FACT: Examining the Effectiveness of Iterative Context Rewriting for Multi-fact Retrieval

Large Language Models (LLMs) are proficient at retrieving single facts from extended contexts, yet they struggle with tasks requiring the simultaneous retrieval of multiple facts, especially during generation. This paper identifies a novel "lost-in-the-middle" phenomenon, where LLMs progressively lose track of critical information throughout the generation process, resulting in incomplete or inaccurate retrieval. To address this challenge, we introduce Find All Crucial Texts (FACT), an iterative retrieval method that refines context through successive rounds of rewriting. This approach enables models to capture essential facts incrementally, which are often overlooked in single-pass retrieval. Experiments demonstrate that FACT substantially enhances multi-fact retrieval performance across various tasks, though improvements are less notable in general-purpose QA scenarios. Our findings shed light on the limitations of LLMs in multi-fact retrieval and underscore the need for more resilient long-context retrieval strategies.

SELA: Tree-Search Enhanced LLM Agents for Automated Machine Learning

Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) approaches encompass traditional methods that optimize fixed pipelines for model selection and ensembling, as well as newer LLM-based frameworks that autonomously build pipelines. While LLM-based agents have shown promise in automating machine learning tasks, they often generate low-diversity and suboptimal code, even after multiple iterations. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Tree-Search Enhanced LLM Agents (SELA), an innovative agent-based system that leverages Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to optimize the AutoML process. By representing pipeline configurations as trees, our framework enables agents to conduct experiments intelligently and iteratively refine their strategies, facilitating a more effective exploration of the machine learning solution space. This novel approach allows SELA to discover optimal pathways based on experimental feedback, improving the overall quality of the solutions. In an extensive evaluation across 20 machine learning datasets, we compare the performance of traditional and agent-based AutoML methods, demonstrating that SELA achieves a win rate of 65% to 80% against each baseline across all datasets. These results underscore the significant potential of agent-based strategies in AutoML, offering a fresh perspective on tackling complex machine learning challenges.

AFlow: Automating Agentic Workflow Generation

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in solving complex tasks across diverse domains, typically by employing agentic workflows that follow detailed instructions and operational sequences. However, constructing these workflows requires significant human effort, limiting scalability and generalizability. Recent research has sought to automate the generation and optimization of these workflows, but existing methods still rely on initial manual setup and fall short of achieving fully automated and effective workflow generation. To address this challenge, we reformulate workflow optimization as a search problem over code-represented workflows, where LLM-invoking nodes are connected by edges. We introduce AFlow, an automated framework that efficiently explores this space using Monte Carlo Tree Search, iteratively refining workflows through code modification, tree-structured experience, and execution feedback. Empirical evaluations across six benchmark datasets demonstrate AFlow's efficacy, yielding a 5.7% average improvement over state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, AFlow enables smaller models to outperform GPT-4o on specific tasks at 4.55% of its inference cost in dollars. The code will be available at https://github.com/geekan/MetaGPT.

Data Interpreter: An LLM Agent For Data Science

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness. However, their performance can be compromised in data science scenarios that require real-time data adjustment, expertise in optimization due to complex dependencies among various tasks, and the ability to identify logical errors for precise reasoning. In this study, we introduce the Data Interpreter, a solution designed to solve with code that emphasizes three pivotal techniques to augment problem-solving in data science: 1) dynamic planning with hierarchical graph structures for real-time data adaptability;2) tool integration dynamically to enhance code proficiency during execution, enriching the requisite expertise;3) logical inconsistency identification in feedback, and efficiency enhancement through experience recording. We evaluate the Data Interpreter on various data science and real-world tasks. Compared to open-source baselines, it demonstrated superior performance, exhibiting significant improvements in machine learning tasks, increasing from 0.86 to 0.95. Additionally, it showed a 26% increase in the MATH dataset and a remarkable 112% improvement in open-ended tasks. The solution will be released at https://github.com/geekan/MetaGPT.

MetaGPT: Meta Programming for Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework

Recently, remarkable progress has been made in automated task-solving through the use of multi-agent driven by large language models (LLMs). However, existing LLM-based multi-agent works primarily focus on solving simple dialogue tasks, and complex tasks are rarely studied, mainly due to the LLM hallucination problem. This type of hallucination becomes cascading when naively chaining multiple intelligent agents, resulting in a failure to effectively address complex problems. Therefore, we introduce MetaGPT, an innovative framework that incorporates efficient human workflows as a meta programming approach into LLM-based multi-agent collaboration. Specifically, MetaGPT encodes Standardized Operating Procedures (SOPs) into prompts to enhance structured coordination. Subsequently, it mandates modular outputs, empowering agents with domain expertise comparable to human professionals, to validate outputs and minimize compounded errors. In this way, MetaGPT leverages the assembly line paradigm to assign diverse roles to various agents, thereby establishing a framework that can effectively and cohesively deconstruct complex multi-agent collaborative problems. Our experiments on collaborative software engineering benchmarks demonstrate that MetaGPT generates more coherent and correct solutions compared to existing chat-based multi-agent systems. This highlights the potential of integrating human domain knowledge into multi-agent systems, thereby creating new opportunities to tackle complex real-world challenges. The GitHub repository of this project is publicly available on:https://github.com/geekan/MetaGPT.

Winning solutions and post-challenge analyses of the ChaLearn AutoDL challenge 2019

This paper reports the results and post-challenge analyses of ChaLearn's AutoDL challenge series, which helped sorting out a profusion of AutoML solutions for Deep Learning (DL) that had been introduced in a variety of settings, but lacked fair comparisons. All input data modalities (time series, images, videos, text, tabular) were formatted as tensors and all tasks were multi-label classification problems. Code submissions were executed on hidden tasks, with limited time and computational resources, pushing solutions that get results quickly. In this setting, DL methods dominated, though popular Neural Architecture Search (NAS) was impractical. Solutions relied on fine-tuned pre-trained networks, with architectures matching data modality. Post-challenge tests did not reveal improvements beyond the imposed time limit. While no component is particularly original or novel, a high level modular organization emerged featuring a "meta-learner", "data ingestor", "model selector", "model/learner", and "evaluator". This modularity enabled ablation studies, which revealed the importance of (off-platform) meta-learning, ensembling, and efficient data management. Experiments on heterogeneous module combinations further confirm the (local) optimality of the winning solutions. Our challenge legacy includes an ever-lasting benchmark (http://autodl.chalearn.org), the open-sourced code of the winners, and a free "AutoDL self-service".

First Place Solution of KDD Cup 2021 & OGB Large-Scale Challenge Graph Prediction Track

In this technical report, we present our solution of KDD Cup 2021 OGB Large-Scale Challenge - PCQM4M-LSC Track. We adopt Graphormer and ExpC as our basic models. We train each model by 8-fold cross-validation, and additionally train two Graphormer models on the union of training and validation sets with different random seeds. For final submission, we use a naive ensemble for these 18 models by taking average of their outputs. Using our method, our team MachineLearning achieved 0.1200 MAE on test set, which won the first place in KDD Cup graph prediction track.

Thermodynamic Consistent Neural Networks for Learning Material Interfacial Mechanics

For multilayer materials in thin substrate systems, interfacial failure is one of the most challenges. The traction-separation relations (TSR) quantitatively describe the mechanical behavior of a material interface undergoing openings, which is critical to understand and predict interfacial failures under complex loadings. However, existing theoretical models have limitations on enough complexity and flexibility to well learn the real-world TSR from experimental observations. A neural network can fit well along with the loading paths but often fails to obey the laws of physics, due to a lack of experimental data and understanding of the hidden physical mechanism. In this paper, we propose a thermodynamic consistent neural network (TCNN) approach to build a data-driven model of the TSR with sparse experimental data. The TCNN leverages recent advances in physics-informed neural networks (PINN) that encode prior physical information into the loss function and efficiently train the neural networks using automatic differentiation. We investigate three thermodynamic consistent principles, i.e., positive energy dissipation, steepest energy dissipation gradient, and energy conservative loading path. All of them are mathematically formulated and embedded into a neural network model with a novel defined loss function. A real-world experiment demonstrates the superior performance of TCNN, and we find that TCNN provides an accurate prediction of the whole TSR surface and significantly reduces the violated prediction against the laws of physics.

Multi-task Collaborative Network for Joint Referring Expression Comprehension and Segmentation

Referring expression comprehension (REC) and segmentation (RES) are two highly-related tasks, which both aim at identifying the referent according to a natural language expression. In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-task Collaborative Network (MCN) to achieve a joint learning of REC and RES for the first time. In MCN, RES can help REC to achieve better language-vision alignment, while REC can help RES to better locate the referent. In addition, we address a key challenge in this multi-task setup, i.e., the prediction conflict, with two innovative designs namely, Consistency Energy Maximization (CEM) and Adaptive Soft Non-Located Suppression (ASNLS). Specifically, CEM enables REC and RES to focus on similar visual regions by maximizing the consistency energy between two tasks. ASNLS supresses the response of unrelated regions in RES based on the prediction of REC. To validate our model, we conduct extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets of REC and RES, i.e., RefCOCO, RefCOCO+ and RefCOCOg. The experimental results report the significant performance gains of MCN over all existing methods, i.e., up to +7.13% for REC and +11.50% for RES over SOTA, which well confirm the validity of our model for joint REC and RES learning.

Hadamard Codebook Based Deep Hashing

As an approximate nearest neighbor search technique, hashing has been widely applied in large-scale image retrieval due to its excellent efficiency. Most supervised deep hashing methods have similar loss designs with embedding learning, while quantizing the continuous high-dim feature into compact binary space. We argue that the existing deep hashing schemes are defective in two issues that seriously affect the performance, i.e., bit independence and bit balance. The former refers to hash codes of different classes should be independent of each other, while the latter means each bit should have a balanced distribution of +1s and -1s. In this paper, we propose a novel supervised deep hashing method, termed Hadamard Codebook based Deep Hashing (HCDH), which solves the above two problems in a unified formulation. Specifically, we utilize an off-the-shelf algorithm to generate a binary Hadamard codebook to satisfy the requirement of bit independence and bit balance, which subsequently serves as the desired outputs of the hash functions learning. We also introduce a projection matrix to solve the inconsistency between the order of Hadamard matrix and the number of classes. Besides, the proposed HCDH further exploits the supervised labels by constructing a classifier on top of the outputs of hash functions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HCDH can yield discriminative and balanced binary codes, which well outperforms many state-of-the-arts on three widely-used benchmarks.