OpenR: An Open Source Framework for Advanced Reasoning with Large Language Models

In this technical report, we introduce OpenR, an open-source framework designed to integrate key components for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). OpenR unifies data acquisition, reinforcement learning training (both online and offline), and non-autoregressive decoding into a cohesive software platform. Our goal is to establish an open-source platform and community to accelerate the development of LLM reasoning. Inspired by the success of OpenAI's o1 model, which demonstrated improved reasoning abilities through step-by-step reasoning and reinforcement learning, OpenR integrates test-time compute, reinforcement learning, and process supervision to improve reasoning in LLMs. Our work is the first to provide an open-source framework that explores the core techniques of OpenAI's o1 model with reinforcement learning, achieving advanced reasoning capabilities beyond traditional autoregressive methods. We demonstrate the efficacy of OpenR by evaluating it on the MATH dataset, utilising publicly available data and search methods. Our initial experiments confirm substantial gains, with relative improvements in reasoning and performance driven by test-time computation and reinforcement learning through process reward models. The OpenR framework, including code, models, and datasets, is accessible at https://openreasoner.github.io.

Computing Ex Ante Equilibrium in Heterogeneous Zero-Sum Team Games

The ex ante equilibrium for two-team zero-sum games, where agents within each team collaborate to compete against the opposing team, is known to be the best a team can do for coordination. Many existing works on ex ante equilibrium solutions are aiming to extend the scope of ex ante equilibrium solving to large-scale team games based on Policy Space Response Oracle (PSRO). However, the joint team policy space constructed by the most prominent method, Team PSRO, cannot cover the entire team policy space in heterogeneous team games where teammates play distinct roles. Such insufficient policy expressiveness causes Team PSRO to be trapped into a sub-optimal ex ante equilibrium with significantly higher exploitability and never converges to the global ex ante equilibrium. To find the global ex ante equilibrium without introducing additional computational complexity, we first parameterize heterogeneous policies for teammates, and we prove that optimizing the heterogeneous teammates' policies sequentially can guarantee a monotonic improvement in team rewards. We further propose Heterogeneous-PSRO (H-PSRO), a novel framework for heterogeneous team games, which integrates the sequential correlation mechanism into the PSRO framework and serves as the first PSRO framework for heterogeneous team games. We prove that H-PSRO achieves lower exploitability than Team PSRO in heterogeneous team games. Empirically, H-PSRO achieves convergence in matrix heterogeneous games that are unsolvable by non-heterogeneous baselines. Further experiments reveal that H-PSRO outperforms non-heterogeneous baselines in both heterogeneous team games and homogeneous settings.

HOLA-Drone: Hypergraphic Open-ended Learning for Zero-Shot Multi-Drone Cooperative Pursuit

Zero-shot coordination (ZSC) is a significant challenge in multi-agent collaboration, aiming to develop agents that can coordinate with unseen partners they have not encountered before. Recent cutting-edge ZSC methods have primarily focused on two-player video games such as OverCooked!2 and Hanabi. In this paper, we extend the scope of ZSC research to the multi-drone cooperative pursuit scenario, exploring how to construct a drone agent capable of coordinating with multiple unseen partners to capture multiple evaders. We propose a novel Hypergraphic Open-ended Learning Algorithm (HOLA-Drone) that continuously adapts the learning objective based on our hypergraphic-form game modeling, aiming to improve cooperative abilities with multiple unknown drone teammates. To empirically verify the effectiveness of HOLA-Drone, we build two different unseen drone teammate pools to evaluate their performance in coordination with various unseen partners. The experimental results demonstrate that HOLA-Drone outperforms the baseline methods in coordination with unseen drone teammates. Furthermore, real-world experiments validate the feasibility of HOLA-Drone in physical systems. Videos can be found on the project homepage~\url{https://sites.google.com/view/hola-drone}.

Mutual Theory of Mind in Human-AI Collaboration: An Empirical Study with LLM-driven AI Agents in a Real-time Shared Workspace Task

Theory of Mind (ToM) significantly impacts human collaboration and communication as a crucial capability to understand others. When AI agents with ToM capability collaborate with humans, Mutual Theory of Mind (MToM) arises in such human-AI teams (HATs). The MToM process, which involves interactive communication and ToM-based strategy adjustment, affects the team's performance and collaboration process. To explore the MToM process, we conducted a mixed-design experiment using a large language model-driven AI agent with ToM and communication modules in a real-time shared-workspace task. We find that the agent's ToM capability does not significantly impact team performance but enhances human understanding of the agent and the feeling of being understood. Most participants in our study believe verbal communication increases human burden, and the results show that bidirectional communication leads to lower HAT performance. We discuss the results' implications for designing AI agents that collaborate with humans in real-time shared workspace tasks.

Fusion-PSRO: Nash Policy Fusion for Policy Space Response Oracles

A popular approach for solving zero-sum games is to maintain populations of policies to approximate the Nash Equilibrium (NE). Previous studies have shown that Policy Space Response Oracle (PSRO) algorithm is an effective multi-agent reinforcement learning framework for solving such games. However, repeatedly training new policies from scratch to approximate Best Response (BR) to opponents' mixed policies at each iteration is both inefficient and costly. While some PSRO variants initialize a new policy by inheriting from past BR policies, this approach limits the exploration of new policies, especially against challenging opponents. To address this issue, we propose Fusion-PSRO, which employs policy fusion to initialize policies for better approximation to BR. By selecting high-quality base policies from meta-NE, policy fusion fuses the base policies into a new policy through model averaging. This approach allows the initialized policies to incorporate multiple expert policies, making it easier to handle difficult opponents compared to inheriting from past BR policies or initializing from scratch. Moreover, our method only modifies the policy initialization phase, allowing its application to nearly all PSRO variants without additional training overhead. Our experiments on non-transitive matrix games, Leduc Poker, and the more complex Liars Dice demonstrate that Fusion-PSRO enhances the performance of nearly all PSRO variants, achieving lower exploitability.

Efficient Model-agnostic Alignment via Bayesian Persuasion

With recent advancements in large language models (LLMs), alignment has emerged as an effective technique for keeping LLMs consensus with human intent. Current methods primarily involve direct training through Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT) or Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), both of which require substantial computational resources and extensive ground truth data. This paper explores an efficient method for aligning black-box large models using smaller models, introducing a model-agnostic and lightweight Bayesian Persuasion Alignment framework. We formalize this problem as an optimization of the signaling strategy from the small model's perspective. In the persuasion process, the small model (Advisor) observes the information item (i.e., state) and persuades large models (Receiver) to elicit improved responses. The Receiver then generates a response based on the input, the signal from the Advisor, and its updated belief about the information item. Through training using our framework, we demonstrate that the Advisor can significantly enhance the performance of various Receivers across a range of tasks. We theoretically analyze our persuasion framework and provide an upper bound on the Advisor's regret, confirming its effectiveness in learning the optimal signaling strategy. Our Empirical results demonstrates that GPT-2 can significantly improve the performance of various models, achieving an average enhancement of 16.1% in mathematical reasoning ability and 13.7% in code generation. We hope our work can provide an initial step toward rethinking the alignment framework from the Bayesian Persuasion perspective.

Reinforcing Language Agents via Policy Optimization with Action Decomposition

Language models as intelligent agents push the boundaries of sequential decision-making agents but struggle with limited knowledge of environmental dynamics and exponentially huge action space. Recent efforts like GLAM and TWOSOME manually constrain the action space to a restricted subset and employ reinforcement learning to align agents' knowledge with specific environments. However, they overlook fine-grained credit assignments for intra-action tokens, which is essential for efficient language agent optimization, and rely on human's prior knowledge to restrict action space. This paper proposes decomposing language agent optimization from the action level to the token level, offering finer supervision for each intra-action token and manageable optimization complexity in environments with unrestricted action spaces. Beginning with the simplification of flattening all actions, we theoretically explore the discrepancies between action-level optimization and this naive token-level optimization. We then derive the Bellman backup with Action Decomposition (BAD) to integrate credit assignments for both intra-action and inter-action tokens, effectively eliminating the discrepancies. Implementing BAD within the PPO algorithm, we introduce Policy Optimization with Action Decomposition (POAD). POAD benefits from a finer-grained credit assignment process and lower optimization complexity, leading to enhanced learning efficiency and generalization abilities in aligning language agents with interactive environments. We validate POAD across diverse testbeds, with results affirming the advantages of our approach and the correctness of our theoretical analysis.

DS-Agent: Automated Data Science by Empowering Large Language Models with Case-Based Reasoning

In this work, we investigate the potential of large language models (LLMs) based agents to automate data science tasks, with the goal of comprehending task requirements, then building and training the best-fit machine learning models. Despite their widespread success, existing LLM agents are hindered by generating unreasonable experiment plans within this scenario. To this end, we present DS-Agent, a novel automatic framework that harnesses LLM agent and case-based reasoning (CBR). In the development stage, DS-Agent follows the CBR framework to structure an automatic iteration pipeline, which can flexibly capitalize on the expert knowledge from Kaggle, and facilitate consistent performance improvement through the feedback mechanism. Moreover, DS-Agent implements a low-resource deployment stage with a simplified CBR paradigm to adapt past successful solutions from the development stage for direct code generation, significantly reducing the demand on foundational capabilities of LLMs. Empirically, DS-Agent with GPT-4 achieves an unprecedented 100% success rate in the development stage, while attaining 36% improvement on average one pass rate across alternative LLMs in the deployment stage. In both stages, DS-Agent achieves the best rank in performance, costing \$1.60 and \$0.13 per run with GPT-4, respectively. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/guosyjlu/DS-Agent.

TRAD: Enhancing LLM Agents with Step-Wise Thought Retrieval and Aligned Decision

Numerous large language model (LLM) agents have been built for different tasks like web navigation and online shopping due to LLM's wide knowledge and text-understanding ability. Among these works, many of them utilize in-context examples to achieve generalization without the need for fine-tuning, while few of them have considered the problem of how to select and effectively utilize these examples. Recently, methods based on trajectory-level retrieval with task meta-data and using trajectories as in-context examples have been proposed to improve the agent's overall performance in some sequential decision making tasks. However, these methods can be problematic due to plausible examples retrieved without task-specific state transition dynamics and long input with plenty of irrelevant context. In this paper, we propose a novel framework (TRAD) to address these issues. TRAD first conducts Thought Retrieval, achieving step-level demonstration selection via thought matching, leading to more helpful demonstrations and less irrelevant input noise. Then, TRAD introduces Aligned Decision, complementing retrieved demonstration steps with their previous or subsequent steps, which enables tolerance for imperfect thought and provides a choice for balance between more context and less noise. Extensive experiments on ALFWorld and Mind2Web benchmarks show that TRAD not only outperforms state-of-the-art models but also effectively helps in reducing noise and promoting generalization. Furthermore, TRAD has been deployed in real-world scenarios of a global business insurance company and improves the success rate of robotic process automation.

AceMap: Knowledge Discovery through Academic Graph

The exponential growth of scientific literature requires effective management and extraction of valuable insights. While existing scientific search engines excel at delivering search results based on relational databases, they often neglect the analysis of collaborations between scientific entities and the evolution of ideas, as well as the in-depth analysis of content within scientific publications. The representation of heterogeneous graphs and the effective measurement, analysis, and mining of such graphs pose significant challenges. To address these challenges, we present AceMap, an academic system designed for knowledge discovery through academic graph. We present advanced database construction techniques to build the comprehensive AceMap database with large-scale academic publications that contain rich visual, textual, and numerical information. AceMap also employs innovative visualization, quantification, and analysis methods to explore associations and logical relationships among academic entities. AceMap introduces large-scale academic network visualization techniques centered on nebular graphs, providing a comprehensive view of academic networks from multiple perspectives. In addition, AceMap proposes a unified metric based on structural entropy to quantitatively measure the knowledge content of different academic entities. Moreover, AceMap provides advanced analysis capabilities, including tracing the evolution of academic ideas through citation relationships and concept co-occurrence, and generating concise summaries informed by this evolutionary process. In addition, AceMap uses machine reading methods to generate potential new ideas at the intersection of different fields. Exploring the integration of large language models and knowledge graphs is a promising direction for future research in idea evolution. Please visit \url{https://www.acemap.info} for further exploration.