LLM-First Search: Self-Guided Exploration of the Solution Space

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable improvements in reasoning and planning through increased test-time compute, often by framing problem-solving as a search process. While methods like Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) have proven effective in some domains, their reliance on fixed exploration hyperparameters limits their adaptability across tasks of varying difficulty, rendering them impractical or expensive in certain settings. In this paper, we propose \textbf{LLM-First Search (LFS)}, a novel \textit{LLM Self-Guided Search} method that removes the need for pre-defined search strategies by empowering the LLM to autonomously control the search process via self-guided exploration. Rather than relying on external heuristics or hardcoded policies, the LLM evaluates whether to pursue the current search path or explore alternative branches based on its internal scoring mechanisms. This enables more flexible and context-sensitive reasoning without requiring manual tuning or task-specific adaptation. We evaluate LFS on Countdown and Sudoku against three classic widely-used search algorithms, Tree-of-Thoughts' Breadth First Search (ToT-BFS), Best First Search (BestFS), and MCTS, each of which have been used to achieve SotA results on a range of challenging reasoning tasks. We found that LFS (1) performs better on more challenging tasks without additional tuning, (2) is more computationally efficient compared to the other methods, especially when powered by a stronger model, (3) scales better with stronger models, due to its LLM-First design, and (4) scales better with increased compute budget. Our code is publicly available at \href{https://github.com/NathanHerr/LLM-First-Search}{LLM-First-Search}.

QGen Studio: An Adaptive Question-Answer Generation, Training and Evaluation Platform

We present QGen Studio: an adaptive question-answer generation, training, and evaluation platform. QGen Studio enables users to leverage large language models (LLMs) to create custom question-answer datasets and fine-tune models on this synthetic data. It features a dataset viewer and model explorer to streamline this process. The dataset viewer provides key metrics and visualizes the context from which the QA pairs are generated, offering insights into data quality. The model explorer supports model comparison, allowing users to contrast the performance of their trained LLMs against other models, supporting performance benchmarking and refinement. QGen Studio delivers an interactive, end-to-end solution for generating QA datasets and training scalable, domain-adaptable models. The studio will be open-sourced soon, allowing users to deploy it locally.

Are Large Language Models Strategic Decision Makers? A Study of Performance and Bias in Two-Player Non-Zero-Sum Games

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been increasingly used in real-world settings, yet their strategic abilities remain largely unexplored. Game theory provides a good framework for assessing the decision-making abilities of LLMs in interactions with other agents. Although prior studies have shown that LLMs can solve these tasks with carefully curated prompts, they fail when the problem setting or prompt changes. In this work we investigate LLMs' behaviour in strategic games, Stag Hunt and Prisoner Dilemma, analyzing performance variations under different settings and prompts. Our results show that the tested state-of-the-art LLMs exhibit at least one of the following systematic biases: (1) positional bias, (2) payoff bias, or (3) behavioural bias. Subsequently, we observed that the LLMs' performance drops when the game configuration is misaligned with the affecting biases. Performance is assessed based on the selection of the correct action, one which agrees with the prompted preferred behaviours of both players. Alignment refers to whether the LLM's bias aligns with the correct action. For example, GPT-4o's average performance drops by 34% when misaligned. Additionally, the current trend of "bigger and newer is better" does not hold for the above, where GPT-4o (the current best-performing LLM) suffers the most substantial performance drop. Lastly, we note that while chain-of-thought prompting does reduce the effect of the biases on most models, it is far from solving the problem at the fundamental level.

Towards Generalist Robot Learning from Internet Video: A Survey

This survey presents an overview of methods for learning from video (LfV) in the context of reinforcement learning (RL) and robotics. We focus on methods capable of scaling to large internet video datasets and, in the process, extracting foundational knowledge about the world's dynamics and physical human behaviour. Such methods hold great promise for developing general-purpose robots. We open with an overview of fundamental concepts relevant to the LfV-for-robotics setting. This includes a discussion of the exciting benefits LfV methods can offer (e.g., improved generalization beyond the available robot data) and commentary on key LfV challenges (e.g., challenges related to missing information in video and LfV distribution shifts). Our literature review begins with an analysis of video foundation model techniques that can extract knowledge from large, heterogeneous video datasets. Next, we review methods that specifically leverage video data for robot learning. Here, we categorise work according to which RL knowledge modality benefits from the use of video data. We additionally highlight techniques for mitigating LfV challenges, including reviewing action representations that address the issue of missing action labels in video. Finally, we examine LfV datasets and benchmarks, before concluding the survey by discussing challenges and opportunities in LfV. Here, we advocate for scalable approaches that can leverage the full range of available data and that target the key benefits of LfV. Overall, we hope this survey will serve as a comprehensive reference for the emerging field of LfV, catalysing further research in the area, and ultimately facilitating progress towards obtaining general-purpose robots.