Advances and Challenges in Foundation Agents: From Brain-Inspired Intelligence to Evolutionary, Collaborative, and Safe Systems

The advent of large language models (LLMs) has catalyzed a transformative shift in artificial intelligence, paving the way for advanced intelligent agents capable of sophisticated reasoning, robust perception, and versatile action across diverse domains. As these agents increasingly drive AI research and practical applications, their design, evaluation, and continuous improvement present intricate, multifaceted challenges. This survey provides a comprehensive overview, framing intelligent agents within a modular, brain-inspired architecture that integrates principles from cognitive science, neuroscience, and computational research. We structure our exploration into four interconnected parts. First, we delve into the modular foundation of intelligent agents, systematically mapping their cognitive, perceptual, and operational modules onto analogous human brain functionalities, and elucidating core components such as memory, world modeling, reward processing, and emotion-like systems. Second, we discuss self-enhancement and adaptive evolution mechanisms, exploring how agents autonomously refine their capabilities, adapt to dynamic environments, and achieve continual learning through automated optimization paradigms, including emerging AutoML and LLM-driven optimization strategies. Third, we examine collaborative and evolutionary multi-agent systems, investigating the collective intelligence emerging from agent interactions, cooperation, and societal structures, highlighting parallels to human social dynamics. Finally, we address the critical imperative of building safe, secure, and beneficial AI systems, emphasizing intrinsic and extrinsic security threats, ethical alignment, robustness, and practical mitigation strategies necessary for trustworthy real-world deployment.

AutoIOT: LLM-Driven Automated Natural Language Programming for AIoT Applications

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has profoundly transformed our lives, revolutionizing interactions with AI and lowering the barrier to AI usage. While LLMs are primarily designed for natural language interaction, the extensive embedded knowledge empowers them to comprehend digital sensor data. This capability enables LLMs to engage with the physical world through IoT sensors and actuators, performing a myriad of AIoT tasks. Consequently, this evolution triggers a paradigm shift in conventional AIoT application development, democratizing its accessibility to all by facilitating the design and development of AIoT applications via natural language. However, some limitations need to be addressed to unlock the full potential of LLMs in AIoT application development. First, existing solutions often require transferring raw sensor data to LLM servers, which raises privacy concerns, incurs high query fees, and is limited by token size. Moreover, the reasoning processes of LLMs are opaque to users, making it difficult to verify the robustness and correctness of inference results. This paper introduces AutoIOT, an LLM-based automated program generator for AIoT applications. AutoIOT enables users to specify their requirements using natural language (input) and automatically synthesizes interpretable programs with documentation (output). AutoIOT automates the iterative optimization to enhance the quality of generated code with minimum user involvement. AutoIOT not only makes the execution of AIoT tasks more explainable but also mitigates privacy concerns and reduces token costs with local execution of synthesized programs. Extensive experiments and user studies demonstrate AutoIOT's remarkable capability in program synthesis for various AIoT tasks. The synthesized programs can match and even outperform some representative baselines.

FedConv: A Learning-on-Model Paradigm for Heterogeneous Federated Clients

Federated Learning (FL) facilitates collaborative training of a shared global model without exposing clients' private data. In practical FL systems, clients (e.g., edge servers, smartphones, and wearables) typically have disparate system resources. Conventional FL, however, adopts a one-size-fits-all solution, where a homogeneous large global model is transmitted to and trained on each client, resulting in an overwhelming workload for less capable clients and starvation for other clients. To address this issue, we propose FedConv, a client-friendly FL framework, which minimizes the computation and memory burden on resource-constrained clients by providing heterogeneous customized sub-models. FedConv features a novel learning-on-model paradigm that learns the parameters of the heterogeneous sub-models via convolutional compression. Unlike traditional compression methods, the compressed models in FedConv can be directly trained on clients without decompression. To aggregate the heterogeneous sub-models, we propose transposed convolutional dilation to convert them back to large models with a unified size while retaining personalized information from clients. The compression and dilation processes, transparent to clients, are optimized on the server leveraging a small public dataset. Extensive experiments on six datasets demonstrate that FedConv outperforms state-of-the-art FL systems in terms of model accuracy (by more than 35% on average), computation and communication overhead (with 33% and 25% reduction, respectively).

PPC-GPT: Federated Task-Specific Compression of Large Language Models via Pruning and Chain-of-Thought Distillation

Compressing Large Language Models (LLMs) into task-specific Small Language Models (SLMs) encounters two significant challenges: safeguarding domain-specific knowledge privacy and managing limited resources. To tackle these challenges, we propose PPC-GPT, a innovative privacy-preserving federated framework specifically designed for compressing LLMs into task-specific SLMs via pruning and Chain-of-Thought (COT) distillation. PPC-GPT works on a server-client federated architecture, where the client sends differentially private (DP) perturbed task-specific data to the server's LLM. The LLM then generates synthetic data along with their corresponding rationales. This synthetic data is subsequently used for both LLM pruning and retraining processes. Additionally, we harness COT knowledge distillation, leveraging the synthetic data to further improve the retraining of structurally-pruned SLMs. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of PPC-GPT across various text generation tasks. By compressing LLMs into task-specific SLMs, PPC-GPT not only achieves competitive performance but also prioritizes data privacy protection.

Noise May Contain Transferable Knowledge: Understanding Semi-supervised Heterogeneous Domain Adaptation from an Empirical Perspective

Semi-supervised heterogeneous domain adaptation (SHDA) addresses learning across domains with distinct feature representations and distributions, where source samples are labeled while most target samples are unlabeled, with only a small fraction labeled. Moreover, there is no one-to-one correspondence between source and target samples. Although various SHDA methods have been developed to tackle this problem, the nature of the knowledge transferred across heterogeneous domains remains unclear. This paper delves into this question from an empirical perspective. We conduct extensive experiments on about 330 SHDA tasks, employing two supervised learning methods and seven representative SHDA methods. Surprisingly, our observations indicate that both the category and feature information of source samples do not significantly impact the performance of the target domain. Additionally, noise drawn from simple distributions, when used as source samples, may contain transferable knowledge. Based on this insight, we perform a series of experiments to uncover the underlying principles of transferable knowledge in SHDA. Specifically, we design a unified Knowledge Transfer Framework (KTF) for SHDA. Based on the KTF, we find that the transferable knowledge in SHDA primarily stems from the transferability and discriminability of the source domain. Consequently, ensuring those properties in source samples, regardless of their origin (e.g., image, text, noise), can enhance the effectiveness of knowledge transfer in SHDA tasks. The codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/yyyaoyuan/SHDA.

Addressing Spatial-Temporal Data Heterogeneity in Federated Continual Learning via Tail Anchor

Federated continual learning (FCL) allows each client to continually update its knowledge from task streams, enhancing the applicability of federated learning in real-world scenarios. However, FCL needs to address not only spatial data heterogeneity between clients but also temporal data heterogeneity between tasks. In this paper, empirical experiments demonstrate that such input-level heterogeneity significantly affects the model's internal parameters and outputs, leading to severe spatial-temporal catastrophic forgetting of local and previous knowledge. To this end, we propose Federated Tail Anchor (FedTA) to mix trainable Tail Anchor with the frozen output features to adjust their position in the feature space, thereby overcoming parameter-forgetting and output-forgetting. Moreover, three novel components are also included in FedTA: Input Enhancement for improving the performance of pre-trained models on downstream tasks; Selective Input Knowledge Fusion for fusion of heterogeneous local knowledge on the server side; and Best Global Prototype Selection for finding the best anchor point for each class in the feature space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FedTA not only outperforms existing FCL methods but also effectively preserves the relative positions of features, remaining unaffected by spatial and temporal changes.

A Survey on Recommendation Unlearning: Fundamentals, Taxonomy, Evaluation, and Open Questions

Recommender systems have become increasingly influential in shaping user behavior and decision-making, highlighting their growing impact in various domains. Meanwhile, the widespread adoption of machine learning models in recommender systems has raised significant concerns regarding user privacy and security. As compliance with privacy regulations becomes more critical, there is a pressing need to address the issue of recommendation unlearning, i.e., eliminating the memory of specific training data from the learned recommendation models. Despite its importance, traditional machine unlearning methods are ill-suited for recommendation unlearning due to the unique challenges posed by collaborative interactions and model parameters. This survey offers a comprehensive review of the latest advancements in recommendation unlearning, exploring the design principles, challenges, and methodologies associated with this emerging field. We provide a unified taxonomy that categorizes different recommendation unlearning approaches, followed by a summary of widely used benchmarks and metrics for evaluation. By reviewing the current state of research, this survey aims to guide the development of more efficient, scalable, and robust recommendation unlearning techniques. Furthermore, we identify open research questions in this field, which could pave the way for future innovations not only in recommendation unlearning but also in a broader range of unlearning tasks across different machine learning applications.

Lossless and Privacy-Preserving Graph Convolution Network for Federated Item Recommendation

Graph neural network (GNN) has emerged as a state-of-the-art solution for item recommendation. However, existing GNN-based recommendation methods rely on a centralized storage of fragmented user-item interaction sub-graphs and training on an aggregated global graph, which will lead to privacy concerns. As a response, some recent works develop GNN-based federated recommendation methods by exploiting decentralized and fragmented user-item sub-graphs in order to preserve user privacy. However, due to privacy constraints, the graph convolution process in existing federated recommendation methods is incomplete compared with the centralized counterpart, causing a degradation of the recommendation performance. In this paper, we propose a novel lossless and privacy-preserving graph convolution network (LP-GCN), which fully completes the graph convolution process with decentralized user-item interaction sub-graphs while ensuring privacy. It is worth mentioning that its performance is equivalent to that of the non-federated (i.e., centralized) counterpart. Moreover, we validate its effectiveness through both theoretical analysis and empirical studies. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets show that our LP-GCN outperforms the existing federated recommendation methods. The code will be publicly available once the paper is accepted.

Can ChatGPT Overcome Behavioral Biases in the Financial Sector? Classify-and-Rethink: Multi-Step Zero-Shot Reasoning in the Gold Investment

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success recently, displaying exceptional capabilities in creating understandable and organized text. These LLMs have been utilized in diverse fields, such as clinical research, where domain-specific models like Med-Palm have achieved human-level performance. Recently, researchers have employed advanced prompt engineering to enhance the general reasoning ability of LLMs. Despite the remarkable success of zero-shot Chain-of-Thoughts (CoT) in solving general reasoning tasks, the potential of these methods still remains paid limited attention in the financial reasoning task.To address this issue, we explore multiple prompt strategies and incorporated semantic news information to improve LLMs' performance on financial reasoning tasks.To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to explore this important issue by applying ChatGPT to the gold investment.In this work, our aim is to investigate the financial reasoning capabilities of LLMs and their capacity to generate logical and persuasive investment opinions. We will use ChatGPT, one of the most powerful LLMs recently, and prompt engineering to achieve this goal. Our research will focus on understanding the ability of LLMs in sophisticated analysis and reasoning within the context of investment decision-making. Our study finds that ChatGPT with CoT prompt can provide more explainable predictions and overcome behavioral biases, which is crucial in finance-related tasks and can achieve higher investment returns.

FedCoLLM: A Parameter-Efficient Federated Co-tuning Framework for Large and Small Language Models

By adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to domain-specific tasks or enriching them with domain-specific knowledge, we can fully harness the capabilities of LLMs. Nonetheless, a gap persists in achieving simultaneous mutual enhancement between the server's LLM and the downstream clients' Small Language Models (SLMs). To address this, we propose FedCoLLM, a novel and parameter-efficient federated framework designed for co-tuning LLMs and SLMs. This approach is aimed at adaptively transferring server-side LLMs knowledge to clients' SLMs while simultaneously enriching the LLMs with domain insights from the clients. To accomplish this, FedCoLLM utilizes lightweight adapters in conjunction with SLMs, facilitating knowledge exchange between server and clients in a manner that respects data privacy while also minimizing computational and communication overhead. Our evaluation of FedCoLLM, utilizing various public LLMs and SLMs across a range of NLP text generation tasks, reveals that the performance of clients' SLMs experiences notable improvements with the assistance of the LLMs. Simultaneously, the LLMs enhanced via FedCoLLM achieves comparable performance to that obtained through direct fine-tuning on clients' data.