More on LLM based agents

• SlideDeck: W13.1-T3-smallLLM-agents
• Version: current
• Lead team: team-3

Scaling

In this session, our readings cover:

Required Readings:

Advances and Challenges in Foundation Agents: From Brain-Inspired Intelligence to Evolutionary, Collaborative, and Safe Systems

• [Submitted on 31 Mar 2025]
• Bang Liu, Xinfeng Li, Jiayi Zhang, Jinlin Wang, Tanjin He, Sirui Hong, Hongzhang Liu, Shaokun Zhang, Kaitao Song, Kunlun Zhu, Yuheng Cheng, Suyuchen Wang, Xiaoqiang Wang, Yuyu Luo, Haibo Jin, Peiyan Zhang, Ollie Liu, Jiaqi Chen, Huan Zhang, Zhaoyang Yu, Haochen Shi, Boyan Li, Dekun Wu, Fengwei Teng, Xiaojun Jia, Jiawei Xu, Jinyu Xiang, Yizhang Lin, Tianming Liu, Tongliang Liu, Yu Su, Huan Sun, Glen Berseth, Jianyun Nie, Ian Foster, Logan Ward, Qingyun Wu, Yu Gu, Mingchen Zhuge, Xiangru Tang, Haohan Wang, Jiaxuan You, Chi Wang, Jian Pei, Qiang Yang, Xiaoliang Qi, Chenglin Wu
• The advent of large language models (LLMs) has catalyzed a transformative shift in artificial intelligence, paving the way for advanced intelligent agents capable of sophisticated reasoning, robust perception, and versatile action across diverse domains. As these agents increasingly drive AI research and practical applications, their design, evaluation, and continuous improvement present intricate, multifaceted challenges. This survey provides a comprehensive overview, framing intelligent agents within a modular, brain-inspired architecture that integrates principles from cognitive science, neuroscience, and computational research. We structure our exploration into four interconnected parts. First, we delve into the modular foundation of intelligent agents, systematically mapping their cognitive, perceptual, and operational modules onto analogous human brain functionalities, and elucidating core components such as memory, world modeling, reward processing, and emotion-like systems. Second, we discuss self-enhancement and adaptive evolution mechanisms, exploring how agents autonomously refine their capabilities, adapt to dynamic environments, and achieve continual learning through automated optimization paradigms, including emerging AutoML and LLM-driven optimization strategies. Third, we examine collaborative and evolutionary multi-agent systems, investigating the collective intelligence emerging from agent interactions, cooperation, and societal structures, highlighting parallels to human social dynamics. Finally, we address the critical imperative of building safe, secure, and beneficial AI systems, emphasizing intrinsic and extrinsic security threats, ethical alignment, robustness, and practical mitigation strategies necessary for trustworthy real-world deployment.

A Review of Prominent Paradigms for LLM-Based Agents: Tool Use (Including RAG), Planning, and Feedback Learning

• https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.05804
• [Submitted on 9 Jun 2024 (v1), last revised 30 Nov 2024 (this version, v6)] Xinzhe Li
• Tool use, planning, and feedback learning are currently three prominent paradigms for developing Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents across various tasks. Although numerous frameworks have been devised for each paradigm, their intricate workflows and inconsistent taxonomy create challenges in understanding and reviewing the frameworks across different paradigms. This survey introduces a unified taxonomy to systematically review and discuss these frameworks. Specifically, 1) the taxonomy defines environments/tasks, common LLM-profiled roles or LMPRs (policy models, evaluators, and dynamic models), and universally applicable workflows found in prior work, and 2) it enables a comparison of key perspectives on the implementations of LMPRs and workflow designs across different agent paradigms and frameworks. 3) Finally, we identify three limitations in existing workflow designs and systematically discuss the future work. Resources have been made publicly available at in our GitHub repository this https URL.
• Comments: CoLing 2025 Camera Ready (extended to 9 pages)

rStar-Math: Small LLMs Can Master Math Reasoning with Self-Evolved Deep Thinking

• [Submitted on 8 Jan 2025]
• Xinyu Guan, Li Lyna Zhang, Yifei Liu, Ning Shang, Youran Sun, Yi Zhu, Fan Yang, Mao Yang
• We present rStar-Math to demonstrate that small language models (SLMs) can rival or even surpass the math reasoning capability of OpenAI o1, without distillation from superior models. rStar-Math achieves this by exercising “deep thinking” through Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), where a math policy SLM performs test-time search guided by an SLM-based process reward model. rStar-Math introduces three innovations to tackle the challenges in training the two SLMs: (1) a novel code-augmented CoT data sythesis method, which performs extensive MCTS rollouts to generate step-by-step verified reasoning trajectories used to train the policy SLM; (2) a novel process reward model training method that avoids naïve step-level score annotation, yielding a more effective process preference model (PPM); (3) a self-evolution recipe in which the policy SLM and PPM are built from scratch and iteratively evolved to improve reasoning capabilities. Through 4 rounds of self-evolution with millions of synthesized solutions for 747k math problems, rStar-Math boosts SLMs’ math reasoning to state-of-the-art levels. On the MATH benchmark, it improves Qwen2.5-Math-7B from 58.8% to 90.0% and Phi3-mini-3.8B from 41.4% to 86.4%, surpassing o1-preview by +4.5% and +0.9%. On the USA Math Olympiad (AIME), rStar-Math solves an average of 53.3% (8/15) of problems, ranking among the top 20% the brightest high school math students. Code and data will be available at this https URL.

More Readings:

Agent Laboratory: Using LLM Agents as Research Assistants

• [Submitted on 8 Jan 2025]
• Samuel Schmidgall, Yusheng Su, Ze Wang, Ximeng Sun, Jialian Wu, Xiaodong Yu, Jiang Liu, Zicheng Liu, Emad Barsoum
• Historically, scientific discovery has been a lengthy and costly process, demanding substantial time and resources from initial conception to final results. To accelerate scientific discovery, reduce research costs, and improve research quality, we introduce Agent Laboratory, an autonomous LLM-based framework capable of completing the entire research process. This framework accepts a human-provided research idea and progresses through three stages–literature review, experimentation, and report writing to produce comprehensive research outputs, including a code repository and a research report, while enabling users to provide feedback and guidance at each stage. We deploy Agent Laboratory with various state-of-the-art LLMs and invite multiple researchers to assess its quality by participating in a survey, providing human feedback to guide the research process, and then evaluate the final paper. We found that: (1) Agent Laboratory driven by o1-preview generates the best research outcomes; (2) The generated machine learning code is able to achieve state-of-the-art performance compared to existing methods; (3) Human involvement, providing feedback at each stage, significantly improves the overall quality of research; (4) Agent Laboratory significantly reduces research expenses, achieving an 84% decrease compared to previous autonomous research methods. We hope Agent Laboratory enables researchers to allocate more effort toward creative ideation rather than low-level coding and writing, ultimately accelerating scientific discovery.

Phi-4 Technical Report

• https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.08905
• Marah Abdin, Jyoti Aneja, Harkirat Behl, Sébastien Bubeck, Ronen Eldan, Suriya Gunasekar, Michael Harrison, Russell J. Hewett, Mojan Javaheripi, Piero Kauffmann, James R. Lee, Yin Tat Lee, Yuanzhi Li, Weishung Liu, Caio C. T. Mendes, Anh Nguyen, Eric Price, Gustavo de Rosa, Olli Saarikivi, Adil Salim, Shital Shah, Xin Wang, Rachel Ward, Yue Wu, Dingli Yu, Cyril Zhang, Yi Zhang
• We present phi-4, a 14-billion parameter language model developed with a training recipe that is centrally focused on data quality. Unlike most language models, where pre-training is based primarily on organic data sources such as web content or code, phi-4 strategically incorporates synthetic data throughout the training process. While previous models in the Phi family largely distill the capabilities of a teacher model (specifically GPT-4), phi-4 substantially surpasses its teacher model on STEM-focused QA capabilities, giving evidence that our data-generation and post-training techniques go beyond distillation. Despite minimal changes to the phi-3 architecture, phi-4 achieves strong performance relative to its size – especially on reasoning-focused benchmarks – due to improved data, training curriculum, and innovations in the post-training scheme.

Smaller, Weaker, Yet Better: Training LLM Reasoners via Compute-Optimal Sampling

• [Submitted on 29 Aug 2024 (v1), last revised 7 Oct 2024 (this version, v2)]
• https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.16737
• Hritik Bansal, Arian Hosseini, Rishabh Agarwal, Vinh Q. Tran, Mehran Kazemi
• Training on high-quality synthetic data from strong language models (LMs) is a common strategy to improve the reasoning performance of LMs. In this work, we revisit whether this strategy is compute-optimal under a fixed inference budget (e.g., FLOPs). To do so, we investigate the trade-offs between generating synthetic data using a stronger but more expensive (SE) model versus a weaker but cheaper (WC) model. We evaluate the generated data across three key metrics: coverage, diversity, and false positive rate, and show that the data from WC models may have higher coverage and diversity, but also exhibit higher false positive rates. We then finetune LMs on data from SE and WC models in different settings: knowledge distillation, self-improvement, and a novel weak-to-strong improvement setup where a weaker LM teaches reasoning to a stronger LM. Our findings reveal that models finetuned on WC-generated data consistently outperform those trained on SE-generated data across multiple benchmarks and multiple choices of WC and SE models. These results challenge the prevailing practice of relying on SE models for synthetic data generation, suggesting that WC may be the compute-optimal approach for training advanced LM reasoners.

Synthetica: Large Scale Synthetic Data for Robot Perception

• [Submitted on 28 Oct 2024]
• Ritvik Singh, Jingzhou Liu, Karl Van Wyk, Yu-Wei Chao, Jean-Francois Lafleche, Florian Shkurti, Nathan Ratliff, Ankur Handa
• Vision-based object detectors are a crucial basis for robotics applications as they provide valuable information about object localisation in the environment. These need to ensure high reliability in different lighting conditions, occlusions, and visual artifacts, all while running in real-time. Collecting and annotating real-world data for these networks is prohibitively time consuming and costly, especially for custom assets, such as industrial objects, making it untenable for generalization to in-the-wild scenarios. To this end, we present Synthetica, a method for large-scale synthetic data generation for training robust state estimators. This paper focuses on the task of object detection, an important problem which can serve as the front-end for most state estimation problems, such as pose estimation. Leveraging data from a photorealistic ray-tracing renderer, we scale up data generation, generating 2.7 million images, to train highly accurate real-time detection transformers. We present a collection of rendering randomization and training-time data augmentation techniques conducive to robust sim-to-real performance for vision tasks. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on the task of object detection while having detectors that run at 50-100Hz which is 9 times faster than the prior SOTA. We further demonstrate the usefulness of our training methodology for robotics applications by showcasing a pipeline for use in the real world with custom objects for which there do not exist prior datasets. Our work highlights the importance of scaling synthetic data generation for robust sim-to-real transfer while achieving the fastest real-time inference speeds. Videos and supplementary information can be found at this URL: this https URL.

Small Language Models (SLMs) Can Still Pack a Punch: A survey

• [Submitted on 3 Jan 2025]
• Shreyas Subramanian, Vikram Elango, Mecit Gungor
• As foundation AI models continue to increase in size, an important question arises - is massive scale the only path forward? This survey of about 160 papers presents a family of Small Language Models (SLMs) in the 1 to 8 billion parameter range that demonstrate smaller models can perform as well, or even outperform large models. We explore task agnostic, general purpose SLMs, task-specific SLMs and techniques to create SLMs that can guide the community to build models while balancing performance, efficiency, scalability and cost. Furthermore we define and characterize SLMs’ effective sizes, representing increased capability with respect to LLMs.