Shiwei Lin | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

LLM Agents for Deliberative Collaboration: A Study on Joint Decision Making Under Partial Observability

Deliberation plays a crucial role in collaboration; when humans work together, they naturally engage in communication to align information and reach an agreement. In this paper, we investigate deliberative large language model (LLM) agents under partially observable joint decision-making tasks. We formalize deliberative collaboration as a cooperative joint decision problem with partial and asymmetric observations, and introduce a scalable benchmark that instantiates this problem across multiple task settings and domains in which agents must exchange information through deliberation to reach a joint decision with a shared reward. We then instantiate a reference scaffold and evaluation protocol for deliberative agents and conduct a systematic evaluation of a range of representative LLMs. The results reveal that complex deliberative collaboration tasks continue to challenge state-of-the-art language models. Even with the aid of external mathematical tools, language models may fail in either the deliberation process for aligning information or the complex reasoning process for making the decision. On the other hand, diagnostic analysis reveals that the deliberation process may also provide opportunities for reflection and error correction, sometimes improving performance over centralized baselines. Altogether, our work establishes a foundation for evaluating and improving LLM agents in deliberative collaboration and provides insights into the strengths, limitations, and properties of current LLM-based multi-agent systems.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

A VLM-based Method for Visual Anomaly Detection in Robotic Scientific Laboratories

In robot scientific laboratories, visual anomaly detection is important for the timely identification and resolution of potential faults or deviations. It has become a key factor in ensuring the stability and safety of experimental processes. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a VLM-based visual reasoning approach that supports different levels of supervision through four progressively informative prompt configurations. To systematically evaluate its effectiveness, we construct a visual benchmark tailored for process anomaly detection in scientific workflows. Experiments on two representative vision-language models show that detection accuracy improves as more contextual information is provided, confirming the effectiveness and adaptability of the proposed reasoning approach for process anomaly detection in scientific workflows. Furthermore, real-world validations at selected experimental steps confirm that first-person visual observation can effectively identify process-level anomalies. This work provides both a data-driven foundation and an evaluation framework for vision anomaly detection in scientific experiment workflows.

cs.CV↗