SearcharxivSearch

arXiv subjects

Minzhi Li

Publications and source records attributed to Minzhi Li.

10 recordsLinked to original sources

Unified-MAS: Universally Generating Domain-Specific Nodes for Empowering Automatic Multi-Agent Systems

Automatic Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) generation has emerged as a promising paradigm for solving complex reasoning tasks. However, existing frameworks are fundamentally bottlenecked when applied to knowledge-intensive domains (e.g., healthcare and law). They either rely on a static library of general nodes like Chain-of-Thought, which lack specialized expertise, or attempt to generate nodes on the fly. In the latter case, the orchestrator is not only bound by its internal knowledge limits but must also simultaneously generate domain-specific logic and optimize high-level topology, leading to a severe architectural coupling that degrades overall system efficacy. To bridge this gap, we propose Unified-MAS that decouples granular node implementation from topological orchestration via offline node synthesis. Unified-MAS operates in two stages: (1) Search-Based Node Generation retrieves external open-world knowledge to synthesize specialized node blueprints, overcoming the internal knowledge limits of LLMs; and (2) Reward-Based Node Optimization utilizes a perplexity-guided reward to iteratively enhance the internal logic of bottleneck nodes. Extensive experiments across four specialized domains demonstrate that integrating Unified-MAS into four Automatic-MAS baselines yields a better performance-cost trade-off, achieving up to a 14.2% gain while significantly reducing costs. Further analysis reveals its robustness across different designer LLMs and its effectiveness on conventional tasks such as mathematical reasoning.

cs.AI

Interactive Learning for LLM Reasoning

Existing multi-agent learning approaches have developed interactive training environments to explicitly promote collaboration among multiple Large Language Models (LLMs), thereby constructing stronger multi-agent systems (MAS). However, during inference, they require re-executing the MAS to obtain final solutions, which diverges from human cognition that individuals can enhance their reasoning capabilities through interactions with others and resolve questions independently in the future. To investigate whether multi-agent interaction can enhance LLMs' independent problem-solving ability, we introduce ILR, a novel co-learning framework for MAS that integrates two key components: Dynamic Interaction and Perception Calibration. Specifically, Dynamic Interaction first adaptively selects either cooperative or competitive strategies depending on question difficulty and model ability. LLMs then exchange information through Idea3, an innovative interaction paradigm designed to mimic human discussion, before deriving their respective final answers. In Perception Calibration, ILR employs Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to train LLMs while integrating one LLM's reward distribution characteristics into another's reward function, thereby enhancing the cohesion of multi-agent interactions. We evaluate the effectiveness of ILR across three LLMs from two model families of varying scales on five mathematical, one coding, one general question answering, and one scientific reasoning benchmarks. Experimental results show that ILR consistently outperforms single-agent learning, yielding an improvement of up to 5% over the strongest baseline. We further discover that Idea3 can enhance the robustness of stronger LLMs during multi-agent inference, and dynamic interaction types can boost multi-agent learning compared to pure cooperative or competitive strategies.

cs.AI

A Survey of Frontiers in LLM Reasoning: Inference Scaling, Learning to Reason, and Agentic Systems

Reasoning is a fundamental cognitive process that enables logical inference, problem-solving, and decision-making. With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), reasoning has emerged as a key capability that distinguishes advanced AI systems from conventional models that empower chatbots. In this survey, we categorize existing methods along two orthogonal dimensions: (1) Regimes, which define the stage at which reasoning is achieved (either at inference time or through dedicated training); and (2) Architectures, which determine the components involved in the reasoning process, distinguishing between standalone LLMs and agentic compound systems that incorporate external tools, and multi-agent collaborations. Within each dimension, we analyze two key perspectives: (1) Input level, which focuses on techniques that construct high-quality prompts that the LLM condition on; and (2) Output level, which methods that refine multiple sampled candidates to enhance reasoning quality. This categorization provides a systematic understanding of the evolving landscape of LLM reasoning, highlighting emerging trends such as the shift from inference-scaling to learning-to-reason (e.g., DeepSeek-R1), and the transition to agentic workflows (e.g., OpenAI Deep Research, Manus Agent). Additionally, we cover a broad spectrum of learning algorithms, from supervised fine-tuning to reinforcement learning such as PPO and GRPO, and the training of reasoners and verifiers. We also examine key designs of agentic workflows, from established patterns like generator-evaluator and LLM debate to recent innovations. ...

cs.AI

Mind the Gap! Static and Interactive Evaluations of Large Audio Models

As AI chatbots become ubiquitous, voice interaction presents a compelling way to enable rapid, high-bandwidth communication for both semantic and social signals. This has driven research into Large Audio Models (LAMs) to power voice-native experiences. However, aligning LAM development with user goals requires a clear understanding of user needs and preferences to establish reliable progress metrics. This study addresses these challenges by introducing an interactive approach to evaluate LAMs and collecting 7,500 LAM interactions from 484 participants. Through topic modeling of user queries, we identify primary use cases for audio interfaces. We then analyze user preference rankings and qualitative feedback to determine which models best align with user needs. Finally, we evaluate how static benchmarks predict interactive performance - our analysis reveals no individual benchmark strongly correlates with interactive results ($τ\leq 0.33$ for all benchmarks). While combining multiple coarse-grained features yields modest predictive power ($R^2$=$0.30$), only two out of twenty datasets on spoken question answering and age prediction show significantly positive correlations. This suggests a clear need to develop LAM evaluations that better correlate with user preferences.

cs.CL

DnA-Eval: Enhancing Large Language Model Evaluation through Decomposition and Aggregation

The acceleration of Large Language Models (LLMs) research has opened up new possibilities for evaluating generated texts. They serve as scalable and economical evaluators, but the question of how reliable these evaluators are has emerged as a crucial research question. Prior research efforts in the meta-evaluation of LLMs as judges limit the prompting of an LLM to a single use to obtain a final evaluation decision. They then compute the agreement between LLMs' outputs and human labels. This lacks interpretability in understanding the evaluation capability of LLMs. In light of this challenge, we propose Decompose and Aggregate, which breaks down the evaluation process into different stages based on pedagogical practices. Our experiments illustrate that it not only provides a more interpretable window for how well LLMs evaluate, but also leads to improvements up to 39.6% for different LLMs on a variety of meta-evaluation benchmarks.

cs.CL

Towards Social AI: A Survey on Understanding Social Interactions

Social interactions form the foundation of human societies. Artificial intelligence has made significant progress in certain areas, but enabling machines to seamlessly understand social interactions remains an open challenge. It is important to address this gap by endowing machines with social capabilities. We identify three key capabilities needed for effective social understanding: 1) understanding multimodal social cues, 2) understanding multi-party dynamics, and 3) understanding beliefs. Building upon these foundations, we classify and review existing machine learning works on social understanding from the perspectives of verbal, non-verbal, and multimodal social cues. The verbal branch focuses on understanding linguistic signals such as speaker intent, dialogue sentiment, and commonsense reasoning. The non-verbal branch addresses techniques for perceiving social meaning from visual behaviors such as body gestures, gaze patterns, and facial expressions. The multimodal branch covers approaches that integrate verbal and non-verbal multimodal cues to holistically interpret social interactions such as recognizing emotions, conversational dynamics, and social situations. By reviewing the scope and limitations of current approaches and benchmarks, we aim to clarify the development trajectory and illuminate the path towards more comprehensive intelligence for social understanding. We hope this survey will spur further research interest and insights into this area.

cs.HC

Social Intelligence Data Infrastructure: Structuring the Present and Navigating the Future

As Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems become increasingly integrated into human social life, these technologies will need to increasingly rely on social intelligence. Although there are many valuable datasets that benchmark isolated dimensions of social intelligence, there does not yet exist any body of work to join these threads into a cohesive subfield in which researchers can quickly identify research gaps and future directions. Towards this goal, we build a Social AI Data Infrastructure, which consists of a comprehensive social AI taxonomy and a data library of 480 NLP datasets. Our infrastructure allows us to analyze existing dataset efforts, and also evaluate language models' performance in different social intelligence aspects. Our analyses demonstrate its utility in enabling a thorough understanding of current data landscape and providing a holistic perspective on potential directions for future dataset development. We show there is a need for multifaceted datasets, increased diversity in language and culture, more long-tailed social situations, and more interactive data in future social intelligence data efforts.

cs.CY

Retrieving Multimodal Information for Augmented Generation: A Survey

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become popular, there emerged an important trend of using multimodality to augment the LLMs' generation ability, which enables LLMs to better interact with the world. However, there lacks a unified perception of at which stage and how to incorporate different modalities. In this survey, we review methods that assist and augment generative models by retrieving multimodal knowledge, whose formats range from images, codes, tables, graphs, to audio. Such methods offer a promising solution to important concerns such as factuality, reasoning, interpretability, and robustness. By providing an in-depth review, this survey is expected to provide scholars with a deeper understanding of the methods' applications and encourage them to adapt existing techniques to the fast-growing field of LLMs.

cs.CL

CoAnnotating: Uncertainty-Guided Work Allocation between Human and Large Language Models for Data Annotation

Annotated data plays a critical role in Natural Language Processing (NLP) in training models and evaluating their performance. Given recent developments in Large Language Models (LLMs), models such as ChatGPT demonstrate zero-shot capability on many text-annotation tasks, comparable with or even exceeding human annotators. Such LLMs can serve as alternatives for manual annotation, due to lower costs and higher scalability. However, limited work has leveraged LLMs as complementary annotators, nor explored how annotation work is best allocated among humans and LLMs to achieve both quality and cost objectives. We propose CoAnnotating, a novel paradigm for Human-LLM co-annotation of unstructured texts at scale. Under this framework, we utilize uncertainty to estimate LLMs' annotation capability. Our empirical study shows CoAnnotating to be an effective means to allocate work from results on different datasets, with up to 21% performance improvement over random baseline. For code implementation, see https://github.com/SALT-NLP/CoAnnotating.

cs.CL

Inducing Positive Perspectives with Text Reframing

Sentiment transfer is one popular example of a text style transfer task, where the goal is to reverse the sentiment polarity of a text. With a sentiment reversal comes also a reversal in meaning. We introduce a different but related task called positive reframing in which we neutralize a negative point of view and generate a more positive perspective for the author without contradicting the original meaning. Our insistence on meaning preservation makes positive reframing a challenging and semantically rich task. To facilitate rapid progress, we introduce a large-scale benchmark, Positive Psychology Frames, with 8,349 sentence pairs and 12,755 structured annotations to explain positive reframing in terms of six theoretically-motivated reframing strategies. Then we evaluate a set of state-of-the-art text style transfer models, and conclude by discussing key challenges and directions for future work.

cs.CL