LLMs exhibit promising Social Intelligence (SI) in modeling human behavior, raising the need to evaluate LLMs’ SI and their discrepancy with humans. SI equips humans with interpersonal abilities to behave wisely in navigating social interactions to achieve social goals. This presents an operational evaluation paradigm: outcome-oriented goal achievement evaluation and process-oriented interpersonal ability evaluation, which existing work fails to address. To this end, we propose SocialEval, a script-based bilingual SI benchmark, integrating outcome- and process-oriented evaluation by manually crafting narrative scripts. Each script is structured as a world tree that contains plot lines driven by interpersonal ability, providing a comprehensive view of how LLMs navigate social interactions. Experiments show that LLMs fall behind humans on both SI evaluations, exhibit prosociality, and prefer more positive social behaviors, even if they lead to goal failure. Analysis of LLMs’ formed representation space and neuronal activations reveals that LLMs have developed ability-specific functional partitions akin to the human brain.

The rapid advancement of generative AI technologies is driving the integration of diverse AI-powered services into smartphones, transforming how users interact with their devices. To simplify access to predefined AI services, this paper introduces MIRA, a pioneering framework for task instruction recommendation that enables intuitive one-touch AI tasking on smartphones. With MIRA, users can long-press on images or text objects to receive contextually relevant instruction recommendations for executing AI tasks. Our work introduces three key innovations: 1) A multimodal large language model (MLLM)-based recommendation pipeline with structured reasoning to extract key entities, infer user intent, and generate precise instructions; 2) A template-augmented reasoning mechanism that integrates high-level reasoning templates, enhancing task inference accuracy; 3) A prefix-tree-based constrained decoding strategy that restricts outputs to predefined instruction candidates, ensuring coherence and intent alignment. Through evaluation using a real-world annotated datasets and a user study, MIRA has demonstrated substantial improvements in recommendation accuracy. The encouraging results highlight MIRA’s potential to revolutionize the way users engage with AI services on their smartphones, offering a more seamless and efficient experience.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly propelled the development of Conversational Recommendation Agents (CRAs). However, these agents often generate short-sighted responses that fail to sustain user guidance and meet expectations. Although preference optimization has proven effective in aligning LLMs with user expectations, it remains costly and performs poorly in multi-turn dialogue. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel multi-turn preference optimization (MTPO) paradigm **ECPO**, which leverages Expectation Confirmation Theory to explicitly model the evolution of user satisfaction throughout multi-turn dialogues, uncovering the underlying causes of dissatisfaction. These causes can be utilized to support targeted optimization of unsatisfactory responses, thereby achieving turn-level preference optimization. ECPO eliminates the significant sampling overhead of existing MTPO methods while ensuring the optimization process drives meaningful improvements. To support ECPO, we also introduce an LLM-based user simulator, **AILO**, to simulate user feedback and expectation confirmation during conversational recommendations. Experimental results show that ECPO significantly enhances CRA’s interaction capabilities, offering notable improvements in both efficiency and effectiveness over existing MTPO methods.

Recent works have highlighted the significance of memory mechanisms in LLM-based agents, which enable them to store observed information and adapt to dynamic environments. However, evaluating their memory capabilities still remains challenges. Previous evaluations are commonly limited by the diversity of memory levels and interactive scenarios. They also lack comprehensive metrics to reflect the memory capabilities from multiple aspects. To address these problems, in this paper, we construct a more comprehensive dataset and benchmark to evaluate the memory capability of LLM-based agents. Our dataset incorporates factual memory and reflective memory as different levels, and proposes participation and observation as various interactive scenarios. Based on our dataset, we present a benchmark, named MemBench, to evaluate the memory capability of LLM-based agents from multiple aspects, including their effectiveness, efficiency, and capacity. To benefit the research community, we release our dataset and project at https://github.com/import-myself/Membench.

In recent research advancements within the community, large language models (LLMs) have sparked great interest in creating autonomous agents. However, current prompt-based agents often heavily rely on large-scale LLMs. Meanwhile, although fine-tuning methods significantly enhance the capabilities of smaller LLMs, the fine-tuned agents often lack the potential for self-reflection and self-improvement. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel agent framework named RetroAct, which is a framework that jointly optimizes both task-planning and self-reflective evolution capabilities in language agents. Specifically, we develop a two-stage joint optimization process that integrates imitation learning and reinforcement learning, and design an off-policy joint policy gradient optimization algorithm with imitation learning regularization to enhance the data efficiency and training stability in agent tasks. RetroAct significantly improves the performance of open-source models, reduces dependency on closed-source LLMs, and enables fine-tuned agents to learn and evolve continuously. We conduct extensive experiments across various testing environments, demonstrating RetroAct has substantial improvements in task performance and decision-making processes.

Understanding news content is critical to improving the quality of news recommendation. To achieve this goal, recent studies have attempted to apply pre-trained language models (PLMs) such as BERT for semantic-enhanced news recommendation. Despite their great success in offline evaluation, it is still a challenge to apply such large PLMs in real-time ranking model due to the stringent requirement in inference and updating time. To bridge this gap, we propose a plug-and-play pre-trainer, namely PREC, to learn both user and news encoders through multi-task pre-training. Instead of directly leveraging sophisticated PLMs for end-to-end inference, we focus on how to use the derived user and item representations to boost the performance of conventional lightweight models for click-through-rate prediction. This enables efficient online inference as well as compatibility to conventional models, which would significantly ease the practical deployment. We validate the effectiveness of PREC through both offline evaluation on public datasets and online A/B testing in an industrial application.