AI 速览：该研究考察由大生成模型构成的多智能体系统在共享资源竞争、顺序交接与集体决策等场景中自发出现的群体性失败模式。
Multi-agent systems composed of large generative models are rapidly moving from laboratory prototypes to real-world deployments, where they jointly plan, negotiate, and allocate shared resources to solve complex tasks. While such systems promise unprecedented scalability and autonomy, their collective interaction also gives rise to failure modes that cannot be reduced to individual agents. Understanding these emergent risks is therefore critical. Here, we present a pioneer study of such emergent multi-agent risk in workflows that involve competition over shared resources (e.g., computing resources or market share), sequential handoff collaboration (where downstream agents see only predecessor outputs), collective decision aggregation, and others. Across these settings, we observe that such group behaviors arise frequently across repeated trials and a wide range of interaction conditions, rather than as rare or pathological cases. In particular, phenomena such as collusion-like coordination and conformity emerge with non-trivial frequency under realistic resource constraints, communication protocols, and role assignments, mirroring well-known pathologies in human societies despite no explicit instruction. Moreover, these risks cannot be prevented by existing agent-level safeguards alone. These findings expose the dark side of intelligent multi-agent systems: a social intelligence risk where agent collectives, despite no instruction to do so, spontaneously reproduce familiar failure patterns from human societies.
A binary success indicator is a natural representation for discriminative tasks such as image classification under adversarial perturbations, where each input is mapped to a single prediction. However, generative tasks are fundamentally different: an LLM jailbreak prompt induces a distribution over open-ended trajectories, while a sampled response reveals only one path. Yet LLM jailbreak evaluation typically retains the binary response indicator underlying attack success rate, obscuring the surrounding structure of possible generations. We introduce a continuous, context-conditioned risk landscape over first-token branches, estimated by fixing candidate openings and repeatedly sampling their continuations. This continuous risk-landscape perspective reveals two complementary properties: current decoder exposure and safe rerouting capacity, which have been obscured by binary-indicator-based ASR. The resulting representation also provides a common basis for comparing clean prompts, attacked variants, and attack strength against a known adaptive defense. Across multiple target models and jailbreak attacks, we uncover risky branches beneath apparently safe outputs, identify qualitatively different ways attacks reshape the model's opening distribution, and show that attacks strongest before a defense do not necessarily remain the strongest after the adaptive defense reacts. These findings recast jailbreaks as deformations of the surrounding continuation-risk landscape, establishing a more informative foundation for understanding jailbreak behavior and developing safer language models.
Rui Tian, Yi Fang, Yejin Hua, Du Wang, Yuzhe Wang, Minxuan Shan, Zirui Ren, Xinyu Lin 等 11 位作者
Recommender Systems Engineer Agents (RSE-Agents), which use LLM-based agents to autonomously improve recommendation algorithms, are emerging as a promising paradigm. However, their capabilities and limitations remain poorly understood due to the lack of a unified, standardized evaluation framework and systematic trajectory-level analysis. To address this gap, we introduce AutoRSE, an evaluation framework spanning six representative industrial-grade recommendation tasks, and conduct a large-scale empirical study of three frontier LLMs across three widely used agent harnesses. Our results show that RSE-Agents consistently enhance the performance of backbones on five of the six tasks, with an average relative improvement of 16.1%, indicating that they can already autonomously improve recommendation performance. However, trajectory-level analysis also reveals that current RSE-Agents function primarily as engineering optimizers rather than algorithmic improvers: their gains are largely driven by hyperparameter tuning, training strategies, and model ensembling, while genuine algorithmic innovations are rare. Since the largest gains in recommender systems often stem from algorithmic advances, this behavior underscores a fundamental limitation of current RSE-Agents. To probe this limitation, we perform idea-injection experiments and show that agents equipped with innovative ideas from frontier research or human experts achieve substantially larger improvements than those relying on self-generated ideas. These results suggest that idea generation is a central bottleneck of current RSE-Agents, highlights a key direction for the future recommendation system research. Our implementation is publicly available on GitHub: https://github.com/Ray-Tiann/AutoRSE.
Generative recommendation (GR) models for ranking typically adopt a fast-thinking direct prediction paradigm with strong practical efficiency. However, ranking requires fine-grained scoring across multiple candidate items, while existing GR models still mainly rely on one-shot prediction. This raises the question whether additional inference-time computation can further improve ranking quality. Recently, inspired by Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning in large language models (LLMs), some work has begun to introduce reasoning into recommendation systems. Some of these methods rely on LLM reasoning frameworks to perform explicit reasoning in textual space, but such designs are not suitable for more widely deployed non-textual recommendation models. A more relevant direction is to introduce latent reasoning into ID-based recommendation models. Although recent work has extended latent reasoning to industrial ranking, how successive reasoning steps should improve fine-grained candidate scores remains less explored. To address this problem, we propose Refiner, a latent residual reasoning framework with parameter-efficient fine-tuning for generative ranking. Our approach introduces three key components: (1) a residual reasoning mechanism that progressively refines ranking scores through cumulative additive corrections, (2) history queries that provide condensed user behavior representations to enhance candidate-specific reasoning, and (3) a parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategy that leverages LoRA modules to adapt pre-trained models for latent reasoning. Extensive experiments on two public benchmarks, an offline industrial dataset, and an online A/B test demonstrate that Refiner consistently improves over direct prediction, validating its effectiveness and practical utility.
Memory systems are essential for personalized Large Language Models (LLMs). However, retrieval within these systems primarily relies on semantic similarity, potentially missing logically critical memories with limited semantic overlap. We refer to this failure as semantic deflection, which remains insufficiently evaluated by existing benchmarks. To address this gap, we construct IMLogic, a benchmark for implicit logical memory retrieval in long dialogues. Each question is designed around the divergence between semantic and logical relevance, with diagnostic response options that probe semantic deflection, hallucination, and lack of personalization. To help systems utilize associations that are difficult to discover through semantic matching, we introduce root memory, a structured representation that distills reusable, response-guiding logic from user histories through LLM reasoning and grounds it in supporting evidence. We further develop RootMem, a plug-and-play framework that constructs and routes root memories to complement semantic retrieval. Extensive experiments reveal persistent challenges across retrieval methods and memory systems, including substantial preference-driven errors even under full-memory access. RootMem consistently improves performance, demonstrating the potential of structured personalized logic while leaving considerable challenges unresolved. Our benchmark and code are available at https://github.com/ThisIsCosine/IMLogic.
Yu Jiang, Wenjie Wang, Yue Huang University of Notre Dame, Yanbo Wang Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Zhenhong Zhou, Xiuying Chen Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Yang Liu Nanyang Technological University, Pin-Yu Chen International Business Machines 等 10 位作者
Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly operate in multi-agent settings where failures emerge from interaction dynamics rather than isolated model errors. We introduce RiskLab, an open-source toolkit for instantiating, probing, and measuring emergent risks in LLM-based multi-agent systems under controlled conditions. Each experiment is defined as a structured topology–environment–protocol–agent–task quintuple, enabling reproducible studies of how communication structure, coordination mechanisms, and incentives shape system-level risks. RiskLab provides flexible communication topologies, swappable interaction protocols, trajectory-grounded evaluation, and extensible registries for risk detectors and agent backends. We demonstrate the toolkit across representative risks, including collusion, resource overreach, semantic drift, and strategic misreporting, and support one-file reproducibility via configuration.
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cs.CL · cs.MA
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations) · 2026 · 正式发表
Related search query recommendation is essential for enhancing user engagement and information discovery on digital platforms. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shifted the field toward generative retrieval, existing methods suffer from two primary limitations: (1) pointwise generation via beam search often leads to semantic redundancy and wasted retrieval quota, and (2) current listwise approaches lack explicit reasoning, relying on superficial click-through rate (CTR) rewards. In this paper, we propose ReList, a novel framework that transforms related search into a reasoning-enhanced listwise generation task. ReList follows a two-stage training paradigm: first, Reasoning Activation constructs a high-quality dataset by back-translating diverse query lists into Chain-of-Thought (CoT) rationales; second, Alternative Training iteratively evolves the model using Reinforcement Learning with a Gated Multi-Objective Reward and a Corrective SFT mechanism to handle hard samples. Experimental results on real-world search benchmarks and online A/B tests demonstrate that ReList significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both query diversity and user engagement, providing more insightful and logically grounded query recommendations.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track) · 2026 · 正式发表
Runyang You Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Yongqi Li Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Meng Liu Shandong University and Shandong Jianzhu University, Wenjie Wang University of Science and Technology of China, Liqiang Nie Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen) and Shandong University, Wenjie Li The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Parallel test-time scaling (TTS) is a pivotal approach for enhancing large language models (LLMs), typically by sampling multiple token-based chains-of-thought in parallel and aggregating outcomes through voting or search. Recent advances in latent reasoning, where intermediate reasoning unfolds in continuous vector spaces, offer a more efficient alternative to explicit Chain-of-Thought, yet whether such latent models can similarly benefit from parallel TTS remains open, mainly due to the absence of sampling mechanisms in continuous space, and the lack of probabilistic signals for advanced trajectory aggregation. This work enables parallel TTS for latent reasoning models by addressing the above issues. For sampling, we introduce two uncertainty-inspired stochastic strategies: Monte Carlo Dropout and Additive Gaussian Noise. For aggregation, we design a Latent Reward Model (LatentRM) trained with step-wise contrastive objective to score and guide latent reasoning. Extensive experiments and visualization analyses show that both sampling strategies scale effectively with compute and exhibit distinct exploration dynamics, while LatentRM enables effective trajectory selection. Together, our explorations open a new direction for scalable inference in continuous spaces. Code and checkpoint are included as supplementary materials.GitHub Project: https://github.com/ModalityDance/LatentTTS
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Yi Fang, Wenjie Wang University of Science and Technology of China, Mingfeng Xue Sichuan University, Boyi Deng University of Science and Technology of China, Fengli Xu Tsinghua University, Tsinghua University, Dayiheng Liu Alibaba Group, Fuli Feng University of Science and Technology of China
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) exhibit human-like cognitive reasoning strategies (e.g. backtracking, cross-verification) during reasoning process, which improves their performance on complex tasks. Currently, reasoning strategies are autonomously selected by LRMs themselves. However, such autonomous selection often produces inefficient or even erroneous reasoning paths. To make reasoning more reliable and flexible, it is important to develop methods for controlling reasoning strategies. Existing methods struggle to control fine-grained reasoning strategies due to conceptual entanglement in LRMs’ hidden states. To address this, we leverage Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) to decompose strategy-entangled hidden states into a disentangled feature space. To identify the few strategy-specific features from the vast pool of SAE features, we propose SAE-Steering, an efficient two-stage feature identification pipeline. SAE-Steering first recalls features that amplify the logits of strategy-specific keywords, filtering out over 99% of features, and then ranks the remaining features by their control effectiveness. Using the identified strategy-specific features as control vectors, SAE-Steering outperforms existing methods by over 15% in control effectiveness. Furthermore, controlling reasoning strategies can redirect LRMs from erroneous paths to correct ones, achieving a 7% absolute accuracy improvement.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Xiaoyuan Li, Keqin Bao, Yubo Ma, Moxin Li, Wenjie Wang University of Science and Technology of China, Rui Men Alibaba Group, Yichang Zhang Alibaba Group, Fuli Feng University of Science and Technology of China 等 9 位作者
Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising results in complex reasoning tasks. However, current evaluations predominantly focus on single-turn reasoning scenarios, leaving interactive tasks largely unexplored. We attribute it to the absence of comprehensive datasets and scalable automatic evaluation protocols. To fill these gaps, we present MTR-Bench for LLMs’ Multi-Turn Reasoning evaluation. Comprising 4 classes, 40 tasks and 3600 instances, MTR-Bench covers diverse reasoning capabilities, fine-grained difficulty granularity, and necessitates multi-turn interactions with the environments. Moreover, MTR-Bench features fully-automated framework spanning both dataset constructions and model evaluations, which enables scalable assessment without human interventions. Extensive experiments reveal that even the cutting-edge reasoning models fall short of multi-turn, interactive reasoning tasks. And the further analysis upon these results brings valuable insights for future research in interactive AI systems.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表