Towards Rationality in Language and Multimodal Agents: A Survey

Bowen Jiang, Yangxinyu Xie, Xiaomeng Wang, Yuan Yuan, Zhuoqun Hao, Xinyi Bai, Weijie J Su, Camillo Jose Taylor, Tanwi Mallick


Abstract
This work discusses how to build more rational language and multimodal agents and what criteria define rationality in intelligent systems.Rationality is the quality of being guided by reason, characterized by decision-making that aligns with evidence and logical principles. It plays a crucial role in reliable problem-solving by ensuring well-grounded and consistent solutions. Despite their progress, large language models (LLMs) often fall short of rationality due to their bounded knowledge space and inconsistent outputs. In response, recent efforts have shifted toward developing multimodal and multi-agent systems, as well as integrating modules like external tools, programming codes, symbolic reasoners, utility function, and conformal risk controls rather than relying solely on a single LLM for decision-making. This paper surveys state-of-the-art advancements in language and multimodal agents, assesses their role in enhancing rationality, and outlines open challenges and future research directions. We maintain an open repository at https://github.com/bowen-upenn/Agent_Rationality.
Anthology ID:
2025.naacl-long.186
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
April
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Luis Chiruzzo, Alan Ritter, Lu Wang
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3656–3675
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.naacl-long.186/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bowen Jiang, Yangxinyu Xie, Xiaomeng Wang, Yuan Yuan, Zhuoqun Hao, Xinyi Bai, Weijie J Su, Camillo Jose Taylor, and Tanwi Mallick. 2025. Towards Rationality in Language and Multimodal Agents: A Survey. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 3656–3675, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Rationality in Language and Multimodal Agents: A Survey (Jiang et al., NAACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.naacl-long.186.pdf