Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems commonly suffer from **Knowledge Conflicts**, where retrieved external knowledge contradicts the inherent, parametric knowledge of large language models (LLMs). It adversely affects performance on downstream tasks such as question answering (QA). Existing approaches often attempt to mitigate conflicts by directly comparing two knowledge sources in a side-by-side manner, but this can overwhelm LLMs with extraneous or lengthy contexts, ultimately hindering their ability to identify and mitigate inconsistencies. To address this issue, we propose **Micro-Act** a framework with a hierarchical action space that automatically perceives context complexity and adaptively decomposes each knowledge source into a sequence of fine-grained comparisons. These comparisons are represented as actionable steps, enabling reasoning beyond the superficial context. Through extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets, Micro-Act consistently achieves significant increase in QA accuracy over state-of-the-art baselines across all 5 datasets and 3 conflict types, especially in temporal and semantic types where all baselines fail significantly. More importantly, Micro-Act exhibits robust performance on non-conflict questions simultaneously, highlighting its practical value in real-world RAG applications.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved the performance of multi-hop question answering (MHQA) systems. Despite the success of MHQA systems, the evaluation of MHQA is not deeply investigated. Existing evaluations mainly focus on comparing the final answers of the reasoning method and given ground-truths. We argue that the reasoning process should also be evaluated because wrong reasoning process can also lead to the correct final answers. Motivated by this, we propose a “Planner-Executor-Reasoner” (PER) architecture, which forms the core of the Plan-anchored Data Preprocessing (PER-DP) and the Plan-guided Multi-Hop QA (PER-QA).The former provides the ground-truth of intermediate reasoning steps and final answers, and the latter offers them of a reasoning method. Moreover, we design a fine-grained evaluation metric called Plan-aligned Stepwise Evaluation (PSE), which evaluates the intermediate reasoning steps from two aspects: planning and solving. Extensive experiments on ten types of questions demonstrate competitive reasoning performance, improved explainability of the MHQA system, and uncover issues such as “fortuitous reasoning continuance” and “latent reasoning suspension” in RAG-based MHQA systems. Besides, we also demonstrate the potential of our approach in data contamination scenarios.

Despite the abundance of prior social strategies possessed by humans, there remains a paucity of research dedicated to their transfer and integration into social agents. Our proposed SOTOPIA-Ω framework aims to address and bridge this gap, with a particular focus on enhancing the social capabilities of language agents. This framework dynamically injects a variety of social strategies into expert agents, thereby automating the construction of high-quality social dialogue training corpus. Additionally, we introduce the concept of Social Instruction Following (S-IF) and propose two new S-IF evaluation metrics that are complementary to social capability. We demonstrate that several 7B models trained on high-quality corpus not only significantly surpasses the expert agent (GPT-4) in achieving social goals but also enhances S-IF performance. Analysis and variant experiments validate the advantages of dynamic construction, which can especially break the agent’s prolonged deadlock.

The challenge of developing agents capable of open-world planning remains fundamental to artificial general intelligence (AGI). While large language models (LLMs) have made progress with their vast world knowledge, their limitations in perception, memory, and reliable reasoning still hinder LLM-based agents from achieving human-level performance in long-term tasks. Drawing inspiration from human cognitive-metacognitive collaboration, we propose Metagent-P, integrating the world knowledge of LLMs, the symbolic reasoning capabilities of cognitive architectures, and the self-reflection characteristic of metacognition to construct a “planning-verification-execution-reflection” framework. Metagent-P improves experience utilization through multimodal memory integration. It uses a neural-symbolic hierarchical representation structure to ensure the plan’s reasoning correctness in advance. Finally, it actively adapts the agent to dynamic environments through monitoring, evaluation, and regulation mechanisms. Experimental results show Metagent-P significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in Minecraft. In long-term tasks, Metagent-P reduces the average replanning counts by 34% and exceeds the average human success rate by 18.96%. Additionally, Metagent-P also demonstrates self-evolution through step-by-step open-world exploration.

Open-world planning poses a significant challenge for general artificial intelligence due to environmental complexity and task diversity, especially in long-term tasks and lifelong learning. Inspired by cognitive theories, we propose M2PA, an open-world multi-memory planning agent. M2PA innovates by combining Large Language Models (LLMs) with human-like multi-memory systems, aiming to fully leverage the strengths of both while mitigating their respective limitations. By integrating the expansive world knowledge and language processing capabilities of LLMs with the perception and experience accumulation abilities of the human memory system, M2PA exhibits situation awareness, and experience generalization capabilities, as well as the potential for lifelong learning. In experiments, M2PA significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art agents across 50 Minecraft tasks in zero-shot learning. In exploratory lifelong learning experiments, M2PA demonstrates its continuous learning ability, achieving a 38.33% success rate in the “ObtainDiamond” task. Our findings provide a novel paradigm for constructing more effective agents in open-world environments.