Towards a Science of Collective AI: LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems Need a Transition from Blind Trial-and-Error to Rigorous Science

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have greatly extended the capabilities of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), demonstrating significant effectiveness across a wide range of complex and open-ended domains. However, despite this rapid progress, the field still relies heavily on empirical trial-and-error. It lacks a unified and principled scientific framework necessary for systematic optimization and improvement. This bottleneck stems from the ambiguity of attribution: first, the absence of a structured taxonomy of factors leaves researchers restricted to unguided adjustments; second, the lack of a unified metric fails to distinguish genuine collaboration gain from mere resource accumulation. In this paper, we advocate for a transition to design science through an integrated framework. We advocate to establish the collaboration gain metric ($Γ$) as the scientific standard to isolate intrinsic gains from increased budgets. Leveraging $Γ$, we propose a factor attribution paradigm to systematically identify collaboration-driving factors. To support this, we construct a systematic MAS factor library, structuring the design space into control-level presets and information-level dynamics. Ultimately, this framework facilitates the transition from blind experimentation to rigorous science, paving the way towards a true science of Collective AI.

AutoJudger: An Agent-Driven Framework for Efficient Benchmarking of MLLMs

Evaluating multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is increasingly expensive, as the growing size and cross-modality complexity of benchmarks demand significant scoring efforts. To tackle with this difficulty, we introduce AutoJudger, an agent-driven framework for efficient and adaptive benchmarking of MLLMs that tackles this escalating cost. AutoJudger employs the Item Response Theory (IRT) to estimate the question difficulty and an autonomous evaluation agent to dynamically select the most informative test questions based on the model's real-time performance. Specifically, AutoJudger incorporates two pivotal components: a semantic-aware retrieval mechanism to ensure that selected questions cover diverse and challenging scenarios across both vision and language modalities, and a dynamic memory that maintains contextual statistics of previously evaluated questions to guide coherent and globally informed question selection throughout the evaluation process. Extensive experiments on four representative multimodal benchmarks demonstrate that our adaptive framework dramatically reduces evaluation expenses, i.e. AutoJudger uses only 4% of the data to achieve over 90% ranking accuracy with the full benchmark evaluation on MMT-Bench.

From Individual to Society: A Survey on Social Simulation Driven by Large Language Model-based Agents

Traditional sociological research often relies on human participation, which, though effective, is expensive, challenging to scale, and with ethical concerns. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) highlight their potential to simulate human behavior, enabling the replication of individual responses and facilitating studies on many interdisciplinary studies. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey of this field, illustrating the recent progress in simulation driven by LLM-empowered agents. We categorize the simulations into three types: (1) Individual Simulation, which mimics specific individuals or demographic groups; (2) Scenario Simulation, where multiple agents collaborate to achieve goals within specific contexts; and (3) Society Simulation, which models interactions within agent societies to reflect the complexity and variety of real-world dynamics. These simulations follow a progression, ranging from detailed individual modeling to large-scale societal phenomena. We provide a detailed discussion of each simulation type, including the architecture or key components of the simulation, the classification of objectives or scenarios and the evaluation method. Afterward, we summarize commonly used datasets and benchmarks. Finally, we discuss the trends across these three types of simulation. A repository for the related sources is at {\url{https://github.com/FudanDISC/SocialAgent}}.

Recent Advances of Foundation Language Models-based Continual Learning: A Survey

Recently, foundation language models (LMs) have marked significant achievements in the domains of natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV). Unlike traditional neural network models, foundation LMs obtain a great ability for transfer learning by acquiring rich commonsense knowledge through pre-training on extensive unsupervised datasets with a vast number of parameters. However, they still can not emulate human-like continuous learning due to catastrophic forgetting. Consequently, various continual learning (CL)-based methodologies have been developed to refine LMs, enabling them to adapt to new tasks without forgetting previous knowledge. However, a systematic taxonomy of existing approaches and a comparison of their performance are still lacking, which is the gap that our survey aims to fill. We delve into a comprehensive review, summarization, and classification of the existing literature on CL-based approaches applied to foundation language models, such as pre-trained language models (PLMs), large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs). We divide these studies into offline CL and online CL, which consist of traditional methods, parameter-efficient-based methods, instruction tuning-based methods and continual pre-training methods. Offline CL encompasses domain-incremental learning, task-incremental learning, and class-incremental learning, while online CL is subdivided into hard task boundary and blurry task boundary settings. Additionally, we outline the typical datasets and metrics employed in CL research and provide a detailed analysis of the challenges and future work for LMs-based continual learning.

Boosting Large Language Models with Continual Learning for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is an important subtask of sentiment analysis, which aims to extract the aspects and predict their sentiments. Most existing studies focus on improving the performance of the target domain by fine-tuning domain-specific models (trained on source domains) based on the target domain dataset. Few works propose continual learning tasks for ABSA, which aim to learn the target domain's ability while maintaining the history domains' abilities. In this paper, we propose a Large Language Model-based Continual Learning (\texttt{LLM-CL}) model for ABSA. First, we design a domain knowledge decoupling module to learn a domain-invariant adapter and separate domain-variant adapters dependently with an orthogonal constraint. Then, we introduce a domain knowledge warmup strategy to align the representation between domain-invariant and domain-variant knowledge. In the test phase, we index the corresponding domain-variant knowledge via domain positioning to not require each sample's domain ID. Extensive experiments over 19 datasets indicate that our \texttt{LLM-CL} model obtains new state-of-the-art performance.