PTR: Precision-Driven Tool Recommendation for Large Language Models

By augmenting Large Language Models (LLMs) with external tools, their capacity to solve complex problems has been significantly enhanced. However, despite ongoing advancements in the parsing capabilities of LLMs, incorporating all available tools simultaneously in the prompt remains impractical due to the vast number of external tools. Consequently, it is essential to provide LLMs with a precise set of tools tailored to the specific task, considering both quantity and quality. Current tool retrieval methods primarily focus on refining the ranking list of tools and directly packaging a fixed number of top-ranked tools as the tool set. However, these approaches often fail to equip LLMs with the optimal set of tools prior to execution, since the optimal number of tools for different tasks could be different, resulting in inefficiencies such as redundant or unsuitable tools, which impede immediate access to the most relevant tools. This paper addresses the challenge of recommending precise toolsets for LLMs. We introduce the problem of tool recommendation, define its scope, and propose a novel Precision-driven Tool Recommendation (PTR) approach. PTR captures an initial, concise set of tools by leveraging historical tool bundle usage and dynamically adjusts the tool set by performing tool matching, culminating in a multi-view-based tool addition. Additionally, we present a new dataset, RecTools, and a metric, TRACC, designed to evaluate the effectiveness of tool recommendation for LLMs. We further validate our design choices through comprehensive experiments, demonstrating promising accuracy across two open benchmarks and our RecTools dataset.

Game-theoretic LLM: Agent Workflow for Negotiation Games

This paper investigates the rationality of large language models (LLMs) in strategic decision-making contexts, specifically within the framework of game theory. We evaluate several state-of-the-art LLMs across a spectrum of complete-information and incomplete-information games. Our findings reveal that LLMs frequently deviate from rational strategies, particularly as the complexity of the game increases with larger payoff matrices or deeper sequential trees. To address these limitations, we design multiple game-theoretic workflows that guide the reasoning and decision-making processes of LLMs. These workflows aim to enhance the models' ability to compute Nash Equilibria and make rational choices, even under conditions of uncertainty and incomplete information. Experimental results demonstrate that the adoption of these workflows significantly improves the rationality and robustness of LLMs in game-theoretic tasks. Specifically, with the workflow, LLMs exhibit marked improvements in identifying optimal strategies, achieving near-optimal allocations in negotiation scenarios, and reducing susceptibility to exploitation during negotiations. Furthermore, we explore the meta-strategic considerations of whether it is rational for agents to adopt such workflows, recognizing that the decision to use or forgo the workflow constitutes a game-theoretic issue in itself. Our research contributes to a deeper understanding of LLMs' decision-making capabilities in strategic contexts and provides insights into enhancing their rationality through structured workflows. The findings have implications for the development of more robust and strategically sound AI agents capable of navigating complex interactive environments. Code and data supporting this study are available at \url{https://github.com/Wenyueh/game_theory}.

Large Language Model-driven Multi-Agent Simulation for News Diffusion Under Different Network Structures

The proliferation of fake news in the digital age has raised critical concerns, particularly regarding its impact on societal trust and democratic processes. Diverging from conventional agent-based simulation approaches, this work introduces an innovative approach by employing a large language model (LLM)-driven multi-agent simulation to replicate complex interactions within information ecosystems. We investigate key factors that facilitate news propagation, such as agent personalities and network structures, while also evaluating strategies to combat misinformation. Through simulations across varying network structures, we demonstrate the potential of LLM-based agents in modeling the dynamics of misinformation spread, validating the influence of agent traits on the diffusion process. Our findings emphasize the advantages of LLM-based simulations over traditional techniques, as they uncover underlying causes of information spread -- such as agents promoting discussions -- beyond the predefined rules typically employed in existing agent-based models. Additionally, we evaluate three countermeasure strategies, discovering that brute-force blocking influential agents in the network or announcing news accuracy can effectively mitigate misinformation. However, their effectiveness is influenced by the network structure, highlighting the importance of considering network structure in the development of future misinformation countermeasures.

Agent Security Bench (ASB): Formalizing and Benchmarking Attacks and Defenses in LLM-based Agents

Although LLM-based agents, powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), can use external tools and memory mechanisms to solve complex real-world tasks, they may also introduce critical security vulnerabilities. However, the existing literature does not comprehensively evaluate attacks and defenses against LLM-based agents. To address this, we introduce Agent Security Bench (ASB), a comprehensive framework designed to formalize, benchmark, and evaluate the attacks and defenses of LLM-based agents, including 10 scenarios (e.g., e-commerce, autonomous driving, finance), 10 agents targeting the scenarios, over 400 tools, 23 different types of attack/defense methods, and 8 evaluation metrics. Based on ASB, we benchmark 10 prompt injection attacks, a memory poisoning attack, a novel Plan-of-Thought backdoor attack, a mixed attack, and 10 corresponding defenses across 13 LLM backbones with nearly 90,000 testing cases in total. Our benchmark results reveal critical vulnerabilities in different stages of agent operation, including system prompt, user prompt handling, tool usage, and memory retrieval, with the highest average attack success rate of 84.30\%, but limited effectiveness shown in current defenses, unveiling important works to be done in terms of agent security for the community. Our code can be found at https://github.com/agiresearch/ASB.

AIPatient: Simulating Patients with EHRs and LLM Powered Agentic Workflow

Simulated patient systems play a crucial role in modern medical education and research, providing safe, integrative learning environments and enabling clinical decision-making simulations. Large Language Models (LLM) could advance simulated patient systems by replicating medical conditions and patient-doctor interactions with high fidelity and low cost. However, ensuring the effectiveness and trustworthiness of these systems remains a challenge, as they require a large, diverse, and precise patient knowledgebase, along with a robust and stable knowledge diffusion to users. Here, we developed AIPatient, an advanced simulated patient system with AIPatient Knowledge Graph (AIPatient KG) as the input and the Reasoning Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Reasoning RAG) agentic workflow as the generation backbone. AIPatient KG samples data from Electronic Health Records (EHRs) in the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC)-III database, producing a clinically diverse and relevant cohort of 1,495 patients with high knowledgebase validity (F1 0.89). Reasoning RAG leverages six LLM powered agents spanning tasks including retrieval, KG query generation, abstraction, checker, rewrite, and summarization. This agentic framework reaches an overall accuracy of 94.15% in EHR-based medical Question Answering (QA), outperforming benchmarks that use either no agent or only partial agent integration. Our system also presents high readability (median Flesch Reading Ease 77.23; median Flesch Kincaid Grade 5.6), robustness (ANOVA F-value 0.6126, p<0.1), and stability (ANOVA F-value 0.782, p<0.1). The promising performance of the AIPatient system highlights its potential to support a wide range of applications, including medical education, model evaluation, and system integration.

Beyond KAN: Introducing KarSein for Adaptive High-Order Feature Interaction Modeling in CTR Prediction

Modeling feature interactions is crucial for click-through rate (CTR) prediction, particularly when it comes to high-order explicit interactions. Traditional methods struggle with this task because they often predefine a maximum interaction order, which relies heavily on prior knowledge and can limit the model's effectiveness. Additionally, modeling high-order interactions typically leads to increased computational costs. Therefore, the challenge lies in adaptively modeling high-order feature interactions while maintaining efficiency. To address this issue, we introduce Kolmogorov-Arnold Represented Sparse Efficient Interaction Network (KarSein), designed to optimize both predictive accuracy and computational efficiency. We firstly identify limitations of directly applying Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KAN) to CTR and then introduce KarSein to overcome these issues. It features a novel architecture that reduces the computational costs of KAN and supports embedding vectors as feature inputs. Additionally, KarSein employs guided symbolic regression to address the challenge of KAN in spontaneously learning multiplicative relationships. Extensive experiments demonstrate KarSein's superior performance, achieving significant predictive accuracy with minimal computational overhead. Furthermore, KarSein maintains strong global explainability while enabling the removal of redundant features, resulting in a sparse network structure. These advantages also position KarSein as a promising method for efficient inference.

Visual Agents as Fast and Slow Thinkers

Achieving human-level intelligence requires refining cognitive distinctions between System 1 and System 2 thinking. While contemporary AI, driven by large language models, demonstrates human-like traits, it falls short of genuine cognition. Transitioning from structured benchmarks to real-world scenarios presents challenges for visual agents, often leading to inaccurate and overly confident responses. To address the challenge, we introduce FaST, which incorporates the Fast and Slow Thinking mechanism into visual agents. FaST employs a switch adapter to dynamically select between System 1/2 modes, tailoring the problem-solving approach to different task complexity. It tackles uncertain and unseen objects by adjusting model confidence and integrating new contextual data. With this novel design, we advocate a flexible system, hierarchical reasoning capabilities, and a transparent decision-making pipeline, all of which contribute to its ability to emulate human-like cognitive processes in visual intelligence. Empirical results demonstrate that FaST outperforms various well-known baselines, achieving 80.8% accuracy over VQA^{v2} for visual question answering and 48.7% GIoU score over ReasonSeg for reasoning segmentation, demonstrate FaST's superior performance. Extensive testing validates the efficacy and robustness of FaST's core components, showcasing its potential to advance the development of cognitive visual agents in AI systems.

LawLLM: Law Large Language Model for the US Legal System

In the rapidly evolving field of legal analytics, finding relevant cases and accurately predicting judicial outcomes are challenging because of the complexity of legal language, which often includes specialized terminology, complex syntax, and historical context. Moreover, the subtle distinctions between similar and precedent cases require a deep understanding of legal knowledge. Researchers often conflate these concepts, making it difficult to develop specialized techniques to effectively address these nuanced tasks. In this paper, we introduce the Law Large Language Model (LawLLM), a multi-task model specifically designed for the US legal domain to address these challenges. LawLLM excels at Similar Case Retrieval (SCR), Precedent Case Recommendation (PCR), and Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP). By clearly distinguishing between precedent and similar cases, we provide essential clarity, guiding future research in developing specialized strategies for these tasks. We propose customized data preprocessing techniques for each task that transform raw legal data into a trainable format. Furthermore, we also use techniques such as in-context learning (ICL) and advanced information retrieval methods in LawLLM. The evaluation results demonstrate that LawLLM consistently outperforms existing baselines in both zero-shot and few-shot scenarios, offering unparalleled multi-task capabilities and filling critical gaps in the legal domain.

Uncertainty is Fragile: Manipulating Uncertainty in Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are employed across various high-stakes domains, where the reliability of their outputs is crucial. One commonly used method to assess the reliability of LLMs' responses is uncertainty estimation, which gauges the likelihood of their answers being correct. While many studies focus on improving the accuracy of uncertainty estimations for LLMs, our research investigates the fragility of uncertainty estimation and explores potential attacks. We demonstrate that an attacker can embed a backdoor in LLMs, which, when activated by a specific trigger in the input, manipulates the model's uncertainty without affecting the final output. Specifically, the proposed backdoor attack method can alter an LLM's output probability distribution, causing the probability distribution to converge towards an attacker-predefined distribution while ensuring that the top-1 prediction remains unchanged. Our experimental results demonstrate that this attack effectively undermines the model's self-evaluation reliability in multiple-choice questions. For instance, we achieved a 100 attack success rate (ASR) across three different triggering strategies in four models. Further, we investigate whether this manipulation generalizes across different prompts and domains. This work highlights a significant threat to the reliability of LLMs and underscores the need for future defenses against such attacks. The code is available at https://github.com/qcznlp/uncertainty_attack.

VRSD: Rethinking Similarity and Diversity for Retrieval in Large Language Models

Vector retrieval algorithms are vital for semantic queries in the evolving landscape of Large Language Models (LLMs). Retrieving vectors that simultaneously meet criteria for both similarity and diversity significantly enhances the capabilities of LLM-based agents. Despite the widespread use of the Maximal Marginal Relevance (MMR) in retrieval scenarios with relevance and diversity requirements, fluctuations caused by variations in the parameter $ \lambda $ within the MMR complicate the determination of the optimization trajectory in vector spaces, thus obscuring the direction of enhancement. Moreover, there is a lack of a robust theoretical analysis for the constraints of similarity and diversity in retrieval processes. This paper introduces a novel approach to characterizing both constraints through the relationship between the sum vector and the query vector. The proximity of these vectors addresses the similarity constraint, while necessitating that individual vectors within the sum vector divergently align with the query vector to satisfy the diversity constraint. We also formulate a new combinatorial optimization challenge, taking a selection of $k$ vectors from a set of candidates such that their sum vector maximally aligns with the query vector, a problem we demonstrate to be NP-complete. This establishes the profound difficulty of pursuing similarity and diversity simultaneously in vector retrieval and lays a theoretical groundwork for further research. Additionally, we present the heuristic algorithm Vectors Retrieval with Similarity and Diversity (VRSD) which not only has a definitive optimization goal and eschews the need for preset parameters but also offers a modest reduction in time complexity compared to MMR. Empirical validation further confirm that VRSD significantly surpasses MMR across various datasets.