Our goal is to build language model based multi-agent systems for complex planning problems involving multiple explicit and implicit constraints, some of which may be commonsense. Our initial investigations reveal that large language models (LLMs) are often unable to maintain consistency across the planning process, whereas large reasoning models (LRMs) struggle with handling implicit commonsense constraints. In response, we introduce LRPlan, a novel domain-independent, language-based multi-agent architecture where LLM and LRM-based agents collaborate at training time to abstract important patterns, heuristics and insights about the domain. At test time, they collaborate in implementing these learned patterns and insights for a new planning instance. We perform experiments on two datasets, TravelPlanner and TimeArena-Static, and use two LLM-LRM combinations from GPT and DeepSeek families. We find that LRPlan outperforms various multi-agent and single-agent baselines obtaining notably higher accuracy as well as cost efficiency. We make the code publiclyavailable.

The proliferation of educational videos on the Internet has changed the educational landscape by enabling students to learn complex concepts at their own pace. Our work outlines the vision of an automated tutor – a multimodal question answering (QA) system to answer questions from students watching a video. This can make doubt resolution faster and further improve learning experience. In this work, we take first steps towards building such a QA system. We curate and release a dataset named EduVidQA, with 3,158 videos and 18,474 QA-pairs. However, building and evaluating an educational QA system is challenging because (1) existing evaluation metrics do not correlate with human judgments, and (2) a student question could be answered in many different ways, training on a single gold answer could confuse the model and make it worse. We conclude with important research questions to develop this research area further.

In this paper, we present our approach to the BioLaySumm 2024 Shared Task on Lay Sum- marization of Biomedical Research Articles at BioNLP workshop 2024. The task aims to generate lay summaries from the abstract and main texts of biomedical research articles, making them understandable to lay audiences. We used some preprocessing techniques and finetuned FLAN-T5 models for the summarization task. Our method achieved an AlignScore of 0.9914 and a SummaC metric score of 0.944.