Large Language Model (LLM) empowered agents have recently emerged as advanced paradigms that exhibit impressive capabilities in a wide range of domains and tasks. Despite their potential, current LLM agents often adopt a one-size-fits-all approach, lacking the flexibility to respond to users’ varying needs and preferences. This limitation motivates us to develop PersonaAgent, the first personalized LLM agent framework designed to address versatile personalization tasks. Specifically, PersonaAgent integrates two complementary components: a personalized memory module that includes episodic and semantic memory mechanisms; a personalized action module that enables the agent to perform tool actions tailored to the user. At the core, the persona (defined as unique system prompt for each user) functions as an intermediary: it leverages insights from personalized memory to control agent actions, while the outcomes of these actions in turn refine the memory. Based on the framework, we propose a test-time user-preference alignment strategy that simulate the latest n interactions to optimize the persona prompt, ensuring real-time user preference alignment through textual loss feedback between simulated and ground-truth responses. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that PersonaAgent significantly outperforms other baseline methods by not only personalizing the action space effectively but also scaling during test-time real-world applications. These results underscore the feasibility and potential of our approach in delivering tailored, dynamic user experiences.

To sustain coherent long-term interactions, Large Language Model (LLM) agents must navigate the tension between acquiring new information and retaining prior knowledge. Current unified stream-based memory systems facilitate context updates but remain vulnerable to interference from transient noise. Conversely, discrete structured memory architectures provide robust knowledge retention but often struggle to adapt to fluid narrative evolution. To address this, we propose GAM, a hierarchical Graph-based Agentic Memory framework that explicitly decouples memory encoding from consolidation to effectively resolve the conflict between rapid context perception and stable knowledge retention. By isolating ongoing dialogue in a event progression graph and integrating it into a topic associative network only upon semantic shifts, our approach minimizes interference while preserving long-term consistency. Additionally, we introduce a Graph-guided, Multi-factor Retrieval strategy to enhance context precision. Experiments on LoCoMo and LongDialQA benchmarks indicate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both reasoning accuracy and computational efficiency.

Deep research frameworks have shown promising capabilities in synthesizing comprehensive reports from web sources. While deep research possesses significant potential to address complex issues through planning and research cycles, existing frameworks are deficient in sufficient evaluation procedures and stage-specific protections. They typically treat evaluation as exact match accuracy of question-answering, but overlook crucial aspects of report quality such as credibility, coherence, breadth, depth, and safety. This oversight may result in hazardous or malicious sources being integrated into the final report. To address this, we introduce DeepResearchGuard, a framework featuring four-stage safeguards with open-domain evaluation, and DRSafeBench, a novel stage-wise safety benchmark. Evaluating across GPT-4o, o4-mini, Gemini-2.5-flash, DeepSeek-v3, and GPT-5, DeepResearchGuard improves defense success rates by an absolute 16.53% while reducing over-refusal rates to approximately 6%. Through extensive experiments, we show that DeepResearchGuard enables comprehensive open-domain evaluation and stage-aware defenses that effectively block harmful content propagation, while systematically improving report quality without excessive over-refusal rates.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have sparked growing interest in building fully autonomous agents. However, fully autonomous LLM-based agents still face significant challenges, including limited reliability due to hallucinations, difficulty in handling complex tasks, and substantial safety and ethical risks, all of which limit their feasibility and trustworthiness in real-world applications. To overcome these limitations, LLM-based human-agent systems (LLM-HAS) incorporate human-provided information, feedback, or control into the agent system to enhance system performance, reliability, and safety. These human-agent collaboration systems enable humans and LLM-based agents to collaborate effectively by leveraging their complementary strengths.This paper provides the first comprehensive and structured survey of LLM-HAS. It clarifies fundamental concepts, systematically presents core components shaping these systems, including environment and profiling, human feedback, interaction types, orchestration, and communication, explores emerging applications, and discusses unique challenges and opportunities arising from human-AI collaboration. By consolidating current knowledge and offering a structured overview, we aim to foster further research and innovation in this rapidly evolving interdisciplinary field. Paper lists and resources are available at https://github.com/HenryPengZou/Awesome-Human-Agent-Collaboration-Interaction-Systems.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to scientific research, yet existing evaluations often fail to reflect the fine-grained capabilities required in practice. Most benchmarks are manually curated or domain-generic, limiting scalability and alignment with real scientific use cases. In this paper, we propose a new framework named SciCustom to address the problem. It enables the custom construction of benchmarks from large-scale scientific data to evaluate application-specific scientific capabilities in LLMs. SciCustom first organizes scientific knowledge into ontology-grounded knowledge units with controlled granularity and trains a tagger to map large-scale data instances into this knowledge space. Given a custom requirement, relevant knowledge units are identified via voting-based multi-model consensus. These units enable relevance-aware benchmark retrieval via binary search, followed by proxy subset selection and data-grounded benchmark generation for efficient evaluation. Experiments in chemistry and healthcare demonstrate that SciCustom reveals fine-grained differences in LLM scientific capabilities that standard benchmarks overlook, while requiring neither expert annotation nor synthetic question generation. This work provides a scalable and application-aware foundation for benchmarking scientific capabilities in LLMs.

The high cost of obtaining high-quality annotated data for in-context learning (ICL) has motivated the development of methods that use self-generated annotations in place of ground truth labels. While these approaches have shown promising results in few-shot settings, they generally do not scale to many-shot scenarios. In this work, we study ICL with self-generated examples using a framework analogous to traditional semi-supervised learning, consisting of annotation generation, demonstration selection, and in-context inference. Within this framework, we propose a simple baseline that outperforms ground truth ICL under zero-shot, few-shot, and many-shot settings. Notably, we observe consistent scaling behaviors with respect to the number of self-annotated demonstrations. To further extract performance from this many-shot capability, we introduce IterPSD, an iterative self-annotation approach that integrates iterative refinement and curriculum pseudo-labeling techniques from semi-supervised learning, yielding up to 6.8% additional gains on classification tasks. Motivated by our baseline and IterPSD results, we demonstrate that semi-supervised ICL offers a promising avenue for future ICL research.

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have recently achieved great success in processing and understanding information from diverse modalities (e.g., text, audio, and visual signals). Despite their growing popularity, there remains a lack of comprehensive evaluation measuring the audio-visual capabilities of these models, especially in diverse scenarios (e.g., distribution shifts and adversarial attacks). In this paper, we present a multifaceted evaluation of the audio-visual capability of MLLMs, focusing on four key dimensions: effectiveness, efficiency, generalizability, and robustness. Through extensive experiments, we find that MLLMs exhibit strong zero-shot and few-shot generalization abilities, enabling them to achieve great performance with limited data. However, their success relies heavily on the vision modality, which impairs performance when visual input is corrupted or missing. Additionally, while MLLMs are susceptible to adversarial samples, they demonstrate greater robustness compared to traditional models. The experimental results and our observations provide new insights into the audio-visual capabilities of MLLMs, highlighting areas for improvement and offering guidance for future research.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) lifts the factuality of Large Language Models (LLMs) by injecting external knowledge, yet it falls short on problems that demand multi-step inference; conversely, purely reasoning-oriented approaches often hallucinate or mis-ground facts. This survey synthesizes both strands under a unified reasoning-search perspective. We first map how advanced reasoning optimizes each stage of RAG (Reasoning-Enhanced RAG). Then, we show how retrieved knowledge of different type supply missing premises and expand context for complex inference (RAG-Enhanced Reasoning). Finally, we spotlight emerging Synergized RAG-Reasoning frameworks, where (agentic) LLMs iteratively interleave search and thought to achieve state-of-the-art performance across knowledge-intensive benchmarks. We categorize methods, datasets, and open challenges, and outline research avenues toward deeper RAG-Reasoning systems that are more effective, multimodally-adaptive, trustworthy, and human-centric.

While reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated remarkable success in enhancing large language models (LLMs), it has primarily focused on single-turn tasks such as solving math problems. Training effective web agents for multi-turn interactions remains challenging due to the complexity of long-horizon decision-making across dynamic web interfaces. In this work, we present WebAgent-R1, a simple yet effective end-to-end multi-turn RL framework for training web agents. It learns directly from online interactions with web environments by asynchronously generating diverse trajectories, entirely guided by binary rewards depending on task success. Experiments on the WebArena-Lite benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of WebAgent-R1, boosting the task success rate of Qwen-2.5-3B from 6.1% to 33.9% and LLaMA-3.1-8B from 8.5% to 44.8%, significantly outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods and strong proprietary models such as OpenAI o3. In-depth analyses reveal the effectiveness of the thinking-based prompting strategy and test-time scaling through increased interactions for web tasks. We further investigate different RL initialization policies by introducing two variants, namely WebAgent-R1-Zero and WebAgent-R1-CoT, which highlight the importance of the warm-up training stage (i.e., behavior cloning) and provide insights on incorporating long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning in web agents.

Collaborative filtering (CF) is widely adopted in industrial recommender systems (RecSys) for modeling user-item interactions across numerous applications, but often struggles with cold-start and data-sparse scenarios. Recent advancements in pre-trained large language models (LLMs) with rich semantic knowledge, offer promising solutions to these challenges. However, deploying LLMs at scale is hindered by their significant computational demands and latency. In this paper, we propose a novel and scalable LLM-RecSys framework, LLMInit, designed to integrate pretrained LLM embeddings into CF models through selective initialization strategies. Specifically, we identify the embedding collapse issue observed when CF models scale and match the large embedding sizes in LLMs and avoid the problem by introducing efficient sampling methods, including, random, uniform, and variance-based selections. Comprehensive experiments conducted on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that LLMInit significantly improves recommendation performance while maintaining low computational costs, offering a practical and scalable solution for industrial applications. To facilitate industry adoption and promote future research, we provide open-source access to our implementation at https://github.com/DavidZWZ/LLMInit.

Large Language models (LLMs) have achieved encouraging results in tabular data generation. However, existing approaches require fine-tuning, which is computationally expensive. This paper explores an alternative: prompting a fixed LLM with in-context examples. We observe that using randomly selected in-context examples hampers the LLM’s performance, resulting in sub-optimal generation quality. To address this, we propose a novel in-context learning framework: TabGen-ICL, to enhance the in-context learning ability of LLMs for tabular data generation. TabGen-ICL operates iteratively, retrieving a subset of real samples that represent the residual between currently generated samples and true data distributions. This approach serves two purposes: locally, it provides more effective in-context learning examples for the LLM in each iteration; globally, it progressively narrows the gap between generated and real data. Extensive experiments on five real-world tabular datasets demonstrate that TabGen-ICL significantly outperforms the random selection strategy. Specifically, it reduces the error rate by a margin of up to 42.2% on the fidelity metric. We demonstrate for the first time that prompting a fixed LLM can yield high-quality synthetic tabular data.

Test-time computing approaches, which leverage additional computational resources during inference, have been proven effective in enhancing large language model performance. This work introduces a novel, linearly scaling approach, TestNUC, that improves test-time predictions by leveraging the local consistency of neighboring unlabeled data-it classifies an input instance by considering not only the model’s prediction on that instance but also on neighboring unlabeled instances. We evaluate TestNUC across eight diverse datasets, spanning intent classification, topic mining, domain discovery, and emotion detection, demonstrating its consistent superiority over baseline methods such as standard prompting and self-consistency. Furthermore, TestNUC can be seamlessly integrated with existing test-time computing approaches, substantially boosting their performance. Our analysis reveals that TestNUC scales effectively with increasing amounts of unlabeled data and performs robustly across different embedding models, making it practical for real-world applications. Our code is available at https://github.com/HenryPengZou/TestNUC.

Existing datasets for attribute value extraction (AVE) predominantly focus on explicit attribute values while neglecting the implicit ones, lack product images, are often not publicly available, and lack an in-depth human inspection across diverse domains. To address these limitations, we present ImplicitAVE, the first, publicly available multimodal dataset for implicit attribute value extraction. ImplicitAVE, sourced from the MAVE dataset, is carefully curated and expanded to include implicit AVE and multimodality, resulting in a refined dataset of 68k training and 1.6k testing data across five domains. We also explore the application of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to implicit AVE, establishing a comprehensive benchmark for MLLMs on the ImplicitAVE dataset. Six recent MLLMs with eleven variants are evaluated across diverse settings, revealing that implicit value extraction remains a challenging task for MLLMs. The contributions of this work include the development and release of ImplicitAVE, and the exploration and benchmarking of various MLLMs for implicit AVE, providing valuable insights and potential future research directions. Dataset and code are available at https://github.com/HenryPengZou/ImplicitAVE.

During crisis events, people often use social media platforms such as Twitter to disseminate information about the situation, warnings, advice, and support. Emergency relief organizations leverage such information to acquire timely crisis circumstances and expedite rescue operations. While existing works utilize such information to build models for crisis event analysis, fully-supervised approaches require annotating vast amounts of data and are impractical due to limited response time. On the other hand, semi-supervised models can be biased, performing moderately well for certain classes while performing extremely poorly for others, resulting in substantially negative effects on disaster monitoring and rescue. In this paper, we first study two recent debiasing methods on semi-supervised crisis tweet classification. Then we propose a simple but effective debiasing method, DeCrisisMB, that utilizes a Memory Bank to store and perform equal sampling for generated pseudo-labels from each class at each training iteration. Extensive experiments are conducted to compare different debiasing methods’ performance and generalization ability in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution settings. The results demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method. Our code is available at https://github.com/HenryPengZou/DeCrisisMB.