Yadong Lu


2025

pdf bib
Adapting LLM Agents with Universal Communication Feedback
Kuan Wang | Yadong Lu | Michael Santacroce | Yeyun Gong | Chao Zhang | Yelong Shen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated potential for LLM agents. To facilitate the training for these agents with both linguistic feedback and non-linguistic reward signals, we introduce Learning through Communication (LTC). We design a universal buffer to store all the feedback, and an iterative pipeline to enable an LLM agent to explore and update its policy in an given environment. To optimize agent interactions for task-specific learning with our universal buffer and pipeline, we introduce diverse communication patterns tailored for both single-agent and multi-agent environments. We evaluate the efficacy of our LTC approach on four diverse datasets: ALFWorld (single-agent), HotpotQA (multi-agent collaboration), Chameleon (multi-agent competition), and GSM8k (multi-agent teacher-student). On these data sets, LTC outperforms the supervised instruction fine-tuning baselines by 3.6% to 12%. These results highlight the versatility and efficiency of LTC in facilitating online adaptation for LLM agents.

pdf bib
Explorer: Scaling Exploration-driven Web Trajectory Synthesis for Multimodal Web Agents
Vardaan Pahuja | Yadong Lu | Corby Rosset | Boyu Gou | Arindam Mitra | Spencer Whitehead | Yu Su | Ahmed Hassan Awadallah
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025

Recent success in large multimodal models (LMMs) has sparked promising applications of agents capable of autonomously completing complex web tasks. While open-source LMM agents have made significant advances in offline evaluation benchmarks, their performance still falls substantially short of human-level capabilities in more realistic online settings. A key bottleneck is the lack of diverse and large-scale trajectory-level datasets across various domains, which are expensive to collect. In this paper, we address this challenge by developing a scalable recipe to synthesize the largest and most diverse trajectory-level dataset to date, containing over 94K successful multimodal web trajectories, spanning 49K unique URLs, 720K screenshots, and 33M web elements. In particular, we leverage extensive web exploration and refinement to obtain diverse task intents. The average cost is 28 cents per successful trajectory, making it affordable to a wide range of users in the community. Leveraging this dataset, we train Explorer, a multimodal web agent, and demonstrate strong performance on both offline and online web agent benchmarks such as Mind2Web-Live, Multimodal-Mind2Web, and MiniWob++. Additionally, our experiments highlight data scaling as a key driver for improving web agent capabilities. We hope this study makes state-of-the-art LMM-based agent research at a larger scale more accessible.