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.

Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT), especially Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), has emerged as a promising approach to fine-tuning large language models(LLMs) while reducing computational and memory overhead. However, LoRA assumes a uniform rank r for each incremental matrix, not accounting for the varying significance of weight matrices across different modules and layers. AdaLoRA leverages Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to parameterize updates and employs pruning of singular values to introduce dynamic rank allocation, thereby enhancing adaptability. However, during the training process, it often encounters issues of slow convergence speed and high computational overhead. To address this issue, we propose HyperAdaLoRA, a novel framework that accelerates the convergence of AdaLoRA by leveraging a hypernetwork. Instead of directly optimizing the components of Singular Value Decomposition (P, 𝛬, Q), HyperAdaLoRA employs a hypernetwork based on attention mechanisms to dynamically generate these parameters. By pruning the outputs of the hypernetwork that generates the singular values, dynamic rank allocation is achieved. Comprehensive experiments on various datasets and models demonstrate that our method achieves faster convergence without sacrificing performance. Moreover, our method generalizes well to other LoRA-based approaches, highlighting its strong generalization capability.

Session history is a common way of recording user interacting behaviors throughout a browsing activity with multiple products. For example, if an user clicks a product webpage and then leaves, it might because there are certain features that don’t satisfy the user, which serve as an important indicator of on-the-spot user preferences. However, all prior works fail to capture and model customer intention effectively because insufficient information exploitation and only apparent information like descriptions and titles are used. There is also a lack of data and corresponding benchmark for explicitly modeling intention in E-commerce product purchase sessions. To address these issues, we introduce the concept of an intention tree and propose a dataset curation pipeline. Together, we construct a sibling multimodal benchmark, SessionIntentBench, that evaluates L(V)LMs’ capability on understanding inter-session intention shift with four subtasks. With 1,952,177 intention entries, 1,132,145 session intention trajectories, and 13,003,664 available tasks mined using 10,905 sessions, we provide a scalable way to exploit the existing session data for customer intention understanding. We conduct human annotations to collect ground-truth label for a subset of collected data to form an evaluation gold set. Extensive experiments on the annotated data further confirm that current L(V)LMs fail to capture and utilize the intention across the complex session setting. Further analysis show injecting intention enhances LLMs’ performances.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become a popular interface for human–AI interaction, supporting information seeking and task assistance through natural, multi-turn dialogue. To respond to users within multi-turn dialogues, the context-dependent user intent evolves across interactions, requiring contextual interpretation, query reformulation, and dynamic coordination between retrieval and generation. Existing studies usually follow static “rewrite, retrieve, and generate” pipelines, which optimize different procedures separately and overlook the mixed-initiative action optimization simultaneously. Although the recent developments in deep search agents demonstrate the effectiveness in jointly optimizing retrieval and generation via reasoning, these approaches focus on single-turn scenarios, which might lack the ability to handle multi-turn interactions. We introduce a conversational agent that interleaves search and reasoning across turns, enabling exploratory and adaptive behaviors learned through reinforcement learning (RL) training with tailored rewards towards evolving user goals. The experimental results across four widely used conversational benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods by surpassing several existing strong baselines.

Learning from preference feedback is essential for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values and improving the quality of generated responses. However, existing preference learning methods rely heavily on curated data from humans or advanced LLMs, which is costly and difficult to scale. In this work, we present PUGC, a novel framework that leverages implicit human Preferences in unlabeled User-Generated Content (UGC) to generate preference data. Although UGC is not explicitly created to guide LLMs in generating human-preferred responses, it often reflects valuable insights and implicit preferences from its creators that has the potential to address readers’ questions. PUGC transforms UGC into user queries and generates responses from the policy model. The UGC is then leveraged as a reference text for response scoring, aligning the model with these implicit preferences. This approach improves the quality of preference data while enabling scalable, domain-specific alignment. Experimental results on Alpaca Eval 2 show that models trained with DPO and PUGC achieve a 9.37% performance improvement over traditional methods, setting a 35.93% state-of-the-art length-controlled win rate using Mistral-7B-Instruct. Further studies highlight gains in reward quality, domain-specific alignment effectiveness, robustness against UGC quality, and theory of mind capabilities. Our code and dataset are available at https://zhaoxuan.info/PUGC.github.io/.

Due to the scarcity of agent-oriented pre-training data, LLM-based autonomous agents typically rely on complex prompting or extensive fine-tuning, which often fails to introduce new capabilities while preserving strong generalizability. We introduce Hephaestus-Forge, the first large-scale pre-training corpus designed to enhance the fundamental capabilities of LLM agents in API function calling, intrinsic reasoning and planning, and adapting to environmental feedback. Hephaestus-Forge comprises 103B agent-specific data encompassing 76,537 APIs, including both tool documentation to introduce knowledge of API functions and function calling trajectories to strengthen intrinsic reasoning. To explore effective training protocols, we investigate scaling laws to identify the optimal recipe in data mixing ratios. By continual pre-training on Hephaestus-Forge, Hephaestus outperforms small- to medium-scale open-source LLMs and rivals commercial LLMs on three agent benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our pre-training corpus in enhancing fundamental agentic capabilities and generalization of LLMs to new tasks or environments.

Recommendation explanation systems have become increasingly vital with the widespread adoption of recommender systems. However, existing recommendation explanation evaluation benchmarks suffer from limited item diversity, impractical user profiling requirements, and unreliable and unscalable evaluation protocols. We present ALERT, a model-agnostic recommendation explanation evaluation benchmark. The benchmark comprises three main contributions: 1) a diverse dataset encompassing 15 Amazon e-commerce categories with 2,761 user-item interactions, incorporating implicit preferences through purchase histories;2) two novel LLM-powered automatic evaluators that enable scalable and human-preference aligned evaluation of explanations; and 3) a robust divide-and-aggregate approach that synthesizes multiple LLM judgments, achieving 70% concordance with expert human evaluation and substantially outperforming existing methods.ALERT facilitates comprehensive evaluation of recommendation explanations across diverse domains, advancing the development of more effective explanation systems.

The instruction hierarchy, which establishes a priority order from system messages to user messages, conversation history, and tool outputs, is essential for ensuring consistent and safe behavior in language models (LMs). Despite its importance, this topic receives limited attention, and there is a lack of comprehensive benchmarks for evaluating models’ ability to follow the instruction hierarchy. We bridge this gap by introducing IHEval, a novel benchmark comprising 3,538 examples across nine tasks, covering cases where instructions in different priorities either align or conflict. Our evaluation of popular LMs highlights their struggle to recognize instruction priorities. All evaluated models experience a sharp performance decline when facing conflicting instructions, compared to their original instruction-following performance. Moreover, the most competitive open-source model only achieves 48% accuracy in resolving such conflicts. Our results underscore the need for targeted optimization in the future development of LMs.

Goal-oriented script planning, or the ability to devise coherent sequences of actions toward specific goals, is commonly employed by humans to plan for typical activities. In e-commerce, customers increasingly seek LLM-based assistants to generate scripts and recommend products at each step, thereby facilitating convenient and efficient shopping experiences. However, this capability remains underexplored due to several challenges, including the inability of LLMs to simultaneously conduct script planning and product retrieval, difficulties in matching products caused by semantic discrepancies between planned actions and search queries, and a lack of methods and benchmark data for evaluation. In this paper, we step forward by formally defining the task of E-commerce Script Planning (EcomScript) as three sequential subtasks. We propose a novel framework that enables the scalable generation of product-enriched scripts by associating products with each step based on the semantic similarity between the actions and their purchase intentions. By applying our framework to real-world e-commerce data, we construct the very first large-scale EcomScript dataset, EcomScriptBench, which includes 605,229 scripts sourced from 2.4 million products. Human annotations are then conducted to provide gold labels for a sampled subset, forming an evaluation benchmark. Extensive experiments reveal that current (L)LMs face significant challenges with EcomScript tasks, even after fine-tuning, while injecting product purchase intentions improves their performance.

The rapid advancement of conversational search systems revolutionizes how information is accessed by enabling the multi-turn interaction between the user and the system. Existing conversational search systems are usually built with two different models. This separation restricts the system from leveraging the intrinsic knowledge of the models simultaneously, which cannot ensure the effectiveness of retrieval benefiting the generation. The existing studies for developing unified models cannot fully address the aspects of understanding conversational context, managing retrieval independently, and generating responses. In this paper, we explore how to unify dense retrieval and response generation for large language models in conversation. We conduct joint fine-tuning with different objectives and design two mechanisms to reduce the inconsistency risks while mitigating data discrepancy. The evaluations on five conversational search datasets demonstrate that our unified model can mutually improve both tasks and outperform the existing baselines.

Despite of significant achievements in improving instruction-following capabilities of large language models (LLMs), the ability to process multiple potentially entangled or conflict instructions remains a considerable challenge. Real-world scenarios often require the consistency across multiple instructions over time, such as secret privacy, presonal preferences, and prioritization, so we demand sophisticated abilities to integrate multiple turns and carefully balance competing objectives when instructions intersect or conflict. This work presents a systematic investigation of LLMs’ capabilities in handling multiple turns of instructions, covering three levels of difficulty: (1) retrieving information from instructions, (2) tracking and reasoning across turns, and (3) resolving conflicts among instructions. We construct MultiTurnInstruct with 1.1K high-quality multi-turn conversations through the human-in-the-loop approach and result in a total of nine capability categories, including statics and dynamics, reasoning and multitasking. Our finding reveals an intriguing trade-off between different capabilities. While GPT models demonstrate superior memorization, they show reduced effectiveness in privacy-protection tasks requiring selective information withholding. Larger models exhibit stronger reasoning capabilities but still struggle with resolving conflicting instructions. Importantly, these performance gaps cannot be attributed solely to information loss, as models demonstrate strong BLEU scores on memorization tasks but their attention mechanisms fail to effectively integrate multiple related instructions. These findings highlight critical areas for improvement in the complex real-world tasks involving multi-turn instructions.

The adoption of large language models (LLMs) to assist clinicians has attracted remarkable attention. Existing works mainly adopt the close-ended question-answering (QA) task with answer options for evaluation. However, many clinical decisions involve answering open-ended questions without pre-set options. To better understand LLMs in the clinic, we construct a benchmark ClinicBench. We first collect eleven existing datasets covering diverse clinical language generation, understanding, and reasoning tasks. Furthermore, we construct six novel datasets and clinical tasks that are complex but common in real-world practice, e.g., open-ended decision-making, long document processing, and emerging drug analysis. We conduct an extensive evaluation of twenty-two LLMs under both zero-shot and few-shot settings. Finally, we invite medical experts to evaluate the clinical usefulness of LLMs

Attribute Value Extraction (AVE) aims to retrieve the values of attributes from the product profiles. The state-of-the-art methods tackle the AVE task through a question-answering (QA) paradigm, where the value is predicted from the context (i.e. product profile) given a query (i.e. attributes). Despite of the substantial advancements that have been made, the performance of existing methods on rare attributes is still far from satisfaction, and they cannot be easily extended to unseen attributes due to the poor generalization ability. In this work, we propose to leverage pretraining and transfer learning to address the aforementioned weaknesses. We first collect the product information from various E-commerce stores and retrieve a large number of (profile, attribute, value) triples, which will be used as the pretraining corpus. To more effectively utilize the retrieved corpus, we further design a Knowledge-Selective Framework (KSelF) based on query expansion that can be closely combined with the pretraining corpus to boost the performance. Meanwhile, considering the public AE-pub dataset contains considerable noise, we construct and contribute a larger benchmark EC-AVE collected from E-commerce websites. We conduct evaluation on both of these datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed KSelF achieves new state-of-the-art performance without pretraining. When incorporated with the pretraining corpus, the performance of KSelF can be further improved, particularly on the attributes with limited training resources.

Current abstractive summarization models often generate inconsistent content, i.e. texts that are not directly inferable from the source document, are not consistent with respect to world knowledge, or are self-contradictory. These inconsistencies motivate a new consistency taxonomy that we define as faithfulness, factuality, and self-supportiveness. However, most recent work on reducing inconsistency in document summarization only focuses on faithfulness detection and correction while ignoring other inconsistency phenomena, which limits the model’s scalability. To improve the general consistency we introduce EnergySum, where we apply the Residual Energy-based Model by designing energy scorers that reflect each type of consistency. These energy scores are utilized in candidate re-ranking during the sampling process. Experiments on XSUM and CNN/DM datasets show that EnergySum mitigates the trade-off between accuracy and consistency.

Question Answering (QA) is a longstanding challenge in natural language processing. Existing QA works mostly focus on specific question types, knowledge domains, or reasoning skills. The specialty in QA research hinders systems from modeling commonalities between tasks and generalization for wider applications. To address this issue, we present ProQA, a unified QA paradigm that solves various tasks through a single model. ProQA takes a unified structural prompt as the bridge and improves the QA-centric ability by structural prompt-based pre-training. Through a structurally designed prompt-based input schema, ProQA concurrently models the knowledge generalization for all QA tasks while keeping the knowledge customization for every specific QA task. Furthermore, ProQA is pre-trained with structural prompt-formatted large-scale synthesized corpus, which empowers the model with the commonly-required QA ability. Experimental results on 11 QA benchmarks demonstrate that ProQA consistently boosts performance on both full data fine-tuning, few-shot learning, and zero-shot testing scenarios. Furthermore, ProQA exhibits strong ability in both continual learning and transfer learning by taking the advantages of the structural prompt.

Keyphrase generation is the task of automatically predicting keyphrases given a piece of long text. Despite its recent flourishing, keyphrase generation on non-English languages haven’t been vastly investigated. In this paper, we call attention to a new setting named multilingual keyphrase generation and we contribute two new datasets, EcommerceMKP and AcademicMKP, covering six languages. Technically, we propose a retrieval-augmented method for multilingual keyphrase generation to mitigate the data shortage problem in non-English languages. The retrieval-augmented model leverages keyphrase annotations in English datasets to facilitate generating keyphrases in low-resource languages. Given a non-English passage, a cross-lingual dense passage retrieval module finds relevant English passages. Then the associated English keyphrases serve as external knowledge for keyphrase generation in the current language. Moreover, we develop a retriever-generator iterative training algorithm to mine pseudo parallel passage pairs to strengthen the cross-lingual passage retriever. Comprehensive experiments and ablations show that the proposed approach outperforms all baselines.

In open-domain question answering, questions are highly likely to be ambiguous because users may not know the scope of relevant topics when formulating them. Therefore, a system needs to find possible interpretations of the question, and predict one or multiple plausible answers. When multiple plausible answers are found, the system should rewrite the question for each answer to resolve the ambiguity. In this paper, we present a model that aggregates and combines evidence from multiple passages to adaptively predict a single answer or a set of question-answer pairs for ambiguous questions. In addition, we propose a novel round-trip prediction approach to iteratively generate additional interpretations that our model fails to find in the first pass, and then verify and filter out the incorrect question-answer pairs to arrive at the final disambiguated output. Our model, named Refuel, achieves a new state-of-the-art performance on the AmbigQA dataset, and shows competitive performance on NQ-Open and TriviaQA. The proposed round-trip prediction is a model-agnostic general approach for answering ambiguous open-domain questions, which improves our Refuel as well as several baseline models. We release source code for our models and experiments at https://github.com/amzn/refuel-open-domain-qa.

We formulate the problem of hypernym prediction as a sequence generation task, where the sequences are taxonomy paths in WordNet. Our experiments with encoder-decoder models show that training to generate taxonomy paths can improve the performance of direct hypernym prediction. As a simple but powerful model, the hypo2path model achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming the best benchmark by 4.11 points in hit-at-one (H@1).

Document interpretation and dialog understanding are the two major challenges for conversational machine reading. In this work, we propose “Discern”, a discourse-aware entailment reasoning network to strengthen the connection and enhance the understanding of both document and dialog. Specifically, we split the document into clause-like elementary discourse units (EDU) using a pre-trained discourse segmentation model, and we train our model in a weakly-supervised manner to predict whether each EDU is entailed by the user feedback in a conversation. Based on the learned EDU and entailment representations, we either reply to the user our final decision “yes/no/irrelevant” of the initial question, or generate a follow-up question to inquiry more information. Our experiments on the ShARC benchmark (blind, held-out test set) show that Discern achieves state-of-the-art results of 78.3% macro-averaged accuracy on decision making and 64.0 BLEU1 on follow-up question generation. Code and models are released at https://github.com/Yifan-Gao/Discern.

The goal of conversational machine reading is to answer user questions given a knowledge base text which may require asking clarification questions. Existing approaches are limited in their decision making due to struggles in extracting question-related rules and reasoning about them. In this paper, we present a new framework of conversational machine reading that comprises a novel Explicit Memory Tracker (EMT) to track whether conditions listed in the rule text have already been satisfied to make a decision. Moreover, our framework generates clarification questions by adopting a coarse-to-fine reasoning strategy, utilizing sentence-level entailment scores to weight token-level distributions. On the ShARC benchmark (blind, held-out) testset, EMT achieves new state-of-the-art results of 74.6% micro-averaged decision accuracy and 49.5 BLEU4. We also show that EMT is more interpretable by visualizing the entailment-oriented reasoning process as the conversation flows. Code and models are released at https://github.com/Yifan-Gao/explicit_memory_tracker.

Sentence function is an important linguistic feature indicating the communicative purpose in uttering a sentence. Incorporating sentence functions into conversations has shown improvements in the quality of generated responses. However, the number of utterances for different types of fine-grained sentence functions is extremely imbalanced. Besides a small number of high-resource sentence functions, a large portion of sentence functions is infrequent. Consequently, dialogue generation conditioned on these infrequent sentence functions suffers from data deficiency. In this paper, we investigate a structured meta-learning (SML) approach for dialogue generation on infrequent sentence functions. We treat dialogue generation conditioned on different sentence functions as separate tasks, and apply model-agnostic meta-learning to high-resource sentence functions data. Furthermore, SML enhances meta-learning effectiveness by promoting knowledge customization among different sentence functions but simultaneously preserving knowledge generalization for similar sentence functions. Experimental results demonstrate that SML not only improves the informativeness and relevance of generated responses, but also can generate responses consistent with the target sentence functions. Code will be public to facilitate the research along this line.

Question generation (QG) is the task of generating a question from a reference sentence and a specified answer within the sentence. A major challenge in QG is to identify answer-relevant context words to finish the declarative-to-interrogative sentence transformation. Existing sequence-to-sequence neural models achieve this goal by proximity-based answer position encoding under the intuition that neighboring words of answers are of high possibility to be answer-relevant. However, such intuition may not apply to all cases especially for sentences with complex answer-relevant relations. Consequently, the performance of these models drops sharply when the relative distance between the answer fragment and other non-stop sentence words that also appear in the ground truth question increases. To address this issue, we propose a method to jointly model the unstructured sentence and the structured answer-relevant relation (extracted from the sentence in advance) for question generation. Specifically, the structured answer-relevant relation acts as the to the point context and it thus naturally helps keep the generated question to the point, while the unstructured sentence provides the full information. Extensive experiments show that to the point context helps our question generation model achieve significant improvements on several automatic evaluation metrics. Furthermore, our model is capable of generating diverse questions for a sentence which conveys multiple relations of its answer fragment.

We study the problem of generating interconnected questions in question-answering style conversations. Compared with previous works which generate questions based on a single sentence (or paragraph), this setting is different in two major aspects: (1) Questions are highly conversational. Almost half of them refer back to conversation history using coreferences. (2) In a coherent conversation, questions have smooth transitions between turns. We propose an end-to-end neural model with coreference alignment and conversation flow modeling. The coreference alignment modeling explicitly aligns coreferent mentions in conversation history with corresponding pronominal references in generated questions, which makes generated questions interconnected to conversation history. The conversation flow modeling builds a coherent conversation by starting questioning on the first few sentences in a text passage and smoothly shifting the focus to later parts. Extensive experiments show that our system outperforms several baselines and can generate highly conversational questions. The code implementation is released at https://github.com/Evan-Gao/conversaional-QG.