Agentic Knowledgeable Self-awareness

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved considerable performance across various agentic planning tasks. However, traditional agent planning approaches adopt a "flood irrigation" methodology that indiscriminately injects gold trajectories, external feedback, and domain knowledge into agent models. This practice overlooks the fundamental human cognitive principle of situational self-awareness during decision-making-the ability to dynamically assess situational demands and strategically employ resources during decision-making. We propose agentic knowledgeable self-awareness to address this gap, a novel paradigm enabling LLM-based agents to autonomously regulate knowledge utilization. Specifically, we propose KnowSelf, a data-centric approach that applies agents with knowledgeable self-awareness like humans. Concretely, we devise a heuristic situation judgement criterion to mark special tokens on the agent's self-explored trajectories for collecting training data. Through a two-stage training process, the agent model can switch between different situations by generating specific special tokens, achieving optimal planning effects with minimal costs. Our experiments demonstrate that KnowSelf can outperform various strong baselines on different tasks and models with minimal use of external knowledge. Code is available at https://github.com/zjunlp/KnowSelf.

SynWorld: Virtual Scenario Synthesis for Agentic Action Knowledge Refinement

In the interaction between agents and their environments, agents expand their capabilities by planning and executing actions. However, LLM-based agents face substantial challenges when deployed in novel environments or required to navigate unconventional action spaces. To empower agents to autonomously explore environments, optimize workflows, and enhance their understanding of actions, we propose SynWorld, a framework that allows agents to synthesize possible scenarios with multi-step action invocation within the action space and perform Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) exploration to effectively refine their action knowledge in the current environment. Our experiments demonstrate that SynWorld is an effective and general approach to learning action knowledge in new environments. Code is available at https://github.com/zjunlp/SynWorld.

An Adaptive Framework for Generating Systematic Explanatory Answer in Online Q&A Platforms

Question Answering (QA) systems face challenges in handling complex questions that require multi-domain knowledge synthesis. The naive RAG models, although effective in information retrieval, struggle with complex questions that require comprehensive and in-depth answers. The pioneering task is defined as explanatory answer generation, which entails handling identified challenges such as the requirement for comprehensive information and logical coherence within the generated context. To address these issues, we refer to systematic thinking theory and propose SynthRAG, an innovative framework designed to enhance QA performance. SynthRAG improves on conventional models by employing adaptive outlines for dynamic content structuring, generating systematic information to ensure detailed coverage, and producing customized answers tailored to specific user inquiries. This structured approach guarantees logical coherence and thorough integration of information, yielding responses that are both insightful and methodically organized. Empirical evaluations underscore SynthRAG's effectiveness, demonstrating its superiority in handling complex questions, overcoming the limitations of naive RAG models, and significantly improving answer quality and depth. Furthermore, an online deployment on the Zhihu platform revealed that SynthRAG's answers achieved notable user engagement, with each response averaging 5.73 upvotes and surpassing the performance of 79.8% of human contributors, highlighting the practical relevance and impact of the proposed framework. Our code is available at https://github.com/czy1999/SynthRAG .

Benchmarking Agentic Workflow Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs), with their exceptional ability to handle a wide range of tasks, have driven significant advancements in tackling reasoning and planning tasks, wherein decomposing complex problems into executable workflows is a crucial step in this process. Existing workflow evaluation frameworks either focus solely on holistic performance or suffer from limitations such as restricted scenario coverage, simplistic workflow structures, and lax evaluation standards. To this end, we introduce WorFBench, a unified workflow generation benchmark with multi-faceted scenarios and intricate graph workflow structures. Additionally, we present WorFEval, a systemic evaluation protocol utilizing subsequence and subgraph matching algorithms to accurately quantify the LLM agent's workflow generation capabilities. Through comprehensive evaluations across different types of LLMs, we discover distinct gaps between the sequence planning capabilities and graph planning capabilities of LLM agents, with even GPT-4 exhibiting a gap of around 15%. We also train two open-source models and evaluate their generalization abilities on held-out tasks. Furthermore, we observe that the generated workflows can enhance downstream tasks, enabling them to achieve superior performance with less time during inference. Code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/zjunlp/WorFBench.

Effective Demonstration Annotation for In-Context Learning via Language Model-Based Determinantal Point Process

In-context learning (ICL) is a few-shot learning paradigm that involves learning mappings through input-output pairs and appropriately applying them to new instances. Despite the remarkable ICL capabilities demonstrated by Large Language Models (LLMs), existing works are highly dependent on large-scale labeled support sets, not always feasible in practical scenarios. To refine this approach, we focus primarily on an innovative selective annotation mechanism, which precedes the standard demonstration retrieval. We introduce the Language Model-based Determinant Point Process (LM-DPP) that simultaneously considers the uncertainty and diversity of unlabeled instances for optimal selection. Consequently, this yields a subset for annotation that strikes a trade-off between the two factors. We apply LM-DPP to various language models, including GPT-J, LlaMA, and GPT-3. Experimental results on 9 NLU and 2 Generation datasets demonstrate that LM-DPP can effectively select canonical examples. Further analysis reveals that LLMs benefit most significantly from subsets that are both low uncertainty and high diversity.

ProductAgent: Benchmarking Conversational Product Search Agent with Asking Clarification Questions

This paper introduces the task of product demand clarification within an e-commercial scenario, where the user commences the conversation with ambiguous queries and the task-oriented agent is designed to achieve more accurate and tailored product searching by asking clarification questions. To address this task, we propose ProductAgent, a conversational information seeking agent equipped with abilities of strategic clarification question generation and dynamic product retrieval. Specifically, we develop the agent with strategies for product feature summarization, query generation, and product retrieval. Furthermore, we propose the benchmark called PROCLARE to evaluate the agent's performance both automatically and qualitatively with the aid of a LLM-driven user simulator. Experiments show that ProductAgent interacts positively with the user and enhances retrieval performance with increasing dialogue turns, where user demands become gradually more explicit and detailed. All the source codes will be released after the review anonymity period.

DIALIGHT: Lightweight Multilingual Development and Evaluation of Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems with Large Language Models

We present DIALIGHT, a toolkit for developing and evaluating multilingual Task-Oriented Dialogue (ToD) systems which facilitates systematic evaluations and comparisons between ToD systems using fine-tuning of Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) and those utilising the zero-shot and in-context learning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). In addition to automatic evaluation, this toolkit features (i) a secure, user-friendly web interface for fine-grained human evaluation at both local utterance level and global dialogue level, and (ii) a microservice-based backend, improving efficiency and scalability. Our evaluations reveal that while PLM fine-tuning leads to higher accuracy and coherence, LLM-based systems excel in producing diverse and likeable responses. However, we also identify significant challenges of LLMs in adherence to task-specific instructions and generating outputs in multiple languages, highlighting areas for future research. We hope this open-sourced toolkit will serve as a valuable resource for researchers aiming to develop and properly evaluate multilingual ToD systems and will lower, currently still high, entry barriers in the field.

EcomGPT-CT: Continual Pre-training of E-commerce Large Language Models with Semi-structured Data

Large Language Models (LLMs) pre-trained on massive corpora have exhibited remarkable performance on various NLP tasks. However, applying these models to specific domains still poses significant challenges, such as lack of domain knowledge, limited capacity to leverage domain knowledge and inadequate adaptation to domain-specific data formats. Considering the exorbitant cost of training LLMs from scratch and the scarcity of annotated data within particular domains, in this work, we focus on domain-specific continual pre-training of LLMs using E-commerce domain as an exemplar. Specifically, we explore the impact of continual pre-training on LLMs employing unlabeled general and E-commercial corpora. Furthermore, we design a mixing strategy among different data sources to better leverage E-commercial semi-structured data. We construct multiple tasks to assess LLMs' few-shot In-context Learning ability and their zero-shot performance after instruction tuning in E-commerce domain. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of continual pre-training of E-commerce LLMs and the efficacy of our devised data mixing strategy.

Taxonomic analysis of asteroids with artificial neural networks

We study the surface composition of asteroids with visible and/or infrared spectroscopy. For example, asteroid taxonomy is based on the spectral features or multiple color indices in visible and near-infrared wavelengths. The composition of asteroids gives key information to understand their origin and evolution. However, we lack compositional information for faint asteroids due to limits of ground-based observational instruments. In the near future, the Chinese Space Survey telescope (CSST) will provide multiple colors and spectroscopic data for asteroids of apparent magnitude brighter than 25 mag and 23 mag, respectively. For the aim of analysis of the CSST spectroscopic data, we applied an algorithm using artificial neural networks (ANNs) to establish a preliminary classification model for asteroid taxonomy according to the design of the survey module of CSST. Using the SMASS II spectra and the Bus-Binzel taxonomy system, our ANN classification tool composed of 5 individual ANNs is constructed, and the accuracy of this classification system is higher than 92 %. As the first application of our ANN tool, 64 spectra of 42 asteroids obtained in 2006 and 2007 by us with the 2.16-m telescope in the Xinglong station (Observatory Code 327) of National Astronomical Observatory of China are analyzed. The predicted labels of these spectra using our ANN tool are found to be reasonable when compared to their known taxonomic labels. Considering the accuracy and stability, our ANN tool can be applied to analyse the CSST asteroid spectra in the future.

EcomGPT: Instruction-tuning Large Language Models with Chain-of-Task Tasks for E-commerce

Recently, instruction-following Large Language Models (LLMs) , represented by ChatGPT, have exhibited exceptional performance in general Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, the unique characteristics of E-commerce data pose significant challenges to general LLMs. An LLM tailored specifically for E-commerce scenarios, possessing robust cross-dataset/task generalization capabilities, is a pressing necessity. To solve this issue, in this work, we proposed the first e-commerce instruction dataset EcomInstruct, with a total of 2.5 million instruction data. EcomInstruct scales up the data size and task diversity by constructing atomic tasks with E-commerce basic data types, such as product information, user reviews. Atomic tasks are defined as intermediate tasks implicitly involved in solving a final task, which we also call Chain-of-Task tasks. We developed EcomGPT with different parameter scales by training the backbone model BLOOMZ with the EcomInstruct. Benefiting from the fundamental semantic understanding capabilities acquired from the Chain-of-Task tasks, EcomGPT exhibits excellent zero-shot generalization capabilities. Extensive experiments and human evaluations demonstrate that EcomGPT outperforms ChatGPT in term of cross-dataset/task generalization on E-commerce tasks.