5% in complex scenarios. By bridging retrieval with actionable application, RAG+ advances a more cognitively grounded framework for knowledge integration, representing a step toward more interpretable and capable LLMs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming scientific hypothesis generation and validation by enabling information synthesis, latent relationship discovery, and reasoning augmentation. This survey provides a structured overview of LLM-driven approaches, including symbolic frameworks, generative models, hybrid systems, and multi-agent architectures. We examine techniques such as retrieval-augmented generation, knowledge-graph completion, simulation, causal inference, and tool-assisted reasoning, highlighting trade-offs in interpretability, novelty, and domain alignment. We contrast early symbolic discovery systems (e.g., BACON, KEKADA) with modern LLM pipelines that leverage in-context learning and domain adaptation via fine-tuning, retrieval, and symbolic grounding. For validation, we review simulation, human-AI collaboration, causal modeling, and uncertainty quantification, emphasizing iterative assessment in open-world contexts. The survey maps datasets across biomedicine, materials science, environmental science, and social science, introducing new resources like AHTech and CSKG-600. Finally, we outline a roadmap emphasizing novelty-aware generation, multimodal-symbolic integration, human-in-the-loop systems, and ethical safeguards, positioning LLMs as agents for principled, scalable scientific discovery.

With the rapid improvement in the general capabilities of LLMs, LLM personalization, i.e., how to build LLM systems that can generate personalized responses or services that are tailored to distinct user personas, has become an increasingly important research and engineering problem. However, unlike many new challenging benchmarks being released for evaluating the general/reasoning capabilities, the lack of high-quality benchmarks for evaluating LLM personalization greatly hinders progress in this field. To address this, we introduce PersonaFeedback, a new benchmark that directly evaluates LLMs' ability to provide personalized responses given pre-defined user personas and queries. Unlike existing benchmarks that require models to infer implicit user personas from historical interactions, PersonaFeedback decouples persona inference from personalization, focusing on evaluating the model's ability to generate responses tailored to explicit personas. PersonaFeedback consists of 8298 human-annotated test cases, which are categorized into easy, medium, and hard tiers based on the contextual complexity of the user personas and the difficulty in distinguishing subtle differences between two personalized responses. We conduct comprehensive evaluations across a wide range of models. The empirical results reveal that even state-of-the-art LLMs that can solve complex real-world reasoning tasks could fall short on the hard tier of PersonaFeedback where even human evaluators may find the distinctions challenging. Furthermore, we conduct an in-depth analysis of failure modes across various types of systems, demonstrating that the current retrieval-augmented framework should not be seen as a de facto solution for personalization tasks. All benchmark data, annotation protocols, and the evaluation pipeline will be publicly available to facilitate future research on LLM personalization.

Various human-designed prompt engineering techniques have been proposed to improve problem solvers based on Large Language Models (LLMs), yielding many disparate code bases. We unify these approaches by describing LLM-based agents as computational graphs. The nodes implement functions to process multimodal data or query LLMs, and the edges describe the information flow between operations. Graphs can be recursively combined into larger composite graphs representing hierarchies of inter-agent collaboration (where edges connect operations of different agents). Our novel automatic graph optimizers (1) refine node-level LLM prompts (node optimization) and (2) improve agent orchestration by changing graph connectivity (edge optimization). Experiments demonstrate that our framework can be used to efficiently develop, integrate, and automatically improve various LLM agents. The code can be found at https://github.com/metauto-ai/gptswarm.

Recently, tool-augmented LLMs have gained increasing attention. Given an instruction, tool-augmented LLMs can interact with various external tools in multiple rounds and provide a final answer. However, previous LLMs were trained on overly detailed instructions, which included API names or parameters, while real users would not explicitly mention these API details. This leads to a gap between trained LLMs and real-world scenarios. In addition, most works ignore whether the interaction process follows the instruction. To address these issues, we constructed a training dataset called MGToolBench, which contains statement and category-level instructions to better reflect real-world scenarios. In addition, we propose ToolPlanner, a two-stage reinforcement learning framework that utilizes path planning and two feedback mechanisms to enhance the LLM's task completion and instruction-following capabilities. Experimental results show that ToolPlanner significantly improves the Match Rate, Pass Rate and Win Rate by 26.8%, 20.2%, and 5.6% compared to the SOTA model. Human evaluation verifies that the multi-granularity instructions can better align with users' usage habits. Our data and code will be released upon acceptance.

Recommender systems have seen significant advancements with the influence of deep learning and graph neural networks, particularly in capturing complex user-item relationships. However, these graph-based recommenders heavily depend on ID-based data, potentially disregarding valuable textual information associated with users and items, resulting in less informative learned representations. Moreover, the utilization of implicit feedback data introduces potential noise and bias, posing challenges for the effectiveness of user preference learning. While the integration of large language models (LLMs) into traditional ID-based recommenders has gained attention, challenges such as scalability issues, limitations in text-only reliance, and prompt input constraints need to be addressed for effective implementation in practical recommender systems. To address these challenges, we propose a model-agnostic framework RLMRec that aims to enhance existing recommenders with LLM-empowered representation learning. It proposes a recommendation paradigm that integrates representation learning with LLMs to capture intricate semantic aspects of user behaviors and preferences. RLMRec incorporates auxiliary textual signals, develops a user/item profiling paradigm empowered by LLMs, and aligns the semantic space of LLMs with the representation space of collaborative relational signals through a cross-view alignment framework. This work further establish a theoretical foundation demonstrating that incorporating textual signals through mutual information maximization enhances the quality of representations. In our evaluation, we integrate RLMRec with state-of-the-art recommender models, while also analyzing its efficiency and robustness to noise data. Our implementation codes are available at https://github.com/HKUDS/RLMRec.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have sparked growing interest in building fully autonomous agents. However, fully autonomous LLM-based agents still face significant challenges, including limited reliability due to hallucinations, difficulty in handling complex tasks, and substantial safety and ethical risks, all of which limit their feasibility and trustworthiness in real-world applications. To overcome these limitations, LLM-based human-agent systems (LLM-HAS) incorporate human-provided information, feedback, or control into the agent system to enhance system performance, reliability and safety. This paper provides the first comprehensive and structured survey of LLM-HAS. It clarifies fundamental concepts, systematically presents core components shaping these systems, including environment & profiling, human feedback, interaction types, orchestration and communication, explores emerging applications, and discusses unique challenges and opportunities. By consolidating current knowledge and offering a structured overview, we aim to foster further research and innovation in this rapidly evolving interdisciplinary field. Paper lists and resources are available at https://github.com/HenryPengZou/Awesome-LLM-Based-Human-Agent-Systems.

LLM-based agents have made significant advancements in interactive environments, such as mobile operations and web browsing, and other domains beyond computer using. Current multi-agent systems universally excel in performance, compared to single agents, but struggle with generalization across environments due to predefined roles and inadequate strategies for generalizing language agents. The challenge of achieving both strong performance and good generalization has hindered the progress of multi-agent systems for interactive environments. To address these issues, we propose CollabUIAgents, a multi-agent reinforcement learning framework with a novel multi-agent credit re-assignment (CR) strategy, assigning process rewards with LLMs rather than environment-specific rewards and learning with synthesized preference data, in order to foster generalizable, collaborative behaviors among the role-free agents' policies. Empirical results show that our framework improves both performance and cross-environment generalizability of multi-agent systems. Moreover, our 7B-parameter system achieves results on par with or exceed strong closed-source models, and the LLM that guides the CR. We also provide insights in using granular CR rewards effectively for environment generalization, and accommodating trained LLMs in multi-agent systems.

The rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs) and their capacity to simulate human cognition and behavior has given rise to LLM-based frameworks and tools that are evaluated and applied based on their ability to perform tasks traditionally performed by humans, namely those involving cognition, decision-making, and social interaction. This survey provides a comprehensive examination of such human-centric LLM capabilities, focusing on their performance in both individual tasks (where an LLM acts as a stand-in for a single human) and collective tasks (where multiple LLMs coordinate to mimic group dynamics). We first evaluate LLM competencies across key areas including reasoning, perception, and social cognition, comparing their abilities to human-like skills. Then, we explore real-world applications of LLMs in human-centric domains such as behavioral science, political science, and sociology, assessing their effectiveness in replicating human behaviors and interactions. Finally, we identify challenges and future research directions, such as improving LLM adaptability, emotional intelligence, and cultural sensitivity, while addressing inherent biases and enhancing frameworks for human-AI collaboration. This survey aims to provide a foundational understanding of LLMs from a human-centric perspective, offering insights into their current capabilities and potential for future development.

Large Language Models(LLMs)have become effective tools for natural language processing and have been used in many different fields. This essay offers a succinct summary of various LLM subcategories. The survey emphasizes recent developments and efforts made for various LLM kinds, including task-based financial LLMs, multilingual language LLMs, biomedical and clinical LLMs, vision language LLMs, and code language models. The survey gives a general summary of the methods, attributes, datasets, transformer models, and comparison metrics applied in each category of LLMs. Furthermore, it highlights unresolved problems in the field of developing chatbots and virtual assistants, such as boosting natural language processing, enhancing chatbot intelligence, and resolving moral and legal dilemmas. The purpose of this study is to provide readers, developers, academics, and users interested in LLM-based chatbots and virtual intelligent assistant technologies with useful information and future directions.

Large Language Models (LLMs) equipped with web search capabilities have demonstrated impressive potential for deep research tasks. However, current approaches predominantly rely on either manually engineered prompts (prompt engineering-based) with brittle performance or reinforcement learning within controlled Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) environments (RAG-based) that fail to capture the complexities of real-world interaction. In this paper, we introduce DeepResearcher, the first comprehensive framework for end-to-end training of LLM-based deep research agents through scaling reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world environments with authentic web search interactions. Unlike RAG-based approaches that assume all necessary information exists within a fixed corpus, our method trains agents to navigate the noisy, unstructured, and dynamic nature of the open web. We implement a specialized multi-agent architecture where browsing agents extract relevant information from various webpage structures and overcoming significant technical challenges. Extensive experiments on open-domain research tasks demonstrate that DeepResearcher achieves substantial improvements of up to 28.9 points over prompt engineering-based baselines and up to 7.2 points over RAG-based RL agents. Our qualitative analysis reveals emergent cognitive behaviors from end-to-end RL training, including the ability to formulate plans, cross-validate information from multiple sources, engage in self-reflection to redirect research, and maintain honesty when unable to find definitive answers. Our results highlight that end-to-end training in real-world web environments is not merely an implementation detail but a fundamental requirement for developing robust research capabilities aligned with real-world applications. We release DeepResearcher at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/DeepResearcher.

Recommender systems are central to online services, enabling users to navigate through massive amounts of content across various domains. However, their evaluation remains challenging due to the disconnect between offline metrics and online performance. The emergence of Large Language Model-powered agents offers a promising solution, yet existing studies model users in isolation, neglecting the contextual factors such as time, location, and needs, which fundamentally shape human decision-making. In this paper, we introduce ContextSim, an LLM agent framework that simulates believable user proxies by anchoring interactions in daily life activities. Namely, a life simulation module generates scenarios specifying when, where, and why users engage with recommendations. To align preferences with genuine humans, we model agents' internal thoughts and enforce consistency at both the action and trajectory levels. Experiments across domains show our method generates interactions more closely aligned with human behavior than prior work. We further validate our approach through offline A/B testing correlation and show that RS parameters optimized using ContextSim yield improved real-world engagement.

Existing dialog system models require extensive human annotations and are difficult to generalize to different tasks. The recent success of large pre-trained language models such as BERT and GPT-2 (Devlin et al., 2019; Radford et al., 2019) have suggested the effectiveness of incorporating language priors in down-stream NLP tasks. However, how much pre-trained language models can help dialog response generation is still under exploration. In this paper, we propose a simple, general, and effective framework: Alternating Roles Dialog Model (ARDM). ARDM models each speaker separately and takes advantage of the large pre-trained language model. It requires no supervision from human annotations such as belief states or dialog acts to achieve effective conversations. ARDM outperforms or is on par with state-of-the-art methods on two popular task-oriented dialog datasets: CamRest676 and MultiWOZ. Moreover, we can generalize ARDM to more challenging, non-collaborative tasks such as persuasion. In persuasion tasks, ARDM is capable of generating human-like responses to persuade people to donate to a charity.

LLM-based agents have shown promising capabilities in a growing range of software engineering (SWE) tasks. However, advancing this field faces two critical challenges. First, high-quality training data is scarce, especially data that reflects real-world SWE scenarios, where agents must interact with development environments, execute code and adapt behavior based on the outcomes of their actions. Existing datasets are either limited to one-shot code generation or comprise small, manually curated collections of interactive tasks, lacking both scale and diversity. Second, the lack of fresh interactive SWE tasks affects evaluation of rapidly improving models, as static benchmarks quickly become outdated due to contamination issues. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel, automated, and scalable pipeline to continuously extract real-world interactive SWE tasks from diverse GitHub repositories. Using this pipeline, we construct SWE-rebench, a public dataset comprising over 21,000 interactive Python-based SWE tasks, suitable for reinforcement learning of SWE agents at scale. Additionally, we use continuous supply of fresh tasks collected using SWE-rebench methodology to build a contamination-free benchmark for agentic software engineering. We compare results of various LLMs on this benchmark to results on SWE-bench Verified and show that performance of some language models might be inflated due to contamination issues.

This survey reviews works in which language models (LMs) are augmented with reasoning skills and the ability to use tools. The former is defined as decomposing a potentially complex task into simpler subtasks while the latter consists in calling external modules such as a code interpreter. LMs can leverage these augmentations separately or in combination via heuristics, or learn to do so from demonstrations. While adhering to a standard missing tokens prediction objective, such augmented LMs can use various, possibly non-parametric external modules to expand their context processing ability, thus departing from the pure language modeling paradigm. We therefore refer to them as Augmented Language Models (ALMs). The missing token objective allows ALMs to learn to reason, use tools, and even act, while still performing standard natural language tasks and even outperforming most regular LMs on several benchmarks. In this work, after reviewing current advance in ALMs, we conclude that this new research direction has the potential to address common limitations of traditional LMs such as interpretability, consistency, and scalability issues.

We initiate a formal investigation into the design and analysis of LLM-based algorithms, i.e. algorithms that contain one or multiple calls of large language models (LLMs) as sub-routines and critically rely on the capabilities of LLMs. While LLM-based algorithms, ranging from basic LLM calls with prompt engineering to complicated LLM-powered agent systems and compound AI systems, have achieved remarkable empirical success, the design and optimization of them have mostly relied on heuristics and trial-and-errors, which is largely due to a lack of formal and analytical study for these algorithms. To fill this gap, we start by identifying the computational-graph representation of LLM-based algorithms, the design principle of task decomposition, and some key abstractions, which then facilitate our formal analysis for the accuracy and efficiency of LLM-based algorithms, despite the black-box nature of LLMs. Through extensive analytical and empirical investigation in a series of case studies, we demonstrate that the proposed framework is broadly applicable to a wide range of scenarios and diverse patterns of LLM-based algorithms, such as parallel, hierarchical and recursive task decomposition. Our proposed framework holds promise for advancing LLM-based algorithms, by revealing the reasons behind curious empirical phenomena, guiding the choices of hyperparameters, predicting the empirical performance of algorithms, and inspiring new algorithm design. To promote further study of LLM-based algorithms, we release our source code at https://github.com/modelscope/agentscope/tree/main/examples/paper_llm_based_algorithm.

Historically, LLMs have been trained using either autoregressive (AR) or masked language modeling (MLM) objectives, with AR models gaining dominance in recent years. However, AR models are inherently incapable of masked infilling, which is the ability to predict masked tokens between past and future context. In contrast, MLM models suffer from intrinsic computational inefficiencies during both training and inference that hinder their scalability. This work introduces MARIA (Masked and Autoregressive Infilling Architecture), a novel approach that leverages the strengths of both paradigms to achieve state-of-the-art masked infilling performance. MARIA combines a pre-trained MLM and AR model by training a linear decoder that takes their concatenated hidden states as input. This minimal modification enables the AR model to perform infilling while retaining its inherent advantages in terms of faster inference with KV caching. Our results demonstrate that MARIA significantly outperforms existing methods, namely discrete diffusion models, on masked infilling tasks.

In the past year, Generative Recommendations (GRs) have undergone substantial advancements, especially in leveraging the powerful sequence modeling and reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance overall recommendation performance. LLM-based GRs are forming a new paradigm that is distinctly different from discriminative recommendations, showing strong potential to replace traditional recommendation systems heavily dependent on complex hand-crafted features. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey aimed at facilitating further research of LLM-based GRs. Initially, we outline the general preliminaries and application cases of LLM-based GRs. Subsequently, we introduce the main considerations when LLM-based GRs are applied in real industrial scenarios. Finally, we explore promising directions for LLM-based GRs. We hope that this survey contributes to the ongoing advancement of the GR domain.

Large language models (LLMs) have advanced rapidly from conversational problem solving to addressing real-world tasks involving tool use, such as software engineering (SWE). Recent LLM-powered toolkits, such as OpenAI Codex and Cursor, have offered end-to-end automation of the software development process. However, building effective SWE agents remains challenging due to the lack of high-quality training data and effective test cases. To address this issue, we present SWE-Dev, an SWE agent built upon open-source LLMs. First, we develop a robust pipeline to synthesize test cases for patch evaluation. Second, we scale up agent trajectories to construct the training data for building SWE-Dev. Experiments on the SWE-bench-Verified benchmark show that the SWE-Dev models can achieve top performance among all open SWE agents. Specifically, the success rates of the SWE-Dev 7B and 32B parameter models reach 23.4% and 36.6%, respectively, outperforming state-of-the-art open-source models. All code, models, and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/THUDM/SWE-Dev.

The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has led to the widespread deployment of LLM agents across diverse industries, including customer service, content generation, data analysis, and even healthcare. However, as more LLM agents are deployed, a major issue has emerged: there is no standard way for these agents to communicate with external tools or data sources. This lack of standardized protocols makes it difficult for agents to work together or scale effectively, and it limits their ability to tackle complex, real-world tasks. A unified communication protocol for LLM agents could change this. It would allow agents and tools to interact more smoothly, encourage collaboration, and triggering the formation of collective intelligence. In this paper, we provide the first comprehensive analysis of existing agent protocols, proposing a systematic two-dimensional classification that differentiates context-oriented versus inter-agent protocols and general-purpose versus domain-specific protocols. Additionally, we conduct a comparative performance analysis of these protocols across key dimensions such as security, scalability, and latency. Finally, we explore the future landscape of agent protocols by identifying critical research directions and characteristics necessary for next-generation protocols. These characteristics include adaptability, privacy preservation, and group-based interaction, as well as trends toward layered architectures and collective intelligence infrastructures. We expect this work to serve as a practical reference for both researchers and engineers seeking to design, evaluate, or integrate robust communication infrastructures for intelligent agents.

LLMs exhibit promising Social Intelligence (SI) in modeling human behavior, raising the need to evaluate LLMs' SI and their discrepancy with humans. SI equips humans with interpersonal abilities to behave wisely in navigating social interactions to achieve social goals. This presents an operational evaluation paradigm: outcome-oriented goal achievement evaluation and process-oriented interpersonal ability evaluation, which existing work fails to address. To this end, we propose SocialEval, a script-based bilingual SI benchmark, integrating outcome- and process-oriented evaluation by manually crafting narrative scripts. Each script is structured as a world tree that contains plot lines driven by interpersonal ability, providing a comprehensive view of how LLMs navigate social interactions. Experiments show that LLMs fall behind humans on both SI evaluations, exhibit prosociality, and prefer more positive social behaviors, even if they lead to goal failure. Analysis of LLMs' formed representation space and neuronal activations reveals that LLMs have developed ability-specific functional partitions akin to the human brain.

The rapid rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has created new disruptive possibilities for persuasive communication, by enabling fully-automated personalized and interactive content generation at an unprecedented scale. In this paper, we survey the research field of LLM-based persuasion that has emerged as a result. We begin by exploring the different modes in which LLM Systems are used to influence human attitudes and behaviors. In areas such as politics, marketing, public health, e-commerce, and charitable giving, such LLM Systems have already achieved human-level or even super-human persuasiveness. We identify key factors influencing their effectiveness, such as the manner of personalization and whether the content is labelled as AI-generated. We also summarize the experimental designs that have been used to evaluate progress. Our survey suggests that the current and future potential of LLM-based persuasion poses profound ethical and societal risks, including the spread of misinformation, the magnification of biases, and the invasion of privacy. These risks underscore the urgent need for ethical guidelines and updated regulatory frameworks to avoid the widespread deployment of irresponsible and harmful LLM Systems.