Towards Unified Alignment Between Agents, Humans, and Environment

The rapid progress of foundation models has led to the prosperity of autonomous agents, which leverage the universal capabilities of foundation models to conduct reasoning, decision-making, and environmental interaction. However, the efficacy of agents remains limited when operating in intricate, realistic environments. In this work, we introduce the principles of $\mathbf{U}$nified $\mathbf{A}$lignment for $\mathbf{A}$gents ($\mathbf{UA}^2$), which advocate for the simultaneous alignment of agents with human intentions, environmental dynamics, and self-constraints such as the limitation of monetary budgets. From the perspective of $\mathbf{UA}^2$, we review the current agent research and highlight the neglected factors in existing agent benchmarks and method candidates. We also conduct proof-of-concept studies by introducing realistic features to WebShop, including user profiles to demonstrate intentions, personalized reranking for complex environmental dynamics, and runtime cost statistics to reflect self-constraints. We then follow the principles of $\mathbf{UA}^2$ to propose an initial design of our agent, and benchmark its performance with several candidate baselines in the retrofitted WebShop. The extensive experimental results further prove the importance of the principles of $\mathbf{UA}^2$. Our research sheds light on the next steps of autonomous agent research with improved general problem-solving abilities.

Failures Pave the Way: Enhancing Large Language Models through Tuning-free Rule Accumulation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased impressive performance. However, due to their inability to capture relationships among samples, these frozen LLMs inevitably keep repeating similar mistakes. In this work, we propose our Tuning-free Rule Accumulation (TRAN) framework, which guides LLMs in improving their performance by learning from previous mistakes. Considering data arrives sequentially, LLMs gradually accumulate rules from incorrect cases, forming a rule collection. These rules are then utilized by the LLMs to avoid making similar mistakes when processing subsequent inputs. Moreover, the rules remain independent of the primary prompts, seamlessly complementing prompt design strategies. Experimentally, we show that TRAN improves over recent baselines by a large margin.

Restricted Orthogonal Gradient Projection for Continual Learning

Continual learning aims to avoid catastrophic forgetting and effectively leverage learned experiences to master new knowledge. Existing gradient projection approaches impose hard constraints on the optimization space for new tasks to minimize interference, which simultaneously hinders forward knowledge transfer. To address this issue, recent methods reuse frozen parameters with a growing network, resulting in high computational costs. Thus, it remains a challenge whether we can improve forward knowledge transfer for gradient projection approaches using a fixed network architecture. In this work, we propose the Restricted Orthogonal Gradient prOjection (ROGO) framework. The basic idea is to adopt a restricted orthogonal constraint allowing parameters optimized in the direction oblique to the whole frozen space to facilitate forward knowledge transfer while consolidating previous knowledge. Our framework requires neither data buffers nor extra parameters. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the superiority of our framework over several strong baselines. We also provide theoretical guarantees for our relaxing strategy.

Machine Learning for Intelligent Optical Networks: A Comprehensive Survey

With the rapid development of Internet and communication systems, both in services and technologies, communication networks have been suffering increasing complexity. It is imperative to improve intelligence in communication network, and several aspects have been incorporating with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). Optical network, which plays an important role both in core and access network in communication networks, also faces great challenges of system complexity and the requirement of manual operations. To overcome the current limitations and address the issues of future optical networks, it is essential to deploy more intelligence capability to enable autonomous and exible network operations. ML techniques are proved to have superiority on solving complex problems; and thus recently, ML techniques have been used for many optical network applications. In this paper, a detailed survey of existing applications of ML for intelligent optical networks is presented. The applications of ML are classified in terms of their use cases, which are categorized into optical network control and resource management, and optical networks monitoring and survivability. The use cases are analyzed and compared according to the used ML techniques. Besides, a tutorial for ML applications is provided from the aspects of the introduction of common ML algorithms, paradigms of ML, and motivations of applying ML. Lastly, challenges and possible solutions of ML application in optical networks are also discussed, which intends to inspire future innovations in leveraging ML to build intelligent optical networks.