APIGen: Automated Pipeline for Generating Verifiable and Diverse Function-Calling Datasets

The advancement of function-calling agent models requires diverse, reliable, and high-quality datasets. This paper presents APIGen, an automated data generation pipeline designed to synthesize verifiable high-quality datasets for function-calling applications. We leverage APIGen and collect 3,673 executable APIs across 21 different categories to generate diverse function-calling datasets in a scalable and structured manner. Each data in our dataset is verified through three hierarchical stages: format checking, actual function executions, and semantic verification, ensuring its reliability and correctness. We demonstrate that models trained with our curated datasets, even with only 7B parameters, can achieve state-of-the-art performance on the Berkeley Function-Calling Benchmark, outperforming multiple GPT-4 models. Moreover, our 1B model achieves exceptional performance, surpassing GPT-3.5-Turbo and Claude-3 Haiku. We release a dataset containing 60,000 high-quality entries, aiming to advance the field of function-calling agent domains. The dataset is available on Huggingface: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Salesforce/xlam-function-calling-60k and the project homepage: https://apigen-pipeline.github.io/

MobileAIBench: Benchmarking LLMs and LMMs for On-Device Use Cases

The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) on mobile devices has gained significant attention due to the benefits of enhanced privacy, stability, and personalization. However, the hardware constraints of mobile devices necessitate the use of models with fewer parameters and model compression techniques like quantization. Currently, there is limited understanding of quantization's impact on various task performances, including LLM tasks, LMM tasks, and, critically, trust and safety. There is a lack of adequate tools for systematically testing these models on mobile devices. To address these gaps, we introduce MobileAIBench, a comprehensive benchmarking framework for evaluating mobile-optimized LLMs and LMMs. MobileAIBench assesses models across different sizes, quantization levels, and tasks, measuring latency and resource consumption on real devices. Our two-part open-source framework includes a library for running evaluations on desktops and an iOS app for on-device latency and hardware utilization measurements. Our thorough analysis aims to accelerate mobile AI research and deployment by providing insights into the performance and feasibility of deploying LLMs and LMMs on mobile platforms.

Towards LLM-RecSys Alignment with Textual ID Learning

Generative recommendation based on Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed the traditional ranking-based recommendation style into a text-to-text generation paradigm. However, in contrast to standard NLP tasks that inherently operate on human vocabulary, current research in generative recommendations struggles to effectively encode recommendation items within the text-to-text framework using concise yet meaningful ID representations. To better align LLMs with recommendation needs, we propose IDGen, representing each item as a unique, concise, semantically rich, platform-agnostic textual ID using human language tokens. This is achieved by training a textual ID generator alongside the LLM-based recommender, enabling seamless integration of personalized recommendations into natural language generation. Notably, as user history is expressed in natural language and decoupled from the original dataset, our approach suggests the potential for a foundational generative recommendation model. Experiments show that our framework consistently surpasses existing models in sequential recommendation under standard experimental setting. Then, we explore the possibility of training a foundation recommendation model with the proposed method on data collected from 19 different datasets and tested its recommendation performance on 6 unseen datasets across different platforms under a completely zero-shot setting. The results show that the zero-shot performance of the pre-trained foundation model is comparable to or even better than some traditional recommendation models based on supervised training, showing the potential of the IDGen paradigm serving as the foundation model for generative recommendation. Code and data are open-sourced at https://github.com/agiresearch/IDGenRec.

AgentOhana: Design Unified Data and Training Pipeline for Effective Agent Learning

Autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have garnered significant research attention. However, fully harnessing the potential of LLMs for agent-based tasks presents inherent challenges due to the heterogeneous nature of diverse data sources featuring multi-turn trajectories. In this paper, we introduce \textbf{AgentOhana} as a comprehensive solution to address these challenges. \textit{AgentOhana} aggregates agent trajectories from distinct environments, spanning a wide array of scenarios. It meticulously standardizes and unifies these trajectories into a consistent format, streamlining the creation of a generic data loader optimized for agent training. Leveraging the data unification, our training pipeline maintains equilibrium across different data sources and preserves independent randomness across devices during dataset partitioning and model training. Additionally, we present \textbf{xLAM-v0.1}, a large action model tailored for AI agents, which demonstrates exceptional performance across various benchmarks.

AgentLite: A Lightweight Library for Building and Advancing Task-Oriented LLM Agent System

The booming success of LLMs initiates rapid development in LLM agents. Though the foundation of an LLM agent is the generative model, it is critical to devise the optimal reasoning strategies and agent architectures. Accordingly, LLM agent research advances from the simple chain-of-thought prompting to more complex ReAct and Reflection reasoning strategy; agent architecture also evolves from single agent generation to multi-agent conversation, as well as multi-LLM multi-agent group chat. However, with the existing intricate frameworks and libraries, creating and evaluating new reasoning strategies and agent architectures has become a complex challenge, which hinders research investigation into LLM agents. Thus, we open-source a new AI agent library, AgentLite, which simplifies this process by offering a lightweight, user-friendly platform for innovating LLM agent reasoning, architectures, and applications with ease. AgentLite is a task-oriented framework designed to enhance the ability of agents to break down tasks and facilitate the development of multi-agent systems. Furthermore, we introduce multiple practical applications developed with AgentLite to demonstrate its convenience and flexibility. Get started now at: \url{https://github.com/SalesforceAIResearch/AgentLite}.

LLM as OS, Agents as Apps: Envisioning AIOS, Agents and the AIOS-Agent Ecosystem

This paper envisions a revolutionary AIOS-Agent ecosystem, where Large Language Model (LLM) serves as the (Artificial) Intelligent Operating System (IOS, or AIOS)--an operating system "with soul". Upon this foundation, a diverse range of LLM-based AI Agent Applications (Agents, or AAPs) are developed, enriching the AIOS-Agent ecosystem and signaling a paradigm shift from the traditional OS-APP ecosystem. We envision that LLM's impact will not be limited to the AI application level, instead, it will in turn revolutionize the design and implementation of computer system, architecture, software, and programming language, featured by several main concepts: LLM as OS (system-level), Agents as Applications (application-level), Natural Language as Programming Interface (user-level), and Tools as Devices/Libraries (hardware/middleware-level). We begin by introducing the architecture of traditional OS. Then we formalize a conceptual framework for AIOS through "LLM as OS (LLMOS)", drawing analogies between AIOS and traditional OS: LLM is likened to OS kernel, context window to memory, external storage to file system, hardware tools to peripheral devices, software tools to programming libraries, and user prompts to user commands. Subsequently, we introduce the new AIOS-Agent Ecosystem, where users can easily program Agent Applications (AAPs) using natural language, democratizing the development of software, which is different from the traditional OS-APP ecosystem. Following this, we explore the diverse scope of Agent Applications. We delve into both single-agent and multi-agent systems, as well as human-agent interaction. Lastly, drawing on the insights from traditional OS-APP ecosystem, we propose a roadmap for the evolution of the AIOS-Agent ecosystem. This roadmap is designed to guide the future research and development, suggesting systematic progresses of AIOS and its Agent applications.

User-Controllable Recommendation via Counterfactual Retrospective and Prospective Explanations

Modern recommender systems utilize users' historical behaviors to generate personalized recommendations. However, these systems often lack user controllability, leading to diminished user satisfaction and trust in the systems. Acknowledging the recent advancements in explainable recommender systems that enhance users' understanding of recommendation mechanisms, we propose leveraging these advancements to improve user controllability. In this paper, we present a user-controllable recommender system that seamlessly integrates explainability and controllability within a unified framework. By providing both retrospective and prospective explanations through counterfactual reasoning, users can customize their control over the system by interacting with these explanations. Furthermore, we introduce and assess two attributes of controllability in recommendation systems: the complexity of controllability and the accuracy of controllability. Experimental evaluations on MovieLens and Yelp datasets substantiate the effectiveness of our proposed framework. Additionally, our experiments demonstrate that offering users control options can potentially enhance recommendation accuracy in the future. Source code and data are available at \url{https://github.com/chrisjtan/ucr}.

GenRec: Large Language Model for Generative Recommendation

In recent years, large language models (LLM) have emerged as powerful tools for diverse natural language processing tasks. However, their potential for recommender systems under the generative recommendation paradigm remains relatively unexplored. This paper presents an innovative approach to recommendation systems using large language models (LLMs) based on text data. In this paper, we present a novel LLM for generative recommendation (GenRec) that utilized the expressive power of LLM to directly generate the target item to recommend, rather than calculating ranking score for each candidate item one by one as in traditional discriminative recommendation. GenRec uses LLM's understanding ability to interpret context, learn user preferences, and generate relevant recommendation. Our proposed approach leverages the vast knowledge encoded in large language models to accomplish recommendation tasks. We first we formulate specialized prompts to enhance the ability of LLM to comprehend recommendation tasks. Subsequently, we use these prompts to fine-tune the LLaMA backbone LLM on a dataset of user-item interactions, represented by textual data, to capture user preferences and item characteristics. Our research underscores the potential of LLM-based generative recommendation in revolutionizing the domain of recommendation systems and offers a foundational framework for future explorations in this field. We conduct extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, and the experiments shows that our GenRec has significant better results on large dataset.

Counterfactual Collaborative Reasoning

Causal reasoning and logical reasoning are two important types of reasoning abilities for human intelligence. However, their relationship has not been extensively explored under machine intelligence context. In this paper, we explore how the two reasoning abilities can be jointly modeled to enhance both accuracy and explainability of machine learning models. More specifically, by integrating two important types of reasoning ability -- counterfactual reasoning and (neural) logical reasoning -- we propose Counterfactual Collaborative Reasoning (CCR), which conducts counterfactual logic reasoning to improve the performance. In particular, we use recommender system as an example to show how CCR alleviate data scarcity, improve accuracy and enhance transparency. Technically, we leverage counterfactual reasoning to generate "difficult" counterfactual training examples for data augmentation, which -- together with the original training examples -- can enhance the model performance. Since the augmented data is model irrelevant, they can be used to enhance any model, enabling the wide applicability of the technique. Besides, most of the existing data augmentation methods focus on "implicit data augmentation" over users' implicit feedback, while our framework conducts "explicit data augmentation" over users explicit feedback based on counterfactual logic reasoning. Experiments on three real-world datasets show that CCR achieves better performance than non-augmented models and implicitly augmented models, and also improves model transparency by generating counterfactual explanations.

VIP5: Towards Multimodal Foundation Models for Recommendation

Computer Vision (CV), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Recommender Systems (RecSys) are three prominent AI applications that have traditionally developed independently, resulting in disparate modeling and engineering methodologies. This has impeded the ability for these fields to directly benefit from each other's advancements. With the increasing availability of multimodal data on the web, there is a growing need to consider various modalities when making recommendations for users. With the recent emergence of foundation models, large language models have emerged as a potential general-purpose interface for unifying different modalities and problem formulations. In light of this, we propose the development of a multimodal foundation model by considering both visual and textual modalities under the P5 recommendation paradigm (VIP5) to unify various modalities and recommendation tasks. This will enable the processing of vision, language, and personalization information in a shared architecture for improved recommendations. To achieve this, we introduce multimodal personalized prompts to accommodate multiple modalities under a shared format. Additionally, we propose a parameter-efficient training method for foundation models, which involves freezing the backbone and fine-tuning lightweight adapters, resulting in improved recommendation performance and increased efficiency in terms of training time and memory usage.