Lian, Jianxun
LLM-powered Multi-agent Framework for Goal-oriented Learning in Intelligent Tutoring System
Wang, Tianfu, Zhan, Yi, Lian, Jianxun, Hu, Zhengyu, Yuan, Nicholas Jing, Zhang, Qi, Xie, Xing, Xiong, Hui
Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) have revolutionized education by offering personalized learning experiences. However, as goal-oriented learning, which emphasizes efficiently achieving specific objectives, becomes increasingly important in professional contexts, existing ITSs often struggle to deliver this type of targeted learning experience. In this paper, we propose GenMentor, an LLM-powered multi-agent framework designed to deliver goal-oriented, personalized learning within ITS. GenMentor begins by accurately mapping learners' goals to required skills using a fine-tuned LLM trained on a custom goal-to-skill dataset. After identifying the skill gap, it schedules an efficient learning path using an evolving optimization approach, driven by a comprehensive and dynamic profile of learners' multifaceted status. Additionally, GenMentor tailors learning content with an exploration-drafting-integration mechanism to align with individual learner needs. Extensive automated and human evaluations demonstrate GenMentor's effectiveness in learning guidance and content quality. Furthermore, we have deployed it in practice and also implemented it as an application. Practical human study with professional learners further highlights its effectiveness in goal alignment and resource targeting, leading to enhanced personalization. Supplementary resources are available at https://github.com/GeminiLight/gen-mentor.
The Road to Artificial SuperIntelligence: A Comprehensive Survey of Superalignment
Kim, HyunJin, Yi, Xiaoyuan, Yao, Jing, Lian, Jianxun, Huang, Muhua, Duan, Shitong, Bak, JinYeong, Xie, Xing
The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has sparkedthe discussion on Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), a hypothetical AI system surpassing human intelligence. Though ASI is still hypothetical and far from current AI capabilities, existing alignment methods struggle to guide such advanced AI ensure its safety in the future. It is essential to discuss the alignment of such AI now. Superalignment, the alignment of AI at superhuman levels of capability systems with human values and safety requirements, aims to address two primary goals: scalability in supervision to provide high-quality guidance signals and robust governance to ensure alignment with human values. In this survey, we review the original scalable oversight problem and corresponding methods and potential solutions for superalignment. Specifically, we introduce the Figure 1: Challenges from the perspectives of supervision challenges and limitations of current alignment and governance. While supervision perspective paradigms in addressing the superalignment focuses on providing high-quality guidance signals for problem. Then we review scalable oversight enhancing system competence, governance perspective methods for superalignment. Finally, we discuss emphasizes aligning the behavior of advanced aI with the key challenges and propose pathways human values to prevent harmful outcomes.
TrendSim: Simulating Trending Topics in Social Media Under Poisoning Attacks with LLM-based Multi-agent System
Zhang, Zeyu, Lian, Jianxun, Ma, Chen, Qu, Yaning, Luo, Ye, Wang, Lei, Li, Rui, Chen, Xu, Lin, Yankai, Wu, Le, Xie, Xing, Wen, Ji-Rong
Trending topics have become a significant part of modern social media, attracting users to participate in discussions of breaking events. However, they also bring in a new channel for poisoning attacks, resulting in negative impacts on society. Therefore, it is urgent to study this critical problem and develop effective strategies for defense. In this paper, we propose TrendSim, an LLM-based multi-agent system to simulate trending topics in social media under poisoning attacks. Specifically, we create a simulation environment for trending topics that incorporates a time-aware interaction mechanism, centralized message dissemination, and an interactive system. Moreover, we develop LLM-based human-like agents to simulate users in social media, and propose prototype-based attackers to replicate poisoning attacks. Besides, we evaluate TrendSim from multiple aspects to validate its effectiveness. Based on TrendSim, we conduct simulation experiments to study four critical problems about poisoning attacks on trending topics for social benefit.
CharacterBox: Evaluating the Role-Playing Capabilities of LLMs in Text-Based Virtual Worlds
Wang, Lei, Lian, Jianxun, Huang, Yi, Dai, Yanqi, Li, Haoxuan, Chen, Xu, Xie, Xing, Wen, Ji-Rong
Role-playing is a crucial capability of Large Language Models (LLMs), enabling a wide range of practical applications, including intelligent non-player characters, digital twins, and emotional companions. Evaluating this capability in LLMs is challenging due to the complex dynamics involved in role-playing, such as maintaining character fidelity throughout a storyline and navigating open-ended narratives without a definitive ground truth. Current evaluation methods, which primarily focus on question-answering or conversational snapshots, fall short of adequately capturing the nuanced character traits and behaviors essential for authentic role-playing. In this paper, we propose CharacterBox, which is a simulation sandbox designed to generate situational fine-grained character behavior trajectories. These behavior trajectories enable a more comprehensive and in-depth evaluation of role-playing capabilities. CharacterBox consists of two main components: the character agent and the narrator agent. The character agent, grounded in psychological and behavioral science, exhibits human-like behaviors, while the narrator agent coordinates interactions between character agents and environmental changes. Additionally, we introduce two trajectory-based methods that leverage CharacterBox to enhance LLM performance. To reduce costs and facilitate the adoption of CharacterBox by public communities, we fine-tune two smaller models, CharacterNR and CharacterRM, as substitutes for GPT API calls, and demonstrate their competitive performance compared to advanced GPT APIs.
GraphInstruct: Empowering Large Language Models with Graph Understanding and Reasoning Capability
Luo, Zihan, Song, Xiran, Huang, Hong, Lian, Jianxun, Zhang, Chenhao, Jiang, Jinqi, Xie, Xing
Evaluating and enhancing the general capabilities of large language models (LLMs) has been an important research topic. Graph is a common data structure in the real world, and understanding graph data is a crucial part for advancing general intelligence. To evaluate and enhance the graph understanding abilities of LLMs, in this paper, we propose a benchmark named GraphInstruct, which comprehensively includes 21 classical graph reasoning tasks, providing diverse graph generation pipelines and detailed reasoning steps. Based on GraphInstruct, we further construct GraphLM through efficient instruction-tuning, which shows prominent graph understanding capability. In order to enhance the LLM with graph reasoning capability as well, we propose a step mask training strategy, and construct a model named GraphLM+. As one of the pioneering efforts to enhance the graph understanding and reasoning abilities of LLMs, extensive experiments have demonstrated the superiority of GraphLM and GraphLM+ over other LLMs. We look forward to more researchers exploring the potential of LLMs in the graph data mining domain through GraphInstruct. Our code for generating GraphInstruct is released publicly at: https://github.com/CGCL-codes/GraphInstruct.
RecAI: Leveraging Large Language Models for Next-Generation Recommender Systems
Lian, Jianxun, Lei, Yuxuan, Huang, Xu, Yao, Jing, Xu, Wei, Xie, Xing
This paper introduces RecAI, a practical toolkit designed to augment or even revolutionize recommender systems with the advanced capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). RecAI provides a suite of tools, including Recommender AI Agent, Recommendation-oriented Language Models, Knowledge Plugin, RecExplainer, and Evaluator, to facilitate the integration of LLMs into recommender systems from multifaceted perspectives. The new generation of recommender systems, empowered by LLMs, are expected to be more versatile, explainable, conversational, and controllable, paving the way for more intelligent and user-centric recommendation experiences. We hope the open-source of RecAI can help accelerate evolution of new advanced recommender systems. The source code of RecAI is available at \url{https://github.com/microsoft/RecAI}.
Aligning Large Language Models for Controllable Recommendations
Lu, Wensheng, Lian, Jianxun, Zhang, Wei, Li, Guanghua, Zhou, Mingyang, Liao, Hao, Xie, Xing
Inspired by the exceptional general intelligence of Large Language Models (LLMs), researchers have begun to explore their application in pioneering the next generation of recommender systems - systems that are conversational, explainable, and controllable. However, existing literature primarily concentrates on integrating domain-specific knowledge into LLMs to enhance accuracy, often neglecting the ability to follow instructions. To address this gap, we initially introduce a collection of supervised learning tasks, augmented with labels derived from a conventional recommender model, aimed at explicitly improving LLMs' proficiency in adhering to recommendation-specific instructions. Subsequently, we develop a reinforcement learning-based alignment procedure to further strengthen LLMs' aptitude in responding to users' intentions and mitigating formatting errors. Through extensive experiments on two real-world datasets, our method markedly advances the capability of LLMs to comply with instructions within recommender systems, while sustaining a high level of accuracy performance.
Ada-Retrieval: An Adaptive Multi-Round Retrieval Paradigm for Sequential Recommendations
Li, Lei, Lian, Jianxun, Zhou, Xiao, Xie, Xing
Retrieval models aim at selecting a small set of item candidates which match the preference of a given user. They play a vital role in large-scale recommender systems since subsequent models such as rankers highly depend on the quality of item candidates. However, most existing retrieval models employ a single-round inference paradigm, which may not adequately capture the dynamic nature of user preferences and stuck in one area in the item space. In this paper, we propose Ada-Retrieval, an adaptive multi-round retrieval paradigm for recommender systems that iteratively refines user representations to better capture potential candidates in the full item space. Ada-Retrieval comprises two key modules: the item representation adapter and the user representation adapter, designed to inject context information into items' and users' representations. The framework maintains a model-agnostic design, allowing seamless integration with various backbone models such as RNNs or Transformers. We perform experiments on three widely used public datasets, incorporating five powerful sequential recommenders as backbone models. Our results demonstrate that Ada-Retrieval significantly enhances the performance of various base models, with consistent improvements observed across different datasets. Our code and data are publicly available at: https://github.com/ll0ruc/Ada-Retrieval.
Recommender AI Agent: Integrating Large Language Models for Interactive Recommendations
Huang, Xu, Lian, Jianxun, Lei, Yuxuan, Yao, Jing, Lian, Defu, Xie, Xing
Recommender models excel at providing domain-specific item recommendations by leveraging extensive user behavior data. Despite their ability to act as lightweight domain experts, they struggle to perform versatile tasks such as providing explanations and engaging in conversations. On the other hand, large language models (LLMs) represent a significant step towards artificial general intelligence, showcasing remarkable capabilities in instruction comprehension, commonsense reasoning, and human interaction. However, LLMs lack the knowledge of domain-specific item catalogs and behavioral patterns, particularly in areas that diverge from general world knowledge, such as online e-commerce. Finetuning LLMs for each domain is neither economic nor efficient. In this paper, we bridge the gap between recommender models and LLMs, combining their respective strengths to create a versatile and interactive recommender system. We introduce an efficient framework called \textbf{InteRecAgent}, which employs LLMs as the brain and recommender models as tools. We first outline a minimal set of essential tools required to transform LLMs into InteRecAgent. We then propose an efficient workflow within InteRecAgent for task execution, incorporating key components such as memory components, dynamic demonstration-augmented task planning, and reflection. InteRecAgent enables traditional recommender systems, such as those ID-based matrix factorization models, to become interactive systems with a natural language interface through the integration of LLMs. Experimental results on several public datasets show that InteRecAgent achieves satisfying performance as a conversational recommender system, outperforming general-purpose LLMs. The source code of InteRecAgent is released at https://aka.ms/recagent.
The Good, The Bad, and Why: Unveiling Emotions in Generative AI
Li, Cheng, Wang, Jindong, Zhang, Yixuan, Zhu, Kaijie, Wang, Xinyi, Hou, Wenxin, Lian, Jianxun, Luo, Fang, Yang, Qiang, Xie, Xing
Emotion significantly impacts our daily behaviors and interactions. While recent generative AI models, such as large language models, have shown impressive performance in various tasks, it remains unclear whether they truly comprehend emotions. This paper aims to address this gap by incorporating psychological theories to gain a holistic understanding of emotions in generative AI models. Specifically, we propose three approaches: 1) EmotionPrompt to enhance AI model performance, 2) EmotionAttack to impair AI model performance, and 3) EmotionDecode to explain the effects of emotional stimuli, both benign and malignant. Through extensive experiments involving language and multi-modal models on semantic understanding, logical reasoning, and generation tasks, we demonstrate that both textual and visual EmotionPrompt can boost the performance of AI models while EmotionAttack can hinder it. Additionally, EmotionDecode reveals that AI models can comprehend emotional stimuli akin to the mechanism of dopamine in the human brain. Our work heralds a novel avenue for exploring psychology to enhance our understanding of generative AI models. This paper is an extended version of our previous work EmotionPrompt (arXiv:2307.11760).