This paper investigates the faithfulness of multimodal large language model (MLLM) agents in a graphical user interface (GUI) environment, aiming to address the research question of whether multimodal GUI agents can be distracted by environmental context. A general scenario is proposed where both the user and the agent are benign, and the environment, while not malicious, contains unrelated content. A wide range of MLLMs are evaluated as GUI agents using a simulated dataset, following three working patterns with different levels of perception. Experimental results reveal that even the most powerful models, whether generalist agents or specialist GUI agents, are susceptible to distractions. While recent studies predominantly focus on the helpfulness of agents, our findings first indicate that these agents are prone to environmental distractions. Furthermore, we implement an adversarial environment injection and analyze the approach to improve faithfulness, calling for a collective focus on this important topic.

Training Large Language Models (LLMs) from scratch requires immense computational resources, making it prohibitively expensive. Model scaling-up offers a promising solution by leveraging the parameters of smaller models to create larger ones. However, existing depth scaling-up methods rely on empirical heuristic rules for layer duplication, which result in poorer initialization and slower convergence during continual pre-training. We propose LESA, a novel learnable method for depth scaling-up. By concatenating parameters from each layer and applying Singular Value Decomposition, we uncover latent patterns between layers, suggesting that inter-layer parameters can be learned. LESA uses a neural network to predict the parameters inserted between adjacent layers, enabling better initialization and faster training. Experiments show that LESA outperforms existing baselines, achieving superior performance with less than half the computational cost during continual pre-training. Extensive analyses demonstrate its effectiveness across different model sizes and tasks.

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable versatility and adaptability, while their widespread adoption across various applications also raises critical safety concerns.This paper focuses on the impact of backdoored LLMs. Traditional backdoor injection methods are primarily limited to yes-or-no discriminative tasks, leading users to underestimate the potential risks of backdoored LLMs.Given the inherently generative nature of LLMs, this paper reveals that a generative backdoor injected into LLMs can expose the true safety risks in their applications. We propose an editing-based generative backdoor, named MEGen, aiming to expand the backdoor to generative tasks in a unified format of any text-to any text, leading to natural generations with a specific intention. Experiments show that MEGen achieves a high attack success rate by adjusting only a small set of local parameters with few-shot samples. Notably, we show that the backdoored model, when triggered, can freely output pre-set dangerous information while completing downstream tasks.Our work highlights that MEGen enables backdoors in LLMs to exhibit generative capabilities, causing potential safety risks by altering the generative style. The code is available at [https://github.com/MonoQ-hub/MEGen](https://github.com/MonoQ-hub/MEGen).

Large Language Model (LLM) agents have demonstrated impressive capabilities in handling complex interactive problems. Existing LLM agents mainly generate natural language plans to guide reasoning, which is verbose and inefficient. NL plans are also tailored to specific tasks and restrict agents’ ability to generalize across similar tasks. To this end, we explore pseudocode-style plans (P-code Plan) to capture the structural logic of reasoning. We find that P-code Plan empowers LLM agents with stronger generalization ability and more efficiency. Inspired by this finding, we propose a pseudocode-style  ̲Planning  ̲Guided  ̲Preference  ̲Optimization method called PGPO for effective agent learning. With two planning-oriented rewards, PGPO further enhances LLM agents’ ability to generate high-quality P-code Plans and subsequent reasoning. Experiments show that PGPO achieves superior performance on representative agent benchmarks and outperforms the current leading baselines. Analyses reveal the advantage of PGPO in reducing action errors and omissions during reasoning.

Large language models (LLMs) have played a pivotal role in building communicative AI, yet they encounter the challenge of efficient updates. Model editing enables the manipulation of specific knowledge memories and the behavior of language generation without retraining. However, the robustness of model editing remains an open question. This work seeks to understand the strengths and limitations of editing methods, facilitating practical applications of communicative AI. We focus on three key research questions. RQ1: Can edited LLMs behave consistently resembling communicative AI in realistic situations? RQ2: To what extent does the rephrasing of prompts lead LLMs to deviate from the edited knowledge memory? RQ3: Which knowledge features are correlated with the performance and robustness of editing? Our empirical studies uncover a substantial disparity between existing editing methods and the practical application of LLMs. On rephrased prompts that are flexible but common in realistic applications, the performance of editing experiences a significant decline. Further analysis shows that more popular knowledge is memorized better, easier to recall, and more challenging to edit effectively.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable potential as human-like autonomous language agents to interact with real-world environments, especially for graphical user interface (GUI) automation.However, those GUI agents require comprehensive cognition including exhaustive perception and reliable action response.We propose a Comprehensive Cognitive LLM Agent, CoCo-Agent, with two novel approaches, comprehensive environment perception (CEP) and conditional action prediction (CAP), to systematically improve the GUI automation performance. First, CEP facilitates the GUI perception through different aspects and granularity, including screenshots and complementary detailed layouts for the visual channel and historical actions for the textual channel.Second, CAP decomposes the action prediction into sub-problems: determining the action type and then identifying the action target conditioned on the action type.With our technical design, our agent achieves state-of-the-art performance on AITW and META-GUI benchmarks, showing promising abilities in realistic scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/xbmxb/CoCo-Agent.

The advent of large language models (LLMs) has spurred considerable interest in advancing autonomous LLMs-based agents, particularly in intriguing applications within smartphone graphical user interfaces (GUIs). When presented with a task goal, these agents typically emulate human actions within a GUI environment until the task is completed. However, a key challenge lies in devising effective plans to guide action prediction in GUI tasks, though planning have been widely recognized as effective for decomposing complex tasks into a series of steps. Specifically, given the dynamic nature of environmental GUIs following action execution, it is crucial to dynamically adapt plans based on environmental feedback and action history.We show that the widely-used ReAct approach fails due to the excessively long historical dialogues. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach called Dynamic Planning of Thoughts (D-PoT) for LLM-based GUI agents.D-PoT involves the dynamic adjustment of planning based on the environmental feedback and execution history. Experimental results reveal that the proposed D-PoT significantly surpassed the strong GPT-4V baseline by +12.7% (34.66% → 47.36%) in accuracy. The analysis highlights the generality of dynamic planning in different backbone LLMs, as well as the benefits in mitigating hallucinations and adapting to unseen tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/sqzhang-lazy/D-PoT.

Based on the remarkable achievements of pre-trained language models in abstractive summarization, the copying mechanism has proved helpful by improving the factuality, stability, and overall performance. This work proposes PROM, a new PhRase-level cOpying Mechanism that enhances attention on n-grams, which can be applied to zero-shot summarization with pre-training. PROM adds an indicator layer to explicitly pick up tokens in n-gram that can be copied from the source, and calculates an auxiliary loss for the copying prediction. Empirical studies show that PROM makes significant improvements in fine-tuning on benchmarks. In the zero-shot setting, PROM is utilized in the self-supervised pre-training on raw corpora and provides new general baselines on a wide range of summarization datasets. Further analysis shows that PROM performs more reasonable copying and contributes to faithfulness. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/xbmxb/PROM.

Large Language Models (LLMs) play powerful, black-box readers in the retrieve-then-read pipeline, making remarkable progress in knowledge-intensive tasks. This work introduces a new framework, Rewrite-Retrieve-Read instead of the previous retrieve-then-read for the retrieval-augmented LLMs from the perspective of the query rewriting. Unlike prior studies focusing on adapting either the retriever or the reader, our approach pays attention to the adaptation of the search query itself, for there is inevitably a gap between the input text and the needed knowledge in retrieval. We first prompt an LLM to generate the query, then use a web search engine to retrieve contexts. Furthermore, to better align the query to the frozen modules, we propose a trainable scheme for our pipeline. A small language model is adopted as a trainable rewriter to cater to the black-box LLM reader. The rewriter is trained using the feedback of the LLM reader by reinforcement learning. Evaluation is conducted on downstream tasks, open-domain QA and multiple-choice QA. Experiments results show consistent performance improvement, indicating that our framework is proven effective and scalable, and brings a new framework for retrieval-augmented LLM.

Tangled multi-party dialogue contexts lead to challenges for dialogue reading comprehension, where multiple dialogue threads flow simultaneously within a common dialogue record, increasing difficulties in understanding the dialogue history for both human and machine. Previous studies mainly focus on utterance encoding methods with carefully designed features but pay inadequate attention to characteristic features of the structure of dialogues. We specially take structure factors into account and design a novel model for dialogue disentangling. Based on the fact that dialogues are constructed on successive participation and interactions between speakers, we model structural information of dialogues in two aspects: 1)speaker property that indicates whom a message is from, and 2) reference dependency that shows whom a message may refer to. The proposed method achieves new state-of-the-art on the Ubuntu IRC benchmark dataset and contributes to dialogue-related comprehension.