Large language models (LLMs) have recently transformed from text-based assistants to autonomous agents capable of planning, reasoning, and iteratively improving their actions. While numerical reward signals and verifiers can effectively rank candidate actions, they often provide limited contextual guidance. In contrast, natural language feedback better aligns with the generative capabilities of LLMs, providing richer and more actionable suggestions. However, parsing and implementing this feedback effectively can be challenging for LLM-based agents. In this work, we introduce Critique-Guided Improvement (CGI), a novel two-player framework, comprising an actor model that explores an environment and a critic model that generates detailed nature language feedback. By training the critic to produce fine-grained assessments and actionable revisions, and the actor to utilize these critiques, our approach promotes more robust exploration of alternative strategies while avoiding local optima. Experiments in three interactive environments show that CGI outperforms existing baselines by a substantial margin. Notably, even a small critic model surpasses GPT-4 in feedback quality. The resulting actor achieves state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating the power of explicit iterative guidance to enhance decision-making in LLM-based agents.

-- Autonomous interaction is crucial for the effective use of elderly care robots. However, developing universal AI architectures is extremely challenging due to the diversity in robot configurations and a lack of dataset. We proposed a universal architecture for the AI - ization of elderly care robots, called AoECR. Specifically, based on a nursing bed, we d eveloped a patient - nurse inter action dataset tailored for elderly care scenarios and fine - tuned a large language model to enable it to perform nursing manipulations. Additionally, the inference process included a self - check chain to ensure the security of control commands. An expert op timization process further enhanced the humanization and personalization of the interactive responses. The physical experiment demonstrated that the AoECR exhibited zero - shot generalization capabilities across diverse scenario s, understood patients' instru ctions, implemented secure control commands, and delivered humanized and personalized interactive responses. In general, our research provides a valuable dataset reference and AI - ization solutions for elderly care robots. M anuscript received Month xx, x xxx; revised Month xx, xxxx; accepted Month x, xxxx.

Transformers serve as the foundational architecture for many successful large-scale models, demonstrating the ability to overfit the training data while maintaining strong generalization on unseen data, a phenomenon known as benign overfitting. However, research on how the training dynamics influence error bounds within the context of benign overfitting has been limited. This paper addresses this gap by developing a generalization theory for a two-layer transformer with labeled flip noise. Specifically, we present generalization error bounds for both benign and harmful overfitting under varying signal-to-noise ratios (SNR), where the training dynamics are categorized into three distinct stages, each with its corresponding error bounds. Additionally, we conduct extensive experiments to identify key factors that influence test errors in transformers. Our experimental results align closely with the theoretical predictions, validating our findings.

As a fundamental method in economics and finance, the factor model has been extensively utilized in quantitative investment. In recent years, there has been a paradigm shift from traditional linear models with expert-designed factors to more flexible nonlinear machine learning-based models with data-driven factors, aiming to enhance the effectiveness of these factor models. However, due to the low signal-to-noise ratio in market data, mining effective factors in data-driven models remains challenging. In this work, we propose a hypergraph-based factor model with temporal residual contrastive learning (FactorGCL) that employs a hypergraph structure to better capture high-order nonlinear relationships among stock returns and factors. To mine hidden factors that supplement human-designed prior factors for predicting stock returns, we design a cascading residual hypergraph architecture, in which the hidden factors are extracted from the residual information after removing the influence of prior factors. Additionally, we propose a temporal residual contrastive learning method to guide the extraction of effective and comprehensive hidden factors by contrasting stock-specific residual information over different time periods. Our extensive experiments on real stock market data demonstrate that FactorGCL not only outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods but also mines effective hidden factors for predicting stock returns.

Multi-task visual grounding involves the simultaneous execution of localization and segmentation in images based on textual expressions. The majority of advanced methods predominantly focus on transformer-based multimodal fusion, aiming to extract robust multimodal representations. However, ambiguity between referring expression comprehension (REC) and referring image segmentation (RIS) is error-prone, leading to inconsistencies between multi-task predictions. Besides, insufficient multimodal understanding directly contributes to biased target perception. To overcome these challenges, we propose a Coarse-to-fine Consistency Constraints Visual Grounding architecture ($\text{C}^3\text{VG}$), which integrates implicit and explicit modeling approaches within a two-stage framework. Initially, query and pixel decoders are employed to generate preliminary detection and segmentation outputs, a process referred to as the Rough Semantic Perception (RSP) stage. These coarse predictions are subsequently refined through the proposed Mask-guided Interaction Module (MIM) and a novel explicit bidirectional consistency constraint loss to ensure consistent representations across tasks, which we term the Refined Consistency Interaction (RCI) stage. Furthermore, to address the challenge of insufficient multimodal understanding, we leverage pre-trained models based on visual-linguistic fusion representations. Empirical evaluations on the RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg datasets demonstrate the efficacy and soundness of $\text{C}^3\text{VG}$, which significantly outperforms state-of-the-art REC and RIS methods by a substantial margin. Code and model will be available at \url{https://github.com/Dmmm1997/C3VG}.

In the field of industrial inspection, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have a high potential to renew the paradigms in practical applications due to their robust language capabilities and generalization abilities. However, despite their impressive problem-solving skills in many domains, MLLMs' ability in industrial anomaly detection has not been systematically studied. To bridge this gap, we present MMAD, the first-ever full-spectrum MLLMs benchmark in industrial Anomaly Detection. We defined seven key subtasks of MLLMs in industrial inspection and designed a novel pipeline to generate the MMAD dataset with 39,672 questions for 8,366 industrial images. With MMAD, we have conducted a comprehensive, quantitative evaluation of various state-of-theart MLLMs. The commercial models performed the best, with the average accuracy of GPT-4o models reaching 74.9%. However, this result falls far short of industrial requirements. Our analysis reveals that current MLLMs still have significant room for improvement in answering questions related to industrial anomalies and defects. We further explore two training-free performance enhancement strategies to help models improve in industrial scenarios, highlighting their promising potential for future research. The code and data are available at https://github.com/jam-cc/MMAD. Automatic vision inspection is a crucial challenge in realizing an unmanned factory (Benbarrad et al., 2021). Traditional AI research for automatic vision inspection, such as industrial anomaly detection (IAD) (Jiang et al., 2022b; Ren et al., 2022), typically relies on discriminative models within the conventional deep learning paradigm. These models can only perform trained detection tasks and cannot provide detailed reports like quality inspection workers. The development of MLLMs (Jin et al., 2024) has the potential to alter this situation. These generative models can flexibly produce the required textual output based on input language and visual prompts, allowing us to guide the model using language similar to instructing humans. Nowadays, multimodal large language models, represented by GPT-4 (Achiam et al., 2023), can already do many human jobs, especially high-paying intellectual jobs like programmers, writers, and data analysts (Eloundou et al., 2023). In comparison, the work of quality inspectors is simple, typically not requiring a high level of education but relying heavily on work experience.

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has proven to be highly effective in boosting the generative performance of language model in knowledge-intensive tasks. However, existing RAG framework either indiscriminately perform retrieval or rely on rigid single-class classifiers to select retrieval methods, leading to inefficiencies and suboptimal performance across queries of varying complexity. To address these challenges, we propose a reinforcement learning-based framework that dynamically selects the most suitable retrieval strategy based on query complexity. % our solution Our approach leverages a multi-armed bandit algorithm, which treats each retrieval method as a distinct ``arm'' and adapts the selection process by balancing exploration and exploitation. Additionally, we introduce a dynamic reward function that balances accuracy and efficiency, penalizing methods that require more retrieval steps, even if they lead to a correct result. Our method achieves new state of the art results on multiple single-hop and multi-hop datasets while reducing retrieval costs. Our code are available at https://github.com/FUTUREEEEEE/MBA .

Despite the superior performance of Large language models on many NLP tasks, they still face significant limitations in memorizing extensive world knowledge. Recent studies have demonstrated that leveraging the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework, combined with Knowledge Graphs that encapsulate extensive factual data in a structured format, robustly enhances the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. However, deploying such systems in real-world scenarios presents challenges: the continuous evolution of non-stationary environments may lead to performance degradation and user satisfaction requires a careful balance of performance and responsiveness. To address these challenges, we introduce a Multi-objective Multi-Armed Bandit enhanced RAG framework, supported by multiple retrieval methods with diverse capabilities under rich and evolving retrieval contexts in practice. Within this framework, each retrieval method is treated as a distinct ``arm''. The system utilizes real-time user feedback to adapt to dynamic environments, by selecting the appropriate retrieval method based on input queries and the historical multi-objective performance of each arm. Extensive experiments conducted on two benchmark KGQA datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms baseline methods in non-stationary settings while achieving state-of-the-art performance in stationary environments. Code and data are available at https://github.com/FUTUREEEEEE/Dynamic-RAG.git

Personality assessment, particularly through situational judgment tests (SJTs), is a vital tool for psychological research, talent selection, and educational evaluation. This study explores the potential of GPT-4, a state-of-the-art large language model (LLM), to automate the generation of personality situational judgment tests (PSJTs) in Chinese. Traditional SJT development is labor-intensive and prone to biases, while GPT-4 offers a scalable, efficient alternative. Two studies were conducted: Study 1 evaluated the impact of prompt design and temperature settings on content validity, finding that optimized prompts with a temperature of 1.0 produced creative and accurate items. Study 2 assessed the psychometric properties of GPT-4-generated PSJTs, revealing that they demonstrated satisfactory reliability and validity, surpassing the performance of manually developed tests in measuring the Big Five personality traits. This research highlights GPT-4's effectiveness in developing high-quality PSJTs, providing a scalable and innovative method for psychometric test development. These findings expand the possibilities of automatic item generation and the application of LLMs in psychology, and offer practical implications for streamlining test development processes in resource-limited settings.

Modern recommendation systems frequently employ online learning to dynamically update their models with freshly collected data. The most commonly used optimizer for updating neural networks in these contexts is the Adam optimizer, which integrates momentum ($m_t$) and adaptive learning rate ($v_t$). However, the volatile nature of online learning data, characterized by its frequent distribution shifts and presence of noises, poses significant challenges to Adam's standard optimization process: (1) Adam may use outdated momentum and the average of squared gradients, resulting in slower adaptation to distribution changes, and (2) Adam's performance is adversely affected by data noise. To mitigate these issues, we introduce CAdam, a confidence-based optimization strategy that assesses the consistence between the momentum and the gradient for each parameter dimension before deciding on updates. If momentum and gradient are in sync, CAdam proceeds with parameter updates according to Adam's original formulation; if not, it temporarily withholds updates and monitors potential shifts in data distribution in subsequent iterations. This method allows CAdam to distinguish between the true distributional shifts and mere noise, and adapt more quickly to new data distributions. Our experiments with both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that CAdam surpasses other well-known optimizers, including the original Adam, in efficiency and noise robustness. Furthermore, in large-scale A/B testing within a live recommendation system, CAdam significantly enhances model performance compared to Adam, leading to substantial increases in the system's gross merchandise volume (GMV).