Learning Distribution-Wise Control in Representation Space for Language Models

Interventions in language models (LMs) are applied strategically to steer model behavior during the forward pass. Learnable interventions, also known as representation fine-tuning, aim to apply pointwise control within the concept subspace and have proven effective in altering high-level behaviors. In this work, we extend this approach to the distribution level, enabling the model to learn not only pointwise transformations but also the surrounding regions of the concept subspace. We demonstrate that these methods perform effectively in early layers, with larger standard deviations correlating strongly with improved performance. Across eight commonsense reasoning and seven arithmetic reasoning benchmarks, our distribution-wise interventions consistently outperform pointwise interventions in controllability and robustness. These results illustrate that distribution-wise interventions provide a more comprehensive method for steering model behavior and enabling finer-grained control over language models. The code is at: \href{https://github.com/chili-lab/D-Intervention}{https://github.com/chili-lab/D-Intervention}.

Language Models are Symbolic Learners in Arithmetic

Large Language Models (LLMs) are thought to struggle with arithmetic learning due to the inherent differences between language modeling and numerical computation, but concrete evidence has been lacking. This work responds to this claim through a two-side experiment. We first investigate whether LLMs leverage partial products during arithmetic learning. We find that although LLMs can identify some partial products after learning, they fail to leverage them for arithmetic tasks, conversely. We then explore how LLMs approach arithmetic symbolically by breaking tasks into subgroups, hypothesizing that difficulties arise from subgroup complexity and selection. Our results show that when subgroup complexity is fixed, LLMs treat a collection of different arithmetic operations similarly. By analyzing position-level accuracy across different training sizes, we further observe that it follows a U-shaped pattern: LLMs quickly learn the easiest patterns at the first and last positions, while progressively learning the more difficult patterns in the middle positions. This suggests that LLMs select subgroup following an easy-to-hard paradigm during learning. Our work confirms that LLMs are pure symbolic learners in arithmetic tasks and underscores the importance of understanding them deeply through subgroup-level quantification.

Large Language Model based Multi-Agents: A Survey of Progress and Challenges

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across a wide array of tasks. Due to the impressive planning and reasoning abilities of LLMs, they have been used as autonomous agents to do many tasks automatically. Recently, based on the development of using one LLM as a single planning or decision-making agent, LLM-based multi-agent systems have achieved considerable progress in complex problem-solving and world simulation. To provide the community with an overview of this dynamic field, we present this survey to offer an in-depth discussion on the essential aspects of multi-agent systems based on LLMs, as well as the challenges. Our goal is for readers to gain substantial insights on the following questions: What domains and environments do LLM-based multi-agents simulate? How are these agents profiled and how do they communicate? What mechanisms contribute to the growth of agents' capacities? For those interested in delving into this field of study, we also summarize the commonly used datasets or benchmarks for them to have convenient access. To keep researchers updated on the latest studies, we maintain an open-source GitHub repository, dedicated to outlining the research on LLM-based multi-agent systems.