From Language to Action: A Review of Large Language Models as Autonomous Agents and Tool Users

The pursuit of human-level artificial intelligence (AI) has significantly advanced the development of autonomous agents and Large Language Models (LLMs). LLMs are now widely utilized as decision-making agents for their ability to interpret instructions, manage sequential tasks, and adapt through feedback. This review examines recent developments in employing LLMs as autonomous agents and tool users and comprises seven research questions. We only used the papers published between 2023 and 2025 in conferences of the A* and A rank and Q1 journals. A structured analysis of the LLM agents' architectural design principles, dividing their applications into single-agent and multi-agent systems, and strategies for integrating external tools is presented. In addition, the cognitive mechanisms of LLM, including reasoning, planning, and memory, and the impact of prompting methods and fine-tuning procedures on agent performance are also investigated. Furthermore, we evaluated current benchmarks and assessment protocols and have provided an analysis of 68 publicly available datasets to assess the performance of LLM-based agents in various tasks. In conducting this review, we have identified critical findings on verifiable reasoning of LLMs, the capacity for self-improvement, and the personalization of LLM-based agents. Finally, we have discussed ten future research directions to overcome these gaps.

Hallucination to Truth: A Review of Fact-Checking and Factuality Evaluation in Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on vast and diverse internet corpora that often include inaccurate or misleading content. Consequently, LLMs can generate misinformation, making robust fact-checking essential. This review systematically analyzes how LLM-generated content is evaluated for factual accuracy by exploring key challenges such as hallucinations, dataset limitations, and the reliability of evaluation metrics. The review emphasizes the need for strong fact-checking frameworks that integrate advanced prompting strategies, domain-specific fine-tuning, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods. It proposes five research questions that guide the analysis of the recent literature from 2020 to 2025, focusing on evaluation methods and mitigation techniques. The review also discusses the role of instruction tuning, multi-agent reasoning, and external knowledge access via RAG frameworks. Key findings highlight the limitations of current metrics, the value of grounding outputs with validated external evidence, and the importance of domain-specific customization to improve factual consistency. Overall, the review underlines the importance of building LLMs that are not only accurate and explainable but also tailored for domain-specific fact-checking. These insights contribute to the advancement of research toward more trustworthy and context-aware language models.

Discrete Scale-invariant Metric Learning for Efficient Collaborative Filtering

Metric learning has attracted extensive interest for its ability to provide personalized recommendations based on the importance of observed user-item interactions. Current metric learning methods aim to push negative items away from the corresponding users and positive items by an absolute geometrical distance margin. However, items may come from imbalanced categories with different intra-class variations. Thus, the absolute distance margin may not be ideal for estimating the difference between user preferences over imbalanced items. To this end, we propose a new method, named discrete scale-invariant metric learning (DSIML), by adding binary constraints to users and items, which maps users and items into binary codes of a shared Hamming subspace to speed up the online recommendation. Specifically, we firstly propose a scale-invariant margin based on angles at the negative item points in the shared Hamming subspace. Then, we derive a scale-invariant triple hinge loss based on the margin. To capture more preference difference information, we integrate a pairwise ranking loss into the scale-invariant loss in the proposed model. Due to the difficulty of directly optimizing the mixed integer optimization problem formulated with \textit{log-sum-exp} functions, we seek to optimize its variational quadratic upper bound and learn hash codes with an alternating optimization strategy. Experiments on benchmark datasets clearly show that our proposed method is superior to competitive metric learning and hashing-based baselines for recommender systems. The implementation code is available at https://github.com/AnonyFeb/dsml.

Revealing the Self: Brainwave-Based Human Trait Identification

People exhibit unique emotional responses. In the same scenario, the emotional reactions of two individuals can be either similar or vastly different. For instance, consider one person's reaction to an invitation to smoke versus another person's response to a query about their sleep quality. The identification of these individual traits through the observation of common physical parameters opens the door to a wide range of applications, including psychological analysis, criminology, disease prediction, addiction control, and more. While there has been previous research in the fields of psychometrics, inertial sensors, computer vision, and audio analysis, this paper introduces a novel technique for identifying human traits in real time using brainwave data. To achieve this, we begin with an extensive study of brainwave data collected from 80 participants using a portable EEG headset. We also conduct a statistical analysis of the collected data utilizing box plots. Our analysis uncovers several new insights, leading us to a groundbreaking unified approach for identifying diverse human traits by leveraging machine learning techniques on EEG data. Our analysis demonstrates that this proposed solution achieves high accuracy. Moreover, we explore two deep-learning models to compare the performance of our solution. Consequently, we have developed an integrated, real-time trait identification solution using EEG data, based on the insights from our analysis. To validate our approach, we conducted a rigorous user evaluation with an additional 20 participants. The outcomes of this evaluation illustrate both high accuracy and favorable user ratings, emphasizing the robust potential of our proposed method to serve as a versatile solution for human trait identification.

Improving ICD coding using Chapter based Named Entities and Attentional Models

Recent advancements in natural language processing (NLP) have led to automation in various domains. However, clinical NLP often relies on benchmark datasets that may not reflect real-world scenarios accurately. Automatic ICD coding, a vital NLP task, typically uses outdated and imbalanced datasets like MIMIC-III, with existing methods yielding micro-averaged F1 scores between 0.4 and 0.7 due to many false positives. Our research introduces an enhanced approach to ICD coding that improves F1 scores by using chapter-based named entities and attentional models. This method categorizes discharge summaries into ICD-9 Chapters and develops attentional models with chapter-specific data, eliminating the need to consider external data for code identification. For categorization, we use Chapter-IV to de-bias and influence key entities and weights without neural networks, creating accurate thresholds and providing interpretability for human validation. Post-validation, we develop attentional models for three frequent and three non-frequent codes from Chapter-IV using Bidirectional-Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs) with Attention and Transformer with Multi-head Attention architectures. The average Micro-F1 scores of 0.79 and 0.81 from these models demonstrate significant performance improvements in ICD coding.

Methods to Measure the Broncho-Arterial Ratio and Wall Thickness in the Right Lower Lobe for Defining Radiographic Reversibility of Bronchiectasis

The diagnosis of bronchiectasis requires measuring abnormal bronchial dilation. It is confirmed using a chest CT scan, where the key feature is an increased broncho-arterial ratio (BAR) (>0.8 in children), often with bronchial wall thickening. Image processing methods facilitate quicker interpretation and detailed evaluations by lobes and segments. Challenges like inclined nature, oblique orientation, and partial volume effect make it difficult to obtain accurate measurements in the upper and middle lobes using the same algorithms. Therefore, accurate detection and measurement of airway and artery regions for BAR and wall thickness in each lobe require different image processing/machine learning methods. We propose methods for: 1. Separating the right lower lobe (RLL) region from full-length CT scans using the tracheal bifurcation (Carina) point as a central marker; 2. Locating the inner diameter of airways and outer diameter of arteries for BAR measurement; and 3. Measuring airway wall thickness (WT) by identifying the outer and inner diameters of airway boundaries. Analysis of 13 HRCT scans with varying thicknesses (0.67mm, 1mm, 2mm) shows the tracheal bifurcation frame can be detected accurately, with a deviation of +/- 2 frames in some cases. A Windows app was developed for measuring inner airway diameter, artery diameter, BAR, and wall thickness, allowing users to draw boundaries around visible BA pairs in the RLL region. Measurements of 10 BA pairs revealed accurate results comparable to those of a human reader, with deviations of +/- 0.10-0.15mm. Additional studies and validation are needed to consolidate inter- and intra-rater variability and enhance the methods.

Feature Extraction Using Deep Generative Models for Bangla Text Classification on a New Comprehensive Dataset

The selection of features for text classification is a fundamental task in text mining and information retrieval. Despite being the sixth most widely spoken language in the world, Bangla has received little attention due to the scarcity of text datasets. In this research, we collected, annotated, and prepared a comprehensive dataset of 212,184 Bangla documents in seven different categories and made it publicly accessible. We implemented three deep learning generative models: LSTM variational autoencoder (LSTM VAE), auxiliary classifier generative adversarial network (AC-GAN), and adversarial autoencoder (AAE) to extract text features, although their applications are initially found in the field of computer vision. We utilized our dataset to train these three models and used the feature space obtained in the document classification task. We evaluated the performance of the classifiers and found that the adversarial autoencoder model produced the best feature space.