PLANET: A Collection of Benchmarks for Evaluating LLMs' Planning Capabilities

Planning is central to agents and agentic AI. The ability to plan, e.g., creating travel itineraries within a budget, holds immense potential in both scientific and commercial contexts. Moreover, optimal plans tend to require fewer resources compared to ad-hoc methods. To date, a comprehensive understanding of existing planning benchmarks appears to be lacking. Without it, comparing planning algorithms' performance across domains or selecting suitable algorithms for new scenarios remains challenging. In this paper, we examine a range of planning benchmarks to identify commonly used testbeds for algorithm development and highlight potential gaps. These benchmarks are categorized into embodied environments, web navigation, scheduling, games and puzzles, and everyday task automation. Our study recommends the most appropriate benchmarks for various algorithms and offers insights to guide future benchmark development.

Toward Aligning Human and Robot Actions via Multi-Modal Demonstration Learning

Understanding action correspondence between humans and robots is essential for evaluating alignment in decision-making, particularly in human-robot collaboration and imitation learning within unstructured environments. We propose a multimodal demonstration learning framework that explicitly models human demonstrations from RGB video with robot demonstrations in voxelized RGB-D space. Focusing on the "pick and place" task from the RH20T dataset, we utilize data from 5 users across 10 diverse scenes. Our approach combines ResNet-based visual encoding for human intention modeling and a Perceiver Transformer for voxel-based robot action prediction. After 2000 training epochs, the human model reaches 71.67% accuracy, and the robot model achieves 71.8% accuracy, demonstrating the framework's potential for aligning complex, multimodal human and robot behaviors in manipulation tasks.

Probabilistic Task Parameterization of Tool-Tissue Interaction via Sparse Landmarks Tracking in Robotic Surgery

Accurate modeling of tool-tissue interactions in robotic surgery requires precise tracking of deformable tissues and integration of surgical domain knowledge. Traditional methods rely on labor-intensive annotations or rigid assumptions, limiting flexibility. We propose a framework combining sparse keypoint tracking and probabilistic modeling that propagates expert-annotated landmarks across endoscopic frames, even with large tissue deformations. Clustered tissue keypoints enable dynamic local transformation construction via PCA, and tool poses, tracked similarly, are expressed relative to these frames. Embedding these into a Task-Parameterized Gaussian Mixture Model (TP-GMM) integrates data-driven observations with labeled clinical expertise, effectively predicting relative tool-tissue poses and enhancing visual understanding of robotic surgical motions directly from video data.

From Understanding to Excelling: Template-Free Algorithm Design through Structural-Functional Co-Evolution

Large language models (LLMs) have greatly accelerated the automation of algorithm generation and optimization. However, current methods such as EoH and FunSearch mainly rely on predefined templates and expert-specified functions that focus solely on the local evolution of key functionalities. Consequently, they fail to fully leverage the synergistic benefits of the overall architecture and the potential of global optimization. In this paper, we introduce an end-to-end algorithm generation and optimization framework based on LLMs. Our approach utilizes the deep semantic understanding of LLMs to convert natural language requirements or human-authored papers into code solutions, and employs a two-dimensional co-evolution strategy to optimize both functional and structural aspects. This closed-loop process spans problem analysis, code generation, and global optimization, automatically identifying key algorithm modules for multi-level joint optimization and continually enhancing performance and design innovation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms traditional local optimization approaches in both performance and innovation, while also exhibiting strong adaptability to unknown environments and breakthrough potential in structural design. By building on human research, our framework generates and optimizes novel algorithms that surpass those designed by human experts, broadening the applicability of LLMs for algorithm design and providing a novel solution pathway for automated algorithm development.

Large Language Models for Multi-Facility Location Mechanism Design

Designing strategyproof mechanisms for multi-facility location that optimize social costs based on agent preferences had been challenging due to the extensive domain knowledge required and poor worst-case guarantees. Recently, deep learning models have been proposed as alternatives. However, these models require some domain knowledge and extensive hyperparameter tuning as well as lacking interpretability, which is crucial in practice when transparency of the learned mechanisms is mandatory. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach, named LLMMech, that addresses these limitations by incorporating large language models (LLMs) into an evolutionary framework for generating interpretable, hyperparameter-free, empirically strategyproof, and nearly optimal mechanisms. Our experimental results, evaluated on various problem settings where the social cost is arbitrarily weighted across agents and the agent preferences may not be uniformly distributed, demonstrate that the LLM-generated mechanisms generally outperform existing handcrafted baselines and deep learning models. Furthermore, the mechanisms exhibit impressive generalizability to out-of-distribution agent preferences and to larger instances with more agents.

Seedream 2.0: A Native Chinese-English Bilingual Image Generation Foundation Model

Rapid advancement of diffusion models has catalyzed remarkable progress in the field of image generation. However, prevalent models such as Flux, SD3.5 and Midjourney, still grapple with issues like model bias, limited text rendering capabilities, and insufficient understanding of Chinese cultural nuances. To address these limitations, we present Seedream 2.0, a native Chinese-English bilingual image generation foundation model that excels across diverse dimensions, which adeptly manages text prompt in both Chinese and English, supporting bilingual image generation and text rendering. We develop a powerful data system that facilitates knowledge integration, and a caption system that balances the accuracy and richness for image description. Particularly, Seedream is integrated with a self-developed bilingual large language model as a text encoder, allowing it to learn native knowledge directly from massive data. This enable it to generate high-fidelity images with accurate cultural nuances and aesthetic expressions described in either Chinese or English. Beside, Glyph-Aligned ByT5 is applied for flexible character-level text rendering, while a Scaled ROPE generalizes well to untrained resolutions. Multi-phase post-training optimizations, including SFT and RLHF iterations, further improve the overall capability. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that Seedream 2.0 achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple aspects, including prompt-following, aesthetics, text rendering, and structural correctness. Furthermore, Seedream 2.0 has been optimized through multiple RLHF iterations to closely align its output with human preferences, as revealed by its outstanding ELO score. In addition, it can be readily adapted to an instruction-based image editing model, such as SeedEdit, with strong editing capability that balances instruction-following and image consistency.

Destroy and Repair Using Hyper Graphs for Routing

Recent advancements in Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) have shown promise in solving routing problems like the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) and Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) without handcrafted designs. Research in this domain has explored two primary categories of methods: iterative and non-iterative. While non-iterative methods struggle to generate near-optimal solutions directly, iterative methods simplify the task by learning local search steps. However, existing iterative methods are often limited by restricted neighborhood searches, leading to suboptimal results. To address this limitation, we propose a novel approach that extends the search to larger neighborhoods by learning a destroy-and-repair strategy. Specifically, we introduce a Destroy-and-Repair framework based on Hyper-Graphs (DRHG). This framework reduces consecutive intact edges to hyper-edges, allowing the model to pay more attention to the destroyed part and decrease the complexity of encoding all nodes. Experiments demonstrate that DRHG achieves stateof-the-art performance on TSP with up to 10,000 nodes and shows strong generalization to real-world TSPLib and CVRPLib problems.

ARS: Automatic Routing Solver with Large Language Models

Real-world Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs) are characterized by a variety of practical constraints, making manual solver design both knowledge-intensive and time-consuming. Although there is increasing interest in automating the design of routing algorithms, existing research has explored only a limited array of VRP variants and fails to adequately address the complex and prevalent constraints encountered in real-world situations. To fill this gap, this paper introduces RoutBench, a benchmark of 1,000 VRP variants derived from 24 attributes, for evaluating the effectiveness of automatic routing solvers in addressing complex constraints. Along with RoutBench, we present the Automatic Routing Solver (ARS), which employs Large Language Model (LLM) agents to enhance a backbone algorithm framework by automatically generating constraint-aware heuristic code, based on problem descriptions and several representative constraints selected from a database. Our experiments show that ARS outperforms state-of-the-art LLM-based methods and commonly used solvers, automatically solving 91.67% of common VRPs and achieving at least a 30% improvement across all benchmarks.

HARBOR: Exploring Persona Dynamics in Multi-Agent Competition

We investigate factors contributing to LLM agents' success in competitive multi-agent environments, using auctions as a testbed where agents bid to maximize profit. The agents are equipped with bidding domain knowledge, distinct personas that reflect item preferences, and a memory of auction history. Our work extends the classic auction scenario by creating a realistic environment where multiple agents bid on houses, weighing aspects such as size, location, and budget to secure the most desirable homes at the lowest prices. Particularly, we investigate three key questions: (a) How does a persona influence an agent's behavior in a competitive setting? (b) Can an agent effectively profile its competitors' behavior during auctions? (c) How can persona profiling be leveraged to create an advantage using strategies such as theory of mind? Through a series of experiments, we analyze the behaviors of LLM agents and shed light on new findings. Our testbed, called HARBOR, offers a valuable platform for deepening our understanding of multi-agent workflows in competitive environments.

MOS-Attack: A Scalable Multi-objective Adversarial Attack Framework

Crafting adversarial examples is crucial for evaluating and enhancing the robustness of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), presenting a challenge equivalent to maximizing a non-differentiable 0-1 loss function. However, existing single objective methods, namely adversarial attacks focus on a surrogate loss function, do not fully harness the benefits of engaging multiple loss functions, as a result of insufficient understanding of their synergistic and conflicting nature. To overcome these limitations, we propose the Multi-Objective Set-based Attack (MOS Attack), a novel adversarial attack framework leveraging multiple loss functions and automatically uncovering their interrelations. The MOS Attack adopts a set-based multi-objective optimization strategy, enabling the incorporation of numerous loss functions without additional parameters. It also automatically mines synergistic patterns among various losses, facilitating the generation of potent adversarial attacks with fewer objectives. Extensive experiments have shown that our MOS Attack outperforms single-objective attacks. Furthermore, by harnessing the identified synergistic patterns, MOS Attack continues to show superior results with a reduced number of loss functions.