Minerva: A Programmable Memory Test Benchmark for Language Models

How effectively can LLM-based AI assistants utilize their memory (context) to perform various tasks? Traditional data benchmarks, which are often manually crafted, suffer from several limitations: they are static, susceptible to overfitting, difficult to interpret, and lack actionable insights--failing to pinpoint the specific capabilities a model lacks when it does not pass a test. In this paper, we present a framework for automatically generating a comprehensive set of tests to evaluate models' abilities to use their memory effectively. Our framework extends the range of capability tests beyond the commonly explored (passkey, key-value, needle in the haystack) search, a dominant focus in the literature. Specifically, we evaluate models on atomic tasks such as searching, recalling, editing, matching, comparing information in context memory, and performing basic operations when inputs are structured into distinct blocks, simulating real-world data. Additionally, we design composite tests to investigate the models' ability to maintain state while operating on memory. Our benchmark enables an interpretable, detailed assessment of memory capabilities of LLMs.

MEETING DELEGATE: Benchmarking LLMs on Attending Meetings on Our Behalf

In contemporary workplaces, meetings are essential for exchanging ideas and ensuring team alignment but often face challenges such as time consumption, scheduling conflicts, and inefficient participation. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their strong capabilities in natural language generation and reasoning, prompting the question: can LLMs effectively delegate participants in meetings? To explore this, we develop a prototype LLM-powered meeting delegate system and create a comprehensive benchmark using real meeting transcripts. Our evaluation reveals that GPT-4/4o maintain balanced performance between active and cautious engagement strategies. In contrast, Gemini 1.5 Pro tends to be more cautious, while Gemini 1.5 Flash and Llama3-8B/70B display more active tendencies. Overall, about 60\% of responses address at least one key point from the ground-truth. However, improvements are needed to reduce irrelevant or repetitive content and enhance tolerance for transcription errors commonly found in real-world settings. Additionally, we implement the system in practical settings and collect real-world feedback from demos. Our findings underscore the potential and challenges of utilizing LLMs as meeting delegates, offering valuable insights into their practical application for alleviating the burden of meetings.

Enabling Autonomic Microservice Management through Self-Learning Agents

The increasing complexity of modern software systems necessitates robust autonomic self-management capabilities. While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate potential in this domain, they often face challenges in adapting their general knowledge to specific service contexts. To address this limitation, we propose ServiceOdyssey, a self-learning agent system that autonomously manages microservices without requiring prior knowledge of service-specific configurations. By leveraging curriculum learning principles and iterative exploration, ServiceOdyssey progressively develops a deep understanding of operational environments, reducing dependence on human input or static documentation. A prototype built with the Sock Shop microservice demonstrates the potential of this approach for autonomic microservice management.

Skeleton-Guided-Translation: A Benchmarking Framework for Code Repository Translation with Fine-Grained Quality Evaluation

The advancement of large language models has intensified the need to modernize enterprise applications and migrate legacy systems to secure, versatile languages. However, existing code translation benchmarks primarily focus on individual functions, overlooking the complexities involved in translating entire repositories, such as maintaining inter-module coherence and managing dependencies. While some recent repository-level translation benchmarks attempt to address these challenges, they still face limitations, including poor maintainability and overly coarse evaluation granularity, which make them less developer-friendly. We introduce Skeleton-Guided-Translation, a framework for repository-level Java to C# code translation with fine-grained quality evaluation. It uses a two-step process: first translating the repository's structural "skeletons", then translating the full repository guided by these skeletons. Building on this, we present TRANSREPO-BENCH, a benchmark of high quality open-source Java repositories and their corresponding C# skeletons, including matching unit tests and build configurations. Our unit tests are fixed and can be applied across multiple or incremental translations without manual adjustments, enhancing automation and scalability in evaluations. Additionally, we develop fine-grained evaluation metrics that assess translation quality at the individual test case level, addressing traditional binary metrics' inability to distinguish when build failures cause all tests to fail. Evaluations using TRANSREPO-BENCH highlight key challenges and advance more accurate repository level code translation.

DI-BENCH: Benchmarking Large Language Models on Dependency Inference with Testable Repositories at Scale

Large Language Models have advanced automated software development, however, it remains a challenge to correctly infer dependencies, namely, identifying the internal components and external packages required for a repository to successfully run. Existing studies highlight that dependency-related issues cause over 40\% of observed runtime errors on the generated repository. To address this, we introduce DI-BENCH, a large-scale benchmark and evaluation framework specifically designed to assess LLMs' capability on dependency inference. The benchmark features 581 repositories with testing environments across Python, C#, Rust, and JavaScript. Extensive experiments with textual and execution-based metrics reveal that the current best-performing model achieves only a 42.9% execution pass rate, indicating significant room for improvement. DI-BENCH establishes a new viewpoint for evaluating LLM performance on repositories, paving the way for more robust end-to-end software synthesis.

AIOpsLab: A Holistic Framework to Evaluate AI Agents for Enabling Autonomous Clouds

AI for IT Operations (AIOps) aims to automate complex operational tasks, such as fault localization and root cause analysis, to reduce human workload and minimize customer impact. While traditional DevOps tools and AIOps algorithms often focus on addressing isolated operational tasks, recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI agents are revolutionizing AIOps by enabling end-to-end and multitask automation. This paper envisions a future where AI agents autonomously manage operational tasks throughout the entire incident lifecycle, leading to self-healing cloud systems, a paradigm we term AgentOps. Realizing this vision requires a comprehensive framework to guide the design, development, and evaluation of these agents. To this end, we present AIOPSLAB, a framework that not only deploys microservice cloud environments, injects faults, generates workloads, and exports telemetry data but also orchestrates these components and provides interfaces for interacting with and evaluating agents. We discuss the key requirements for such a holistic framework and demonstrate how AIOPSLAB can facilitate the evaluation of next-generation AIOps agents. Through evaluations of state-of-the-art LLM agents within the benchmark created by AIOPSLAB, we provide insights into their capabilities and limitations in handling complex operational tasks in cloud environments.

WarriorCoder: Learning from Expert Battles to Augment Code Large Language Models

Despite recent progress achieved by code large language models (LLMs), their remarkable abilities are largely dependent on fine-tuning on the high-quality data, posing challenges for data collection and annotation. To address this, current methods often design various data flywheels to gather complex code instructions, enabling models to handle more intricate tasks. However, these approaches typically rely on off-the-shelf datasets and data augmentation from the limited pool of proprietary LLMs (e.g., Claude, GPT4, and so on), which limits the diversity of the constructed data and makes it prone to systemic biases. In this paper, we propose WarriorCoder which learns from expert battles to address these limitations. Specifically, we create an arena for current expert code LLMs, where each model challenges and responds to others' challenges, with evaluations conducted by uninvolved judge models. This competitive framework generates novel training data constructed from scratch, harnessing the strengths of all participants. Experimental results demonstrate that WarriorCoder achieves competitive performance compared to previous methods, even without relying on proprietary LLMs.

REFA: Reference Free Alignment for multi-preference optimization

We introduce REFA, a family of reference-free alignment methods that optimize over multiple user preferences while enforcing fine-grained length control. Our approach integrates deviation-based weighting to emphasize high-quality responses more strongly, length normalization to prevent trivial short-response solutions, and an EOS-probability regularizer to mitigate dataset-induced brevity biases. Theoretically, we show that under the Uncertainty Reduction with Sequence Length Assertion (URSLA), naive length normalization can still incentivize length-based shortcuts. By contrast, REFA corrects these subtle incentives, guiding models toward genuinely more informative and higher-quality outputs. Empirically, REFA sets a new state-of-the-art among reference-free alignment methods, producing richer responses aligned more closely with human preferences. Compared to a base supervised fine-tuned (SFT) mistral-7b model that achieves 8.4% length-controlled win rate (LC-WR) and 6.2% win rate (WR), our best REFA configuration attains 21.62% LC-WR and 19.87% WR on the AlpacaEval v2 benchmark. This represents a substantial improvement over both the strongest multi-preference baseline, InfoNCA (16.82% LC-WR, 10.44% WR), and the strongest reference-free baseline, SimPO (20.01% LC-WR, 17.65% WR)

Reason-before-Retrieve: One-Stage Reflective Chain-of-Thoughts for Training-Free Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) aims to retrieve target images that closely resemble a reference image while integrating user-specified textual modifications, thereby capturing user intent more precisely. Existing training-free zero-shot CIR (ZS-CIR) methods often employ a two-stage process: they first generate a caption for the reference image and then use Large Language Models for reasoning to obtain a target description. However, these methods suffer from missing critical visual details and limited reasoning capabilities, leading to suboptimal retrieval performance. To address these challenges, we propose a novel, training-free one-stage method, One-Stage Reflective Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for ZS-CIR (OSrCIR), which employs Multimodal Large Language Models to retain essential visual information in a single-stage reasoning process, eliminating the information loss seen in two-stage methods. Our Reflective Chain-of-Thought framework further improves interpretative accuracy by aligning manipulation intent with contextual cues from reference images. OSrCIR achieves performance gains of 1.80% to 6.44% over existing training-free methods across multiple tasks, setting new state-of-the-art results in ZS-CIR and enhancing its utility in vision-language applications. Our code will be available at https://github.com/Pter61/osrcir2024/.

Large Action Models: From Inception to Implementation

As AI continues to advance, there is a growing demand for systems that go beyond language-based assistance and move toward intelligent agents capable of performing real-world actions. This evolution requires the transition from traditional Large Language Models (LLMs), which excel at generating textual responses, to Large Action Models (LAMs), designed for action generation and execution within dynamic environments. Enabled by agent systems, LAMs hold the potential to transform AI from passive language understanding to active task completion, marking a significant milestone in the progression toward artificial general intelligence. In this paper, we present a comprehensive framework for developing LAMs, offering a systematic approach to their creation, from inception to deployment. We begin with an overview of LAMs, highlighting their unique characteristics and delineating their differences from LLMs. Using a Windows OS-based agent as a case study, we provide a detailed, step-by-step guide on the key stages of LAM development, including data collection, model training, environment integration, grounding, and evaluation. This generalizable workflow can serve as a blueprint for creating functional LAMs in various application domains. We conclude by identifying the current limitations of LAMs and discussing directions for future research and industrial deployment, emphasizing the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead in realizing the full potential of LAMs in real-world applications. The code for the data collection process utilized in this paper is publicly available at: https://github.com/microsoft/UFO/tree/main/dataflow, and comprehensive documentation can be found at https://microsoft.github.io/UFO/dataflow/overview/.