This paper presents SOLOMON, a novel Neuro-inspired Large Language Model (LLM) Reasoning Network architecture that enhances the adaptability of foundation models for domain-specific applications. Through a case study in semiconductor layout design, we demonstrate how SOLOMON enables swift adaptation of general-purpose LLMs to specialized tasks by leveraging Prompt Engineering and In-Context Learning techniques. Our experiments reveal the challenges LLMs face in spatial reasoning and applying domain knowledge to practical problems. Results show that SOLOMON instances significantly outperform their baseline LLM counterparts and achieve performance comparable to state-of-the-art reasoning model, o1-preview. We discuss future research directions for developing more adaptive AI systems that can continually learn, adapt, and evolve in response to new information and changing requirements.

As LLM-based agents exhibit exceptional capabilities in addressing complex problems, there is a growing focus on developing coding agents to tackle increasingly sophisticated tasks. Despite their promising performance, these coding agents often produce programs or modifications that contain runtime errors, which can cause code failures and are difficult for static analysis tools to detect. Enhancing the ability of coding agents to statically identify such errors could significantly improve their overall performance. In this work, we introduce Execution-free Runtime Error Detection for COding Agents (REDO), a method that integrates LLMs with static analysis tools to detect runtime errors for coding agents, without code execution. Additionally, we propose a benchmark task, SWE-Bench-Error-Detection (SWEDE), based on SWE-Bench (lite), to evaluate error detection in repository-level problems with complex external dependencies. Finally, through both quantitative and qualitative analyses across various error detection tasks, we demonstrate that REDO outperforms current state-of-the-art methods by achieving a 11.0% higher accuracy and 9.1% higher weighted F1 score; and provide insights into the advantages of incorporating LLMs for error detection. Large language models (LLMs) and LLM-based agents have exhibited significant potential in code generation, code editing, and code evaluation. This progress has culminated in the development of advanced LLM-based agents (hereafter referred to as coding agents) designed to address increasingly complex tasks. For example, SWE-Bench (Jimenez et al., 2024a) presents a demanding benchmark comprising repository-level coding challenges. This benchmark requires coding agents to generate a modification patch that solves a given problem within a GitHub repository, based on a problem statement expressed in natural language. To effectively navigate complex tasks such as those posed by SWE-Bench, coding agents must demonstrate proficiency in the following core competencies: 1) comprehension of the problem statement and retrieving relevant code, 2) reasoning towards a functionally correct solution, and 3) generation of programs free from runtime errors such as SyntaxError, AttributeError, or TypeError. While the majority of coding agents across different tasks focus on enhancing comprehension, retrieval and reasoning capabilities, the systematic detection of runtime errors has received comparatively limited attention. However, ensuring that generated code is free from runtime errors is as critical as the aforementioned capabilities. For example, an AttributeError can cause the modified code to fail, irrespective of the agent's comprehension and reasoning processes.

The predominant approach for language modeling is to process sequences from left to right, but this eliminates a source of information: the order by which the sequence was generated. One strategy to recover this information is to decode both the content and ordering of tokens. Existing approaches supervise content and ordering by designing problem-specific loss functions and pre-training with an ordering pre-selected. Other recent works use iterative search to discover problem-specific orderings for training, but suffer from high time complexity and cannot be efficiently parallelized. We address these limitations with an unsupervised parallelizable learner that discovers high-quality generation orders purely from training data -- no domain knowledge required. The learner contains an encoder network and decoder language model that perform variational inference with autoregressive orders (represented as permutation matrices) as latent variables. The corresponding ELBO is not differentiable, so we develop a practical algorithm for end-to-end optimization using policy gradients. We implement the encoder as a Transformer with non-causal attention that outputs permutations in one forward pass. Permutations then serve as target generation orders for training an insertion-based Transformer language model. Empirical results in language modeling tasks demonstrate that our method is context-aware and discovers orderings that are competitive with or even better than fixed orders.