Abstract:Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely adopted in conversational applications. However, their reliance on parametric knowledge limits reliability in real-world scenarios that require dynamic or domain-specific information. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) addresses this limitation by incorporating external knowledge during generation, but existing text-based and graph-based RAG methods often struggle with noisy or irrelevant contexts. In this work, we propose Structure-aware Retrieval Augmented Generation (SA-RAG), which uses tables as an intermediate structured representation to provide a compact and controllable interface that reduces noise while preserving essential information. We introduce a quality-aware table metadata generation framework that models metadata normalization and effectiveness, improving metadata quality and downstream performance. Furthermore, we explore both training-free and training-based table generation methods. Generation validation and direct preference optimization further improve table quality while maintaining semantic and structural consistency. Experiments on two noisy real-world datasets show that SA-RAG significantly outperforms existing RAG baselines. Our code is publicly available at a public repository.
Abstract:Automating scientific discovery requires more than generating papers from ideas. Real research is iterative: hypotheses are challenged from multiple perspectives, experiments fail and inform the next attempt, and lessons accumulate across cycles. Existing autonomous research systems often model this process as a linear pipeline: they rely on single-agent reasoning, stop when execution fails, and do not carry experience across runs. We present AutoResearchClaw, a multi-agent autonomous research pipeline built on five mechanisms: structured multi-agent debate for hypothesis generation and result analysis, a self-healing executor with a \textsc{Pivot}/\textsc{Refine} decision loop that transforms failures into information, verifiable result reporting that prevents fabricated numbers and hallucinated citations, human-in-the-loop collaboration with seven intervention modes spanning full autonomy to step-by-step oversight, and cross-run evolution that converts past mistakes into future safeguards. On ARC-Bench, a 25-topic experiment-stage benchmark, AutoResearchClaw outperforms AI Scientist v2 by 54.7%. A human-in-the-loop ablation across seven intervention modes reveals that precise, targeted collaboration at high-leverage decision points consistently outperforms both full autonomy and exhaustive step-by-step oversight. We position AutoResearchClaw as a research amplifier that augments rather than replaces human scientific judgment. Code is available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/AutoResearchClaw.
Abstract:In the era of large-scale pre-trained models, effectively adapting general knowledge to specific affective computing tasks remains a challenge, particularly regarding computational efficiency and multimodal heterogeneity. While Transformer-based methods have excelled at modeling inter-modal dependencies, their quadratic computational complexity limits their use with long-sequence data. Mamba-based models have emerged as a computationally efficient alternative; however, their inherent sequential scanning mechanism struggles to capture the global, non-sequential relationships that are crucial for effective cross-modal alignment. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{AlignMamba-2}, an effective and efficient framework for multimodal fusion and sentiment analysis. Our approach introduces a dual alignment strategy that regularizes the model using both Optimal Transport distance and Maximum Mean Discrepancy, promoting geometric and statistical consistency between modalities without incurring any inference-time overhead. More importantly, we design a Modality-Aware Mamba layer, which employs a Mixture-of-Experts architecture with modality-specific and modality-shared experts to explicitly handle data heterogeneity during the fusion process. Extensive experiments on four challenging benchmarks, including dynamic time-series (on the CMU-MOSI and CMU-MOSEI datasets) and static image-related tasks (on the NYU-Depth V2 and MVSA-Single datasets), demonstrate that AlignMamba-2 establishes a new state-of-the-art in both effectiveness and efficiency across diverse pattern recognition tasks, ranging from dynamic time-series analysis to static image-text classification.
Abstract:Simulation-to-decision learning enables safe policy training in digital environments without risking real-world deployment, and has become essential in mission-critical domains such as supply chains and industrial systems. However, simulators learned from noisy or biased real-world data often exhibit prediction errors in decision-critical regions, leading to unstable action ranking and unreliable policies. Existing approaches either focus on improving average simulation fidelity or adopt conservative regularization, which may cause policy collapse by discarding high-risk high-reward actions. We propose Sim2Act, a robust simulation-to-decision framework that addresses both simulator and policy robustness. First, we introduce an adversarial calibration mechanism that re-weights simulation errors in decision-critical state-action pairs to align surrogate fidelity with downstream decision impact. Second, we develop a group-relative perturbation strategy that stabilizes policy learning under simulator uncertainty without enforcing overly pessimistic constraints. Extensive experiments on multiple supply chain benchmarks demonstrate improved simulation robustness and more stable decision performance under structured and unstructured perturbations.
Abstract:Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in culturally sensitive real-world tasks. However, existing cultural alignment approaches fail to align LLMs' broad cultural values with the specific goals of downstream tasks and suffer from cross-culture interference. We propose CultureManager, a novel pipeline for task-specific cultural alignment. CultureManager synthesizes task-aware cultural data in line with target task formats, grounded in culturally relevant web search results. To prevent conflicts between cultural norms, it manages multi-culture knowledge learned in separate adapters with a culture router that selects the appropriate one to apply. Experiments across ten national cultures and culture-sensitive tasks show consistent improvements over prompt-based and fine-tuning baselines. Our results demonstrate the necessity of task adaptation and modular culture management for effective cultural alignment.
Abstract:Tool invocation is a core capability of agentic systems, yet failures often arise not from individual tool calls but from how multiple tools are organized and executed together. Existing approaches tightly couple tool execution with stepwise language reasoning or explicit planning, leading to brittle behavior and high execution overhead. To overcome these limitations, we revisit tool invocation from the perspective of tool orchestration. Our key insight is that effective orchestration does not require precise dependency graphs or fine-grained planning. Instead, a coarse-grained layer structure suffices to provide global guidance, while execution-time errors can be corrected locally. Specifically, we model tool orchestration as learning a layered execution structure that captures high-level tool dependencies, inducing layer-wise execution through context constraints. To handle execution-time failures, we introduce a schema-aware reflective correction mechanism that detects and repairs errors locally. This design confines errors to individual tool calls and avoids re-planning entire execution trajectories. This structured execution paradigm enables a lightweight and reusable orchestration component for agentic systems. Experimental results show that our approach achieves robust tool execution while reducing execution complexity and overhead. Code will be made publicly available.
Abstract:Large Language Model (LLM) agents have shown stunning results in complex tasks, yet they often operate in isolation, failing to learn from past experiences. Existing memory-based methods primarily store raw trajectories, which are often redundant and noise-heavy. This prevents agents from extracting high-level, reusable behavioral patterns that are essential for generalization. In this paper, we propose SkillRL, a framework that bridges the gap between raw experience and policy improvement through automatic skill discovery and recursive evolution. Our approach introduces an experience-based distillation mechanism to build a hierarchical skill library SkillBank, an adaptive retrieval strategy for general and task-specific heuristics, and a recursive evolution mechanism that allows the skill library to co-evolve with the agent's policy during reinforcement learning. These innovations significantly reduce the token footprint while enhancing reasoning utility. Experimental results on ALFWorld, WebShop and seven search-augmented tasks demonstrate that SkillRL achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming strong baselines over 15.3% and maintaining robustness as task complexity increases. Code is available at this https://github.com/aiming-lab/SkillRL.
Abstract:Automatically extracting workflows as procedural graphs from natural language is promising yet underexplored, demanding both structural validity and logical alignment. While recent large language models (LLMs) show potential for procedural graph extraction, they often produce ill-formed structures or misinterpret logical flows. We present \model{}, a multi-agent framework that formulates procedural graph extraction as a multi-round reasoning process with dedicated structural and logical refinement. The framework iterates through three stages: (1) a graph extraction phase with the graph builder agent, (2) a structural feedback phase in which a simulation agent diagnoses and explains structural defects, and (3) a logical feedback phase in which a semantic agent aligns semantics between flow logic and linguistic cues in the source text. Important feedback is prioritized and expressed in natural language, which is injected into subsequent prompts, enabling interpretable and controllable refinement. This modular design allows agents to target distinct error types without supervision or parameter updates. Experiments demonstrate that \model{} achieves substantial improvements in both structural correctness and logical consistency over strong baselines.
Abstract:The primary value of AI agents in software development lies in their ability to extend the developer's capacity for reasoning and action, not to supplant human involvement. To showcase how to use agents working in tandem with developers, we designed a novel approach for carrying out coordinated renaming. Coordinated renaming, where a single rename refactoring triggers refactorings in multiple, related identifiers, is a frequent yet challenging task. Developers must manually propagate these rename refactorings across numerous files and contexts, a process that is both tedious and highly error-prone. State-of-the-art heuristic-based approaches produce an overwhelming number of false positives, while vanilla Large Language Models (LLMs) provide incomplete suggestions due to their limited context and inability to interact with refactoring tools. This leaves developers with incomplete refactorings or burdens them with filtering too many false positives. Coordinated renaming is exactly the kind of repetitive task that agents can significantly reduce the developers' burden while keeping them in the driver's seat. We designed, implemented, and evaluated the first multi-agent framework that automates coordinated renaming. It operates on a key insight: a developer's initial refactoring is a clue to infer the scope of related refactorings. Our Scope Inference Agent first transforms this clue into an explicit, natural-language Declared Scope. The Planned Execution Agent then uses this as a strict plan to identify program elements that should undergo refactoring and safely executes the changes by invoking the IDE's own trusted refactoring APIs. Finally, the Replication Agent uses it to guide the project-wide search. We first conducted a formative study on the practice of coordinated renaming in 609K commits in 100 open-source projects and surveyed 205 developers ...
Abstract:Extreme events frequently occur in real-world time series and often carry significant practical implications. In domains such as climate and healthcare, these events, such as floods, heatwaves, or acute medical episodes, can lead to serious consequences. Accurate forecasting of such events is therefore of substantial importance. Most existing time series forecasting models are optimized for overall performance within the prediction window, but often struggle to accurately predict extreme events, such as high temperatures or heart rate spikes. The main challenges are data imbalance and the neglect of valuable information contained in intermediate events that precede extreme events. In this paper, we propose xTime, a novel framework for extreme event forecasting in time series. xTime leverages knowledge distillation to transfer information from models trained on lower-rarity events, thereby improving prediction performance on rarer ones. In addition, we introduce a mixture of experts (MoE) mechanism that dynamically selects and fuses outputs from expert models across different rarity levels, which further improves the forecasting performance for extreme events. Experiments on multiple datasets show that xTime achieves consistent improvements, with forecasting accuracy on extreme events improving from 3% to 78%.