Despite recent progress achieved by code large language models (LLMs), their remarkable abilities are largely dependent on fine-tuning on the high-quality data, posing challenges for data collection and annotation. To address this, current methods often design various data flywheels to collect complex code instructions, enabling models to handle more intricate tasks. However, these approaches typically rely on off-the-shelf datasets and data augmentation from a limited set of proprietary LLMs (e.g., Claude, GPT4, and so on), which restricts the diversity of the constructed data and makes it prone to systemic biases. In this paper, we propose **WarriorCoder**, a novel paradigm learns from expert battles to address these limitations. Specifically, we create an arena where leading expert code LLMs challenge each other, with evaluations conducted by impartial judges. This competitive framework generates novel training data from scratch, leveraging the strengths of all participants. Experimental results show that **WarriorCoder** achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to previous models of the same size, even without relying on proprietary LLMs.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have enabled LLM-based agents to directly interact with application user interfaces (UIs), enhancing agents’ performance in complex tasks. However, these agents often suffer from high latency and low reliability due to the extensive sequential UI interactions. To address this issue, we propose AXIS, a novel LLM-based agents framework that prioritize actions through application programming interfaces (APIs) over UI actions. This framework also facilitates the creation and expansion of APIs through automated exploration of applications. Our experiments on Microsoft Word demonstrate that AXIS reduces task completion time by 65%-70% and cognitive workload by 38%-53%, while maintaining accuracy of 97%-98% compared to humans. Our work contributes to a new human-agent-computer interaction (HACI) framework and explores a fresh UI design principle for application providers to turn applications into agents in the era of LLMs, paving the way towards an agent-centric operating system (Agent OS). The code and dataset will be available at https://aka.ms/haci_axis.

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) generate explicit reasoning traces alongside final answers, yet the extent to which these traces influence answer generation remains unclear. In this work, we conduct a three-stage investigation into the interplay between reasoning and answer generation in three distilled DeepSeek R1 models. First, through empirical evaluation, we demonstrate that including explicit reasoning consistently improves answer quality across diverse domains. Second, attention analysis reveals that answer tokens attend substantially to reasoning tokens, with certain mid-layer Reasoning-Focus Heads (RFHs) closely tracking the reasoning trajectory, including self-reflective cues. Third, we apply mechanistic interventions using activation patching to assess the dependence of answer tokens on reasoning activations. Our results show that perturbations to key reasoning tokens can reliably alter the final answers, confirming a directional and functional flow of information from reasoning to answer. These findings deepen our understanding of how LRMs leverage reasoning tokens for answer generation, highlighting the functional role of intermediate reasoning in shaping model outputs.

Code translation is a crucial activity in the software development and maintenance process, and researchers have recently begun to focus on using pre-trained large language models (LLMs) for code translation. However, existing LLMs only learn the contextual semantics of code during pre-training, neglecting executability information closely related to the execution state of the code, which results in unguaranteed code executability and unreliable automated code translation. To address this issue, we propose ExeCoder, an LLM specifically designed for code translation, aimed at utilizing executability representations such as functional semantics, syntax structures, and variable dependencies to enhance the capabilities of LLMs in code translation. To evaluate the effectiveness of ExeCoder, we manually enhanced the widely used benchmark TransCoder-test, resulting in a benchmark called TransCoder-test-X that serves LLMs. Evaluation of TransCoder-test-X indicates that ExeCoder achieves state-of-the-art performance in code translation, surpassing existing open-source code LLMs by over 10.88% to 38.78% and over 27.44% to 42.97% on two metrics, and even outperforms the renowned closed-source LLM GPT-4o. Code is available at https://aka.ms/execoder

Recent advances in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) have substantially improved question-answering systems, particularly for factoid ‘5Ws’ questions. However, significant challenges remain when addressing ‘1H’ questions, specifically how-to questions, which are integral for decision-making and require dynamic, step-by-step responses. The key limitation lies in the prevalent data organization paradigm, chunk, which commonly divides documents into fixed-size segments, and disrupts the logical coherence and connections within the context. To address this, we propose THREAD, a novel data organization paradigm enabling systems to handle how-to questions more effectively. Specifically, we introduce a new knowledge granularity, ‘logic unit’ (LU), where large language models transform documents into more structured and loosely interconnected LUs. Extensive experiments across both open-domain and industrial settings show that THREAD outperforms existing paradigms significantly, improving the success rate of handling how-to questions by 21% to 33%. Additionally, THREAD demonstrates high adaptability across diverse document formats, reducing retrieval information by up to 75% compared to chunk, and also shows better generalizability to ‘5Ws’ questions, such as multi-hop questions, outperforming other paradigms.

Query generation is a critical task for web search engines (e.g. Google, Bing) and recommendation systems. Recently, state-of-the-art query generation methods leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) for their strong capabilities in context understanding and text generation. However, they still face challenges in generating high-quality queries in terms of inferring user intent based on their web search interaction history. In this paper, we propose Token-level Proximal Policy Optimization (TPPO), a noval approach designed to empower LLMs perform better in query generation through fine-tuning. TPPO is based on the Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback (RLAIF) paradigm, consisting of a token-level reward model and a token-level proximal policy optimization module to address the sparse reward challenge in traditional RLAIF frameworks. We conducted experiments on both open-source dataset and an industrial dataset that was collected from a globally-used search engine, demonstrating that TPPO significantly improves the performance of query generation for LLMs and outperforms its existing competitors.

Large Language Models have advanced automated software development, however, it remains a challenge to correctly infer dependencies, namely, identifying the internal components and external packages required for a repository to successfully run. Existing studies highlight that dependency-related issues cause over 40% of observed runtime errors on the generated repository. To address this, we introduce DI-BENCH, a large-scale benchmark and evaluation framework specifically designed to assess LLMs’ capability on dependency inference. The benchmark features 581 repositories with testing environments across Python, C#, Rust, and JavaScript. Extensive experiments with textual and execution-based metrics reveal that the current best-performing model achieves only a 48% execution pass rate on Python, indicating significant room for improvement. DI-BENCH establishes a new viewpoint for evaluating LLM performance on repositories, paving the way for more robust end-to-end software synthesis.

In contemporary workplaces, meetings are essential for exchanging ideas and ensuring team alignment but often face challenges such as time consumption, scheduling conflicts, and inefficient participation. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their strong capabilities in natural language generation and reasoning, prompting the question- can LLMs effectively delegate participants in meetings? To explore this, we develop a prototype LLM-powered meeting delegate system and create a comprehensive benchmark using real meeting transcripts. Our evaluation shows GPT-4/4o balance active and cautious engagement, Gemini 1.5 Pro leans cautious, and Gemini 1.5 Flash and Llama3-8B/70B are more active. About 60% of responses capture at least one key point from the ground truth. Challenges remain in reducing irrelevant or repetitive content and handling transcription errors in real-world settings. We further validate the system through practical deployment and collect feedback. Our results highlight both the promise and limitations of LLMs as meeting delegates, providing insights for their real-world application in reducing meeting burden

We introduce UFO, a UI-Fcused agent designed to fulfill user requests tailored to Windows OS applications by observing and analyzing the GUI and control information of these applications. UFO utilizes a hierarchical dual-agent framework that decomposes user requests using a divide-and-conquer approach, enabling seamless navigation and addressing sub-tasks across multiple applications. It also incorporates a control interaction module tailored for Windows OS, which detects control elements effectively and allows for fully automated execution. As a result, UFO simplifies complex and time-consuming processes into tasks that can be completed with natural language commands.We conducted testing of UFO across 9 popular Windows applications, encompassing a variety of scenarios. The results derived from both quantitative metrics and real-case studies, underscore the superior effectiveness of UFOin fulfilling user requests. To the best of our knowledge, UFO stands as the first UI agent specifically tailored for task completion within the Windows OS.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods encounter difficulties when addressing complex questions like multi-hop queries.While iterative retrieval methods improve performance by gathering additional information, current approaches often rely on multiple calls of large language models (LLMs).In this paper, we introduce EfficientRAG, an efficient retriever for multi-hop question answering.EfficientRAG iteratively generates new queries without the need for LLM calls at each iteration and filters out irrelevant information.Experimental results demonstrate that EfficientRAG surpasses existing RAG methods on three open-domain multi-hop question-answering datasets.The code is available in [aka.ms/efficientrag](https://github.com/NIL-zhuang/EfficientRAG-official).

This paper focuses on task-agnostic prompt compression for better generalizability and efficiency. Considering the redundancy in natural language, existing approaches compress prompts by removing tokens or lexical units according to their information entropy obtained from a causal language model such as LLaMa-7B. The challenge is that information entropy may be a suboptimal compression metric: (i) it only leverages unidirectional context and may fail to capture all essential information needed for prompt compression; (ii) it is not aligned with the prompt compression objective.To address these issues, we propose a data distillation procedure to derive knowledge from an LLM to compress prompts without losing crucial information, and meantime, introduce an extractive text compression dataset. We formulate prompt compression as a token classification problem to guarantee the faithfulness of the compressed prompt to the original one, and use a Transformer encoder as the base architecture to capture all essential information for prompt compression from the full bidirectional context. Our approach leads to lower latency by explicitly learning the compression objective with smaller models such as XLM-RoBERTa-large and mBERT.We evaluate our method on both in-domain and out-of-domain datasets, including MeetingBank, LongBench, ZeroScrolls, GSM8K, and BBH. Despite its small size, our model shows significant performance gains over strong baselines and demonstrates robust generalization ability across different LLMs. Additionally, our model is 3x-6x faster than existing prompt compression methods, while accelerating the end-to-end latency by 1.6x-2.9x with compression ratios of 2x-5x.

This paper introduce a novel thought prompting approach called ”Everything of Thoughts” (XoT) for Large Language Models (LLMs) to defy the law of ”Penrose triangle” of existing thought paradigms, to achieve three key perspectives in thought generation simultaneously: performance, efficiency, and flexibility. XoT leverages pretrained reinforcement learning and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to incorporate external domain knowledge and planning capability into thoughts, thereby enhancing LLMs’ decision-making capabilities. Through the MCTS-LLM collaborative thought revision framework, XoT autonomously produces high-quality comprehensive cognitive mappings with minimal LLM interactions. Additionally, XoT empowers LLMs to utilize flexible cognitive mappings for solving problems with multiple solutions.We evaluate XoT on several challenging problem-solving tasks, including Game of 24, 8-Puzzle, and Pocket Cube. Our results demonstrate that XoT significantly outperforms existing approaches in various dimensions, showcasing its remarkable proficiency in addressing complex problems across diverse domains. The data and code are available at https://github.com/microsoft/Everything-of-Thoughts-XoT.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown potential in reasoning over structured environments, e.g., knowledge graphs and tables. Such tasks typically require multi-hop reasoning, i.e., match natural language utterance with instances in the environment. Previous works adopt LLMs to incrementally build a reasoning path, where LLMs either invoke tools or pick up items by step-by-step interacting with the environment. We propose Reasoning-Path-Editing (Readi), a novel framework where LLMs can efficiently and faithfully reason over structured environments. In Readi, LLMs initially generate a reasoning path given a query, and edit the path only when necessary. We instantiate the path on structured environments and provide feedback to edit the path if anything goes wrong. Experimental results on three KGQA and two TableQA datasets show the effectiveness of Readi, significantly surpassing previous LLM-based methods (by 9.1% Hit@1 on WebQSP, 12.4% on MQA-3H and 9.5% on WTQ), comparable with state-of-the-art fine-tuned methods (67% on CWQ and 74.7% on WebQSP) and substantially boosting the vanilla LLMs (by 14.9% on CWQ). Our code will be available on https://aka.ms/readi.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models have transformed ML/AI development, necessitating a reevaluation of AutoML principles for the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. To address the challenges of hyper-parameter optimization and online adaptation in RAG, we propose the AutoRAG-HP framework, which formulates the hyper-parameter tuning as an online multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem and introduces a novel two-level Hierarchical MAB (Hier-MAB) method for efficient exploration of large search spaces. We conduct extensive experiments on tuning hyper-parameters, such as top-k retrieved documents, prompt compression ratio, and embedding methods, using the ALCE-ASQA and Natural Questions datasets. Our evaluation from jointly optimization all three hyper-parameters demonstrate that MAB-based online learning methods can achieve Recall@5 ≈ 0.8 for scenarios with prominent gradients in search space, using only ~20% of the LLM API calls required by the Grid Search approach. Additionally, the proposed Hier-MAB approach outperforms other baselines in more challenging optimization scenarios. The code will be made available at https://aka.ms/autorag.

With the increasing risk posed by jailbreak attacks, recent studies have investigated various methods to improve the safety of large language models (LLMs), mainly falling into two strategies: safety training and safeguards. Safety training involves fine-tuning the LLM with adversarial samples, which activate the LLM’s capabilities against jailbreak. However, it is not always effective in countering new attacks and often leads to potential performance degradation. Safeguards, on the other hand, are methods using additional models to filter harmful content from the LLM’s response. Nevertheless, they can only reduce a limited amount of harmful output and introduce extra computational costs. Given the distinct strengths and weaknesses of both, we combine them to balance out their flaws and propose a more effective method called Self-Guard.Specifically, we train the LLM to review its responses for any harmful content and append a [harmful] or [harmless] tag to the end of the response. In this way, Self-Guard possesses the advantages of safety training, leveraging the powerful capabilities of the LLMs themselves to detect harmfulness. Besides that, it gains flexibility like safeguards, making the safety check target the output side, which makes the system less vulnerable to attack updates. Experimental results indicate that our Self-Guard can effectively defend against jailbreak attacks and will not cause LLMs’ performance degradation.

Responding with multi-modal content has been recognized as an essential capability for an intelligent conversational agent. In this paper, we introduce the MMDialog dataset to facilitate multi-modal conversation better. MMDialog is composed of a curated set of 1.08 million real-world dialogues with 1.53 million unique images across 4,184 topics. MMDialog has two main and unique advantages. First, it is the largest multi-modal conversation dataset by the number of dialogues by 88x. Second, it contains massive topics to generalize the open domain. To build an engaging dialogue system with this dataset, we propose and normalize two response prediction tasks based on retrieval and generative scenarios. In addition, we build two baselines for the above tasks with state-of-the-art techniques and report their experimental performance. We also propose a novel evaluation metric MM-Relevance to measure the multi-modal responses. Our dataset is available in https://github.com/victorsungo/MMDialog.

Large Language Model (LLM) has gained popularity and achieved remarkable results in open-domain tasks, but its performance in real industrial domain-specific scenarios is average due to its lack of specific domain knowledge. This issue has attracted widespread attention, but there are few relevant benchmarks available. In this paper, we provide a benchmark Question Answering (QA) dataset named MSQA, centered around Microsoft products and IT technical problems encountered by customers. This dataset contains industry cloud-specific QA knowledge, an area not extensively covered in general LLMs, making it well-suited for evaluating methods aiming to enhance LLMs’ domain-specific capabilities. In addition, we propose a new model interaction paradigm that can empower LLM to achieve better performance on domain-specific tasks where it is not proficient. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the approach following our method outperforms the commonly used LLM with retrieval methods. We make our source code and sample data available at: https://aka.ms/Microsoft_QA.