Daily Papers

Despite rapid advancements in video generation models, generating coherent storytelling videos that span multiple scenes and characters remains challenging. Current methods often rigidly convert pre-generated keyframes into fixed-length clips, resulting in disjointed narratives and pacing issues. Furthermore, the inherent instability of video generation models means that even a single low-quality clip can significantly degrade the entire output animation's logical coherence and visual continuity. To overcome these obstacles, we introduce AniMaker, a multi-agent framework enabling efficient multi-candidate clip generation and storytelling-aware clip selection, thus creating globally consistent and story-coherent animation solely from text input. The framework is structured around specialized agents, including the Director Agent for storyboard generation, the Photography Agent for video clip generation, the Reviewer Agent for evaluation, and the Post-Production Agent for editing and voiceover. Central to AniMaker's approach are two key technical components: MCTS-Gen in Photography Agent, an efficient Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS)-inspired strategy that intelligently navigates the candidate space to generate high-potential clips while optimizing resource usage; and AniEval in Reviewer Agent, the first framework specifically designed for multi-shot animation evaluation, which assesses critical aspects such as story-level consistency, action completion, and animation-specific features by considering each clip in the context of its preceding and succeeding clips. Experiments demonstrate that AniMaker achieves superior quality as measured by popular metrics including VBench and our proposed AniEval framework, while significantly improving the efficiency of multi-candidate generation, pushing AI-generated storytelling animation closer to production standards.

Large Language Models' (LLM) reasoning can be improved using test-time aggregation strategies, i.e., generating multiple samples and voting among generated samples. While these improve performance, they often reach a saturation point. Refinement offers an alternative by using LLM-generated feedback to improve solution quality. However, refinement introduces 3 key challenges: (1) Excessive refinement: Uniformly refining all instances can over-correct and reduce the overall performance. (2) Inability to localize and address errors: LLMs have a limited ability to self-correct and struggle to identify and correct their own mistakes. (3) Insufficient refinement: Deciding how many iterations of refinement are needed is non-trivial, and stopping too soon could leave errors unaddressed. To tackle these issues, we propose MAgICoRe, which avoids excessive refinement by categorizing problem difficulty as easy or hard, solving easy problems with coarse-grained aggregation and hard ones with fine-grained and iterative multi-agent refinement. To improve error localization, we incorporate external step-wise reward model (RM) scores. Moreover, to ensure effective refinement, we employ a multi-agent loop with three agents: Solver, Reviewer (which generates targeted feedback based on step-wise RM scores), and the Refiner (which incorporates feedback). To ensure sufficient refinement, we re-evaluate updated solutions, iteratively initiating further rounds of refinement. We evaluate MAgICoRe on Llama-3-8B and GPT-3.5 and show its effectiveness across 5 math datasets. Even one iteration of MAgICoRe beats Self-Consistency by 3.4%, Best-of-k by 3.2%, and Self-Refine by 4.0% while using less than half the samples. Unlike iterative refinement with baselines, MAgICoRe continues to improve with more iterations. Finally, our ablations highlight the importance of MAgICoRe's RMs and multi-agent communication.

AI is increasingly playing a pivotal role in transforming how scientific discoveries are made. We introduce The AI Scientist-v2, an end-to-end agentic system capable of producing the first entirely AI generated peer-review-accepted workshop paper. This system iteratively formulates scientific hypotheses, designs and executes experiments, analyzes and visualizes data, and autonomously authors scientific manuscripts. Compared to its predecessor (v1, Lu et al., 2024 arXiv:2408.06292), The AI Scientist-v2 eliminates the reliance on human-authored code templates, generalizes effectively across diverse machine learning domains, and leverages a novel progressive agentic tree-search methodology managed by a dedicated experiment manager agent. Additionally, we enhance the AI reviewer component by integrating a Vision-Language Model (VLM) feedback loop for iterative refinement of content and aesthetics of the figures. We evaluated The AI Scientist-v2 by submitting three fully autonomous manuscripts to a peer-reviewed ICLR workshop. Notably, one manuscript achieved high enough scores to exceed the average human acceptance threshold, marking the first instance of a fully AI-generated paper successfully navigating a peer review. This accomplishment highlights the growing capability of AI in conducting all aspects of scientific research. We anticipate that further advancements in autonomous scientific discovery technologies will profoundly impact human knowledge generation, enabling unprecedented scalability in research productivity and significantly accelerating scientific breakthroughs, greatly benefiting society at large. We have open-sourced the code at https://github.com/SakanaAI/AI-Scientist-v2 to foster the future development of this transformative technology. We also discuss the role of AI in science, including AI safety.

Recent advancements in large language model (LLM) agents have significantly accelerated scientific discovery automation, yet concurrently raised critical ethical and safety concerns. To systematically address these challenges, we introduce SafeScientist, an innovative AI scientist framework explicitly designed to enhance safety and ethical responsibility in AI-driven scientific exploration. SafeScientist proactively refuses ethically inappropriate or high-risk tasks and rigorously emphasizes safety throughout the research process. To achieve comprehensive safety oversight, we integrate multiple defensive mechanisms, including prompt monitoring, agent-collaboration monitoring, tool-use monitoring, and an ethical reviewer component. Complementing SafeScientist, we propose SciSafetyBench, a novel benchmark specifically designed to evaluate AI safety in scientific contexts, comprising 240 high-risk scientific tasks across 6 domains, alongside 30 specially designed scientific tools and 120 tool-related risk tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SafeScientist significantly improves safety performance by 35\% compared to traditional AI scientist frameworks, without compromising scientific output quality. Additionally, we rigorously validate the robustness of our safety pipeline against diverse adversarial attack methods, further confirming the effectiveness of our integrated approach. The code and data will be available at https://github.com/ulab-uiuc/SafeScientist. red{Warning: this paper contains example data that may be offensive or harmful.}

This paper presents synthetic Preference Optimization (PO) datasets generated using multi-agent workflows and evaluates the effectiveness and potential of these workflows in the dataset generation process. PO dataset generation requires two modules: (1) response evaluation, and (2) response generation. In the response evaluation module, the responses from Large Language Models (LLMs) are evaluated and ranked - a task typically carried out by human annotators that we automate using LLMs. We assess the response evaluation module in a 2 step process. In step 1, we assess LLMs as evaluators using three distinct prompting strategies. In step 2, we apply the winning prompting strategy to compare the performance of LLM-as-a-Judge, LLMs-as-a-Jury, and LLM Debate. In each step, we use inter-rater agreement using Cohen's Kappa between human annotators and LLMs. For the response generation module, we compare different configurations for the LLM Feedback Loop using the identified LLM evaluator configuration. We use the win rate (the fraction of times a generation framework is selected as the best by an LLM evaluator) to determine the best multi-agent configuration for generation. After identifying the best configurations for both modules, we use models from the GPT, Gemma, and Llama families to generate our PO datasets using the above pipeline. We generate two types of PO datasets, one to improve the generation capabilities of individual LLM and the other to improve the multi-agent workflow. Our evaluation shows that GPT-4o-as-a-Judge is more consistent across datasets when the candidate responses do not include responses from the GPT family. Additionally, we find that the LLM Feedback Loop, with Llama as the generator and Gemma as the reviewer, achieves a notable 71.8% and 73.8% win rate over single-agent Llama and Gemma, respectively.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in downstream software engineering tasks such as Automated Program Repair (APR). In particular, there has been a lot of research on repository-level issue-resolution benchmarks such as SWE-Bench. Although there has been significant progress on this topic, we notice that in the process of solving such issues, existing agentic systems tend to hyper-localize on immediately suspicious lines of code and fix them in isolation, without a deeper understanding of the issue semantics, code semantics, or execution semantics. Consequently, many existing systems generate patches that overfit to the user issue, even when a more general fix is preferable. To address this limitation, we introduce SemAgent, a novel workflow-based procedure that leverages issue, code, and execution semantics to generate patches that are complete - identifying and fixing all lines relevant to the issue. We achieve this through a novel pipeline that (a) leverages execution semantics to retrieve relevant context, (b) comprehends issue-semantics via generalized abstraction, (c) isolates code-semantics within the context of this abstraction, and (d) leverages this understanding in a two-stage architecture: a repair stage that proposes fine-grained fixes, followed by a reviewer stage that filters relevant fixes based on the inferred issue-semantics. Our evaluations show that our methodology achieves a solve rate of 44.66% on the SWEBench-Lite benchmark beating all other workflow-based approaches, and an absolute improvement of 7.66% compared to our baseline, which lacks such deep semantic understanding. We note that our approach performs particularly well on issues requiring multi-line reasoning (and editing) and edge-case handling, suggesting that incorporating issue and code semantics into APR pipelines can lead to robust and semantically consistent repairs.

Competitive debate is a complex task of computational argumentation. Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer from hallucinations and lack competitiveness in this field. To address these challenges, we introduce Agent for Debate (Agent4Debate), a dynamic multi-agent framework based on LLMs designed to enhance their capabilities in competitive debate. Drawing inspiration from human behavior in debate preparation and execution, Agent4Debate employs a collaborative architecture where four specialized agents, involving Searcher, Analyzer, Writer, and Reviewer, dynamically interact and cooperate. These agents work throughout the debate process, covering multiple stages from initial research and argument formulation to rebuttal and summary. To comprehensively evaluate framework performance, we construct the Competitive Debate Arena, comprising 66 carefully selected Chinese debate motions. We recruit ten experienced human debaters and collect records of 200 debates involving Agent4Debate, baseline models, and humans. The evaluation employs the Debatrix automatic scoring system and professional human reviewers based on the established Debatrix-Elo and Human-Elo ranking. Experimental results indicate that the state-of-the-art Agent4Debate exhibits capabilities comparable to those of humans. Furthermore, ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of each component in the agent structure.

Peer review is fundamental to the integrity and advancement of scientific publication. Traditional methods of peer review analyses often rely on exploration and statistics of existing peer review data, which do not adequately address the multivariate nature of the process, account for the latent variables, and are further constrained by privacy concerns due to the sensitive nature of the data. We introduce AgentReview, the first large language model (LLM) based peer review simulation framework, which effectively disentangles the impacts of multiple latent factors and addresses the privacy issue. Our study reveals significant insights, including a notable 37.1% variation in paper decisions due to reviewers' biases, supported by sociological theories such as the social influence theory, altruism fatigue, and authority bias. We believe that this study could offer valuable insights to improve the design of peer review mechanisms.

Acquiring high-quality instruction-code pairs is essential for training Large Language Models (LLMs) for code generation. Manually curated data is expensive and inherently limited in scale, motivating the development of code-centric synthesis methods. Yet, current approaches either focus on augmenting existing code or rely on predefined heuristics, both lacking rigorous data validation, which results in synthetic data that is ungrounded, repetitive, or overly simplistic. Inspired by collaborative programming practices, we propose CodeEvo, a framework that synthesizes code data through iterative interactions between two LLM agents: a Coder, which generates candidate code and test cases based on given instructions, and a Reviewer, which guides the synthesis process by producing new instructions and feedback. We further introduce a hybrid feedback mechanism that combines compiler determinism with the generative flexibility of agents, enabling automatic quality control throughout synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that models fine-tuned on CodeEvo data significantly outperform established baselines across code generation benchmarks with various difficulties. In-depth analyses further provide insights from multiple perspectives into effective code-centric data synthesis.

We present OpenReviewer, an open-source system for generating high-quality peer reviews of machine learning and AI conference papers. At its core is Llama-OpenReviewer-8B, an 8B parameter language model specifically fine-tuned on 79,000 expert reviews from top conferences. Given a PDF paper submission and review template as input, OpenReviewer extracts the full text, including technical content like equations and tables, and generates a structured review following conference-specific guidelines. Our evaluation on 400 test papers shows that OpenReviewer produces considerably more critical and realistic reviews compared to general-purpose LLMs like GPT-4 and Claude-3.5. While other LLMs tend toward overly positive assessments, OpenReviewer's recommendations closely match the distribution of human reviewer ratings. The system provides authors with rapid, constructive feedback to improve their manuscripts before submission, though it is not intended to replace human peer review. OpenReviewer is available as an online demo and open-source tool.

To assist human review process, we build a novel ReviewRobot to automatically assign a review score and write comments for multiple categories such as novelty and meaningful comparison. A good review needs to be knowledgeable, namely that the comments should be constructive and informative to help improve the paper; and explainable by providing detailed evidence. ReviewRobot achieves these goals via three steps: (1) We perform domain-specific Information Extraction to construct a knowledge graph (KG) from the target paper under review, a related work KG from the papers cited by the target paper, and a background KG from a large collection of previous papers in the domain. (2) By comparing these three KGs, we predict a review score and detailed structured knowledge as evidence for each review category. (3) We carefully select and generalize human review sentences into templates, and apply these templates to transform the review scores and evidence into natural language comments. Experimental results show that our review score predictor reaches 71.4%-100% accuracy. Human assessment by domain experts shows that 41.7%-70.5% of the comments generated by ReviewRobot are valid and constructive, and better than human-written ones for 20% of the time. Thus, ReviewRobot can serve as an assistant for paper reviewers, program chairs and authors.

Recent developments in LLMs offer new opportunities for assisting authors in improving their work. In this paper, we envision a use case where authors can receive LLM-generated reviews that uncover weak points in the current draft. While initial methods for automated review generation already exist, these methods tend to produce reviews that lack detail, and they do not cover the range of opinions that human reviewers produce. To address this shortcoming, we propose an efficient two-stage review generation framework called Reviewer2. Unlike prior work, this approach explicitly models the distribution of possible aspects that the review may address. We show that this leads to more detailed reviews that better cover the range of aspects that human reviewers identify in the draft. As part of the research, we generate a large-scale review dataset of 27k papers and 99k reviews that we annotate with aspect prompts, which we make available as a resource for future research.

Providing constructive feedback to paper authors is a core component of peer review. With reviewers increasingly having less time to perform reviews, automated support systems are required to ensure high reviewing quality, thus making the feedback in reviews useful for authors. To this end, we identify four key aspects of review comments (individual points in weakness sections of reviews) that drive the utility for authors: Actionability, Grounding & Specificity, Verifiability, and Helpfulness. To enable evaluation and development of models assessing review comments, we introduce the RevUtil dataset. We collect 1,430 human-labeled review comments and scale our data with 10k synthetically labeled comments for training purposes. The synthetic data additionally contains rationales, i.e., explanations for the aspect score of a review comment. Employing the RevUtil dataset, we benchmark fine-tuned models for assessing review comments on these aspects and generating rationales. Our experiments demonstrate that these fine-tuned models achieve agreement levels with humans comparable to, and in some cases exceeding, those of powerful closed models like GPT-4o. Our analysis further reveals that machine-generated reviews generally underperform human reviews on our four aspects.

Peer review is essential for scientific progress but faces growing challenges due to increasing submission volumes and reviewer fatigue. Existing automated review approaches struggle with factual accuracy, rating consistency, and analytical depth, often generating superficial or generic feedback lacking the insights characteristic of high-quality human reviews. We introduce ReviewRL, a reinforcement learning framework for generating comprehensive and factually grounded scientific paper reviews. Our approach combines: (1) an ArXiv-MCP retrieval-augmented context generation pipeline that incorporates relevant scientific literature, (2) supervised fine-tuning that establishes foundational reviewing capabilities, and (3) a reinforcement learning procedure with a composite reward function that jointly enhances review quality and rating accuracy. Experiments on ICLR 2025 papers demonstrate that ReviewRL significantly outperforms existing methods across both rule-based metrics and model-based quality assessments. ReviewRL establishes a foundational framework for RL-driven automatic critique generation in scientific discovery, demonstrating promising potential for future development in this domain. The implementation of ReviewRL will be released at GitHub.

Peer review is the cornerstone of scientific publishing, yet it suffers from inconsistencies, reviewer subjectivity, and scalability challenges. We introduce ReviewerToo, a modular framework for studying and deploying AI-assisted peer review to complement human judgment with systematic and consistent assessments. ReviewerToo supports systematic experiments with specialized reviewer personas and structured evaluation criteria, and can be partially or fully integrated into real conference workflows. We validate ReviewerToo on a carefully curated dataset of 1,963 paper submissions from ICLR 2025, where our experiments with the gpt-oss-120b model achieves 81.8% accuracy for the task of categorizing a paper as accept/reject compared to 83.9% for the average human reviewer. Additionally, ReviewerToo-generated reviews are rated as higher quality than the human average by an LLM judge, though still trailing the strongest expert contributions. Our analysis highlights domains where AI reviewers excel (e.g., fact-checking, literature coverage) and where they struggle (e.g., assessing methodological novelty and theoretical contributions), underscoring the continued need for human expertise. Based on these findings, we propose guidelines for integrating AI into peer-review pipelines, showing how AI can enhance consistency, coverage, and fairness while leaving complex evaluative judgments to domain experts. Our work provides a foundation for systematic, hybrid peer-review systems that scale with the growth of scientific publishing.

Peer review serves as the gatekeeper of science, yet the surge in submissions and widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) in scholarly evaluation present unprecedented challenges. Recent work has focused on using LLMs to improve review efficiency or generate insightful review content. However, unchecked deficient reviews from both human experts and AI systems threaten to systematically undermine the peer review ecosystem and compromise academic integrity. To address this critical issue, we introduce ReviewGuard, an automated system for detecting and categorizing deficient reviews. ReviewGuard employs a comprehensive four-stage LLM-driven framework that: (1) collects ICLR and NeurIPS papers with their corresponding reviews from OpenReview; (2) annotates review types using GPT-4.1 with human validation; (3) addresses class imbalance and data scarcity through LLM-driven synthetic data augmentation, producing a final corpus of 6,634 papers, 24,657 real reviews, and 46,438 synthetic reviews; and (4) fine-tunes both encoder-based models and open source LLMs. We perform comprehensive feature analysis of the structure and quality of the review text. Compared to sufficient reviews, deficient reviews demonstrate lower rating scores, higher self-reported confidence, reduced structural complexity, and a higher proportion of negative sentiment. AI-generated text detection reveals that, since ChatGPT's emergence, AI-generated reviews have increased dramatically. In the evaluation of deficient review detection models, mixed training with synthetic and real review data provides substantial enhancements to recall and F1 scores on the binary task. This study presents the first LLM-driven system for detecting deficient peer reviews, providing evidence to inform AI governance in peer review while offering valuable insights into human-AI collaboration to maintain academic integrity.

Systematic literature reviews and meta-analyses are essential for synthesizing research insights, but they remain time-intensive and labor-intensive due to the iterative processes of screening, evaluation, and data extraction. This paper introduces and evaluates LatteReview, a Python-based framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) and multi-agent systems to automate key elements of the systematic review process. Designed to streamline workflows while maintaining rigor, LatteReview utilizes modular agents for tasks such as title and abstract screening, relevance scoring, and structured data extraction. These agents operate within orchestrated workflows, supporting sequential and parallel review rounds, dynamic decision-making, and iterative refinement based on user feedback. LatteReview's architecture integrates LLM providers, enabling compatibility with both cloud-based and locally hosted models. The framework supports features such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for incorporating external context, multimodal reviews, Pydantic-based validation for structured inputs and outputs, and asynchronous programming for handling large-scale datasets. The framework is available on the GitHub repository, with detailed documentation and an installable package.

Existing vision-language models (VLMs), whether generalists or specialists, remain constrained by their parameter scale, lack robust self-correction capabilities, and underperform in tasks involving long visual contexts and complex reasoning, resulting in suboptimal performance on document-based tasks. To address this, we propose MACT, a Multi-Agent Collaboration framework with Test-Time scaling, tailored for visual document understanding and visual question answering (VQA). It comprises four distinct small-scale agents, i.e., planning, execution, judgment, and answer agents, with clearly defined roles and effective collaboration. Notably, the judgment agent exclusively verifies correctness and redirects to prior agents for revisions, outperforming conventional correction strategies. To further expand the capability boundaries of the framework, we propose mixed reward modeling that balances agent-specific abilities and global collaboration, as well as agent-wise hybrid test-time scaling, which customizes different scaling strategies for each agent based on their functions. Evaluated on benchmarks spanning both document-based and non-document-based settings, our MACT shows superior performance with a smaller parameter scale without sacrificing the ability of general and mathematical tasks. Especially, it stands out in benchmarks involving long visual contexts and complicated reasoning. The three variants of MACT consistently hold the top three positions in average scores, leading in 13 of the 15 benchmarks. Code will be available at: https://github.com/YU-deep/MACT.git.

Helpful reviews have been essential for the success of e-commerce services, as they help customers make quick purchase decisions and benefit the merchants in their sales. While many reviews are informative, others provide little value and may contain spam, excessive appraisal, or unexpected biases. With the large volume of reviews and their uneven quality, the problem of detecting helpful reviews has drawn much attention lately. Existing methods for identifying helpful reviews primarily focus on review text and ignore the two key factors of (1) who post the reviews and (2) when the reviews are posted. Moreover, the helpfulness votes suffer from scarcity for less popular products and recently submitted (a.k.a., cold-start) reviews. To address these challenges, we introduce a dataset and develop a model that integrates the reviewer's expertise, derived from the past review history of the reviewers, and the temporal dynamics of the reviews to automatically assess review helpfulness. We conduct experiments on our dataset to demonstrate the effectiveness of incorporating these factors and report improved results compared to several well-established baselines.

Generating natural language explanations for recommendations has become increasingly important in recommender systems. Traditional approaches typically treat user reviews as ground truth for explanations and focus on improving review prediction accuracy by designing various model architectures. However, due to limitations in data scale and model capability, these explanations often fail to meet key user-centric aspects such as factuality, personalization, and sentiment coherence, significantly reducing their overall helpfulness to users. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm that refines initial explanations generated by existing explainable recommender models during the inference stage to enhance their quality in multiple aspects. Specifically, we introduce a multi-agent collaborative refinement framework based on large language models. To ensure alignment between the refinement process and user demands, we employ a plan-then-refine pattern to perform targeted modifications. To enable continuous improvements, we design a hierarchical reflection mechanism that provides feedback on the refinement process from both strategic and content perspectives. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.

Web agents enable users to perform tasks on web browsers through natural language interaction. Evaluating web agents trajectories is an important problem, since it helps us determine whether the agent successfully completed the tasks. Rule-based methods are widely used for this purpose, but they are challenging to extend to new tasks and may not always recognize successful trajectories. We may achieve higher accuracy through human evaluation, but the process would be substantially slower and more expensive. Automatic evaluations with LLMs may avoid the challenges of designing new rules and manually annotating trajectories, enabling faster and cost-effective evaluation. However, it is unclear how effective they are at evaluating web agents. To this end, we propose AgentRewardBench, the first benchmark to assess the effectiveness of LLM judges for evaluating web agents. AgentRewardBench contains 1302 trajectories across 5 benchmarks and 4 LLMs. Each trajectory in AgentRewardBench is reviewed by an expert, who answers questions pertaining to the success, side effects, and repetitiveness of the agent. Using our benchmark, we evaluate 12 LLM judges and find that no single LLM excels across all benchmarks. We also find that the rule-based evaluation used by common benchmarks tends to underreport the success rate of web agents, highlighting a key weakness of rule-based evaluation and the need to develop more flexible automatic evaluations. We release the benchmark at: https://agent-reward-bench.github.io

This work is motivated by two key trends. On one hand, large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable versatility in various generative tasks such as writing, drawing, and question answering, significantly reducing the time required for many routine tasks. On the other hand, researchers, whose work is not only time-consuming but also highly expertise-demanding, face increasing challenges as they have to spend more time reading, writing, and reviewing papers. This raises the question: how can LLMs potentially assist researchers in alleviating their heavy workload? This study focuses on the topic of LLMs assist NLP Researchers, particularly examining the effectiveness of LLM in assisting paper (meta-)reviewing and its recognizability. To address this, we constructed the ReviewCritique dataset, which includes two types of information: (i) NLP papers (initial submissions rather than camera-ready) with both human-written and LLM-generated reviews, and (ii) each review comes with "deficiency" labels and corresponding explanations for individual segments, annotated by experts. Using ReviewCritique, this study explores two threads of research questions: (i) "LLMs as Reviewers", how do reviews generated by LLMs compare with those written by humans in terms of quality and distinguishability? (ii) "LLMs as Metareviewers", how effectively can LLMs identify potential issues, such as Deficient or unprofessional review segments, within individual paper reviews? To our knowledge, this is the first work to provide such a comprehensive analysis.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in general natural language processing tasks but often fall short in complex reasoning tasks. Recent studies have explored human-like problem-solving strategies, such as self-correct, to push further the boundary of single-model reasoning ability. In this work, we let a single model "step outside the box" by engaging multiple models to correct each other. We introduce a multi-agent collaboration strategy that emulates the academic peer review process. Each agent independently constructs its own solution, provides reviews on the solutions of others, and assigns confidence levels to its reviews. Upon receiving peer reviews, agents revise their initial solutions. Extensive experiments on three different types of reasoning tasks show that our collaboration approach delivers superior accuracy across all ten datasets compared to existing methods. Further study underscores the effectiveness of integrating confidence in reviews, demonstrates the superiority of feedback exchange over mere solution sharing, and highlights the role of capability and diversity in fostering successful collaboration.

This paper describes a highly developed personalised recommendation system using multimodal, autonomous, multi-agent systems. The system focuses on the incorporation of futuristic AI tech and LLMs like Gemini-1.5- pro and LLaMA-70B to improve customer service experiences especially within e-commerce. Our approach uses multi agent, multimodal systems to provide best possible recommendations to its users. The system is made up of three agents as a whole. The first agent recommends products appropriate for answering the given question, while the second asks follow-up questions based on images that belong to these recommended products and is followed up with an autonomous search by the third agent. It also features a real-time data fetch, user preferences-based recommendations and is adaptive learning. During complicated queries the application processes with Symphony, and uses the Groq API to answer quickly with low response times. It uses a multimodal way to utilize text and images comprehensively, so as to optimize product recommendation and customer interaction.

Critique ability, a meta-cognitive capability of humans, presents significant challenges for LLMs to improve. Recent works primarily rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) using critiques generated by a single LLM like GPT-4. However, these model-generated critiques often exhibit flaws due to the inherent complexity of the critique. Consequently, fine-tuning LLMs on such flawed critiques typically limits the model's performance and propagates these flaws into the learned model. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes a novel data generation pipeline, named MultiCritique, that improves the critique ability of LLMs by utilizing multi-agent feedback in both the SFT and reinforcement learning (RL) stages. First, our data generation pipeline aggregates high-quality critiques from multiple agents instead of a single model, with crucial information as input for simplifying the critique. Furthermore, our pipeline improves the preference accuracy of critique quality through multi-agent feedback, facilitating the effectiveness of RL in improving the critique ability of LLMs. Based on our proposed MultiCritique data generation pipeline, we construct the MultiCritiqueDataset for the SFT and RL fine-tuning stages. Extensive experimental results on two benchmarks demonstrate: 1) the superior quality of our constructed SFT dataset compared to existing critique datasets; 2) additional improvements to the critique ability of LLMs brought by the RL stage. Notably, our fine-tuned 7B model significantly surpasses other advanced 7B-13B open-source models, approaching the performance of advanced 70B LLMs and GPT-4. Codes, datasets and model weights will be publicly available.

Scientific Research, vital for improving human life, is hindered by its inherent complexity, slow pace, and the need for specialized experts. To enhance its productivity, we propose a ResearchAgent, a large language model-powered research idea writing agent, which automatically generates problems, methods, and experiment designs while iteratively refining them based on scientific literature. Specifically, starting with a core paper as the primary focus to generate ideas, our ResearchAgent is augmented not only with relevant publications through connecting information over an academic graph but also entities retrieved from an entity-centric knowledge store based on their underlying concepts, mined and shared across numerous papers. In addition, mirroring the human approach to iteratively improving ideas with peer discussions, we leverage multiple ReviewingAgents that provide reviews and feedback iteratively. Further, they are instantiated with human preference-aligned large language models whose criteria for evaluation are derived from actual human judgments. We experimentally validate our ResearchAgent on scientific publications across multiple disciplines, showcasing its effectiveness in generating novel, clear, and valid research ideas based on human and model-based evaluation results.

Large Language Model (LLM) integrations into applications like Microsoft365 suite and Google Workspace for creating/processing documents, emails, presentations, etc. has led to considerable enhancements in productivity and time savings. But as these integrations become more more complex, it is paramount to ensure that the quality of output from the LLM-integrated applications are relevant and appropriate for use. Identifying the need to develop robust evaluation approaches for natural language generation, wherein references/ground labels doesn't exist or isn't amply available, this paper introduces a novel framework called "SAGEval" which utilizes a critiquing Agent to provide feedback on scores generated by LLM evaluators. We show that the critiquing Agent is able to rectify scores from LLM evaluators, in absence of references/ground-truth labels, thereby reducing the need for labeled data even for complex NLG evaluation scenarios, like the generation of JSON-structured forms/surveys with responses in different styles like multiple choice, likert ratings, single choice questions, etc.

Question answering systems should help users to access knowledge on a broad range of topics and to answer a wide array of different questions. Most systems fall short of this expectation as they are only specialized in one particular setting, e.g., answering factual questions with Wikipedia data. To overcome this limitation, we propose composing multiple QA agents within a meta-QA system. We argue that there exist a wide range of specialized QA agents in literature. Thus, we address the central research question of how to effectively and efficiently identify suitable QA agents for any given question. We study both supervised and unsupervised approaches to address this challenge, showing that TWEAC -- Transformer with Extendable Agent Classifiers -- achieves the best performance overall with 94% accuracy. We provide extensive insights on the scalability of TWEAC, demonstrating that it scales robustly to over 100 QA agents with each providing just 1000 examples of questions they can answer. Our code and data is available: https://github.com/UKPLab/TWEAC-qa-agent-selection

AI agents hold the potential to revolutionize scientific productivity by automating literature reviews, replicating experiments, analyzing data, and even proposing new directions of inquiry; indeed, there are now many such agents, ranging from general-purpose "deep research" systems to specialized science-specific agents, such as AI Scientist and AIGS. Rigorous evaluation of these agents is critical for progress. Yet existing benchmarks fall short on several fronts: they (1) fail to provide holistic, product-informed measures of real-world use cases such as science research; (2) lack reproducible agent tools necessary for a controlled comparison of core agentic capabilities; (3) do not account for confounding variables such as model cost and tool access; (4) do not provide standardized interfaces for quick agent prototyping and evaluation; and (5) lack comprehensive baseline agents necessary to identify true advances. In response, we define principles and tooling for more rigorously benchmarking agents. Using these, we present AstaBench, a suite that provides the first holistic measure of agentic ability to perform scientific research, comprising 2400+ problems spanning the entire scientific discovery process and multiple scientific domains, and including many problems inspired by actual user requests to deployed Asta agents. Our suite comes with the first scientific research environment with production-grade search tools that enable controlled, reproducible evaluation, better accounting for confounders. Alongside, we provide a comprehensive suite of nine science-optimized classes of Asta agents and numerous baselines. Our extensive evaluation of 57 agents across 22 agent classes reveals several interesting findings, most importantly that despite meaningful progress on certain individual aspects, AI remains far from solving the challenge of science research assistance.

Modern Code Review (MCR) is an informal tool-assisted quality assurance practice. It relies on the asynchronous communication among the authors of code changes and reviewers, who are developers that provide feedback. However, from candidate developers, some are able to provide better feedback than others given a particular context. The selection of reviewers is thus an important task, which can benefit from automated support. Many approaches have been proposed in this direction, using for example data from code review repositories to recommend reviewers. In this paper, we propose the use of team-related features to improve the performance of predictions that are helpful to build code reviewer recommenders, with our target predictions being the identification of reviewers that would participate in a review and the provided amount of feedback. We evaluate the prediction power of these features, which are related to code ownership, workload, and team relationship. This evaluation was done by carefully addressing challenges imposed by the MCR domain, such as temporal aspects of the dataset and unbalanced classes. Moreover, given that it is currently unknown how much past data is needed for building MCR prediction models with acceptable performance, we explore the amount of past data used to build prediction models. Our results show that, individually, features related to code ownership have the best prediction power. However, based on feature selection, we conclude that all proposed features together with lines of code can make the best predictions for both reviewer participation and amount of feedback. Regarding the amount of past data, the timeframes of 3, 6, 9, and 12 months of data produce similar results. Therefore, models can be trained considering short timeframes, thus reducing the computational costs with negligible impact in the prediction performance ...

The automation of scientific discovery has been a long-standing goal within the research community, driven by the potential to accelerate knowledge creation. While significant progress has been made using commercial large language models (LLMs) as research assistants or idea generators, the possibility of automating the entire research process with open-source LLMs remains largely unexplored. This paper explores the feasibility of using open-source post-trained LLMs as autonomous agents capable of performing the full cycle of automated research and review, from literature review and manuscript preparation to peer review and paper revision. Our iterative preference training framework consists of CycleResearcher, which conducts research tasks, and CycleReviewer, which simulates the peer review process, providing iterative feedback via reinforcement learning. To train these models, we develop two new datasets, Review-5k and Research-14k, reflecting real-world machine learning research and peer review dynamics. Our results demonstrate that CycleReviewer achieves a 26.89\% improvement in mean absolute error (MAE) over individual human reviewers in predicting paper scores, indicating that LLMs can surpass expert-level performance in research evaluation. In research, the papers generated by the CycleResearcher model achieved a score of 5.36 in simulated peer reviews, surpassing the preprint level of 5.24 from human experts and approaching the accepted paper level of 5.69. This work represents a significant step toward fully automated scientific inquiry, providing ethical safeguards and advancing AI-driven research capabilities. The code, dataset and model weight are released at http://github/minjun-zhu/Researcher.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated wide-ranging applications across various fields and have shown significant potential in the academic peer-review process. However, existing applications are primarily limited to static review generation based on submitted papers, which fail to capture the dynamic and iterative nature of real-world peer reviews. In this paper, we reformulate the peer-review process as a multi-turn, long-context dialogue, incorporating distinct roles for authors, reviewers, and decision makers. We construct a comprehensive dataset containing over 26,841 papers with 92,017 reviews collected from multiple sources, including the top-tier conference and prestigious journal. This dataset is meticulously designed to facilitate the applications of LLMs for multi-turn dialogues, effectively simulating the complete peer-review process. Furthermore, we propose a series of metrics to evaluate the performance of LLMs for each role under this reformulated peer-review setting, ensuring fair and comprehensive evaluations. We believe this work provides a promising perspective on enhancing the LLM-driven peer-review process by incorporating dynamic, role-based interactions. It aligns closely with the iterative and interactive nature of real-world academic peer review, offering a robust foundation for future research and development in this area. We open-source the dataset at https://github.com/chengtan9907/ReviewMT.

Foundation models are increasingly used in scientific research, but evaluating AI-generated scientific work remains challenging. While expert reviews are costly, large language models (LLMs) as proxy reviewers have proven to be unreliable. To address this, we investigate two automatic evaluation metrics, specifically citation count prediction and review score prediction. We parse all papers of OpenReview and augment each submission with its citation count, reference, and research hypothesis. Our findings reveal that citation count prediction is more viable than review score prediction, and predicting scores is more difficult purely from the research hypothesis than from the full paper. Furthermore, we show that a simple prediction model based solely on title and abstract outperforms LLM-based reviewers, though it still falls short of human-level consistency.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly utilized in scientific research assessment, particularly in automated paper review. However, existing LLM-based review systems face significant challenges, including limited domain expertise, hallucinated reasoning, and a lack of structured evaluation. To address these limitations, we introduce DeepReview, a multi-stage framework designed to emulate expert reviewers by incorporating structured analysis, literature retrieval, and evidence-based argumentation. Using DeepReview-13K, a curated dataset with structured annotations, we train DeepReviewer-14B, which outperforms CycleReviewer-70B with fewer tokens. In its best mode, DeepReviewer-14B achieves win rates of 88.21\% and 80.20\% against GPT-o1 and DeepSeek-R1 in evaluations. Our work sets a new benchmark for LLM-based paper review, with all resources publicly available. The code, model, dataset and demo have be released in http://ai-researcher.net.

The peer review process is crucial for ensuring the quality and reliability of scholarly work, yet assigning suitable reviewers remains a significant challenge. Traditional manual methods are labor-intensive and often ineffective, leading to nonconstructive or biased reviews. This paper introduces the exHarmony (eHarmony but for connecting experts to manuscripts) benchmark, designed to address these challenges by re-imagining the Reviewer Assignment Problem (RAP) as a retrieval task. Utilizing the extensive data from OpenAlex, we propose a novel approach that considers a host of signals from the authors, most similar experts, and the citation relations as potential indicators for a suitable reviewer for a manuscript. This approach allows us to develop a standard benchmark dataset for evaluating the reviewer assignment problem without needing explicit labels. We benchmark various methods, including traditional lexical matching, static neural embeddings, and contextualized neural embeddings, and introduce evaluation metrics that assess both relevance and diversity in the context of RAP. Our results indicate that while traditional methods perform reasonably well, contextualized embeddings trained on scholarly literature show the best performance. The findings underscore the importance of further research to enhance the diversity and effectiveness of reviewer assignments.

Recent advancements in AI agents have demonstrated their growing potential to drive and support scientific discovery. In this work, we introduce MLR-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating AI agents on open-ended machine learning research. MLR-Bench includes three key components: (1) 201 research tasks sourced from NeurIPS, ICLR, and ICML workshops covering diverse ML topics; (2) MLR-Judge, an automated evaluation framework combining LLM-based reviewers with carefully designed review rubrics to assess research quality; and (3) MLR-Agent, a modular agent scaffold capable of completing research tasks through four stages: idea generation, proposal formulation, experimentation, and paper writing. Our framework supports both stepwise assessment across these distinct research stages, and end-to-end evaluation of the final research paper. We then use MLR-Bench to evaluate six frontier LLMs and an advanced coding agent, finding that while LLMs are effective at generating coherent ideas and well-structured papers, current coding agents frequently (e.g., in 80% of the cases) produce fabricated or invalidated experimental results--posing a major barrier to scientific reliability. We validate MLR-Judge through human evaluation, showing high agreement with expert reviewers, supporting its potential as a scalable tool for research evaluation. We open-source MLR-Bench to help the community benchmark, diagnose, and improve AI research agents toward trustworthy and transparent scientific discovery.

Peer review is a critical process for ensuring the integrity of published scientific research. Confidence in this process is predicated on the assumption that experts in the relevant domain give careful consideration to the merits of manuscripts which are submitted for publication. With the recent rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs), a new risk to the peer review process is that negligent reviewers will rely on LLMs to perform the often time consuming process of reviewing a paper. However, there is a lack of existing resources for benchmarking the detectability of AI text in the domain of peer review. To address this deficiency, we introduce a comprehensive dataset containing a total of 788,984 AI-written peer reviews paired with corresponding human reviews, covering 8 years of papers submitted to each of two leading AI research conferences (ICLR and NeurIPS). We use this new resource to evaluate the ability of 18 existing AI text detection algorithms to distinguish between peer reviews fully written by humans and different state-of-the-art LLMs. Additionally, we explore a context-aware detection method called Anchor, which leverages manuscript content to detect AI-generated reviews, and analyze the sensitivity of detection models to LLM-assisted editing of human-written text. Our work reveals the difficulty of identifying AI-generated text at the individual peer review level, highlighting the urgent need for new tools and methods to detect this unethical use of generative AI. Our dataset is publicly available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/IntelLabs/AI-Peer-Review-Detection-Benchmark.

We present Prover Agent, a novel AI agent for automated theorem proving that integrates large language models (LLMs) with a formal proof assistant, Lean. Prover Agent coordinates an informal reasoning LLM, a formal prover model, and feedback from Lean while also generating auxiliary lemmas. These auxiliary lemmas are not limited to subgoals in the formal proof but can also include special cases or potentially useful facts derived from the assumptions, which help in discovering a viable proof strategy. It achieves an 88.1% success rate on the MiniF2F benchmark, establishing a new state-of-the-art among methods using small language models (SLMs) with a much lower sample budget than previous approaches. We also present theoretical analyses and case studies that illustrate how these generated lemmas contribute to solving challenging problems. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/kAIto47802/Prover-Agent.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in numerous Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, they still struggle with financial question answering (QA), particularly when numerical reasoning is required. Recently, LLM-based multi-agent frameworks have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in multi-step reasoning, which is crucial for financial QA tasks as it involves extracting relevant information from tables and text and then performing numerical reasoning on the extracted data to infer answers. In this study, we propose a multi-agent framework incorporating a critic agent that reflects on the reasoning steps and final answers for each question. Additionally, we enhance our system by adding multiple critic agents, each focusing on a specific aspect of the answer. Our results indicate that this framework significantly improves performance compared to single-agent reasoning, with an average performance increase of 15% for the LLaMA3-8B model and 5% for the LLaMA3-70B model. Furthermore, our framework performs on par with, and in some cases surpasses, larger single-agent LLMs such as LLaMA3.1-405B and GPT-4o-mini, though it falls slightly short compared to Claude-3.5 Sonnet. Overall, our framework presents an effective solution to enhance open-source LLMs for financial QA tasks, offering a cost-effective alternative to larger models like Claude-3.5 Sonnet.

Literature research, vital for scientific work, faces the challenge of the surging torrent of information in the vast ocean of literature exceeding researchers' processing capabilities. To address this issue, we present an automated review generation method based on Large Language Models (LLMs), aimed at overcoming efficiency bottlenecks in literature processing and reducing cognitive load. Our statistically validated evaluation framework demonstrates that the generated reviews match or exceed manual quality, offering broad applicability across research fields due to minimal domain knowledge requirements. In a case study on propane dehydrogenation (PDH) catalysts, our method swiftly analyzed 343 articles, averaging seconds per article per LLM account, producing comprehensive reviews spanning 35 topics. Extended analysis of 1041 articles provided deep insights into catalysts' composition, structure, and performance. Recognizing LLMs' hallucinations, we implemented a multi-layered quality control strategy, effectively mitigating risks and ensuring reliability, as quantitatively demonstrated through manual verification. Expert verification confirms the accuracy and citation integrity of generated reviews, demonstrating LLM hallucination risks reduced to below 0.5\% with over 95\% confidence. Released Windows application enables one-click review generation, aiding researchers in tracking advancements and recommending literature. This approach showcases LLMs' role in enhancing scientific research productivity and sets the stage for further exploration.

Autonomous agents built on language models (LMs) are showing increasing popularity in many fields, including scientific research. AI co-scientists aim to support or automate parts of the research process using these agents. A key component of empirical AI research is the design of ablation experiments. To this end, we introduce AblationBench, a benchmark suite for evaluating agents on ablation planning tasks in empirical AI research. It includes two tasks: AuthorAblation, which helps authors propose ablation experiments based on a method section and contains 83 instances, and ReviewerAblation, which helps reviewers find missing ablations in a full paper and contains 350 instances. For both tasks, we develop LM-based judges that serve as an automatic evaluation framework. Our experiments with frontier LMs show that these tasks remain challenging, with the best-performing LM system identifying only 29% of the original ablations on average. Lastly, we analyze the limitations of current LMs on these tasks, and find that chain-of-thought prompting outperforms the currently existing agent-based approach.

The surge in scientific submissions has placed increasing strain on the traditional peer-review process, prompting the exploration of large language models (LLMs) for automated review generation. While LLMs demonstrate competence in producing structured and coherent feedback, their capacity for critical reasoning, contextual grounding, and quality sensitivity remains limited. To systematically evaluate these aspects, we propose a comprehensive evaluation framework that integrates semantic similarity analysis and structured knowledge graph metrics to assess LLM-generated reviews against human-written counterparts. We construct a large-scale benchmark of 1,683 papers and 6,495 expert reviews from ICLR and NeurIPS in multiple years, and generate reviews using five LLMs. Our findings show that LLMs perform well in descriptive and affirmational content, capturing the main contributions and methodologies of the original work, with GPT-4o highlighted as an illustrative example, generating 15.74% more entities than human reviewers in the strengths section of good papers in ICLR 2025. However, they consistently underperform in identifying weaknesses, raising substantive questions, and adjusting feedback based on paper quality. GPT-4o produces 59.42% fewer entities than real reviewers in the weaknesses and increases node count by only 5.7% from good to weak papers, compared to 50% in human reviews. Similar trends are observed across all conferences, years, and models, providing empirical foundations for understanding the merits and defects of LLM-generated reviews and informing the development of future LLM-assisted reviewing tools. Data, code, and more detailed results are publicly available at https://github.com/RichardLRC/Peer-Review.

Large Language Models are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents for complex real-world tasks, yet existing systems often focus on isolated improvements without a unifying design for robustness and adaptability. We propose a generalist agent architecture that integrates three core components: a collective multi-agent framework combining planning and execution agents with critic model voting, a hierarchical memory system spanning working, semantic, and procedural layers, and a refined tool suite for search, code execution, and multimodal parsing. Evaluated on a comprehensive benchmark, our framework consistently outperforms open-source baselines and approaches the performance of proprietary systems. These results demonstrate the importance of system-level integration and highlight a path toward scalable, resilient, and adaptive AI assistants capable of operating across diverse domains and tasks.

Peer review serves as a backbone of academic research, but in most AI conferences, the review quality is degrading as the number of submissions explodes. To reliably detect low-quality reviews, we define misinformed review points as either "weaknesses" in a review that contain incorrect premises, or "questions" in a review that can be already answered by the paper. We verify that 15.2% of weaknesses and 26.4% of questions are misinformed and introduce ReviewScore indicating if a review point is misinformed. To evaluate the factuality of each premise of weaknesses, we propose an automated engine that reconstructs every explicit and implicit premise from a weakness. We build a human expert-annotated ReviewScore dataset to check the ability of LLMs to automate ReviewScore evaluation. Then, we measure human-model agreements on ReviewScore using eight current state-of-the-art LLMs and verify moderate agreements. We also prove that evaluating premise-level factuality shows significantly higher agreements than evaluating weakness-level factuality. A thorough disagreement analysis further supports a potential of fully automated ReviewScore evaluation.

The growing integration of large language models (LLMs) into the peer review process presents potential risks to the fairness and reliability of scholarly evaluation. While LLMs offer valuable assistance for reviewers with language refinement, there is growing concern over their use to generate substantive review content. Existing general AI-generated text detectors are vulnerable to paraphrasing attacks and struggle to distinguish between surface language refinement and substantial content generation, suggesting that they primarily rely on stylistic cues. When applied to peer review, this limitation can result in unfairly suspecting reviews with permissible AI-assisted language enhancement, while failing to catch deceptively humanized AI-generated reviews. To address this, we propose a paradigm shift from style-based to content-based detection. Specifically, we introduce CoCoNUTS, a content-oriented benchmark built upon a fine-grained dataset of AI-generated peer reviews, covering six distinct modes of human-AI collaboration. Furthermore, we develop CoCoDet, an AI review detector via a multi-task learning framework, designed to achieve more accurate and robust detection of AI involvement in review content. Our work offers a practical foundation for evaluating the use of LLMs in peer review, and contributes to the development of more precise, equitable, and reliable detection methods for real-world scholarly applications. Our code and data will be publicly available at https://github.com/Y1hanChen/COCONUTS.

Existing conversational recommendation (CR) systems usually suffer from insufficient item information when conducted on short dialogue history and unfamiliar items. Incorporating external information (e.g., reviews) is a potential solution to alleviate this problem. Given that reviews often provide a rich and detailed user experience on different interests, they are potential ideal resources for providing high-quality recommendations within an informative conversation. In this paper, we design a novel end-to-end framework, namely, Review-augmented Conversational Recommender (RevCore), where reviews are seamlessly incorporated to enrich item information and assist in generating both coherent and informative responses. In detail, we extract sentiment-consistent reviews, perform review-enriched and entity-based recommendations for item suggestions, as well as use a review-attentive encoder-decoder for response generation. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our approach in yielding better performance on both recommendation and conversation responding.

Machine learning methods have proven useful in transcribing historical data. However, results from even highly accurate methods require manual verification and correction. Such manual review can be time-consuming and expensive, therefore the objective of this paper was to make it more efficient. Previously, we used machine learning to transcribe 2.3 million handwritten occupation codes from the Norwegian 1950 census with high accuracy (97%). We manually reviewed the 90,000 (3%) codes with the lowest model confidence. We allocated those 90,000 codes to human reviewers, who used our annotation tool to review the codes. To assess reviewer agreement, some codes were assigned to multiple reviewers. We then analyzed the review results to understand the relationship between accuracy improvements and effort. Additionally, we interviewed the reviewers to improve the workflow. The reviewers corrected 62.8% of the labels and agreed with the model label in 31.9% of cases. About 0.2% of the images could not be assigned a label, while for 5.1% the reviewers were uncertain, or they assigned an invalid label. 9,000 images were independently reviewed by multiple reviewers, resulting in an agreement of 86.43% and disagreement of 8.96%. We learned that our automatic transcription is biased towards the most frequent codes, with a higher degree of misclassification for the lowest frequency codes. Our interview findings show that the reviewers did internal quality control and found our custom tool well-suited. So, only one reviewer is needed, but they should report uncertainty.

One of the grand challenges of artificial general intelligence is developing agents capable of conducting scientific research and discovering new knowledge. While frontier models have already been used as aids to human scientists, e.g. for brainstorming ideas, writing code, or prediction tasks, they still conduct only a small part of the scientific process. This paper presents the first comprehensive framework for fully automatic scientific discovery, enabling frontier large language models to perform research independently and communicate their findings. We introduce The AI Scientist, which generates novel research ideas, writes code, executes experiments, visualizes results, describes its findings by writing a full scientific paper, and then runs a simulated review process for evaluation. In principle, this process can be repeated to iteratively develop ideas in an open-ended fashion, acting like the human scientific community. We demonstrate its versatility by applying it to three distinct subfields of machine learning: diffusion modeling, transformer-based language modeling, and learning dynamics. Each idea is implemented and developed into a full paper at a cost of less than $15 per paper. To evaluate the generated papers, we design and validate an automated reviewer, which we show achieves near-human performance in evaluating paper scores. The AI Scientist can produce papers that exceed the acceptance threshold at a top machine learning conference as judged by our automated reviewer. This approach signifies the beginning of a new era in scientific discovery in machine learning: bringing the transformative benefits of AI agents to the entire research process of AI itself, and taking us closer to a world where endless affordable creativity and innovation can be unleashed on the world's most challenging problems. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/SakanaAI/AI-Scientist

We show that domain-general automatic evaluators can significantly improve the performance of agents for web navigation and device control. We experiment with multiple evaluation models that trade off between inference cost, modularity of design, and accuracy. We validate the performance of these models in several popular benchmarks for digital agents, finding between 74.4 and 92.9% agreement with oracle evaluation metrics. Finally, we use these evaluators to improve the performance of existing agents via fine-tuning and inference-time guidance. Without any additional supervision, we improve state-of-the-art performance by 29% on the popular benchmark WebArena, and achieve a 75% relative improvement in a challenging domain transfer scenario.

Facing scaling laws, video data from the internet becomes increasingly important. However, collecting extensive videos that meet specific needs is extremely labor-intensive and time-consuming. In this work, we study the way to expedite this collection process and propose VC-Agent, the first interactive agent that is able to understand users' queries and feedback, and accordingly retrieve/scale up relevant video clips with minimal user input. Specifically, considering the user interface, our agent defines various user-friendly ways for the user to specify requirements based on textual descriptions and confirmations. As for agent functions, we leverage existing multi-modal large language models to connect the user's requirements with the video content. More importantly, we propose two novel filtering policies that can be updated when user interaction is continually performed. Finally, we provide a new benchmark for personalized video dataset collection, and carefully conduct the user study to verify our agent's usage in various real scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our agent for customized video dataset collection. Project page: https://allenyidan.github.io/vcagent_page/.

The vision of a broadly capable and goal-directed agent, such as an Internet-browsing agent in the digital world and a household humanoid in the physical world, has rapidly advanced, thanks to the generalization capability of foundation models. Such a generalist agent needs to have a large and diverse skill repertoire, such as finding directions between two travel locations and buying specific items from the Internet. If each skill needs to be specified manually through a fixed set of human-annotated instructions, the agent's skill repertoire will necessarily be limited due to the quantity and diversity of human-annotated instructions. In this work, we address this challenge by proposing Proposer-Agent-Evaluator, an effective learning system that enables foundation model agents to autonomously discover and practice skills in the wild. At the heart of PAE is a context-aware task proposer that autonomously proposes tasks for the agent to practice with context information of the environment such as user demos or even just the name of the website itself for Internet-browsing agents. Then, the agent policy attempts those tasks with thoughts and actual grounded operations in the real world with resulting trajectories evaluated by an autonomous VLM-based success evaluator. The success evaluation serves as the reward signal for the agent to refine its policies through RL. We validate PAE on challenging vision-based web navigation, using both real-world and self-hosted websites from WebVoyager and WebArena.To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first effective learning system to apply autonomous task proposal with RL for agents that generalizes real-world human-annotated benchmarks with SOTA performances. Our open-source checkpoints and code can be found in https://yanqval.github.io/PAE/

Collaborative filtering drives many successful recommender systems but struggles with fine-grained user-item interactions and explainability. As users increasingly seek transparent recommendations, generating textual explanations through language models has become a critical research area. Existing methods employ either RNNs or Transformers. However, RNN-based approaches fail to leverage the capabilities of pre-trained Transformer models, whereas Transformer-based methods often suffer from suboptimal adaptation and neglect aspect modeling, which is crucial for personalized explanations. We propose ELIXIR (Efficient and LIghtweight model for eXplaIning Recommendations), a multi-task model combining rating prediction with personalized review generation. ELIXIR jointly learns global and aspect-specific representations of users and items, optimizing overall rating, aspect-level ratings, and review generation, with personalized attention to emphasize aspect importance. Based on a T5-small (60M) model, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our aspect-based architecture in guiding text generation in a personalized context, where state-of-the-art approaches exploit much larger models but fail to match user preferences as well. Experimental results on TripAdvisor and RateBeer demonstrate that ELIXIR significantly outperforms strong baseline models, especially in review generation.

Peer assessment has been widely applied across diverse academic fields over the last few decades and has demonstrated its effectiveness. However, the advantages of peer assessment can only be achieved with high-quality peer reviews. Previous studies have found that high-quality review comments usually comprise several features (e.g., contain suggestions, mention problems, use a positive tone). Thus, researchers have attempted to evaluate peer-review comments by detecting different features using various machine learning and deep learning models. However, there is no single study that investigates using a multi-task learning (MTL) model to detect multiple features simultaneously. This paper presents two MTL models for evaluating peer-review comments by leveraging the state-of-the-art pre-trained language representation models BERT and DistilBERT. Our results demonstrate that BERT-based models significantly outperform previous GloVe-based methods by around 6% in F1-score on tasks of detecting a single feature, and MTL further improves performance while reducing model size.

Given the rapid ascent of large language models (LLMs), we study the question: (How) can large language models help in reviewing of scientific papers or proposals? We first conduct some pilot studies where we find that (i) GPT-4 outperforms other LLMs (Bard, Vicuna, Koala, Alpaca, LLaMa, Dolly, OpenAssistant, StableLM), and (ii) prompting with a specific question (e.g., to identify errors) outperforms prompting to simply write a review. With these insights, we study the use of LLMs (specifically, GPT-4) for three tasks: 1. Identifying errors: We construct 13 short computer science papers each with a deliberately inserted error, and ask the LLM to check for the correctness of these papers. We observe that the LLM finds errors in 7 of them, spanning both mathematical and conceptual errors. 2. Verifying checklists: We task the LLM to verify 16 closed-ended checklist questions in the respective sections of 15 NeurIPS 2022 papers. We find that across 119 {checklist question, paper} pairs, the LLM had an 86.6% accuracy. 3. Choosing the "better" paper: We generate 10 pairs of abstracts, deliberately designing each pair in such a way that one abstract was clearly superior than the other. The LLM, however, struggled to discern these relatively straightforward distinctions accurately, committing errors in its evaluations for 6 out of the 10 pairs. Based on these experiments, we think that LLMs have a promising use as reviewing assistants for specific reviewing tasks, but not (yet) for complete evaluations of papers or proposals.

Language agents, built on top of language models (LMs), are systems that can interact with complex environments, such as the open web. In this work, we examine whether such agents can perform realistic and time-consuming tasks on the web, e.g., monitoring real-estate markets or locating relevant nearby businesses. We introduce AssistantBench, a challenging new benchmark consisting of 214 realistic tasks that can be automatically evaluated, covering different scenarios and domains. We find that AssistantBench exposes the limitations of current systems, including language models and retrieval-augmented language models, as no model reaches an accuracy of more than 25 points. While closed-book LMs perform well, they exhibit low precision since they tend to hallucinate facts. State-of-the-art web agents reach a score of near zero. Additionally, we introduce SeePlanAct (SPA), a new web agent that significantly outperforms previous agents, and an ensemble of SPA and closed-book models reaches the best overall performance. Moreover, we analyze failures of current systems and highlight that web navigation remains a major challenge.

In recent years, the rapid increase in scientific papers has overwhelmed traditional review mechanisms, resulting in varying quality of publications. Although existing methods have explored the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) for automated scientific reviewing, their generated contents are often generic or partial. To address the issues above, we introduce an automated paper reviewing framework SEA. It comprises of three modules: Standardization, Evaluation, and Analysis, which are represented by models SEA-S, SEA-E, and SEA-A, respectively. Initially, SEA-S distills data standardization capabilities of GPT-4 for integrating multiple reviews for a paper. Then, SEA-E utilizes standardized data for fine-tuning, enabling it to generate constructive reviews. Finally, SEA-A introduces a new evaluation metric called mismatch score to assess the consistency between paper contents and reviews. Moreover, we design a self-correction strategy to enhance the consistency. Extensive experimental results on datasets collected from eight venues show that SEA can generate valuable insights for authors to improve their papers.

Multi-agent systems commonly distribute tasks among specialized, autonomous agents, yet they often lack mechanisms to replace or reassign underperforming agents in real time. Inspired by the free-agency model of Major League Baseball, the Reinforcement Learning Free Agent (RLFA) algorithm introduces a reward-based mechanism to detect and remove agents exhibiting persistent underperformance and seamlessly insert more capable ones. Each agent internally uses a mixture-of-experts (MoE) approach, delegating incoming tasks to specialized sub-models under the guidance of a gating function. A primary use case is fraud detection, where RLFA promptly swaps out an agent whose detection accuracy dips below a preset threshold. A new agent is tested in a probationary mode, and upon demonstrating superior performance, fully replaces the underperformer. This dynamic, free-agency cycle ensures sustained accuracy, quicker adaptation to emerging threats, and minimal disruption to ongoing operations. By continually refreshing its roster of agents, the system fosters ongoing improvements and more resilient collaboration in multi-agent Generative AI environments.

Long-form writing agents require flexible integration and interaction across information retrieval, reasoning, and composition. Current approaches rely on predetermined workflows and rigid thinking patterns to generate outlines before writing, resulting in constrained adaptability during writing. In this paper we propose a general agent framework that achieves human-like adaptive writing through recursive task decomposition and dynamic integration of three fundamental task types, i.e. retrieval, reasoning, and composition. Our methodology features: 1) a planning mechanism that interleaves recursive task decomposition and execution, eliminating artificial restrictions on writing workflow; and 2) integration of task types that facilitates heterogeneous task decomposition. Evaluations on both fiction writing and technical report generation show that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches across all automatic evaluation metrics, which demonstrate the effectiveness and broad applicability of our proposed framework.

We introduce xbench, a dynamic, profession-aligned evaluation suite designed to bridge the gap between AI agent capabilities and real-world productivity. While existing benchmarks often focus on isolated technical skills, they may not accurately reflect the economic value agents deliver in professional settings. To address this, xbench targets commercially significant domains with evaluation tasks defined by industry professionals. Our framework creates metrics that strongly correlate with productivity value, enables prediction of Technology-Market Fit (TMF), and facilitates tracking of product capabilities over time. As our initial implementations, we present two benchmarks: Recruitment and Marketing. For Recruitment, we collect 50 tasks from real-world headhunting business scenarios to evaluate agents' abilities in company mapping, information retrieval, and talent sourcing. For Marketing, we assess agents' ability to match influencers with advertiser needs, evaluating their performance across 50 advertiser requirements using a curated pool of 836 candidate influencers. We present initial evaluation results for leading contemporary agents, establishing a baseline for these professional domains. Our continuously updated evalsets and evaluations are available at https://xbench.org.

Peer reviewing is a central process in modern research and essential for ensuring high quality and reliability of published work. At the same time, it is a time-consuming process and increasing interest in emerging fields often results in a high review workload, especially for senior researchers in this area. How to cope with this problem is an open question and it is vividly discussed across all major conferences. In this work, we propose an Argument Mining based approach for the assistance of editors, meta-reviewers, and reviewers. We demonstrate that the decision process in the field of scientific publications is driven by arguments and automatic argument identification is helpful in various use-cases. One of our findings is that arguments used in the peer-review process differ from arguments in other domains making the transfer of pre-trained models difficult. Therefore, we provide the community with a new peer-review dataset from different computer science conferences with annotated arguments. In our extensive empirical evaluation, we show that Argument Mining can be used to efficiently extract the most relevant parts from reviews, which are paramount for the publication decision. The process remains interpretable since the extracted arguments can be highlighted in a review without detaching them from their context.

Generating a review for an academic research paper is a complex task that requires a deep understanding of the document's content and the interdependencies between its sections. It demands not only insight into technical details but also an appreciation of the paper's overall coherence and structure. Recent methods have predominantly focused on fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) to address this challenge. However, they often overlook the computational and performance limitations imposed by long input token lengths. To address this, we introduce AutoRev, an Automatic Peer Review System for Academic Research Papers. Our novel framework represents an academic document as a graph, enabling the extraction of the most critical passages that contribute significantly to the review. This graph-based approach demonstrates effectiveness for review generation and is potentially adaptable to various downstream tasks, such as question answering, summarization, and document representation. When applied to review generation, our method outperforms SOTA baselines by an average of 58.72% across all evaluation metrics. We hope that our work will stimulate further research in applying graph-based extraction techniques to other downstream tasks in NLP. We plan to make our code public upon acceptance.

Large language models (LLMs) have sparked growing interest in automatic machine learning research agents. Among them, agents capable of autonomously proposing ideas and conducting machine learning experiments are particularly promising, as they maximize research automation and accelerate scientific progress by iteratively refining ideas based on experimental results. However, comprehensively evaluating such agents remains challenging. Existing benchmarks tend to overemphasize engineering aspects while neglecting academic rigor, creating barriers that obscure a clear assessment of an agent's scientific capabilities in machine learning research. They also suffer from limited task diversity, an overemphasis on application-oriented tasks over fundamental research problems, and limited scalability to realistic research settings. To address these limitations, we introduce FML-bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate automatic machine learning research agents on 8 diverse and fundamental machine learning research problems. It reduces coding burden, emphasizes fundamental problems rather than specific use cases, offers high task diversity, and is extensible to real-world machine learning GitHub repositories. Furthermore, we present a unified evaluation framework with five complementary metrics, designed to comprehensively assess agent performance on our benchmark. We evaluate state-of-the-art automatic research agents on FML-bench, and find that agents employing broad research exploration strategies outperform those focusing on narrow but deep exploration. These findings suggest that emphasizing the breadth of exploration may lead to more effective research outcomes than focusing solely on incremental refinement. Our benchmark is available at https://github.com/qrzou/FML-bench.

Contemporary evaluation techniques are inadequate for agentic systems. These approaches either focus exclusively on final outcomes -- ignoring the step-by-step nature of agentic systems, or require excessive manual labour. To address this, we introduce the Agent-as-a-Judge framework, wherein agentic systems are used to evaluate agentic systems. This is an organic extension of the LLM-as-a-Judge framework, incorporating agentic features that enable intermediate feedback for the entire task-solving process. We apply the Agent-as-a-Judge to the task of code generation. To overcome issues with existing benchmarks and provide a proof-of-concept testbed for Agent-as-a-Judge, we present DevAI, a new benchmark of 55 realistic automated AI development tasks. It includes rich manual annotations, like a total of 365 hierarchical user requirements. We benchmark three of the popular agentic systems using Agent-as-a-Judge and find it dramatically outperforms LLM-as-a-Judge and is as reliable as our human evaluation baseline. Altogether, we believe that Agent-as-a-Judge marks a concrete step forward for modern agentic systems -- by providing rich and reliable reward signals necessary for dynamic and scalable self-improvement.

From professional research to everyday planning, many tasks are bottlenecked by wide-scale information seeking, which is more repetitive than cognitively complex. With the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs), automated search agents powered by LLMs offer a promising solution to liberate humans from this tedious work. However, the capability of these agents to perform such "wide-context" collection reliably and completely remains largely unevaluated due to a lack of suitable benchmarks. To bridge this gap, we introduce WideSearch, a new benchmark engineered to evaluate agent reliability on these large-scale collection tasks. The benchmark features 200 manually curated questions (100 in English, 100 in Chinese) from over 15 diverse domains, grounded in real user queries. Each task requires agents to collect large-scale atomic information, which could be verified one by one objectively, and arrange it into a well-organized output. A rigorous five-stage quality control pipeline ensures the difficulty, completeness, and verifiability of the dataset. We benchmark over 10 state-of-the-art agentic search systems, including single-agent, multi-agent frameworks, and end-to-end commercial systems. Most systems achieve overall success rates near 0\%, with the best performer reaching just 5\%. However, given sufficient time, cross-validation by multiple human testers can achieve a near 100\% success rate. These results demonstrate that present search agents have critical deficiencies in large-scale information seeking, underscoring urgent areas for future research and development in agentic search. Our dataset, evaluation pipeline, and benchmark results have been publicly released at https://widesearch-seed.github.io/

Understanding and reasoning on the web-scale scientific literature is a crucial touchstone for large language model (LLM) based agents designed to support complex knowledge-intensive tasks. However, existing works are mainly restricted to tool-free tasks within isolated papers, largely due to the lack of a benchmark for cross-paper reasoning and multi-tool orchestration in real research scenarios. In this work, we propose PaperArena, an evaluation benchmark for agents to address real-world research questions that typically require integrating information across multiple papers with the assistance of external tools. Given a research question, agents should integrate diverse formats across multiple papers through reasoning and interacting with appropriate tools, thereby producing a well-grounded answer. To support standardized evaluation, we provide a modular and extensible platform for agent execution, offering tools such as multimodal parsing, context retrieval, and programmatic computation. Experimental results reveal that even the most advanced LLM powering a well-established agent system achieves merely 38.78% average accuracy. On the hard subset, accuracy drops to only 18.47%, highlighting great potential for improvement. We also present several empirical findings, including that all agents tested exhibit inefficient tool usage, often invoking more tools than necessary to solve a task. We invite the community to adopt PaperArena to develop and evaluate more capable agents for scientific discovery. Our code and data are available https://github.com/Melmaphother/PaperArena.

We present Sparrow, an information-seeking dialogue agent trained to be more helpful, correct, and harmless compared to prompted language model baselines. We use reinforcement learning from human feedback to train our models with two new additions to help human raters judge agent behaviour. First, to make our agent more helpful and harmless, we break down the requirements for good dialogue into natural language rules the agent should follow, and ask raters about each rule separately. We demonstrate that this breakdown enables us to collect more targeted human judgements of agent behaviour and allows for more efficient rule-conditional reward models. Second, our agent provides evidence from sources supporting factual claims when collecting preference judgements over model statements. For factual questions, evidence provided by Sparrow supports the sampled response 78% of the time. Sparrow is preferred more often than baselines while being more resilient to adversarial probing by humans, violating our rules only 8% of the time when probed. Finally, we conduct extensive analyses showing that though our model learns to follow our rules it can exhibit distributional biases.

We present initial results of a forthcoming benchmark for evaluating LLM agents on white-collar tasks of economic value. We evaluate agents on real-world "messy" open-web research tasks of the type that are routine in finance and consulting. In doing so, we lay the groundwork for an LLM agent evaluation suite where good performance directly corresponds to a large economic and societal impact. We built and tested several agent architectures with o1-preview, GPT-4o, Claude-3.5 Sonnet, Llama 3.1 (405b), and GPT-4o-mini. On average, LLM agents powered by Claude-3.5 Sonnet and o1-preview substantially outperformed agents using GPT-4o, with agents based on Llama 3.1 (405b) and GPT-4o-mini lagging noticeably behind. Across LLMs, a ReAct architecture with the ability to delegate subtasks to subagents performed best. In addition to quantitative evaluations, we qualitatively assessed the performance of the LLM agents by inspecting their traces and reflecting on their observations. Our evaluation represents the first in-depth assessment of agents' abilities to conduct challenging, economically valuable analyst-style research on the real open web.

Frontier AI agents show increasing promise as scientific research assistants, and may eventually be useful for extended, open-ended research workflows. However, in order to use agents for novel research, we must first assess the underlying faithfulness and correctness of their work. To evaluate agents as research assistants, we introduce ReplicationBench, an evaluation framework that tests whether agents can replicate entire research papers drawn from the astrophysics literature. Astrophysics, where research relies heavily on archival data and computational study while requiring little real-world experimentation, is a particularly useful testbed for AI agents in scientific research. We split each paper into tasks which require agents to replicate the paper's core contributions, including the experimental setup, derivations, data analysis, and codebase. Each task is co-developed with the original paper authors and targets a key scientific result, enabling objective evaluation of both faithfulness (adherence to original methods) and correctness (technical accuracy of results). ReplicationBench is extremely challenging for current frontier language models: even the best-performing language models score under 20%. We analyze ReplicationBench trajectories in collaboration with domain experts and find a rich, diverse set of failure modes for agents in scientific research. ReplicationBench establishes the first benchmark of paper-scale, expert-validated astrophysics research tasks, reveals insights about agent performance generalizable to other domains of data-driven science, and provides a scalable framework for measuring AI agents' reliability in scientific research.

High-quality code documentation is crucial for software development especially in the era of AI. However, generating it automatically using Large Language Models (LLMs) remains challenging, as existing approaches often produce incomplete, unhelpful, or factually incorrect outputs. We introduce DocAgent, a novel multi-agent collaborative system using topological code processing for incremental context building. Specialized agents (Reader, Searcher, Writer, Verifier, Orchestrator) then collaboratively generate documentation. We also propose a multi-faceted evaluation framework assessing Completeness, Helpfulness, and Truthfulness. Comprehensive experiments show DocAgent significantly outperforms baselines consistently. Our ablation study confirms the vital role of the topological processing order. DocAgent offers a robust approach for reliable code documentation generation in complex and proprietary repositories.

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into daily life, there is growing demand for AI assistants that are not only reactive but also proactive and personalized. While recent advances have pushed forward proactivity and personalization individually, their combination remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce ProPerSim, a new task and simulation framework for developing assistants capable of making timely, personalized recommendations in realistic home scenarios. In our simulation environment, a user agent with a rich persona interacts with the assistant, providing ratings on how well each suggestion aligns with its preferences and context. The assistant's goal is to use these ratings to learn and adapt to achieve higher scores over time. Built on ProPerSim, we propose ProPerAssistant, a retrieval-augmented, preference-aligned assistant that continually learns and adapts through user feedback. Experiments across 32 diverse personas show that ProPerAssistant adapts its strategy and steadily improves user satisfaction, highlighting the promise of uniting proactivity and personalization.

Constrained by the cost and ethical concerns of involving real seekers in AI-driven mental health, researchers develop LLM-based conversational agents (CAs) with tailored configurations, such as profiles, symptoms, and scenarios, to simulate seekers. While these efforts advance AI in mental health, achieving more realistic seeker simulation remains hindered by two key challenges: dynamic evolution and multi-session memory. Seekers' mental states often fluctuate during counseling, which typically spans multiple sessions. To address this, we propose AnnaAgent, an emotional and cognitive dynamic agent system equipped with tertiary memory. AnnaAgent incorporates an emotion modulator and a complaint elicitor trained on real counseling dialogues, enabling dynamic control of the simulator's configurations. Additionally, its tertiary memory mechanism effectively integrates short-term and long-term memory across sessions. Evaluation results, both automated and manual, demonstrate that AnnaAgent achieves more realistic seeker simulation in psychological counseling compared to existing baselines. The ethically reviewed and screened code can be found on https://github.com/sci-m-wang/AnnaAgent.

As digitalization and cloud technologies evolve, the web is becoming increasingly important in the modern society. Autonomous web agents based on large language models (LLMs) hold a great potential in work automation. It is therefore important to accurately measure and monitor the progression of their capabilities. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive and rigorous assessment of the current state of web agents. Our results depict a very different picture of the competency of current agents, suggesting over-optimism in previously reported results. This gap can be attributed to shortcomings in existing benchmarks. We introduce Online-Mind2Web, an online evaluation benchmark consisting of 300 diverse and realistic tasks spanning 136 websites. It enables us to evaluate web agents under a setting that approximates how real users use these agents. To facilitate more scalable evaluation and development, we also develop a novel LLM-as-a-Judge automatic evaluation method and show that it can achieve around 85% agreement with human judgment, substantially higher than existing methods. Finally, we present the first comprehensive comparative analysis of current web agents, highlighting both their strengths and limitations to inspire future research.

AI agents are systems capable of perceiving their environment, autonomously planning and executing tasks. Recent advancements in LLM have introduced a transformative paradigm for AI agents, enabling them to interact with external resources and tools through prompts. In such agents, the workflow integrates developer-written code, which manages framework construction and logic control, with LLM-generated natural language that enhances dynamic decision-making and interaction. However, discrepancies between developer-implemented logic and the dynamically generated content of LLMs in terms of behavior and expected outcomes can lead to defects, such as tool invocation failures and task execution errors. These issues introduce specific risks, leading to various defects in LLM-based AI Agents, such as service interruptions. Despite the importance of these issues, there is a lack of systematic work that focuses on analyzing LLM-based AI Agents to uncover defects in their code. In this paper, we present the first study focused on identifying and detecting defects in LLM Agents. We collected and analyzed 6,854 relevant posts from StackOverflow to define 8 types of agent defects. For each type, we provided detailed descriptions with an example. Then, we designed a static analysis tool, named Agentable, to detect the defects. Agentable leverages Code Property Graphs and LLMs to analyze Agent workflows by efficiently identifying specific code patterns and analyzing natural language descriptions. To evaluate Agentable, we constructed two datasets: AgentSet, consists of 84 real-world Agents, and AgentTest, which contains 78 Agents specifically designed to include various types of defects. Our results show that Agentable achieved an overall accuracy of 88.79% and a recall rate of 91.03%. Furthermore, our analysis reveals the 889 defects of the AgentSet, highlighting the prevalence of these defects.

Despite the remarkable capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in various reasoning tasks, they still struggle with table reasoning tasks, particularly in maintaining consistency throughout multi-step reasoning processes. While existing approaches have explored various decomposition strategies, they often lack effective mechanisms to identify and correct errors in intermediate reasoning steps, leading to cascading error propagation. To address these issues, we propose Table-Critic, a novel multi-agent framework that facilitates collaborative criticism and iterative refinement of the reasoning process until convergence to correct solutions. Our framework consists of four specialized agents: a Judge for error identification, a Critic for comprehensive critiques, a Refiner for process improvement, and a Curator for pattern distillation. To effectively deal with diverse and unpredictable error types, we introduce a self-evolving template tree that systematically accumulates critique knowledge through experience-driven learning and guides future reflections. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that Table-Critic achieves substantial improvements over existing methods, achieving superior accuracy and error correction rates while maintaining computational efficiency and lower solution degradation rate.

AI agents are an exciting new research direction, and agent development is driven by benchmarks. Our analysis of current agent benchmarks and evaluation practices reveals several shortcomings that hinder their usefulness in real-world applications. First, there is a narrow focus on accuracy without attention to other metrics. As a result, SOTA agents are needlessly complex and costly, and the community has reached mistaken conclusions about the sources of accuracy gains. Our focus on cost in addition to accuracy motivates the new goal of jointly optimizing the two metrics. We design and implement one such optimization, showing its potential to greatly reduce cost while maintaining accuracy. Second, the benchmarking needs of model and downstream developers have been conflated, making it hard to identify which agent would be best suited for a particular application. Third, many agent benchmarks have inadequate holdout sets, and sometimes none at all. This has led to agents that are fragile because they take shortcuts and overfit to the benchmark in various ways. We prescribe a principled framework for avoiding overfitting. Finally, there is a lack of standardization in evaluation practices, leading to a pervasive lack of reproducibility. We hope that the steps we introduce for addressing these shortcomings will spur the development of agents that are useful in the real world and not just accurate on benchmarks.

Advances in AI-assisted research have introduced powerful tools for literature retrieval, hypothesis generation, experimentation, and manuscript preparation. However, systems remain fragmented and lack human-centred workflows. To address these gaps, we introduce AIssistant, an agentic, open-source Human-AI collaborative framework designed to simplify the end-to-end creation of scientific workflows. Since our development is still in an early stage, we present here the first experiments with AIssistant for perspective and review research papers in machine learning. Our system integrates modular tools and agents for literature synthesis, section-wise experimentation, citation management, and automatic LaTeX paper text generation, while maintaining human oversight at every stage to ensure accuracy, coherence, and scholarly rigour. We conducted a comprehensive evaluation across three layers: (1) Independent Human Review, following NeurIPS double-blind standards; (2) Automated LLM Review, using GPT-5 as a scalable human review proxy; and (3) Program Chair Oversight, where the chair monitors the entire review process and makes final validation and acceptance decisions. The results demonstrate that AIssistant improves drafting efficiency and thematic consistency. Nonetheless, Human-AI collaboration remains essential for maintaining factual correctness, methodological soundness, and ethical compliance. Despite its effectiveness, we identify key limitations, including hallucinated citations, difficulty adapting to dynamic paper structures, and incomplete integration of multimodal content.

Deep Research Agents are a prominent category of LLM-based agents. By autonomously orchestrating multistep web exploration, targeted retrieval, and higher-order synthesis, they transform vast amounts of online information into analyst-grade, citation-rich reports--compressing hours of manual desk research into minutes. However, a comprehensive benchmark for systematically evaluating the capabilities of these agents remains absent. To bridge this gap, we present DeepResearch Bench, a benchmark consisting of 100 PhD-level research tasks, each meticulously crafted by domain experts across 22 distinct fields. Evaluating DRAs is inherently complex and labor-intensive. We therefore propose two novel methodologies that achieve strong alignment with human judgment. The first is a reference-based method with adaptive criteria to assess the quality of generated research reports. The other framework is introduced to evaluate DRA's information retrieval and collection capabilities by assessing its effective citation count and overall citation accuracy. We have open-sourced DeepResearch Bench and key components of these frameworks at https://github.com/Ayanami0730/deep_research_bench to accelerate the development of practical LLM-based agents.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently transformed from text-based assistants to autonomous agents capable of planning, reasoning, and iteratively improving their actions. While numerical reward signals and verifiers can effectively rank candidate actions, they often provide limited contextual guidance. In contrast, natural language feedback better aligns with the generative capabilities of LLMs, providing richer and more actionable suggestions. However, parsing and implementing this feedback effectively can be challenging for LLM-based agents. In this work, we introduce Critique-Guided Improvement (CGI), a novel two-player framework, comprising an actor model that explores an environment and a critic model that generates detailed nature language feedback. By training the critic to produce fine-grained assessments and actionable revisions, and the actor to utilize these critiques, our approach promotes more robust exploration of alternative strategies while avoiding local optima. Experiments in three interactive environments show that CGI outperforms existing baselines by a substantial margin. Notably, even a small critic model surpasses GPT-4 in feedback quality. The resulting actor achieves state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating the power of explicit iterative guidance to enhance decision-making in LLM-based agents.

Peer review is a cornerstone of quality control in scientific publishing. With the increasing workload, the unintended use of `quick' heuristics, referred to as lazy thinking, has emerged as a recurring issue compromising review quality. Automated methods to detect such heuristics can help improve the peer-reviewing process. However, there is limited NLP research on this issue, and no real-world dataset exists to support the development of detection tools. This work introduces LazyReview, a dataset of peer-review sentences annotated with fine-grained lazy thinking categories. Our analysis reveals that Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to detect these instances in a zero-shot setting. However, instruction-based fine-tuning on our dataset significantly boosts performance by 10-20 performance points, highlighting the importance of high-quality training data. Furthermore, a controlled experiment demonstrates that reviews revised with lazy thinking feedback are more comprehensive and actionable than those written without such feedback. We will release our dataset and the enhanced guidelines that can be used to train junior reviewers in the community. (Code available here: https://github.com/UKPLab/arxiv2025-lazy-review)

Extending the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) with functions or tools for environment interaction has led to the emergence of the agent paradigm. In industry, training an LLM is not always feasible because of the scarcity of domain data, legal holds on proprietary customer data, rapidly changing business requirements, and the need to prototype new assistants. Agents provide an elegant solution to the above by relying on the zero-shot reasoning abilities of the underlying LLM and utilizing tools to explore and reason over customer data and respond to user requests. However, there are two concerns here: (I) acquiring large scale customer queries for agent testing is time-consuming, and (II) high reliance on the tool call sequence (or trajectory) followed by the agent to respond to user queries may lead to unexpected or incorrect behavior. To address this, we propose MAG-V, a multi-agent framework to first generate a dataset of questions that mimic customer queries; and second, reverse-engineer alternate questions from the responses for trajectory verification. Initial results indicate that our synthetic data can improve agent performance on actual customer queries. Furthermore, our trajectory verification methodology, inspired by distant supervision and using traditional machine learning (ML) models, outperforms a GPT-4o judge baseline by 11% accuracy and matches the performance of a GPT-4 judge on our constructed dataset. Overall, our approach is a step towards unifying diverse task agents into a cohesive framework for achieving an aligned objective.

We present the Multilingual Amazon Reviews Corpus (MARC), a large-scale collection of Amazon reviews for multilingual text classification. The corpus contains reviews in English, Japanese, German, French, Spanish, and Chinese, which were collected between 2015 and 2019. Each record in the dataset contains the review text, the review title, the star rating, an anonymized reviewer ID, an anonymized product ID, and the coarse-grained product category (e.g., 'books', 'appliances', etc.) The corpus is balanced across the 5 possible star ratings, so each rating constitutes 20% of the reviews in each language. For each language, there are 200,000, 5,000, and 5,000 reviews in the training, development, and test sets, respectively. We report baseline results for supervised text classification and zero-shot cross-lingual transfer learning by fine-tuning a multilingual BERT model on reviews data. We propose the use of mean absolute error (MAE) instead of classification accuracy for this task, since MAE accounts for the ordinal nature of the ratings.

This paper proposes a query-level meta-agent named FlowReasoner to automate the design of query-level multi-agent systems, i.e., one system per user query. Our core idea is to incentivize a reasoning-based meta-agent via external execution feedback. Concretely, by distilling DeepSeek R1, we first endow the basic reasoning ability regarding the generation of multi-agent systems to FlowReasoner. Then, we further enhance it via reinforcement learning (RL) with external execution feedback. A multi-purpose reward is designed to guide the RL training from aspects of performance, complexity, and efficiency. In this manner, FlowReasoner is enabled to generate a personalized multi-agent system for each user query via deliberative reasoning. Experiments on both engineering and competition code benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of FlowReasoner. Remarkably, it surpasses o1-mini by 10.52% accuracy across three benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/FlowReasoner.

Text evaluation has historically posed significant challenges, often demanding substantial labor and time cost. With the emergence of large language models (LLMs), researchers have explored LLMs' potential as alternatives for human evaluation. While these single-agent-based approaches show promise, experimental results suggest that further advancements are needed to bridge the gap between their current effectiveness and human-level evaluation quality. Recognizing that best practices of human evaluation processes often involve multiple human annotators collaborating in the evaluation, we resort to a multi-agent debate framework, moving beyond single-agent prompting strategies. The multi-agent-based approach enables a group of LLMs to synergize with an array of intelligent counterparts, harnessing their distinct capabilities and expertise to enhance efficiency and effectiveness in handling intricate tasks. In this paper, we construct a multi-agent referee team called ChatEval to autonomously discuss and evaluate the quality of generated responses from different models on open-ended questions and traditional natural language generation (NLG) tasks. Our analysis shows that ChatEval transcends mere textual scoring, offering a human-mimicking evaluation process for reliable assessments. Our code is available at https://github.com/chanchimin/ChatEval.

Review websites, such as TripAdvisor and Yelp, allow users to post online reviews for various businesses, products and services, and have been recently shown to have a significant influence on consumer shopping behaviour. An online review typically consists of free-form text and a star rating out of 5. The problem of predicting a user's star rating for a product, given the user's text review for that product, is called Review Rating Prediction and has lately become a popular, albeit hard, problem in machine learning. In this paper, we treat Review Rating Prediction as a multi-class classification problem, and build sixteen different prediction models by combining four feature extraction methods, (i) unigrams, (ii) bigrams, (iii) trigrams and (iv) Latent Semantic Indexing, with four machine learning algorithms, (i) logistic regression, (ii) Naive Bayes classification, (iii) perceptrons, and (iv) linear Support Vector Classification. We analyse the performance of each of these sixteen models to come up with the best model for predicting the ratings from reviews. We use the dataset provided by Yelp for training and testing the models.

Agents are predominantly evaluated and optimized via task success metrics, which are coarse, rely on manual design from experts, and fail to reward intermediate emergent behaviors. We propose AutoLibra, a framework for agent evaluation, that transforms open-ended human feedback, e.g., "If you find that the button is disabled, don't click it again", or "This agent has too much autonomy to decide what to do on its own", into metrics for evaluating fine-grained behaviors in agent trajectories. AutoLibra accomplishes this by grounding feedback to an agent's behavior, clustering similar positive and negative behaviors, and creating concrete metrics with clear definitions and concrete examples, which can be used for prompting LLM-as-a-Judge as evaluators. We further propose two meta-metrics to evaluate the alignment of a set of (induced) metrics with open feedback: "coverage" and "redundancy". Through optimizing these meta-metrics, we experimentally demonstrate AutoLibra's ability to induce more concrete agent evaluation metrics than the ones proposed in previous agent evaluation benchmarks and discover new metrics to analyze agents. We also present two applications of AutoLibra in agent improvement: First, we show that AutoLibra-induced metrics serve as better prompt-engineering targets than the task success rate on a wide range of text game tasks, improving agent performance over baseline by a mean of 20%. Second, we show that AutoLibra can iteratively select high-quality fine-tuning data for web navigation agents. Our results suggest that AutoLibra is a powerful task-agnostic tool for evaluating and improving language agents.

The impressive performance of large language models (LLMs) has attracted considerable attention from the academic and industrial communities. Besides how to construct and train LLMs, how to effectively evaluate and compare the capacity of LLMs has also been well recognized as an important yet difficult problem. Existing paradigms rely on either human annotators or model-based evaluators to evaluate the performance of LLMs on different tasks. However, these paradigms often suffer from high cost, low generalizability, and inherited biases in practice, which make them incapable of supporting the sustainable development of LLMs in long term. In order to address these issues, inspired by the peer review systems widely used in academic publication process, we propose a novel framework that can automatically evaluate LLMs through a peer-review process. Specifically, for the evaluation of a specific task, we first construct a small qualification exam to select "reviewers" from a couple of powerful LLMs. Then, to actually evaluate the "submissions" written by different candidate LLMs, i.e., the evaluatees, we use the reviewer LLMs to rate or compare the submissions. The final ranking of evaluatee LLMs is generated based on the results provided by all reviewers. We conducted extensive experiments on text summarization tasks with eleven LLMs including GPT-4. The results demonstrate the existence of biasness when evaluating using a single LLM. Also, our PRE model outperforms all the baselines, illustrating the effectiveness of the peer review mechanism.

Peer review, as a cornerstone of scientific research, ensures the integrity and quality of scholarly work by providing authors with objective feedback for refinement. However, in the traditional peer review process, authors often receive vague or insufficiently detailed feedback, which provides limited assistance and leads to a more time-consuming review cycle. If authors can identify some specific weaknesses in their paper, they can not only address the reviewer's concerns but also improve their work. This raises the critical question of how to enhance authors' comprehension of review comments. In this paper, we present SEAGraph, a novel framework developed to clarify review comments by uncovering the underlying intentions behind them. We construct two types of graphs for each paper: the semantic mind graph, which captures the author's thought process, and the hierarchical background graph, which delineates the research domains related to the paper. A retrieval method is then designed to extract relevant content from both graphs, facilitating coherent explanations for the review comments. Extensive experiments show that SEAGraph excels in review comment understanding tasks, offering significant benefits to authors.

LLM web agents now browse and take actions on the open web, yet current agent evaluations are constrained to sandboxed environments or artificial tasks. We introduce BrowserArena, a live open-web agent evaluation platform that collects user-submitted tasks, runs Arena-style head-to-head comparisons, and uses step-level human feedback to surface failure modes. Collecting and analyzing step-level annotations on the agent traces, we identify three consistent failure modes: captcha resolution, pop-up banner removal, and direct navigation to URLs. By constructing targeted datasets to further study these tasks, we discover variations in how different language models navigate these failure modes. We find, for example, that o4-mini deploys a wider variety of strategies to circumvent captcha resolution than other models and DeepSeek-R1 consistently misleads users about pop-up banner closure. Our findings surface both the diversity and brittleness of current web agents. More broadly, our benchmarking methodology provides an approach to evaluating and understanding web agent failure modes at scale.

By consolidating scattered knowledge, the literature review provides a comprehensive understanding of the investigated topic. However, reading, conducting, or peer-reviewing review papers generally demands a significant investment of time and effort from researchers. To improve efficiency, this paper aims to provide a thorough review of reviews in the PAMI field from diverse perspectives. First, this paper proposes several article-level, field-normalized, and large language model-empowered bibliometric indicators to evaluate reviews. To facilitate this, a meta-data database dubbed RiPAMI, and a topic dataset are constructed. Second, based on these indicators, the study presents comparative analyses of representative reviews, unveiling the characteristics of publications across various fields, periods, and journals. The newly emerging AI-generated literature reviews are also appraised, and the observed differences suggest that most AI-generated reviews still lag behind human-authored reviews in multiple aspects. Third, we briefly provide a subjective evaluation of representative PAMI reviews and introduce a paper structure-based typology of literature reviews. This typology may improve the clarity and effectiveness for scholars in reading and writing reviews, while also serving as a guide for AI systems in generating well-organized reviews. Finally, this work offers insights into the current challenges of literature reviews and envisions future directions for their development.

State-of-the-art natural language processing models have been shown to achieve remarkable performance in 'closed-world' settings where all the labels in the evaluation set are known at training time. However, in real-world settings, 'novel' instances that do not belong to any known class are often observed. This renders the ability to deal with novelties crucial. To initiate a systematic research in this important area of 'dealing with novelties', we introduce 'NoveltyTask', a multi-stage task to evaluate a system's performance on pipelined novelty 'detection' and 'accommodation' tasks. We provide mathematical formulation of NoveltyTask and instantiate it with the authorship attribution task that pertains to identifying the correct author of a given text. We use Amazon reviews corpus and compile a large dataset (consisting of 250k instances across 200 authors/labels) for NoveltyTask. We conduct comprehensive experiments and explore several baseline methods for the task. Our results show that the methods achieve considerably low performance making the task challenging and leaving sufficient room for improvement. Finally, we believe our work will encourage research in this underexplored area of dealing with novelties, an important step en route to developing robust systems.

We describe WebSuite, the first diagnostic benchmark for generalist web agents, designed to systematically evaluate why agents fail. Advances in AI have led to the rise of numerous web agents that autonomously operate a browser to complete tasks. However, most existing benchmarks focus on strictly measuring whether an agent can or cannot complete a task, without giving insight on why. In this paper, we 1) develop a taxonomy of web actions to facilitate identifying common failure patterns, and 2) create an extensible benchmark suite to assess agents' performance on our taxonomized actions. This benchmark suite consists of both individual tasks, such as clicking a button, and end-to-end tasks, such as adding an item to a cart, and is designed such that any failure of a task can be attributed directly to a failure of a specific web action. We evaluate two popular generalist web agents, one text-based and one multimodal, and identify unique weaknesses for each agent. Because WebSuite can disaggregate task failures into specific action failures, this enables granular identification of which UX flows an individual agent has trouble with and immediately highlights promising avenues for improvement. These findings highlight the need for more focused benchmarking on where web agents go wrong to effectively improve agents beyond their weaker performance today.

Large language models (LLMs) are often praised for exhibiting near-human performance on a wide range of tasks and valued for their ability to hold a general conversation. The rise of agentic AI systems is, however, ushering in a mass of applications in which language models perform a small number of specialized tasks repetitively and with little variation. Here we lay out the position that small language models (SLMs) are sufficiently powerful, inherently more suitable, and necessarily more economical for many invocations in agentic systems, and are therefore the future of agentic AI. Our argumentation is grounded in the current level of capabilities exhibited by SLMs, the common architectures of agentic systems, and the economy of LM deployment. We further argue that in situations where general-purpose conversational abilities are essential, heterogeneous agentic systems (i.e., agents invoking multiple different models) are the natural choice. We discuss the potential barriers for the adoption of SLMs in agentic systems and outline a general LLM-to-SLM agent conversion algorithm. Our position, formulated as a value statement, highlights the significance of the operational and economic impact even a partial shift from LLMs to SLMs is to have on the AI agent industry. We aim to stimulate the discussion on the effective use of AI resources and hope to advance the efforts to lower the costs of AI of the present day. Calling for both contributions to and critique of our position, we commit to publishing all such correspondence at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/lpr/slm-agents.

Large Language Models (LLMs) agents are increasingly pivotal for addressing complex tasks in interactive environments. Existing work mainly focuses on enhancing performance through behavior cloning from stronger experts, yet such approaches often falter in real-world applications, mainly due to the inability to recover from errors. However, step-level critique data is difficult and expensive to collect. Automating and dynamically constructing self-critique datasets is thus crucial to empowering models with intelligent agent capabilities. In this work, we propose an iterative self-training framework, Agent-R, that enables language Agent to Reflect on the fly. Unlike traditional methods that reward or penalize actions based on correctness, Agent-R leverages MCTS to construct training data that recover correct trajectories from erroneous ones. A key challenge of agent reflection lies in the necessity for timely revision rather than waiting until the end of a rollout. To address this, we introduce a model-guided critique construction mechanism: the actor model identifies the first error step (within its current capability) in a failed trajectory. Starting from it, we splice it with the adjacent correct path, which shares the same parent node in the tree. This strategy enables the model to learn reflection based on its current policy, therefore yielding better learning efficiency. To further explore the scalability of this self-improvement paradigm, we investigate iterative refinement of both error correction capabilities and dataset construction. Our findings demonstrate that Agent-R continuously improves the model's ability to recover from errors and enables timely error correction. Experiments on three interactive environments show that Agent-R effectively equips agents to correct erroneous actions while avoiding loops, achieving superior performance compared to baseline methods (+5.59%).

The dream to create AI assistants as capable and versatile as the fictional J.A.R.V.I.S from Iron Man has long captivated imaginations. With the evolution of (multi-modal) large language models ((M)LLMs), this dream is closer to reality, as (M)LLM-based Agents using computing devices (e.g., computers and mobile phones) by operating within the environments and interfaces (e.g., Graphical User Interface (GUI)) provided by operating systems (OS) to automate tasks have significantly advanced. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of these advanced agents, designated as OS Agents. We begin by elucidating the fundamentals of OS Agents, exploring their key components including the environment, observation space, and action space, and outlining essential capabilities such as understanding, planning, and grounding. We then examine methodologies for constructing OS Agents, focusing on domain-specific foundation models and agent frameworks. A detailed review of evaluation protocols and benchmarks highlights how OS Agents are assessed across diverse tasks. Finally, we discuss current challenges and identify promising directions for future research, including safety and privacy, personalization and self-evolution. This survey aims to consolidate the state of OS Agents research, providing insights to guide both academic inquiry and industrial development. An open-source GitHub repository is maintained as a dynamic resource to foster further innovation in this field. We present a 9-page version of our work, accepted by ACL 2025, to provide a concise overview to the domain.

We introduce Agent Process Reward Models (AgentPRM), a simple and scalable framework for training LLM agents to continually improve through interactions. AgentPRM follows a lightweight actor-critic paradigm, using Monte Carlo rollouts to compute reward targets and optimize policies. It requires minimal modifications to existing RLHF pipelines, making it easy to integrate at scale. Beyond AgentPRM, we propose InversePRM, which learns process rewards directly from demonstrations without explicit outcome supervision. We also explore key challenges and opportunities, including exploration, process reward shaping, and model-predictive reasoning. We evaluate on ALFWorld benchmark, show that small 3B models trained with AgentPRM and InversePRM outperform strong GPT-4o baselines, and analyze test-time scaling, reward hacking, and more. Our code is available at: https://github.com/sanjibanc/agent_prm.

Large Language Models (LLMs) and multi-agent systems have shown impressive capabilities in natural language tasks but face challenges in clinical trial applications, primarily due to limited access to external knowledge. Recognizing the potential of advanced clinical trial tools that aggregate and predict based on the latest medical data, we propose an integrated solution to enhance their accessibility and utility. We introduce Clinical Agent System (ClinicalAgent), a clinical multi-agent system designed for clinical trial tasks, leveraging GPT-4, multi-agent architectures, LEAST-TO-MOST, and ReAct reasoning technology. This integration not only boosts LLM performance in clinical contexts but also introduces novel functionalities. The proposed method achieves competitive predictive performance in clinical trial outcome prediction (0.7908 PR-AUC), obtaining a 0.3326 improvement over the standard prompt Method. Publicly available code can be found at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ClinicalAgent-6671.

The automation of resume screening is a crucial aspect of the recruitment process in organizations. Automated resume screening systems often encompass a range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has notably enhanced the efficacy of these systems, showcasing their robust generalization abilities across diverse language-related tasks. Accompanying these developments are various agents based on LLMs, which facilitate their application in practical scenarios. This paper introduces a novel LLM-based agent framework for resume screening, aimed at enhancing efficiency and time management in recruitment processes. Our framework is distinct in its ability to efficiently summarize and grade each resume from a large dataset. Moreover, it utilizes LLM agents for decision-making, determining which candidates receive job offers, or which ones to bring in for interviews. To evaluate our framework, we constructed a dataset from actual resumes and conducted simulate a resume screening process. Subsequently, the outcomes of the simulation experiment were compared and subjected to detailed analysis. The results demonstrate that our automated resume screening framework is 11 times faster than traditional manual methods. Furthermore, by fine-tuning the LLMs, we observed a significant improvement in the F1 score, reaching 87.73\%, during the resume sentence classification phase. In the resume summarization and grading phase, our fine-tuned model surpassed the baseline performance of the GPT-3.5 model. Analysis of the decision-making efficacy of the LLM agents in the final offer stage further underscores the potential of LLM agents in transforming resume screening processes.

AI agents have the potential to aid users on a variety of consequential tasks, including conducting scientific research. To spur the development of useful agents, we need benchmarks that are challenging, but more crucially, directly correspond to real-world tasks of interest. This paper introduces such a benchmark, designed to measure the accuracy of AI agents in tackling a crucial yet surprisingly challenging aspect of scientific research: computational reproducibility. This task, fundamental to the scientific process, involves reproducing the results of a study using the provided code and data. We introduce CORE-Bench (Computational Reproducibility Agent Benchmark), a benchmark consisting of 270 tasks based on 90 scientific papers across three disciplines (computer science, social science, and medicine). Tasks in CORE-Bench consist of three difficulty levels and include both language-only and vision-language tasks. We provide an evaluation system to measure the accuracy of agents in a fast and parallelizable way, saving days of evaluation time for each run compared to a sequential implementation. We evaluated two baseline agents: the general-purpose AutoGPT and a task-specific agent called CORE-Agent. We tested both variants using two underlying language models: GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini. The best agent achieved an accuracy of 21% on the hardest task, showing the vast scope for improvement in automating routine scientific tasks. Having agents that can reproduce existing work is a necessary step towards building agents that can conduct novel research and could verify and improve the performance of other research agents. We hope that CORE-Bench can improve the state of reproducibility and spur the development of future research agents.

Benchmarks are essential for quantitatively tracking progress in AI. As AI agents become increasingly capable, researchers and practitioners have introduced agentic benchmarks to evaluate agents on complex, real-world tasks. These benchmarks typically measure agent capabilities by evaluating task outcomes via specific reward designs. However, we show that many agentic benchmarks have issues task setup or reward design. For example, SWE-bench Verified uses insufficient test cases, while TAU-bench counts empty responses as successful. Such issues can lead to under- or overestimation agents' performance by up to 100% in relative terms. To make agentic evaluation rigorous, we introduce the Agentic Benchmark Checklist (ABC), a set of guidelines that we synthesized from our benchmark-building experience, a survey of best practices, and previously reported issues. When applied to CVE-Bench, a benchmark with a particularly complex evaluation design, ABC reduces the performance overestimation by 33%.

We present RecoWorld, a blueprint for building simulated environments tailored to agentic recommender systems. Such environments give agents a proper training space where they can learn from errors without impacting real users. RecoWorld distinguishes itself with a dual-view architecture: a simulated user and an agentic recommender engage in multi-turn interactions aimed at maximizing user retention. The user simulator reviews recommended items, updates its mindset, and when sensing potential user disengagement, generates reflective instructions. The agentic recommender adapts its recommendations by incorporating these user instructions and reasoning traces, creating a dynamic feedback loop that actively engages users. This process leverages the exceptional reasoning capabilities of modern LLMs. We explore diverse content representations within the simulator, including text-based, multimodal, and semantic ID modeling, and discuss how multi-turn RL enables the recommender to refine its strategies through iterative interactions. RecoWorld also supports multi-agent simulations, allowing creators to simulate the responses of targeted user populations. It marks an important first step toward recommender systems where users and agents collaboratively shape personalized information streams. We envision new interaction paradigms where "user instructs, recommender responds," jointly optimizing user retention and engagement.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated near-human performance in summarization tasks based on traditional metrics such as ROUGE and BERTScore. However, these metrics do not adequately capture critical aspects of summarization quality, such as factual accuracy, particularly for long narratives (>100K tokens). Recent advances, such as LLM-as-a-Judge, address the limitations of metrics based on lexical similarity but still exhibit factual inconsistencies, especially in understanding character relationships and states. In this work, we introduce NarrativeFactScore, a novel "Agent-as-a-Judge" framework for evaluating and refining summaries. By leveraging a Character Knowledge Graph (CKG) extracted from input and generated summaries, NarrativeFactScore assesses the factual consistency and provides actionable guidance for refinement, such as identifying missing or erroneous facts. We demonstrate the effectiveness of NarrativeFactScore through a detailed workflow illustration and extensive validation on widely adopted benchmarks, achieving superior performance compared to competitive methods. Our results highlight the potential of agent-driven evaluation systems to improve the factual reliability of LLM-generated summaries.

LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems ( LLM-MAS ) have become a research hotspot since the rise of large language models (LLMs). However, with the continuous influx of new related works, the existing reviews struggle to capture them comprehensively. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of these studies. We first discuss the definition of LLM-MAS, a framework encompassing much of previous work. We provide an overview of the various applications of LLM-MAS in (i) solving complex tasks, (ii) simulating specific scenarios, and (iii) evaluating generative agents. Building on previous studies, we also highlight several challenges and propose future directions for research in this field.

LLM-based agent systems are emerging as a new software paradigm and have been widely adopted across diverse domains such as medicine, robotics, and programming. However, maintaining these systems requires substantial effort, as they are inevitably prone to bugs and continually evolve to meet changing external requirements. Therefore, automatically resolving agent issues (i.e., bug reports or feature requests) is a crucial and challenging task. While recent software engineering (SE) agents (e.g., SWE-agent) have shown promise in addressing issues in traditional software systems, it remains unclear how effectively they can resolve real-world issues in agent systems, which differ significantly from traditional software. To fill this gap, we first manually analyze 201 real-world agent issues and identify common categories of agent issues. We then spend 500 person-hours constructing AGENTISSUE-BENCH, a reproducible benchmark comprising 50 agent issue resolution tasks (each with an executable environment and failure-triggering tests). We further evaluate state-of-the-art SE agents on AGENTISSUE-BENCH and reveal their limited effectiveness (i.e., with only 3.33% - 12.67% resolution rates). These results underscore the unique challenges of maintaining agent systems compared to traditional software, highlighting the need for further research to develop advanced SE agents for resolving agent issues. Data and code are available at https://alfin06.github.io/AgentIssue-Bench-Leaderboard/#/ .

This paper develops an agentic framework that employs large language models (LLMs) to automate the generation of persuasive and grounded marketing content, using real estate listing descriptions as our focal application domain. Our method is designed to align the generated content with user preferences while highlighting useful factual attributes. This agent consists of three key modules: (1) Grounding Module, mimicking expert human behavior to predict marketable features; (2) Personalization Module, aligning content with user preferences; (3) Marketing Module, ensuring factual accuracy and the inclusion of localized features. We conduct systematic human-subject experiments in the domain of real estate marketing, with a focus group of potential house buyers. The results demonstrate that marketing descriptions generated by our approach are preferred over those written by human experts by a clear margin. Our findings suggest a promising LLM-based agentic framework to automate large-scale targeted marketing while ensuring responsible generation using only facts.

Large language models (LLMs) have made impressive progress in natural language processing. These models rely on proper human instructions (or prompts) to generate suitable responses. However, the potential of LLMs are not fully harnessed by commonly-used prompting methods: many human-in-the-loop algorithms employ ad-hoc procedures for prompt selection; while auto prompt generation approaches are essentially searching all possible prompts randomly and inefficiently. We propose Evoke, an automatic prompt refinement framework. In Evoke, there are two instances of a same LLM: one as a reviewer (LLM-Reviewer), it scores the current prompt; the other as an author (LLM-Author), it edits the prompt by considering the edit history and the reviewer's feedback. Such an author-reviewer feedback loop ensures that the prompt is refined in each iteration. We further aggregate a data selection approach to Evoke, where only the hard samples are exposed to the LLM. The hard samples are more important because the LLM can develop deeper understanding of the tasks out of them, while the model may already know how to solve the easier cases. Experimental results show that Evoke significantly outperforms existing methods. For instance, in the challenging task of logical fallacy detection, Evoke scores above 80, while all other baseline methods struggle to reach 20.

As the volume of peer-reviewed research surges, scholars increasingly rely on social platforms for discovery, while authors invest considerable effort in promoting their work to ensure visibility and citations. To streamline this process and reduce the reliance on human effort, we introduce Automatic Promotion (AutoPR), a novel task that transforms research papers into accurate, engaging, and timely public content. To enable rigorous evaluation, we release PRBench, a multimodal benchmark that links 512 peer-reviewed articles to high-quality promotional posts, assessing systems along three axes: Fidelity (accuracy and tone), Engagement (audience targeting and appeal), and Alignment (timing and channel optimization). We also introduce PRAgent, a multi-agent framework that automates AutoPR in three stages: content extraction with multimodal preparation, collaborative synthesis for polished outputs, and platform-specific adaptation to optimize norms, tone, and tagging for maximum reach. When compared to direct LLM pipelines on PRBench, PRAgent demonstrates substantial improvements, including a 604% increase in total watch time, a 438% rise in likes, and at least a 2.9x boost in overall engagement. Ablation studies show that platform modeling and targeted promotion contribute the most to these gains. Our results position AutoPR as a tractable, measurable research problem and provide a roadmap for scalable, impactful automated scholarly communication.

User-generated reviews significantly influence consumer decisions, particularly in the travel domain when selecting accommodations. This paper contribution comprising two main elements. Firstly, we present a novel dataset of authentic guest reviews sourced from a prominent online travel platform, totaling over two million reviews from 50,000 distinct accommodations. Secondly, we propose an innovative approach for personalized review ranking. Our method employs contrastive learning to intricately capture the relationship between a review and the contextual information of its respective reviewer. Through a comprehensive experimental study, we demonstrate that our approach surpasses several baselines across all reported metrics. Augmented by a comparative analysis, we showcase the efficacy of our method in elevating personalized review ranking. The implications of our research extend beyond the travel domain, with potential applications in other sectors where personalized review ranking is paramount, such as online e-commerce platforms.

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as agents, their integration into interactive environments and tool use introduce new safety challenges beyond those associated with the models themselves. However, the absence of comprehensive benchmarks for evaluating agent safety presents a significant barrier to effective assessment and further improvement. In this paper, we introduce Agent-SafetyBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the safety of LLM agents. Agent-SafetyBench encompasses 349 interaction environments and 2,000 test cases, evaluating 8 categories of safety risks and covering 10 common failure modes frequently encountered in unsafe interactions. Our evaluation of 16 popular LLM agents reveals a concerning result: none of the agents achieves a safety score above 60%. This highlights significant safety challenges in LLM agents and underscores the considerable need for improvement. Through quantitative analysis, we identify critical failure modes and summarize two fundamental safety detects in current LLM agents: lack of robustness and lack of risk awareness. Furthermore, our findings suggest that reliance on defense prompts alone is insufficient to address these safety issues, emphasizing the need for more advanced and robust strategies. We release Agent-SafetyBench at https://github.com/thu-coai/Agent-SafetyBench to facilitate further research and innovation in agent safety evaluation and improvement.

Online marketplaces will be transformed by autonomous AI agents acting on behalf of consumers. Rather than humans browsing and clicking, vision-language-model (VLM) agents can parse webpages, evaluate products, and transact. This raises a fundamental question: what do AI agents buy, and why? We develop ACES, a sandbox environment that pairs a platform-agnostic VLM agent with a fully programmable mock marketplace to study this question. We first conduct basic rationality checks in the context of simple tasks, and then, by randomizing product positions, prices, ratings, reviews, sponsored tags, and platform endorsements, we obtain causal estimates of how frontier VLMs actually shop. Models show strong but heterogeneous position effects: all favor the top row, yet different models prefer different columns, undermining the assumption of a universal "top" rank. They penalize sponsored tags and reward endorsements. Sensitivities to price, ratings, and reviews are directionally human-like but vary sharply in magnitude across models. Motivated by scenarios where sellers use AI agents to optimize product listings, we show that a seller-side agent that makes minor tweaks to product descriptions, targeting AI buyer preferences, can deliver substantial market-share gains if AI-mediated shopping dominates. We also find that modal product choices can differ across models and, in some cases, demand may concentrate on a few select products, raising competition questions. Together, our results illuminate how AI agents may behave in e-commerce settings and surface concrete seller strategy, platform design, and regulatory questions in an AI-mediated ecosystem.

Meta-analysis is a systematic research methodology that synthesizes data from multiple existing studies to derive comprehensive conclusions. This approach not only mitigates limitations inherent in individual studies but also facilitates novel discoveries through integrated data analysis. Traditional meta-analysis involves a complex multi-stage pipeline including literature retrieval, paper screening, and data extraction, which demands substantial human effort and time. However, while LLM-based methods can accelerate certain stages, they still face significant challenges, such as hallucinations in paper screening and data extraction. In this paper, we propose a multi-agent system, Manalyzer, which achieves end-to-end automated meta-analysis through tool calls. The hybrid review, hierarchical extraction, self-proving, and feedback checking strategies implemented in Manalyzer significantly alleviate these two hallucinations. To comprehensively evaluate the performance of meta-analysis, we construct a new benchmark comprising 729 papers across 3 domains, encompassing text, image, and table modalities, with over 10,000 data points. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Manalyzer achieves significant performance improvements over the LLM baseline in multi meta-analysis tasks. Project page: https://black-yt.github.io/meta-analysis-page/ .

In this paper, we introduce InfiAgent-DABench, the first benchmark specifically designed to evaluate LLM-based agents on data analysis tasks. These tasks require agents to end-to-end solving complex tasks by interacting with an execution environment. This benchmark contains DAEval, a dataset consisting of 257 data analysis questions derived from 52 CSV files, and an agent framework which incorporates LLMs to serve as data analysis agents for both serving and evaluation. Since data analysis questions are often open-ended and hard to evaluate without human supervision, we adopt a format-prompting technique to convert each question into a closed-form format so that they can be automatically evaluated. Our extensive benchmarking of 34 LLMs uncovers the current challenges encountered in data analysis tasks. In addition, building on top of our agent framework, we develop a specialized agent, DAAgent, which surpasses GPT-3.5 by 3.9% on DABench. Evaluation datasets and toolkits for InfiAgent-DABench are released at https://github.com/InfiAgent/InfiAgent .

Reward models (RMs) are crucial for the training and inference-time scaling up of large language models (LLMs). However, existing reward models primarily focus on human preferences, neglecting verifiable correctness signals which have shown strong potential in training LLMs. In this paper, we propose agentic reward modeling, a reward system that combines reward models with verifiable correctness signals from different aspects to provide reliable rewards. We empirically implement a reward agent, named RewardAgent, that combines human preference rewards with two verifiable signals: factuality and instruction following, to provide more reliable rewards. We conduct comprehensive experiments on existing reward model benchmarks and inference time best-of-n searches on real-world downstream tasks. RewardAgent significantly outperforms vanilla reward models, demonstrating its effectiveness. We further construct training preference pairs using RewardAgent and train an LLM with the DPO objective, achieving superior performance on various NLP benchmarks compared to conventional reward models. Our codes are publicly released to facilitate further research (https://github.com/THU-KEG/Agentic-Reward-Modeling).

Long-form text generation remains a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs), particularly in maintaining coherence, ensuring logical consistency, and preserving text quality as sequence length increases. To address these limitations, we propose SuperWriter-Agent, an agent-based framework designed to enhance the quality and consistency of long-form text generation. SuperWriter-Agent introduces explicit structured thinking-through planning and refinement stages into the generation pipeline, guiding the model to follow a more deliberate and cognitively grounded process akin to that of a professional writer. Based on this framework, we construct a supervised fine-tuning dataset to train a 7B SuperWriter-LM. We further develop a hierarchical Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) procedure that uses Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to propagate final quality assessments and optimize each generation step accordingly. Empirical results across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that SuperWriter-LM achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing even larger-scale baseline models in both automatic evaluation and human evaluation. Furthermore, comprehensive ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of hierarchical DPO and underscore the value of incorporating structured thinking steps to improve the quality of long-form text generation.

Driven by curiosity, humans have continually sought to explore and understand the world around them, leading to the invention of various tools to satiate this inquisitiveness. Despite not having the capacity to process and memorize vast amounts of information in their brains, humans excel in critical thinking, planning, reflection, and harnessing available tools to interact with and interpret the world, enabling them to find answers efficiently. The recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) suggest that machines might also possess the aforementioned human-like capabilities, allowing them to exhibit powerful abilities even with a constrained parameter count. In this paper, we introduce KwaiAgents, a generalized information-seeking agent system based on LLMs. Within KwaiAgents, we propose an agent system that employs LLMs as its cognitive core, which is capable of understanding a user's query, behavior guidelines, and referencing external documents. The agent can also update and retrieve information from its internal memory, plan and execute actions using a time-aware search-browse toolkit, and ultimately provide a comprehensive response. We further investigate the system's performance when powered by LLMs less advanced than GPT-4, and introduce the Meta-Agent Tuning (MAT) framework, designed to ensure even an open-sourced 7B or 13B model performs well among many agent systems. We exploit both benchmark and human evaluations to systematically validate these capabilities. Extensive experiments show the superiority of our agent system compared to other autonomous agents and highlight the enhanced generalized agent-abilities of our fine-tuned LLMs.

In natural language processing applied to the clinical domain, utilizing large language models has emerged as a promising avenue for error detection and correction on clinical notes, a knowledge-intensive task for which annotated data is scarce. This paper presents MedReAct'N'MedReFlex, which leverages a suite of four LLM-based medical agents. The MedReAct agent initiates the process by observing, analyzing, and taking action, generating trajectories to guide the search to target a potential error in the clinical notes. Subsequently, the MedEval agent employs five evaluators to assess the targeted error and the proposed correction. In cases where MedReAct's actions prove insufficient, the MedReFlex agent intervenes, engaging in reflective analysis and proposing alternative strategies. Finally, the MedFinalParser agent formats the final output, preserving the original style while ensuring the integrity of the error correction process. One core component of our method is our RAG pipeline based on our ClinicalCorp corpora. Among other well-known sources containing clinical guidelines and information, we preprocess and release the open-source MedWiki dataset for clinical RAG application. Our results demonstrate the central role of our RAG approach with ClinicalCorp leveraged through the MedReAct'N'MedReFlex framework. It achieved the ninth rank on the MEDIQA-CORR 2024 final leaderboard.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have sparked optimism about their potential to accelerate scientific discovery, with a growing number of works proposing research agents that autonomously generate and validate new ideas. Despite this, no evaluations have shown that LLM systems can take the very first step of producing novel, expert-level ideas, let alone perform the entire research process. We address this by establishing an experimental design that evaluates research idea generation while controlling for confounders and performs the first head-to-head comparison between expert NLP researchers and an LLM ideation agent. By recruiting over 100 NLP researchers to write novel ideas and blind reviews of both LLM and human ideas, we obtain the first statistically significant conclusion on current LLM capabilities for research ideation: we find LLM-generated ideas are judged as more novel (p < 0.05) than human expert ideas while being judged slightly weaker on feasibility. Studying our agent baselines closely, we identify open problems in building and evaluating research agents, including failures of LLM self-evaluation and their lack of diversity in generation. Finally, we acknowledge that human judgements of novelty can be difficult, even by experts, and propose an end-to-end study design which recruits researchers to execute these ideas into full projects, enabling us to study whether these novelty and feasibility judgements result in meaningful differences in research outcome.

Temporal progression is an integral part of knowledge accumulation and update. Web search is frequently adopted as grounding for agent knowledge, yet an improper configuration affects the quality of the agent's responses. Here, we assess the agent behavior using distinct date-controlled tools (DCTs) as stress test to measure the knowledge variability of large language model (LLM) agents. We demonstrate the temporal effects of an LLM agent as a writing assistant, which uses web search to complete scientific publication abstracts. We show that the temporality of search engine translates into tool-dependent agent performance but can be alleviated with base model choice and explicit reasoning instructions such as chain-of-thought prompting. Our results indicate that agent design and evaluations should take a dynamical view and implement measures to account for the temporal influence of external resources to ensure reliability.

DeepResearch agents represent a transformative AI paradigm, conducting expert-level research through sophisticated reasoning and multi-tool integration. However, evaluating these systems remains critically challenging due to open-ended research scenarios and existing benchmarks that focus on isolated capabilities rather than holistic performance. Unlike traditional LLM tasks, DeepResearch systems must synthesize diverse sources, generate insights, and present coherent findings, which are capabilities that resist simple verification. To address this gap, we introduce DeepResearch-ReportEval, a comprehensive framework designed to assess DeepResearch systems through their most representative outputs: research reports. Our approach systematically measures three dimensions: quality, redundancy, and factuality, using an innovative LLM-as-a-Judge methodology achieving strong expert concordance. We contribute a standardized benchmark of 100 curated queries spanning 12 real-world categories, enabling systematic capability comparison. Our evaluation of four leading commercial systems reveals distinct design philosophies and performance trade-offs, establishing foundational insights as DeepResearch evolves from information assistants toward intelligent research partners. Source code and data are available at: https://github.com/HKUDS/DeepResearch-Eval.

Assessing the reproducibility of social science papers is essential for promoting rigor in research processes, but manual assessment is costly. With recent advances in agentic AI systems (i.e., AI agents), we seek to evaluate their capability to automate this process. However, existing benchmarks for reproducing research papers (1) focus solely on reproducing results using provided code and data without assessing their consistency with the paper, (2) oversimplify real-world scenarios, and (3) lack necessary diversity in data formats and programming languages. To address these issues, we introduce REPRO-Bench, a collection of 112 task instances, each representing a social science paper with a publicly available reproduction report. The agents are tasked with assessing the reproducibility of the paper based on the original paper PDF and the corresponding reproduction package. REPRO-Bench features end-to-end evaluation tasks on the reproducibility of social science papers with complexity comparable to real-world assessments. We evaluate three representative AI agents on REPRO-Bench, with the best-performing agent achieving an accuracy of only 21.4%. Building on our empirical analysis, we develop REPRO-Agent, which improves the highest accuracy achieved by existing agents by 71%. We conclude that more advanced AI agents should be developed to automate real-world reproducibility assessment. REPRO-Bench is publicly available at https://github.com/uiuc-kang-lab/REPRO-Bench.

Critique, as a natural language description for assessing the quality of model-generated content, has been proven to play an essential role in the training, evaluation, and refinement of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, there is a lack of principled understanding in evaluating the quality of the critique itself. In this paper, we pioneer the critique of critique, termed MetaCritique, which is a framework to evaluate the critique from two aspects, i.e., factuality as precision score and comprehensiveness as recall score. We calculate the harmonic mean of precision and recall as the overall rating called F1 score. To obtain a reliable evaluation outcome, we propose Atomic Information Units (AIUs), which describe the critique in a more fine-grained manner. MetaCritique takes each AIU into account and aggregates each AIU's judgment for the overall score. Moreover, given the evaluation process involves intricate reasoning, our MetaCritique provides a natural language rationale to support each judgment. We construct a meta-evaluation dataset containing 300 critiques (2653 AIUs) across four tasks (question answering, reasoning, entailment, and summarization), and we conduct a comparative study to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness. Experiments also show superior critique judged by MetaCritique leads to better refinement, indicating generative artificial intelligence indeed has the potential to be significantly advanced with our MetaCritique. We will release relevant code and meta-evaluation datasets at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/MetaCritique.

This paper summarizes our entries to both subtasks of the first DialDoc shared task which focuses on the agent response prediction task in goal-oriented document-grounded dialogs. The task is split into two subtasks: predicting a span in a document that grounds an agent turn and generating an agent response based on a dialog and grounding document. In the first subtask, we restrict the set of valid spans to the ones defined in the dataset, use a biaffine classifier to model spans, and finally use an ensemble of different models. For the second subtask, we use a cascaded model which grounds the response prediction on the predicted span instead of the full document. With these approaches, we obtain significant improvements in both subtasks compared to the baseline.

The advancement of natural language processing (NLP) has been significantly boosted by the development of transformer-based large language models (LLMs). These models have revolutionized NLP tasks, particularly in code generation, aiding developers in creating software with enhanced efficiency. Despite their advancements, challenges in balancing code snippet generation with effective test case generation and execution persist. To address these issues, this paper introduces Multi-Agent Assistant Code Generation (AgentCoder), a novel solution comprising a multi-agent framework with specialized agents: the programmer agent, the test designer agent, and the test executor agent. During the coding procedure, the programmer agent will focus on the code generation and refinement based on the test executor agent's feedback. The test designer agent will generate test cases for the generated code, and the test executor agent will run the code with the test cases and write the feedback to the programmer. This collaborative system ensures robust code generation, surpassing the limitations of single-agent models and traditional methodologies. Our extensive experiments on 9 code generation models and 12 enhancement approaches showcase AgentCoder's superior performance over existing code generation models and prompt engineering techniques across various benchmarks. For example, AgentCoder achieves 77.4% and 89.1% pass@1 in HumanEval-ET and MBPP-ET with GPT-3.5, while SOTA baselines obtain only 69.5% and 63.0%.

Recent progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) has drawn attention to their potential for accelerating drug discovery. However, a central problem remains: translating theoretical ideas into robust implementations in the highly specialized context of pharmaceutical research. This limitation prevents practitioners from making full use of the latest AI developments in drug discovery. To address this challenge, we introduce DrugAgent, a multi-agent framework that automates machine learning (ML) programming for drug discovery tasks. DrugAgent employs an LLM Planner that formulates high-level ideas and an LLM Instructor that identifies and integrates domain knowledge when implementing those ideas. We present case studies on three representative drug discovery tasks. Our results show that DrugAgent consistently outperforms leading baselines, including a relative improvement of 4.92% in ROC-AUC compared to ReAct for drug-target interaction (DTI). DrugAgent is publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/drugagent-5C42/.

Recent advancements in machine translation (MT) have significantly enhanced translation quality across various domains. However, the translation of literary texts remains a formidable challenge due to their complex language, figurative expressions, and cultural nuances. In this work, we introduce a novel multi-agent framework based on large language models (LLMs) for literary translation, implemented as a company called TransAgents, which mirrors traditional translation publication process by leveraging the collective capabilities of multiple agents, to address the intricate demands of translating literary works. To evaluate the effectiveness of our system, we propose two innovative evaluation strategies: Monolingual Human Preference (MHP) and Bilingual LLM Preference (BLP). MHP assesses translations from the perspective of monolingual readers of the target language, while BLP uses advanced LLMs to compare translations directly with the original texts. Empirical findings indicate that despite lower d-BLEU scores, translations from TransAgents are preferred by both human evaluators and LLMs over human-written references, particularly in genres requiring domain-specific knowledge. We also highlight the strengths and limitations of TransAgents through case studies and suggests directions for future research.

Many works have recently proposed the use of Large Language Model (LLM) based agents for performing `repository level' tasks, loosely defined as a set of tasks whose scopes are greater than a single file. This has led to speculation that the orchestration of these repository-level tasks could lead to software engineering agents capable of performing almost independently of human intervention. However, of the suite of tasks that would need to be performed by this autonomous software engineering agent, we argue that one important task is missing, which is to fulfil project level dependency by installing other repositories. To investigate the feasibility of this repository level installation task, we introduce a benchmark of of repository installation tasks curated from 40 open source Python projects, which includes a ground truth installation process for each target repository. Further, we propose Installamatic, an agent which aims to perform and verify the installation of a given repository by searching for relevant instructions from documentation in the repository. Empirical experiments reveal that that 55% of the studied repositories can be automatically installed by our agent at least one out of ten times. Through further analysis, we identify the common causes for our agent's inability to install a repository, discuss the challenges faced in the design and implementation of such an agent and consider the implications that such an agent could have for developers.

The rapid growth of scientific literature demands robust tools for automated survey-generation. However, current large language model (LLM)-based methods often lack in-depth analysis, structural coherence, and reliable citations. To address these limitations, we introduce SciSage, a multi-agent framework employing a reflect-when-you-write paradigm. SciSage features a hierarchical Reflector agent that critically evaluates drafts at outline, section, and document levels, collaborating with specialized agents for query interpretation, content retrieval, and refinement. We also release SurveyScope, a rigorously curated benchmark of 46 high-impact papers (2020-2025) across 11 computer science domains, with strict recency and citation-based quality controls. Evaluations demonstrate that SciSage outperforms state-of-the-art baselines (LLM x MapReduce-V2, AutoSurvey), achieving +1.73 points in document coherence and +32% in citation F1 scores. Human evaluations reveal mixed outcomes (3 wins vs. 7 losses against human-written surveys), but highlight SciSage's strengths in topical breadth and retrieval efficiency. Overall, SciSage offers a promising foundation for research-assistive writing tools.

This paper presents first successful steps in designing search agents that learn meta-strategies for iterative query refinement in information-seeking tasks. Our approach uses machine reading to guide the selection of refinement terms from aggregated search results. Agents are then empowered with simple but effective search operators to exert fine-grained and transparent control over queries and search results. We develop a novel way of generating synthetic search sessions, which leverages the power of transformer-based language models through (self-)supervised learning. We also present a reinforcement learning agent with dynamically constrained actions that learns interactive search strategies from scratch. Our search agents obtain retrieval and answer quality performance comparable to recent neural methods, using only a traditional term-based BM25 ranking function and interpretable discrete reranking and filtering actions.

Computer use agents are LLM-based agents that can directly interact with a graphical user interface, by processing screenshots or accessibility trees. While these systems are gaining popularity, their safety has been largely overlooked, despite the fact that evaluating and understanding their potential for harmful behavior is essential for widespread adoption. To address this gap, we introduce OS-Harm, a new benchmark for measuring safety of computer use agents. OS-Harm is built on top of the OSWorld environment and aims to test models across three categories of harm: deliberate user misuse, prompt injection attacks, and model misbehavior. To cover these cases, we create 150 tasks that span several types of safety violations (harassment, copyright infringement, disinformation, data exfiltration, etc.) and require the agent to interact with a variety of OS applications (email client, code editor, browser, etc.). Moreover, we propose an automated judge to evaluate both accuracy and safety of agents that achieves high agreement with human annotations (0.76 and 0.79 F1 score). We evaluate computer use agents based on a range of frontier models - such as o4-mini, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Gemini 2.5 Pro - and provide insights into their safety. In particular, all models tend to directly comply with many deliberate misuse queries, are relatively vulnerable to static prompt injections, and occasionally perform unsafe actions. The OS-Harm benchmark is available at https://github.com/tml-epfl/os-harm.

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is fundamentally limited by the capacity of humans to correctly evaluate model output. To improve human evaluation ability and overcome that limitation this work trains "critic" models that help humans to more accurately evaluate model-written code. These critics are themselves LLMs trained with RLHF to write natural language feedback highlighting problems in code from real-world assistant tasks. On code containing naturally occurring LLM errors model-written critiques are preferred over human critiques in 63% of cases, and human evaluation finds that models catch more bugs than human contractors paid for code review. We further confirm that our fine-tuned LLM critics can successfully identify hundreds of errors in ChatGPT training data rated as "flawless", even though the majority of those tasks are non-code tasks and thus out-of-distribution for the critic model. Critics can have limitations of their own, including hallucinated bugs that could mislead humans into making mistakes they might have otherwise avoided, but human-machine teams of critics and contractors catch similar numbers of bugs to LLM critics while hallucinating less than LLMs alone.

Complex dialog systems often use retrieved evidence to facilitate factual responses. Such RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) systems retrieve from massive heterogeneous data stores that are usually architected as multiple indexes or APIs instead of a single monolithic source. For a given query, relevant evidence needs to be retrieved from one or a small subset of possible retrieval sources. Complex queries can even require multi-step retrieval. For example, a conversational agent on a retail site answering customer questions about past orders will need to retrieve the appropriate customer order first and then the evidence relevant to the customer's question in the context of the ordered product. Most RAG Agents handle such Chain-of-Thought (CoT) tasks by interleaving reasoning and retrieval steps. However, each reasoning step directly adds to the latency of the system. For large models (>100B parameters) this latency cost is significant -- in the order of multiple seconds. Multi-agent systems may classify the query to a single Agent associated with a retrieval source, though this means that a (small) classification model dictates the performance of a large language model. In this work we present REAPER (REAsoning-based PlannER) - an LLM based planner to generate retrieval plans in conversational systems. We show significant gains in latency over Agent-based systems and are able to scale easily to new and unseen use cases as compared to classification-based planning. Though our method can be applied to any RAG system, we show our results in the context of Rufus -- Amazon's conversational shopping assistant.

REST APIs play important roles in enriching the action space of web agents, yet most API-based agents rely on curated and uniform toolsets that do not reflect the complexity of real-world APIs. Building tool-using agents for arbitrary domains remains a major challenge, as it requires reading unstructured API documentation, testing APIs and inferring correct parameters. We propose Doc2Agent, a scalable pipeline to build agents that can call Python-based tools generated from API documentation. Doc2Agent generates executable tools from API documentations and iteratively refines them using a code agent. We evaluate our approach on real-world APIs, WebArena APIs, and research APIs, producing validated tools. We achieved a 55\% relative performance improvement with 90\% lower cost compared to direct API calling on WebArena benchmark. A domain-specific agent built for glycomaterial science further demonstrates the pipeline's adaptability to complex, knowledge-rich tasks. Doc2Agent offers a generalizable solution for building tool agents from unstructured API documentation at scale.

Language models are known to hallucinate incorrect information, and it is unclear if they are sufficiently accurate and reliable for use in scientific research. We developed a rigorous human-AI comparison methodology to evaluate language model agents on real-world literature search tasks covering information retrieval, summarization, and contradiction detection tasks. We show that PaperQA2, a frontier language model agent optimized for improved factuality, matches or exceeds subject matter expert performance on three realistic literature research tasks without any restrictions on humans (i.e., full access to internet, search tools, and time). PaperQA2 writes cited, Wikipedia-style summaries of scientific topics that are significantly more accurate than existing, human-written Wikipedia articles. We also introduce a hard benchmark for scientific literature research called LitQA2 that guided design of PaperQA2, leading to it exceeding human performance. Finally, we apply PaperQA2 to identify contradictions within the scientific literature, an important scientific task that is challenging for humans. PaperQA2 identifies 2.34 +/- 1.99 contradictions per paper in a random subset of biology papers, of which 70% are validated by human experts. These results demonstrate that language model agents are now capable of exceeding domain experts across meaningful tasks on scientific literature.

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.

Language model heavily depends on high-quality data for optimal performance. Existing approaches rely on manually designed heuristics, the perplexity of existing models, training classifiers, or careful prompt engineering, which require significant expert experience and human annotation effort while introduce biases. We introduce CritiQ, a novel data selection method that automatically mines criteria from human preferences for data quality with only sim30 human-annotated pairs and performs efficient data selection. The main component, CritiQ Flow, employs a manager agent to evolve quality criteria and worker agents to make pairwise judgments. We build a knowledge base that extracts quality criteria from previous work to boost CritiQ Flow. Compared to perplexity- and classifier- based methods, verbal criteria are more interpretable and possess reusable value. After deriving the criteria, we train the CritiQ Scorer to give quality scores and perform efficient data selection. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in the code, math, and logic domains, achieving high accuracy on human-annotated test sets. To validate the quality of the selected data, we continually train Llama 3.1 models and observe improved performance on downstream tasks compared to uniform sampling. Ablation studies validate the benefits of the knowledge base and the reflection process. We analyze how criteria evolve and the effectiveness of majority voting.

While user-generated product reviews often contain large quantities of information, their utility in addressing natural language product queries has been limited, with a key challenge being the need to aggregate information from multiple low-level sources (reviews) to a higher item level during retrieval. Existing methods for reviewed-item retrieval (RIR) typically take a late fusion (LF) approach which computes query-item scores by simply averaging the top-K query-review similarity scores for an item. However, we demonstrate that for multi-aspect queries and multi-aspect items, LF is highly sensitive to the distribution of aspects covered by reviews in terms of aspect frequency and the degree of aspect separation across reviews. To address these LF failures, we propose several novel aspect fusion (AF) strategies which include Large Language Model (LLM) query extraction and generative reranking. Our experiments show that for imbalanced review corpora, AF can improve over LF by a MAP@10 increase from 0.36 to 0.52, while achieving equivalent performance for balanced review corpora.

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools in chemistry, significantly impacting molecule design, property prediction, and synthesis optimization. This review highlights LLM capabilities in these domains and their potential to accelerate scientific discovery through automation. We also review LLM-based autonomous agents: LLMs with a broader set of tools to interact with their surrounding environment. These agents perform diverse tasks such as paper scraping, interfacing with automated laboratories, and synthesis planning. As agents are an emerging topic, we extend the scope of our review of agents beyond chemistry and discuss across any scientific domains. This review covers the recent history, current capabilities, and design of LLMs and autonomous agents, addressing specific challenges, opportunities, and future directions in chemistry. Key challenges include data quality and integration, model interpretability, and the need for standard benchmarks, while future directions point towards more sophisticated multi-modal agents and enhanced collaboration between agents and experimental methods. Due to the quick pace of this field, a repository has been built to keep track of the latest studies: https://github.com/ur-whitelab/LLMs-in-science.

Recently, recommender systems have been able to emit substantially improved recommendations by leveraging user-provided reviews. Existing methods typically merge all reviews of a given user or item into a long document, and then process user and item documents in the same manner. In practice, however, these two sets of reviews are notably different: users' reviews reflect a variety of items that they have bought and are hence very heterogeneous in their topics, while an item's reviews pertain only to that single item and are thus topically homogeneous. In this work, we develop a novel neural network model that properly accounts for this important difference by means of asymmetric attentive modules. The user module learns to attend to only those signals that are relevant with respect to the target item, whereas the item module learns to extract the most salient contents with regard to properties of the item. Our multi-hierarchical paradigm accounts for the fact that neither are all reviews equally useful, nor are all sentences within each review equally pertinent. Extensive experimental results on a variety of real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Search agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in tackling knowledge-intensive tasks. Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for training these agents to perform complex, multi-step reasoning. However, prior RL-based methods often rely on sparse or rule-based rewards, which can lead agents to commit to suboptimal or erroneous reasoning paths without the ability to recover. To address these limitations, we propose ReSeek, a novel self-correcting framework for training search agents. Our framework introduces a self-correction mechanism that empowers the agent to dynamically identify and recover from erroneous search paths during an episode. By invoking a special JUDGE action, the agent can judge the information and re-plan its search strategy. To guide this process, we design a dense, instructive process reward function, which decomposes into a correctness reward for retrieving factual information and a utility reward for finding information genuinely useful for the query. Furthermore, to mitigate the risk of data contamination in existing datasets, we introduce FictionalHot, a new and challenging benchmark with recently curated questions requiring complex reasoning. Being intuitively reasonable and practically simple, extensive experiments show that agents trained with ReSeek significantly outperform SOTA baselines in task success rate and path faithfulness.

For web agents to be practically useful, they must adapt to the continuously evolving web environment characterized by frequent updates to user interfaces and content. However, most existing benchmarks only capture the static aspects of the web. To bridge this gap, we introduce WebCanvas, an innovative online evaluation framework for web agents that effectively addresses the dynamic nature of web interactions. WebCanvas contains three main components to facilitate realistic assessments: (1) A novel evaluation metric which reliably capture critical intermediate actions or states necessary for task completions while disregarding noise caused by insignificant events or changed web-elements. (2) A benchmark dataset called Mind2Web-Live, a refined version of original Mind2Web static dataset containing 542 tasks with 2439 intermediate evaluation states; (3) Lightweight and generalizable annotation tools and testing pipelines that enables the community to collect and maintain the high-quality, up-to-date dataset. Building on WebCanvas, we open-source an agent framework with extensible modules for reasoning, providing a foundation for the community to conduct online inference and evaluations. Our best-performing agent achieves a task success rate of 23.1% and a task completion rate of 48.8% on the Mind2Web-Live test set. Additionally, we analyze the performance discrepancies across various websites, domains, and experimental environments. We encourage the community to contribute further insights on online agent evaluation, thereby advancing this field of research.

The emergence of LLM-based agents represents a paradigm shift in AI, enabling autonomous systems to plan, reason, use tools, and maintain memory while interacting with dynamic environments. This paper provides the first comprehensive survey of evaluation methodologies for these increasingly capable agents. We systematically analyze evaluation benchmarks and frameworks across four critical dimensions: (1) fundamental agent capabilities, including planning, tool use, self-reflection, and memory; (2) application-specific benchmarks for web, software engineering, scientific, and conversational agents; (3) benchmarks for generalist agents; and (4) frameworks for evaluating agents. Our analysis reveals emerging trends, including a shift toward more realistic, challenging evaluations with continuously updated benchmarks. We also identify critical gaps that future research must address-particularly in assessing cost-efficiency, safety, and robustness, and in developing fine-grained, and scalable evaluation methods. This survey maps the rapidly evolving landscape of agent evaluation, reveals the emerging trends in the field, identifies current limitations, and proposes directions for future research.

In this paper we introduce ResearchCodeAgent, a novel multi-agent system leveraging large language models (LLMs) agents to automate the codification of research methodologies described in machine learning literature. The system bridges the gap between high-level research concepts and their practical implementation, allowing researchers auto-generating code of existing research papers for benchmarking or building on top-of existing methods specified in the literature with availability of partial or complete starter code. ResearchCodeAgent employs a flexible agent architecture with a comprehensive action suite, enabling context-aware interactions with the research environment. The system incorporates a dynamic planning mechanism, utilizing both short and long-term memory to adapt its approach iteratively. We evaluate ResearchCodeAgent on three distinct machine learning tasks with distinct task complexity and representing different parts of the ML pipeline: data augmentation, optimization, and data batching. Our results demonstrate the system's effectiveness and generalizability, with 46.9% of generated code being high-quality and error-free, and 25% showing performance improvements over baseline implementations. Empirical analysis shows an average reduction of 57.9% in coding time compared to manual implementation. We observe higher gains for more complex tasks. ResearchCodeAgent represents a significant step towards automating the research implementation process, potentially accelerating the pace of machine learning research.

Precision therapeutics require multimodal adaptive models that generate personalized treatment recommendations. We introduce TxAgent, an AI agent that leverages multi-step reasoning and real-time biomedical knowledge retrieval across a toolbox of 211 tools to analyze drug interactions, contraindications, and patient-specific treatment strategies. TxAgent evaluates how drugs interact at molecular, pharmacokinetic, and clinical levels, identifies contraindications based on patient comorbidities and concurrent medications, and tailors treatment strategies to individual patient characteristics. It retrieves and synthesizes evidence from multiple biomedical sources, assesses interactions between drugs and patient conditions, and refines treatment recommendations through iterative reasoning. It selects tools based on task objectives and executes structured function calls to solve therapeutic tasks that require clinical reasoning and cross-source validation. The ToolUniverse consolidates 211 tools from trusted sources, including all US FDA-approved drugs since 1939 and validated clinical insights from Open Targets. TxAgent outperforms leading LLMs, tool-use models, and reasoning agents across five new benchmarks: DrugPC, BrandPC, GenericPC, TreatmentPC, and DescriptionPC, covering 3,168 drug reasoning tasks and 456 personalized treatment scenarios. It achieves 92.1% accuracy in open-ended drug reasoning tasks, surpassing GPT-4o and outperforming DeepSeek-R1 (671B) in structured multi-step reasoning. TxAgent generalizes across drug name variants and descriptions. By integrating multi-step inference, real-time knowledge grounding, and tool-assisted decision-making, TxAgent ensures that treatment recommendations align with established clinical guidelines and real-world evidence, reducing the risk of adverse events and improving therapeutic decision-making.

Customer service is how companies interface with their customers. It can contribute heavily towards the overall customer satisfaction. However, high-quality service can become expensive, creating an incentive to make it as cost efficient as possible and prompting most companies to utilize AI-powered assistants, or "chat bots". On the other hand, human-to-human interaction is still desired by customers, especially when it comes to complex scenarios such as disputes and sensitive topics like bill payment. This raises the bar for customer service agents. They need to accurately understand the customer's question or concern, identify a solution that is acceptable yet feasible (and within the company's policy), all while handling multiple conversations at once. In this work, we introduce "Ask Me Anything" (AMA) as an add-on feature to an agent-facing customer service interface. AMA allows agents to ask questions to a large language model (LLM) on demand, as they are handling customer conversations -- the LLM provides accurate responses in real-time, reducing the amount of context switching the agent needs. In our internal experiments, we find that agents using AMA versus a traditional search experience spend approximately 10% fewer seconds per conversation containing a search, translating to millions of dollars of savings annually. Agents that used the AMA feature provided positive feedback nearly 80% of the time, demonstrating its usefulness as an AI-assisted feature for customer care.

This technical brief introduces Deep Agent, an advanced autonomous AI system designed to manage complex multi-phase tasks through a novel hierarchical task management architecture. The system's foundation is built on our Hierarchical Task DAG (HTDAG) framework, which dynamically decomposes high-level objectives into manageable sub-tasks while rigorously maintaining dependencies and execution coherence. Deep Agent advances beyond traditional agent systems through three key innovations: First, it implements a recursive two-stage planner-executor architecture that enables continuous task refinement and adaptation as circumstances change. Second, it features an Autonomous API & Tool Creation (AATC) system that automatically generates reusable components from UI interactions, substantially reducing operational costs for similar tasks. Third, it incorporates Prompt Tweaking Engine and Autonomous Prompt Feedback Learning components that optimize Large Language Model prompts for specific scenarios, enhancing both inference accuracy and operational stability. These components are integrated to form a service infrastructure that manages user contexts, handles complex task dependencies, and orchestrates end-to-end agentic workflow execution. Through this sophisticated architecture, Deep Agent establishes a novel paradigm in self-governing AI systems, demonstrating robust capability to independently handle intricate, multi-step tasks while maintaining consistent efficiency and reliability through continuous self-optimization.

The advancements of language language models (LLMs) have piqued growing interest in developing LLM-based language agents to automate scientific discovery end-to-end, which has sparked both excitement and skepticism about the true capabilities of such agents. In this work, we argue that for an agent to fully automate scientific discovery, it must be able to complete all essential tasks in the workflow. Thus, we call for rigorous assessment of agents on individual tasks in a scientific workflow before making bold claims on end-to-end automation. To this end, we present ScienceAgentBench, a new benchmark for evaluating language agents for data-driven scientific discovery. To ensure the scientific authenticity and real-world relevance of our benchmark, we extract 102 tasks from 44 peer-reviewed publications in four disciplines and engage nine subject matter experts to validate them. We unify the target output for every task to a self-contained Python program file and employ an array of evaluation metrics to examine the generated programs, execution results, and costs. Each task goes through multiple rounds of manual validation by annotators and subject matter experts to ensure its annotation quality and scientific plausibility. We also propose two effective strategies to mitigate data contamination concerns. Using our benchmark, we evaluate five open-weight and proprietary LLMs, each with three frameworks: direct prompting, OpenHands, and self-debug. Given three attempts for each task, the best-performing agent can only solve 32.4% of the tasks independently and 34.3% with expert-provided knowledge. These results underscore the limited capacities of current language agents in generating code for data-driven discovery, let alone end-to-end automation for scientific research.

When asked, current large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT claim that they can assist us with relevance judgments. Many researchers think this would not lead to credible IR research. In this perspective paper, we discuss possible ways for LLMs to assist human experts along with concerns and issues that arise. We devise a human-machine collaboration spectrum that allows categorizing different relevance judgment strategies, based on how much the human relies on the machine. For the extreme point of "fully automated assessment", we further include a pilot experiment on whether LLM-based relevance judgments correlate with judgments from trained human assessors. We conclude the paper by providing two opposing perspectives - for and against the use of LLMs for automatic relevance judgments - and a compromise perspective, informed by our analyses of the literature, our preliminary experimental evidence, and our experience as IR researchers. We hope to start a constructive discussion within the community to avoid a stale-mate during review, where work is dammed if is uses LLMs for evaluation and dammed if it doesn't.

The advent of Deep Research agents has substantially reduced the time required for conducting extensive research tasks. However, these tasks inherently demand rigorous standards of factual accuracy and comprehensiveness, necessitating thorough evaluation before widespread adoption. In this paper, we propose ReportBench, a systematic benchmark designed to evaluate the content quality of research reports generated by large language models (LLMs). Our evaluation focuses on two critical dimensions: (1) the quality and relevance of cited literature, and (2) the faithfulness and veracity of the statements within the generated reports. ReportBench leverages high-quality published survey papers available on arXiv as gold-standard references, from which we apply reverse prompt engineering to derive domain-specific prompts and establish a comprehensive evaluation corpus. Furthermore, we develop an agent-based automated framework within ReportBench that systematically analyzes generated reports by extracting citations and statements, checking the faithfulness of cited content against original sources, and validating non-cited claims using web-based resources. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that commercial Deep Research agents such as those developed by OpenAI and Google consistently generate more comprehensive and reliable reports than standalone LLMs augmented with search or browsing tools. However, there remains substantial room for improvement in terms of the breadth and depth of research coverage, as well as factual consistency. The complete code and data will be released at the following link: https://github.com/ByteDance-BandAI/ReportBench

Virtual film production requires intricate decision-making processes, including scriptwriting, virtual cinematography, and precise actor positioning and actions. Motivated by recent advances in automated decision-making with language agent-based societies, this paper introduces FilmAgent, a novel LLM-based multi-agent collaborative framework for end-to-end film automation in our constructed 3D virtual spaces. FilmAgent simulates various crew roles, including directors, screenwriters, actors, and cinematographers, and covers key stages of a film production workflow: (1) idea development transforms brainstormed ideas into structured story outlines; (2) scriptwriting elaborates on dialogue and character actions for each scene; (3) cinematography determines the camera setups for each shot. A team of agents collaborates through iterative feedback and revisions, thereby verifying intermediate scripts and reducing hallucinations. We evaluate the generated videos on 15 ideas and 4 key aspects. Human evaluation shows that FilmAgent outperforms all baselines across all aspects and scores 3.98 out of 5 on average, showing the feasibility of multi-agent collaboration in filmmaking. Further analysis reveals that FilmAgent, despite using the less advanced GPT-4o model, surpasses the single-agent o1, showing the advantage of a well-coordinated multi-agent system. Lastly, we discuss the complementary strengths and weaknesses of OpenAI's text-to-video model Sora and our FilmAgent in filmmaking.

Autonomy via agents using large language models (LLMs) for personalized, standardized tasks boosts human efficiency. Automating web tasks (like booking hotels within a budget) is increasingly sought after. Fulfilling practical needs, the web agent also serves as an important proof-of-concept example for various agent grounding scenarios, with its success promising advancements in many future applications. Prior research often handcrafts web agent strategies (e.g., prompting templates, multi-agent systems, search methods, etc.) and the corresponding in-context examples, which may not generalize well across all real-world scenarios. On the other hand, there has been limited study on the misalignment between a web agent's observation/action representation and the pre-training data of the LLM it's based on. This discrepancy is especially notable when LLMs are primarily trained for language completion rather than tasks involving embodied navigation actions and symbolic web elements. Our study enhances an LLM-based web agent by simply refining its observation and action space to better align with the LLM's capabilities. This approach enables our base agent to significantly outperform previous methods on a wide variety of web tasks. Specifically, on WebArena, a benchmark featuring general-purpose web interaction tasks, our agent AgentOccam surpasses the previous state-of-the-art and concurrent work by 9.8 (+29.4%) and 5.9 (+15.8%) absolute points respectively, and boosts the success rate by 26.6 points (+161%) over similar plain web agents with its observation and action space alignment. We achieve this without using in-context examples, new agent roles, online feedback or search strategies. AgentOccam's simple design highlights LLMs' impressive zero-shot performance on web tasks, and underlines the critical role of carefully tuning observation and action spaces for LLM-based agents.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as agents in various contexts by providing tools at their disposal. However, LLM agents can exhibit unpredictable behaviors, including taking undesirable and/or unsafe actions. In order to measure the latent propensity of LLM agents for taking illegal actions under an EU legislative context, we introduce EU-Agent-Bench, a verifiable human-curated benchmark that evaluates an agent's alignment with EU legal norms in situations where benign user inputs could lead to unlawful actions. Our benchmark spans scenarios across several categories, including data protection, bias/discrimination, and scientific integrity, with each user request allowing for both compliant and non-compliant execution of the requested actions. Comparing the model's function calls against a rubric exhaustively supported by citations of the relevant legislature, we evaluate the legal compliance of frontier LLMs, and furthermore investigate the compliance effect of providing the relevant legislative excerpts in the agent's system prompt along with explicit instructions to comply. We release a public preview set for the research community, while holding out a private test set to prevent data contamination in evaluating upcoming models. We encourage future work extending agentic safety benchmarks to different legal jurisdictions and to multi-turn and multilingual interactions. We release our code on https://github.com/ilijalichkovski/eu-agent-bench{this URL}.

Artificial intelligence is undergoing the paradigm shift from closed language models to interconnected agent systems capable of external perception and information integration. As a representative embodiment, Deep Research Agents (DRAs) systematically exhibit the capabilities for task decomposition, cross-source retrieval, multi-stage reasoning, and structured output, which markedly enhance performance on complex and open-ended tasks. However, existing benchmarks remain deficient in evaluation dimensions, response formatting, and scoring mechanisms, limiting their capacity to assess such systems effectively. This paper introduces a rigorous benchmark and a multidimensional evaluation framework tailored to DRAs and report-style responses. The benchmark comprises 214 expert-curated challenging queries distributed across 10 broad thematic domains, each accompanied by manually constructed reference bundles to support composite evaluation. The framework enables comprehensive evaluation of long-form reports generated by DRAs, incorporating integrated scoring metrics for semantic quality, topical focus, and retrieval trustworthiness. Extensive experimentation confirms the superior performance of mainstream DRAs over web-search-tool-augmented reasoning models, yet reveals considerable scope for further improvement. This study provides a robust foundation for capability assessment, architectural refinement, and paradigm advancement in DRA systems.

Large language models (LLMs) excel at natural language tasks but are limited by their static parametric knowledge, especially in knowledge-intensive task. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) mitigates this by integrating external information. However, (1) traditional RAG struggles with complex query understanding, and (2) even search agents trained with reinforcement learning (RL), despite their promise, still face generalization and deployment challenges. To address these limitations, we propose QAgent, a unified agentic RAG framework that employs a search agent for adaptive retrieval. This agent optimizes its understanding of the query through interactive reasoning and retrieval. To facilitate real-world application, we focus on modular search agent for query understanding that are plug-and-play in complex systems. Secifically, the agent follows a multi-step decision process trained with RL to maximize retrieval quality and support accurate downstream answers. We further analyze the strengths and weaknesses of end-to-end RL and propose a strategy that focuses on effective retrieval, thereby enhancing generalization in LLM applications. Experiments show QAgent excels at QA and serves as a plug-and-play module for real-world deployment.

Agentic search such as Deep Research systems, where large language models autonomously browse the web, synthesize information, and return comprehensive citation-backed answers, represents a major shift in how users interact with web-scale information. While promising greater efficiency and cognitive offloading, the growing complexity and open-endedness of agentic search have outpaced existing evaluation benchmarks and methodologies, which largely assume short search horizons and static answers. In this paper, we introduce Mind2Web 2, a benchmark of 130 realistic, high-quality, and long-horizon tasks that require real-time web browsing and extensive information synthesis, constructed with over 1,000 hours of human labor. To address the challenge of evaluating time-varying and complex answers, we propose a novel Agent-as-a-Judge framework. Our method constructs task-specific judge agents based on a tree-structured rubric design to automatically assess both answer correctness and source attribution. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of nine frontier agentic search systems and human performance, along with a detailed error analysis to draw insights for future development. The best-performing system, OpenAI Deep Research, can already achieve 50-70% of human performance while spending half the time, showing a great potential. Altogether, Mind2Web 2 provides a rigorous foundation for developing and benchmarking the next generation of agentic search systems.

This paper explores the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the generation and evaluation of analytical reports derived from Earnings Calls (ECs). Addressing a current gap in research, we explore the generation of analytical reports with LLMs in a multi-agent framework, designing specialized agents that introduce diverse viewpoints and desirable topics of analysis into the report generation process. Through multiple analyses, we examine the alignment between generated and human-written reports and the impact of both individual and collective agents. Our findings suggest that the introduction of additional agents results in more insightful reports, although reports generated by human experts remain preferred in the majority of cases. Finally, we address the challenging issue of report evaluation, we examine the limitations and strengths of LLMs in assessing the quality of generated reports in different settings, revealing a significant correlation with human experts across multiple dimensions.

The chemical reaction recommendation is to select proper reaction condition parameters for chemical reactions, which is pivotal to accelerating chemical science. With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), there is growing interest in leveraging their reasoning and planning capabilities for reaction condition recommendation. Despite their success, existing methods rarely explain the rationale behind the recommended reaction conditions, limiting their utility in high-stakes scientific workflows. In this work, we propose ChemMAS, a multi-agent system that reframes condition prediction as an evidence-based reasoning task. ChemMAS decomposes the task into mechanistic grounding, multi-channel recall, constraint-aware agentic debate, and rationale aggregation. Each decision is backed by interpretable justifications grounded in chemical knowledge and retrieved precedents. Experiments show that ChemMAS achieves 20-35% gains over domain-specific baselines and outperforms general-purpose LLMs by 10-15% in Top-1 accuracy, while offering falsifiable, human-trustable rationales, which establishes a new paradigm for explainable AI in scientific discovery.

Historically, scientific discovery has been a lengthy and costly process, demanding substantial time and resources from initial conception to final results. To accelerate scientific discovery, reduce research costs, and improve research quality, we introduce Agent Laboratory, an autonomous LLM-based framework capable of completing the entire research process. This framework accepts a human-provided research idea and progresses through three stages--literature review, experimentation, and report writing to produce comprehensive research outputs, including a code repository and a research report, while enabling users to provide feedback and guidance at each stage. We deploy Agent Laboratory with various state-of-the-art LLMs and invite multiple researchers to assess its quality by participating in a survey, providing human feedback to guide the research process, and then evaluate the final paper. We found that: (1) Agent Laboratory driven by o1-preview generates the best research outcomes; (2) The generated machine learning code is able to achieve state-of-the-art performance compared to existing methods; (3) Human involvement, providing feedback at each stage, significantly improves the overall quality of research; (4) Agent Laboratory significantly reduces research expenses, achieving an 84% decrease compared to previous autonomous research methods. We hope Agent Laboratory enables researchers to allocate more effort toward creative ideation rather than low-level coding and writing, ultimately accelerating scientific discovery.

Automated drug discovery offers significant potential for accelerating the development of novel therapeutics by substituting labor-intensive human workflows with machine-driven processes. However, molecules generated by artificial intelligence may unintentionally infringe on existing patents, posing legal and financial risks that impede the full automation of drug discovery pipelines. This paper introduces PatentFinder, a novel multi-agent and tool-enhanced intelligence system that can accurately and comprehensively evaluate small molecules for patent infringement. PatentFinder features five specialized agents that collaboratively analyze patent claims and molecular structures with heuristic and model-based tools, generating interpretable infringement reports. To support systematic evaluation, we curate MolPatent-240, a benchmark dataset tailored for patent infringement assessment algorithms. On this benchmark, PatentFinder outperforms baseline methods that rely solely on large language models or specialized chemical tools, achieving a 13.8% improvement in F1-score and a 12% increase in accuracy. Additionally, PatentFinder autonomously generates detailed and interpretable patent infringement reports, showcasing enhanced accuracy and improved interpretability. The high accuracy and interpretability of PatentFinder make it a valuable and reliable tool for automating patent infringement assessments, offering a practical solution for integrating patent protection analysis into the drug discovery pipeline.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents have shown great potential for solving real-world problems and promise to be a solution for tasks automation in industry. However, more benchmarks are needed to systematically evaluate automation agents from an industrial perspective, for example, in Civil Engineering. Therefore, we propose DrafterBench for the comprehensive evaluation of LLM agents in the context of technical drawing revision, a representation task in civil engineering. DrafterBench contains twelve types of tasks summarized from real-world drawing files, with 46 customized functions/tools and 1920 tasks in total. DrafterBench is an open-source benchmark to rigorously test AI agents' proficiency in interpreting intricate and long-context instructions, leveraging prior knowledge, and adapting to dynamic instruction quality via implicit policy awareness. The toolkit comprehensively assesses distinct capabilities in structured data comprehension, function execution, instruction following, and critical reasoning. DrafterBench offers detailed analysis of task accuracy and error statistics, aiming to provide deeper insight into agent capabilities and identify improvement targets for integrating LLMs in engineering applications. Our benchmark is available at https://github.com/Eason-Li-AIS/DrafterBench, with the test set hosted at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Eason666/DrafterBench.

We study the problem of opinion highlights generation from large volumes of user reviews, often exceeding thousands per entity, where existing methods either fail to scale or produce generic, one-size-fits-all summaries that overlook personalized needs. To tackle this, we introduce OpinioRAG, a scalable, training-free framework that combines RAG-based evidence retrieval with LLMs to efficiently produce tailored summaries. Additionally, we propose novel reference-free verification metrics designed for sentiment-rich domains, where accurately capturing opinions and sentiment alignment is essential. These metrics offer a fine-grained, context-sensitive assessment of factual consistency. To facilitate evaluation, we contribute the first large-scale dataset of long-form user reviews, comprising entities with over a thousand reviews each, paired with unbiased expert summaries and manually annotated queries. Through extensive experiments, we identify key challenges, provide actionable insights into improving systems, pave the way for future research, and position OpinioRAG as a robust framework for generating accurate, relevant, and structured summaries at scale.

Peer reviewing is a central component in the scientific publishing process. We present the first public dataset of scientific peer reviews available for research purposes (PeerRead v1) providing an opportunity to study this important artifact. The dataset consists of 14.7K paper drafts and the corresponding accept/reject decisions in top-tier venues including ACL, NIPS and ICLR. The dataset also includes 10.7K textual peer reviews written by experts for a subset of the papers. We describe the data collection process and report interesting observed phenomena in the peer reviews. We also propose two novel NLP tasks based on this dataset and provide simple baseline models. In the first task, we show that simple models can predict whether a paper is accepted with up to 21% error reduction compared to the majority baseline. In the second task, we predict the numerical scores of review aspects and show that simple models can outperform the mean baseline for aspects with high variance such as 'originality' and 'impact'.

Efficiently solving real-world problems with LLMs increasingly hinges on their ability to interact with dynamic web environments and autonomously acquire external information. While recent research like Search-R1 and WebDancer demonstrates strong performance in solving web tasks, they heavily rely on additional tools to convert the interactive web environment into static text content. This is in contrast to human browsing behaviors, which involve diverse interactions with the browser, such as scrolling, clicking, and typing. In this paper, we propose BrowserAgent, a more interactive agent that solves complex tasks through human-inspired browser actions. BrowserAgent operates directly on raw web pages via Playwright through a set of predefined browser actions. We adopt a two-stage training (Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Rejection Fine-Tuning (RFT)) to improve the model's generalization abilities. Despite using significantly less training data than Search-R1, BrowserAgent achieves more competitive results across different Open-QA tasks. Additionally, we introduce an explicit memory mechanism to store key conclusions across steps, further enhancing the model's reasoning capabilities for long-horizon tasks. Notably, BrowserAgent-7B can achieve around 20\% improvement over Search-R1 on multi-hop QA tasks like HotpotQA, 2Wiki, and Bamboogle. These results indicate that BrowserAgent can serve as a more advanced framework for more interactive and scalable web agents.