Large Language Models (LLMs) were shown to struggle with long-term planning, which may be caused by the limited way in which they explore the space of possible solutions. We propose an architecture where a Reinforcement Learning (RL) Agent guides an LLM's space exploration: (1) the Agent has access to domain-specific information, and can therefore make decisions about the quality of candidate solutions based on specific and relevant metrics, which were not explicitly considered by the LLM's training objective; (2) the LLM can focus on generating immediate next steps, without the need for long-term planning. We allow non-linear reasoning by exploring alternative paths and backtracking. We evaluate this architecture on the program equivalence task, and compare it against Chain of Thought (CoT) and Tree of Thoughts (ToT). We assess both the downstream task, denoting the binary classification, and the intermediate reasoning steps. Our approach compares positively against CoT and ToT.

Large Language Model (LLM)-driven interactive systems currently show potential promise in healthcare domains. Despite their remarkable capabilities, LLMs typically lack personalized recommendations and diagnosis analysis in sophisticated medical applications, causing hallucinations and performance bottlenecks. To address these challenges, this paper proposes MedAide, an LLM-based omni medical multi-agent collaboration framework for specialized healthcare services. Specifically, MedAide first performs query rewriting through retrieval-augmented generation to accomplish accurate medical intent understanding. Immediately, we devise a contextual encoder to obtain intent prototype embeddings, which are used to recognize fine-grained intents by similarity matching. According to the intent relevance, the activated agents collaborate effectively to provide integrated decision analysis. Extensive experiments are conducted on four medical benchmarks with composite intents. Experimental results from automated metrics and expert doctor evaluations show that MedAide outperforms current LLMs and improves their medical proficiency and strategic reasoning.

AI alignment is a pivotal issue concerning AI control and safety. It should consider not only value-neutral human preferences but also moral and ethical considerations. In this study, we introduced FairMindSim, which simulates the moral dilemma through a series of unfair scenarios. We used LLM agents to simulate human behavior, ensuring alignment across various stages. To explore the various socioeconomic motivations, which we refer to as beliefs, that drive both humans and LLM agents as bystanders to intervene in unjust situations involving others, and how these beliefs interact to influence individual behavior, we incorporated knowledge from relevant sociological fields and proposed the Belief-Reward Alignment Behavior Evolution Model (BREM) based on the recursive reward model (RRM). Our findings indicate that, behaviorally, GPT-4o exhibits a stronger sense of social justice, while humans display a richer range of emotions. Additionally, we discussed the potential impact of emotions on behavior. This study provides a theoretical foundation for applications in aligning LLMs with altruistic values. As large language models (LLMs), also known as foundational models, increasingly engage in language comprehension and content generation tasks that resemble human capabilities, a critical and scientifically challenging question emerges: How can we ensure that these models' capabilities and behaviors align with human values, intentions, and ethical principles, thereby maintaining security and trust in human-AI collaborative processes Bengio et al. (2024)? These concerns have spurred research efforts in the field of AI alignment Bostrom (2013); Ord (2020); Bucknall & Dori-Hacohen (2022), which strives to develop AI systems that act in accordance with human intentions and values. This challenge extends across various domains, including economics, psychology Demszky et al. (2023), sociology Liu et al. (2024), and education.

Large language models (LLMs) must often respond to highly ambiguous user requests. In such cases, the LLM's best response may be to ask a clarifying question to elicit more information. We observe existing LLMs often respond by presupposing a single interpretation of such ambiguous requests, frustrating users who intended a different interpretation. We speculate this is caused by current preference data labeling practice, where LLM responses are evaluated only on their prior contexts. To address this, we propose to assign preference labels by simulating their expected outcomes in the future turns. This allows LLMs to learn to ask clarifying questions when it can generate responses that are tailored to each user interpretation in future turns. In experiments on open-domain QA, we compare systems that trained using our proposed preference labeling methods against standard methods, which assign preferences based on only prior context. We evaluate systems based on their ability to ask clarifying questions that can recover each user's interpretation and expected answer, and find that our training with our proposed method trains LLMs to ask clarifying questions with a 5% improvement in F1 measured against the answer set from different interpretations of each query. Ambiguity is a hallmark of natural language that enables concise communication by allowing speakers to exclude details that are inferable from the context (e.g., conversational, temporal, geographical) (Piantadosi et al., 2012). At times, however, the speaker's intent is unclear despite the context, and further interaction is necessary to clarify their intent. Asking clarifying questions is particularly important for large language models (LLMs), which are tasked with serving a wide audience, often without access to the personalized context available in human interactions. In this work, we develop LLMs that can ask clarifying questions to resolve ambiguity in their users' requests. State-of-the-art LLMs (OpenAI, 2023; Gemini Team, 2024) often do not ask clarifying questions when presented with an ambiguous request, and instead respond directly by assuming the user's intent (see an example in Figure 1).

Large language models (LLMs) have been used to generate query expansions augmenting original queries for improving information search. Recent studies also explore providing LLMs with initial retrieval results to generate query expansions more grounded to document corpus. However, these methods mostly focus on enhancing textual similarities between search queries and target documents, overlooking document relations. For queries like "Find me a highly rated camera for wildlife photography compatible with my Nikon F-Mount lenses", existing methods may generate expansions that are semantically similar but structurally unrelated to user intents. To handle such semi-structured queries with both textual and relational requirements, in this paper we propose a knowledge-aware query expansion framework, augmenting LLMs with structured document relations from knowledge graph (KG). To further address the limitation of entity-based scoring in existing KG-based methods, we leverage document texts as rich KG node representations and use document-based relation filtering for our Knowledge-Aware Retrieval (KAR). Extensive experiments on three datasets of diverse domains show the advantages of our method compared against state-of-the-art baselines on textual and relational semi-structured retrieval.

Predicting case criticality helps legal professionals in the court system manage large volumes of case law. This paper introduces the Criticality Prediction dataset, a new resource for evaluating the potential influence of Swiss Federal Supreme Court decisions on future jurisprudence. Unlike existing approaches that rely on resource-intensive manual annotations, we semi-automatically derive labels leading to a much larger dataset than otherwise possible. Our dataset features a two-tier labeling system: (1) the LD-Label, which identifies cases published as Leading Decisions (LD), and (2) the Citation-Label, which ranks cases by their citation frequency and recency. This allows for a more nuanced evaluation of case importance. We evaluate several multilingual models, including fine-tuned variants and large language models, and find that fine-tuned models consistently outperform zero-shot baselines, demonstrating the need for task-specific adaptation. Our contributions include the introduction of this task and the release of a multilingual dataset to the research community.

A large part of human communication relies on nonverbal cues such as facial expressions, eye contact, and body language. Unlike language or sign language, such nonverbal communication lacks formal rules, requiring complex reasoning based on commonsense understanding. Enabling current Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) to accurately interpret body language is a crucial challenge, as human unconscious actions can easily cause the model to misinterpret their intent. To address this, we propose a dataset, BQA, a body language question answering dataset, to validate whether the model can correctly interpret emotions from short clips of body language comprising 26 emotion labels of videos of body language. We evaluated various VideoLLMs on BQA and revealed that understanding body language is challenging, and our analyses of the wrong answers by VideoLLMs show that certain VideoLLMs made significantly biased answers depending on the age group and ethnicity of the individuals in the video. The dataset is available.

Conversations often adhere to well-understood social norms that vary across cultures. For example, while "addressing parents by name" is commonplace in the West, it is rare in most Asian cultures. Adherence or violation of such norms often dictates the tenor of conversations. Humans are able to navigate social situations requiring cultural awareness quite adeptly. However, it is a hard task for NLP models. In this paper, we tackle this problem by introducing a "Cultural Context Schema" for conversations. It comprises (1) conversational information such as emotions, dialogue acts, etc., and (2) cultural information such as social norms, violations, etc. We generate ~110k social norm and violation descriptions for ~23k conversations from Chinese culture using LLMs. We refine them using automated verification strategies which are evaluated against culturally aware human judgements. We organize these descriptions into meaningful structures we call "Norm Concepts", using an interactive human-in-loop framework. We ground the norm concepts and the descriptions in conversations using symbolic annotation. Finally, we use the obtained dataset for downstream tasks such as emotion, sentiment, and dialogue act detection. We show that it significantly improves the empirical performance.

Large language models (LLMs) serve as giant information stores, often including personal or copyrighted data, and retraining them from scratch is not a viable option. This has led to the development of various fast, approximate unlearning techniques to selectively remove knowledge from LLMs. Prior research has largely focused on minimizing the probabilities of specific token sequences by reversing the language modeling objective. However, these methods still leave LLMs vulnerable to adversarial attacks that exploit indirect references. In this work, we examine the limitations of current unlearning techniques in effectively erasing a particular type of indirect prompt: multi-hop queries. Our findings reveal that existing methods fail to completely remove multi-hop knowledge when one of the intermediate hops is unlearned. To address this issue, we propose MUNCH, a simple uncertainty-based approach that breaks down multi-hop queries into subquestions and leverages the uncertainty of the unlearned model in final decision-making. Empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, and MUNCH can be easily integrated with existing unlearning techniques, making it a flexible and useful solution for enhancing unlearning processes.

Dialogue agents have been receiving increasing attention for years, and this trend has been further boosted by the recent progress of large language models (LLMs). Stance detection and dialogue summarization are two core tasks of dialogue agents in application scenarios that involve argumentative dialogues. However, research on these tasks is limited by the insufficiency of public datasets, especially for non-English languages. To address this language resource gap in Chinese, we present ORCHID (Oral Chinese Debate), the first Chinese dataset for benchmarking target-independent stance detection and debate summarization. Our dataset consists of 1,218 real-world debates that were conducted in Chinese on 476 unique topics, containing 2,436 stance-specific summaries and 14,133 fully annotated utterances. Besides providing a versatile testbed for future research, we also conduct an empirical study on the dataset and propose an integrated task. The results show the challenging nature of the dataset and suggest a potential of incorporating stance detection in summarization for argumentative dialogue.