LLM as a Mastermind: A Survey of Strategic Reasoning with Large Language Models

This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the current status and opportunities for Large Language Models (LLMs) in strategic reasoning, a sophisticated form of reasoning that necessitates understanding and predicting adversary actions in multi-agent settings while adjusting strategies accordingly. Strategic reasoning is distinguished by its focus on the dynamic and uncertain nature of interactions among multi-agents, where comprehending the environment and anticipating the behavior of others is crucial. We explore the scopes, applications, methodologies, and evaluation metrics related to strategic reasoning with LLMs, highlighting the burgeoning development in this area and the interdisciplinary approaches enhancing their decision-making performance. It aims to systematize and clarify the scattered literature on this subject, providing a systematic review that underscores the importance of strategic reasoning as a critical cognitive capability and offers insights into future research directions and potential improvements.

Synthetic Data (Almost) from Scratch: Generalized Instruction Tuning for Language Models

We introduce Generalized Instruction Tuning (called GLAN), a general and scalable method for instruction tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs). Unlike prior work that relies on seed examples or existing datasets to construct instruction tuning data, GLAN exclusively utilizes a pre-curated taxonomy of human knowledge and capabilities as input and generates large-scale synthetic instruction data across all disciplines. Specifically, inspired by the systematic structure in human education system, we build the taxonomy by decomposing human knowledge and capabilities to various fields, sub-fields and ultimately, distinct disciplines semi-automatically, facilitated by LLMs. Subsequently, we generate a comprehensive list of subjects for every discipline and proceed to design a syllabus tailored to each subject, again utilizing LLMs. With the fine-grained key concepts detailed in every class session of the syllabus, we are able to generate diverse instructions with a broad coverage across the entire spectrum of human knowledge and skills. Extensive experiments on large language models (e.g., Mistral) demonstrate that GLAN excels in multiple dimensions from mathematical reasoning, coding, academic exams, logical reasoning to general instruction following without using task-specific training data of these tasks. In addition, GLAN allows for easy customization and new fields or skills can be added by simply incorporating a new node into our taxonomy.

Reliable long timescale decision-directed channel estimation for OFDM system

Decision-directed channel estimation (DDCE) is one kind of blind channel estimation method that tracks the channel blindly by an iterative algorithm without relying on the pilots, which can increase the utilization of wireless resource. However, one major problem of DDCE is the performance degradation caused by error accumulation during the tracking process. In this paper, we propose an reliable DDCE (RDDCE) scheme for an OFDM-based communication system in the time-varying deep fading environment. By combining the conventional DDCE and discrete Fourier transform (DFT) channel estimation method, the proposed RDDCE scheme selects the reliable estimated channels on the subcarriers which are less affected by deep fading, and then estimates the channel based on the selected subcarriers by an extended DFT channel estimation where the indices of selected subcarriers are not distributed evenly. Simulation results show that RRDCE can alleviate the performance degradation effectively, track the channel with high accuracy on a long time scale, and has good performance under time-varying and noisy channel conditions.

K-Level Reasoning with Large Language Models

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their proficiency in complex reasoning tasks, their performance in dynamic, interactive, and competitive scenarios - such as business strategy and stock market analysis - remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we formally explore the dynamic reasoning capabilities of LLMs for decision-making in rapidly evolving environments. We introduce two game theory-based pilot challenges that mirror the complexities of real-world dynamic decision-making. These challenges are well-defined, enabling clear, controllable, and precise evaluation of LLMs' dynamic reasoning abilities. Through extensive experiments, we find that existing reasoning methods tend to falter in dynamic settings that require k-level thinking - a key concept not tackled by previous works. To address this, we propose a novel reasoning approach for LLMs, named "K-Level Reasoning". This approach adopts the perspective of rivals to recursively employ k-level thinking based on available historical information, which significantly improves the prediction accuracy of rivals' subsequent moves and informs more strategic decision-making. This research not only sets a robust quantitative benchmark for the assessment of dynamic reasoning but also markedly enhances the proficiency of LLMs in dynamic contexts.

On Meta-Prompting

Certain statistical models are capable of interpreting input strings as instructions, or prompts, and carry out tasks based on them. Many approaches to prompting and pre-training these models involve the automated generation of these prompts. We call these approaches meta-prompting, or prompting to obtain prompts. We propose a theoretical framework based on category theory to generalize and describe them. This framework is flexible enough to account for LLM stochasticity; and allows us to obtain formal results around task agnosticity and equivalence of various meta-prompting approaches. We experiment with meta-prompting in two active areas of model research: creativity and ideation. We find that user preference favors (p < 0.01) the prompts generated under meta-prompting, as well as their corresponding outputs, over a series of hardcoded baseline prompts that include the original task prompt. Using our framework, we argue that meta-prompting is more effective than basic prompting at generating desirable outputs.

Gene-MOE: A Sparsely-gated Framework for Pan-Cancer Genomic Analysis

Analyzing the genomic information from the Pan-Cancer database can help us understand cancer-related factors and contribute to the cancer diagnosis and prognosis. However, existing computational methods and deep learning methods can not effectively find the deep correlations between tens of thousands of genes, which leads to precision loss. In this paper, we proposed a novel pretrained model called Gene-MOE to learn the general feature representations of the Pan-Cancer dataset and transfer the pretrained weights to the downstream tasks. The Gene-MOE fully exploits the mixture of expert (MOE) layers to learn rich feature representations of high-dimensional genes. At the same time, we build a mixture of attention expert (MOAE) model to learn the deep semantic relationships within genetic features. Finally, we proposed a new self-supervised pretraining strategy including loss function design, data enhancement, and optimization strategy to train the Gene-MOE and further improve the performance for the downstream analysis. We carried out cancer classification and survival analysis experiments based on the Gene-MOE. According to the survival analysis results on 14 cancer types, using Gene-MOE outperformed state-of-the-art models on 12 cancer types. According to the classification results, the total accuracy of the classification model for 33 cancer classifications reached 95.2\%. Through detailed feature analysis, we found the Gene-MOE model can learn rich feature representations of high-dimensional genes.

ALYMPICS: Language Agents Meet Game Theory

This paper introduces Alympics, a platform that leverages Large Language Model (LLM) agents to facilitate investigations in game theory. By employing LLMs and autonomous agents to simulate human behavior and enable multi-agent collaborations, we can construct realistic and dynamic models of human interactions for game theory hypothesis formulating and testing. To demonstrate this, we present and implement a survival game involving unequal competition for limited resources. Through manipulation of resource availability and agent personalities, we observe how different agents engage in the competition and adapt their strategies. The use of LLM agents in game theory research offers significant advantages, including simulating realistic behavior, providing a controlled, scalable, and reproducible environment. Our work highlights the potential of LLM agents in enhancing the understanding of strategic decision-making within complex socioeconomic contexts. All codes are available at https://github.com/microsoft/Alympics

Unified Multi-modal Unsupervised Representation Learning for Skeleton-based Action Understanding

Unsupervised pre-training has shown great success in skeleton-based action understanding recently. Existing works typically train separate modality-specific models, then integrate the multi-modal information for action understanding by a late-fusion strategy. Although these approaches have achieved significant performance, they suffer from the complex yet redundant multi-stream model designs, each of which is also limited to the fixed input skeleton modality. To alleviate these issues, in this paper, we propose a Unified Multimodal Unsupervised Representation Learning framework, called UmURL, which exploits an efficient early-fusion strategy to jointly encode the multi-modal features in a single-stream manner. Specifically, instead of designing separate modality-specific optimization processes for uni-modal unsupervised learning, we feed different modality inputs into the same stream with an early-fusion strategy to learn their multi-modal features for reducing model complexity. To ensure that the fused multi-modal features do not exhibit modality bias, i.e., being dominated by a certain modality input, we further propose both intra- and inter-modal consistency learning to guarantee that the multi-modal features contain the complete semantics of each modal via feature decomposition and distinct alignment. In this manner, our framework is able to learn the unified representations of uni-modal or multi-modal skeleton input, which is flexible to different kinds of modality input for robust action understanding in practical cases. Extensive experiments conducted on three large-scale datasets, i.e., NTU-60, NTU-120, and PKU-MMD II, demonstrate that UmURL is highly efficient, possessing the approximate complexity with the uni-modal methods, while achieving new state-of-the-art performance across various downstream task scenarios in skeleton-based action representation learning.

NoteChat: A Dataset of Synthetic Doctor-Patient Conversations Conditioned on Clinical Notes

The detailed clinical records drafted by doctors after each patient's visit are crucial for medical practitioners and researchers. Automating the creation of these notes with language models can reduce the workload of doctors. However, training such models can be difficult due to the limited public availability of conversations between patients and doctors. In this paper, we introduce NoteChat, a cooperative multi-agent framework leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for generating synthetic doctor-patient conversations conditioned on clinical notes. NoteChat consists of Planning, Roleplay, and Polish modules. We provide a comprehensive automatic and human evaluation of NoteChat, comparing it with state-of-the-art models, including OpenAI's ChatGPT and GPT-4. Results demonstrate that NoteChat facilitates high-quality synthetic doctor-patient conversations, underscoring the untapped potential of LLMs in healthcare. This work represents the first instance of multiple LLMs cooperating to complete a doctor-patient conversation conditioned on clinical notes, offering promising avenues for the intersection of AI and healthcare