Cooperative Strategic Planning Enhances Reasoning Capabilities in Large Language Models

Enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) is crucial for enabling them to tackle complex, multi-step problems. Multi-agent frameworks have shown great potential in enhancing LLMs' reasoning capabilities. However, the lack of effective cooperation between LLM agents hinders their performance, especially for multi-step reasoning tasks. This paper proposes a novel cooperative multi-agent reasoning framework (CoPlanner) by separating reasoning steps and assigning distinct duties to different agents. CoPlanner consists of two LLM agents: a planning agent and a reasoning agent. The planning agent provides high-level strategic hints, while the reasoning agent follows these hints and infers answers. By training the planning agent's policy through the interactive reasoning process via Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), the LLaMA-3-8B-based CoPlanner outperforms the previous best method by 9.94\% on LogiQA and 3.09\% on BBH. Our results demonstrate that the guidance from the planning agent and the effective cooperation between the agents contribute to the superior performance of CoPlanner in tackling multi-step reasoning problems.

CBT-Bench: Evaluating Large Language Models on Assisting Cognitive Behavior Therapy

There is a significant gap between patient needs and available mental health support today. In this paper, we aim to thoroughly examine the potential of using Large Language Models (LLMs) to assist professional psychotherapy. To this end, we propose a new benchmark, CBT-BENCH, for the systematic evaluation of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) assistance. We include three levels of tasks in CBT-BENCH: I: Basic CBT knowledge acquisition, with the task of multiple-choice questions; II: Cognitive model understanding, with the tasks of cognitive distortion classification, primary core belief classification, and fine-grained core belief classification; III: Therapeutic response generation, with the task of generating responses to patient speech in CBT therapy sessions. These tasks encompass key aspects of CBT that could potentially be enhanced through AI assistance, while also outlining a hierarchy of capability requirements, ranging from basic knowledge recitation to engaging in real therapeutic conversations. We evaluated representative LLMs on our benchmark. Experimental results indicate that while LLMs perform well in reciting CBT knowledge, they fall short in complex real-world scenarios requiring deep analysis of patients' cognitive structures and generating effective responses, suggesting potential future work.

TypedThinker: Typed Thinking Improves Large Language Model Reasoning

Despite significant advancements in the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), the lack of diverse reasoning solutions often makes them trapped in a limited solution search area. In this paper, we propose TypedThinker, a novel framework that enhances LLMs' problem-solving abilities by incorporating multiple reasoning types (deductive, inductive, abductive, and analogical). Our analysis across four benchmarks reveals that different reasoning types uniquely solve distinct sets of problems, highlighting the importance of diverse thinking approaches. TypedThinker addresses two key challenges: selecting appropriate reasoning types for given problems and effectively implementing specific reasoning types. Through self-training on successful experiences, TypedThinker learns an implicit policy for reasoning type selection and application. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements over baseline models, with accuracy increases of 3.4% for Mistral 7B and 16.7% for LLaMA3 8B across four reasoning benchmarks. Notably, TypedThinker shows effective generalization to new benchmarks and can further enhance the reasoning capability of powerful models like GPT-4o. The code is released at https://github.com/dqwang122/ThinkHub.

Leveraging a Cognitive Model to Measure Subjective Similarity of Human and GPT-4 Written Content

Cosine similarity between two documents can be computed using token embeddings formed by Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4, and used to categorize those documents across a range of uses. However, these similarities are ultimately dependent on the corpora used to train these LLMs, and may not reflect subjective similarity of individuals or how their biases and constraints impact similarity metrics. This lack of cognitively-aware personalization of similarity metrics can be particularly problematic in educational and recommendation settings where there is a limited number of individual judgements of category or preference, and biases can be particularly relevant. To address this, we rely on an integration of an Instance-Based Learning (IBL) cognitive model with LLM embeddings to develop the Instance-Based Individualized Similarity (IBIS) metric. This similarity metric is beneficial in that it takes into account individual biases and constraints in a manner that is grounded in the cognitive mechanisms of decision making. To evaluate the IBIS metric, we also introduce a dataset of human categorizations of emails as being either dangerous (phishing) or safe (ham). This dataset is used to demonstrate the benefits of leveraging a cognitive model to measure the subjective similarity of human participants in an educational setting.

Concept-Based Interpretable Reinforcement Learning with Limited to No Human Labels

Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) have predominantly leveraged neural network-based policies for decision-making, yet these models often lack interpretability, posing challenges for stakeholder comprehension and trust. Concept bottleneck models offer an interpretable alternative by integrating human-understandable concepts into neural networks. However, a significant limitation in prior work is the assumption that human annotations for these concepts are readily available during training, necessitating continuous real-time input from human annotators. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a novel training scheme that enables RL algorithms to efficiently learn a concept-based policy by only querying humans to label a small set of data, or in the extreme case, without any human labels. Our algorithm, LICORICE, involves three main contributions: interleaving concept learning and RL training, using a concept ensembles to actively select informative data points for labeling, and decorrelating the concept data with a simple strategy. We show how LICORICE reduces manual labeling efforts to to 500 or fewer concept labels in three environments. Finally, we present an initial study to explore how we can use powerful vision-language models to infer concepts from raw visual inputs without explicit labels at minimal cost to performance.

Multi-Agent Imitation Learning: Value is Easy, Regret is Hard

We study a multi-agent imitation learning (MAIL) problem where we take the perspective of a learner attempting to coordinate a group of agents based on demonstrations of an expert doing so. Most prior work in MAIL essentially reduces the problem to matching the behavior of the expert within the support of the demonstrations. While doing so is sufficient to drive the value gap between the learner and the expert to zero under the assumption that agents are non-strategic, it does not guarantee robustness to deviations by strategic agents. Intuitively, this is because strategic deviations can depend on a counterfactual quantity: the coordinator's recommendations outside of the state distribution their recommendations induce. In response, we initiate the study of an alternative objective for MAIL in Markov Games we term the regret gap that explicitly accounts for potential deviations by agents in the group. We first perform an in-depth exploration of the relationship between the value and regret gaps. First, we show that while the value gap can be efficiently minimized via a direct extension of single-agent IL algorithms, even value equivalence can lead to an arbitrarily large regret gap. This implies that achieving regret equivalence is harder than achieving value equivalence in MAIL. We then provide a pair of efficient reductions to no-regret online convex optimization that are capable of minimizing the regret gap (a) under a coverage assumption on the expert (MALICE) or (b) with access to a queryable expert (BLADES).

Global Rewards in Restless Multi-Armed Bandits

Restless multi-armed bandits (RMAB) extend multi-armed bandits so pulling an arm impacts future states. Despite the success of RMABs, a key limiting assumption is the separability of rewards into a sum across arms. We address this deficiency by proposing restless-multi-armed bandit with global rewards (RMAB-G), a generalization of RMABs to global non-separable rewards. To solve RMAB-G, we develop the Linear- and Shapley-Whittle indices, which extend Whittle indices from RMABs to RMAB-Gs. We prove approximation bounds but also point out how these indices could fail when reward functions are highly non-linear. To overcome this, we propose two sets of adaptive policies: the first computes indices iteratively, and the second combines indices with Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). Empirically, we demonstrate that our proposed policies outperform baselines and index-based policies with synthetic data and real-world data from food rescue.

PATIENT-Ψ: Using Large Language Models to Simulate Patients for Training Mental Health Professionals

Mental illness remains one of the most critical public health issues, with a significant gap between the available mental health support and patient needs. Many mental health professionals highlight a disconnect between their training and real-world patient interactions, leaving some trainees feeling unprepared and potentially affecting their early career success. In this paper, we propose PATIENT-{\Psi}, a novel patient simulation framework for cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) training. To build PATIENT-{\Psi}, we constructed diverse patient profiles and their corresponding cognitive models based on CBT principles, and then used large language models (LLMs) programmed with the patient cognitive models to act as a simulated therapy patient. We propose an interactive training scheme, PATIENT-{\Psi}-TRAINER, for mental health trainees to practice a key skill in CBT -- formulating the cognitive model of the patient -- through role-playing a therapy session with PATIENT-{\Psi}. To evaluate PATIENT-{\Psi}, we conducted a user study of 4 mental health trainees and 10 experts. The results demonstrate that practice using PATIENT-{\Psi}-TRAINER greatly enhances the perceived skill acquisition and confidence of the trainees beyond existing forms of training such as textbooks, videos, and role-play with non-patients. Based on the experts' perceptions, PATIENT-{\Psi} is perceived to be closer to real patient interactions than GPT-4, and PATIENT-{\Psi}-TRAINER holds strong promise to improve trainee competencies. Our pioneering patient simulation training framework, using LLMs, holds great potential to enhance and advance mental health training, ultimately leading to improved patient care and outcomes. We will release all our data, code, and the training platform.

MESA: Cooperative Meta-Exploration in Multi-Agent Learning through Exploiting State-Action Space Structure

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms often struggle to find strategies close to Pareto optimal Nash Equilibrium, owing largely to the lack of efficient exploration. The problem is exacerbated in sparse-reward settings, caused by the larger variance exhibited in policy learning. This paper introduces MESA, a novel meta-exploration method for cooperative multi-agent learning. It learns to explore by first identifying the agents' high-rewarding joint state-action subspace from training tasks and then learning a set of diverse exploration policies to "cover" the subspace. These trained exploration policies can be integrated with any off-policy MARL algorithm for test-time tasks. We first showcase MESA's advantage in a multi-step matrix game. Furthermore, experiments show that with learned exploration policies, MESA achieves significantly better performance in sparse-reward tasks in several multi-agent particle environments and multi-agent MuJoCo environments, and exhibits the ability to generalize to more challenging tasks at test time.

Where It Really Matters: Few-Shot Environmental Conservation Media Monitoring for Low-Resource Languages

Environmental conservation organizations routinely monitor news content on conservation in protected areas to maintain situational awareness of developments that can have an environmental impact. Existing automated media monitoring systems require large amounts of data labeled by domain experts, which is only feasible at scale for high-resource languages like English. However, such tools are most needed in the global south where news of interest is mainly in local low-resource languages, and far fewer experts are available to annotate datasets sustainably. In this paper, we propose NewsSerow, a method to automatically recognize environmental conservation content in low-resource languages. NewsSerow is a pipeline of summarization, in-context few-shot classification, and self-reflection using large language models (LLMs). Using at most 10 demonstration example news articles in Nepali, NewsSerow significantly outperforms other few-shot methods and achieves comparable performance with models fully fine-tuned using thousands of examples. The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) has deployed NewsSerow for media monitoring in Nepal, significantly reducing their operational burden, and ensuring that AI tools for conservation actually reach the communities that need them the most. NewsSerow has also been deployed for countries with other languages like Colombia.