The classic notion of truthfulness requires that no agent has a profitable manipulation -- an untruthful report that, for some combination of reports of the other agents, increases her utility. This strong notion implicitly assumes that the manipulating agent either knows what all other agents are going to report, or is willing to take the risk and act as-if she knows their reports. Without knowledge of the others' reports, most manipulations are risky -- they might decrease the manipulator's utility for some other combinations of reports by the other agents. Accordingly, a recent paper (Bu, Song and Tao, ``On the existence of truthful fair cake cutting mechanisms'', Artificial Intelligence 319 (2023), 103904) suggests a relaxed notion, which we refer to as risk-avoiding truthfulness (RAT), which requires only that no agent can gain from a safe manipulation -- one that is sometimes beneficial and never harmful. Truthfulness and RAT are two extremes: the former considers manipulators with complete knowledge of others, whereas the latter considers manipulators with no knowledge at all. In reality, agents often know about some -- but not all -- of the other agents. This paper introduces the RAT-degree of a mechanism, defined as the smallest number of agents whose reports, if known, may allow another agent to safely manipulate, or $n$ if there is no such number. This notion interpolates between classic truthfulness (degree $n$) and RAT (degree at least $1$): a mechanism with a higher RAT-degree is harder to manipulate safely. To illustrate the generality and applicability of this concept, we analyze the RAT-degree of prominent mechanisms across various social choice settings, including auctions, indivisible goods allocations, cake-cutting, voting, and stable matchings.

This work leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to simulate human mobility, addressing challenges like high costs and privacy concerns in traditional models. Our hierarchical framework integrates persona generation, activity selection, and destination prediction, using real-world demographic and psychological data to create realistic movement patterns. Both physical models and language models are employed to explore and demonstrate different methodologies for human mobility simulation. By structuring data with summarization and weighted density metrics, the system ensures scalable memory management while retaining actionable insights. Preliminary results indicate that LLM-driven simulations align with observed real-world patterns, offering scalable, interpretable insights for social problems such as urban planning, traffic management, and public health. The framework's ability to dynamically generate personas and activities enables it to provide adaptable and realistic daily routines. This study demonstrates the transformative potential of LLMs in advancing mobility modeling for societal and urban applications. The source code and interactive demo for our framework are available at https://github.com/cju0/TrajLLM.

Zero-shot named entity recognition (NER) aims to develop entity recognition systems from unannotated text corpora. This task presents substantial challenges due to minimal human intervention. Recent work has adapted large language models (LLMs) for zero-shot NER by crafting specialized prompt templates. It advances model self-learning abilities by incorporating self-annotated demonstrations. However, two important challenges persist: (i) Correlations between contexts surrounding entities are overlooked, leading to wrong type predictions or entity omissions. (ii) The indiscriminate use of task demonstrations, retrieved through shallow similarity-based strategies, severely misleads LLMs during inference. In this paper, we introduce the cooperative multi-agent system (CMAS), a novel framework for zero-shot NER that uses the collective intelligence of multiple agents to address the challenges outlined above. CMAS has four main agents: (i) a self-annotator, (ii) a type-related feature (TRF) extractor, (iii) a demonstration discriminator, and (iv) an overall predictor. To explicitly capture correlations between contexts surrounding entities, CMAS reformulates NER into two subtasks: recognizing named entities and identifying entity type-related features within the target sentence. To enable controllable utilization of demonstrations, a demonstration discriminator is established to incorporate the self-reflection mechanism, automatically evaluating helpfulness scores for the target sentence. Experimental results show that CMAS significantly improves zero-shot NER performance across six benchmarks, including both domain-specific and general-domain scenarios. Furthermore, CMAS demonstrates its effectiveness in few-shot settings and with various LLM backbones.

Learning therapeutic counseling involves significant role-play experience with mock patients, with current manual training methods providing only intermittent granular feedback. We seek to accelerate and optimize counselor training by providing frequent, detailed feedback to trainees as they interact with a simulated patient. Our first application domain involves training motivational interviewing skills for counselors. Motivational interviewing is a collaborative counseling style in which patients are guided to talk about changing their behavior, with empathetic counseling an essential ingredient. We developed and evaluated an LLM-powered training system that features a simulated patient and visualizations of turn-by-turn performance feedback tailored to the needs of counselors learning motivational interviewing. We conducted an evaluation study with professional and student counselors, demonstrating high usability and satisfaction with the system. We present design implications for the development of automated systems that train users in counseling skills and their generalizability to other types of social skills training.

We introduce a novel multi-agent collaboration framework designed to enhance the accuracy and robustness of text classification models. Leveraging BERT as the primary classifier, our framework dynamically escalates low-confidence predictions to a specialized multi-agent system comprising Lexical, Contextual, Logic, Consensus, and Explainability agents. This collaborative approach allows for comprehensive analysis and consensus-driven decision-making, significantly improving classification performance across diverse text classification tasks. Empirical evaluations on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our framework achieves a 5.5% increase in accuracy compared to standard BERT-based classifiers, underscoring its effectiveness and academic novelty in advancing multi-agent systems within natural language processing.

The target defense problem involves intercepting an attacker before it reaches a designated target region using one or more defenders. This letter focuses on a particularly challenging scenario in which the attacker is more agile than the defenders, significantly increasing the difficulty of effective interception. To address this challenge, we propose a novel residual policy framework that integrates deep reinforcement learning (DRL) with the force-based Boids model. In this framework, the Boids model serves as a baseline policy, while DRL learns a residual policy to refine and optimize the defenders' actions. Simulation experiments demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms traditional interception policies, whether learned via vanilla DRL or fine-tuned from force-based methods. Moreover, the learned policy exhibits strong scalability and adaptability, effectively handling scenarios with varying numbers of defenders and attackers with different agility levels.

Graph-theoretic problems arise in real-world applications like logistics, communication networks, and traffic optimization. These problems are often complex, noisy, and irregular, posing challenges for traditional algorithms. Large language models (LLMs) offer potential solutions but face challenges, including limited accuracy and input length constraints. To address these challenges, we propose MA-GTS (Multi-Agent Graph Theory Solver), a multi-agent framework that decomposes these complex problems through agent collaboration. MA-GTS maps the implicitly expressed text-based graph data into clear, structured graph representations and dynamically selects the most suitable algorithm based on problem constraints and graph structure scale. This approach ensures that the solution process remains efficient and the resulting reasoning path is interpretable. We validate MA-GTS using the G-REAL dataset, a real-world-inspired graph theory dataset we created. Experimental results show that MA-GTS outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of efficiency, accuracy, and scalability, with strong results across multiple benchmarks (G-REAL 94.2%, GraCoRe 96.9%, NLGraph 98.4%).MA-GTS is open-sourced at https://github.com/ZIKEYUAN/MA-GTS.git.

Scientific experimentation, a cornerstone of human progress, demands rigor in reliability, methodical control, and interpretability to yield meaningful results. Despite the growing capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in automating different aspects of the scientific process, automating rigorous experimentation remains a significant challenge. To address this gap, we propose Curie, an AI agent framework designed to embed rigor into the experimentation process through three key components: an intra-agent rigor module to enhance reliability, an inter-agent rigor module to maintain methodical control, and an experiment knowledge module to enhance interpretability. To evaluate Curie, we design a novel experimental benchmark composed of 46 questions across four computer science domains, derived from influential research papers, and widely adopted open-source projects. Compared to the strongest baseline tested, we achieve a 3.4$\times$ improvement in correctly answering experimental questions. Curie is open-sourced at https://github.com/Just-Curieous/Curie.

Leveraging multiple large language models (LLMs) to build collaborative multi-agentic workflows has demonstrated significant potential. However, most previous studies focus on prompting the out-of-the-box LLMs, relying on their innate capability for collaboration, which may not improve LLMs' performance as shown recently. In this paper, we introduce a new post-training paradigm MAPoRL (Multi-Agent Post-co-training for collaborative LLMs with Reinforcement Learning), to explicitly elicit the collaborative behaviors and further unleash the power of multi-agentic LLM frameworks. In MAPoRL, multiple LLMs first generate their own responses independently and engage in a multi-turn discussion to collaboratively improve the final answer. In the end, a MAPoRL verifier evaluates both the answer and the discussion, by assigning a score that verifies the correctness of the answer, while adding incentives to encourage corrective and persuasive discussions. The score serves as the co-training reward, and is then maximized through multi-agent RL. Unlike existing LLM post-training paradigms, MAPoRL advocates the co-training of multiple LLMs together using RL for better generalization. Accompanied by analytical insights, our experiments demonstrate that training individual LLMs alone is insufficient to induce effective collaboration. In contrast, multi-agent co-training can boost the collaboration performance across benchmarks, with generalization to unseen domains.

In this paper we present ToMCAT (Theory-of-Mind for Cooperative Agents in Teams), a new framework for generating ToM-conditioned trajectories. It combines a meta-learning mechanism, that performs ToM reasoning over teammates' underlying goals and future behavior, with a multiagent denoising-diffusion model, that generates plans for an agent and its teammates conditioned on both the agent's goals and its teammates' characteristics, as computed via ToM. We implemented an online planning system that dynamically samples new trajectories (replans) from the diffusion model whenever it detects a divergence between a previously generated plan and the current state of the world. We conducted several experiments using ToMCAT in a simulated cooking domain. Our results highlight the importance of the dynamic replanning mechanism in reducing the usage of resources without sacrificing team performance. We also show that recent observations about the world and teammates' behavior collected by an agent over the course of an episode combined with ToM inferences are crucial to generate team-aware plans for dynamic adaptation to teammates, especially when no prior information is provided about them.