APIGen-MT: Agentic Pipeline for Multi-Turn Data Generation via Simulated Agent-Human Interplay

Training effective AI agents for multi-turn interactions requires high-quality data that captures realistic human-agent dynamics, yet such data is scarce and expensive to collect manually. We introduce APIGen-MT, a two-phase framework that generates verifiable and diverse multi-turn agent data. In the first phase, our agentic pipeline produces detailed task blueprints with ground-truth actions, leveraging a committee of LLM reviewers and iterative feedback loops. These blueprints are then transformed into complete interaction trajectories through simulated human-agent interplay. We train a family of models -- the xLAM-2-fc-r series with sizes ranging from 1B to 70B parameters. Our models outperform frontier models such as GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 on $\tau$-bench and BFCL benchmarks, with the smaller models surpassing their larger counterparts, particularly in multi-turn settings, while maintaining superior consistency across multiple trials. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our verified blueprint-to-details approach yields high-quality training data, enabling the development of more reliable, efficient, and capable agents. We open-source both the synthetic data collected and the trained xLAM-2-fc-r models to advance research in AI agents. Models are available on HuggingFace at https://huggingface.co/collections/Salesforce/xlam-2-67ef5be12949d8dcdae354c4 and project website is https://apigen-mt.github.io

Automating Personalization: Prompt Optimization for Recommendation Reranking

Modern recommender systems increasingly leverage large language models (LLMs) for reranking to improve personalization. However, existing approaches face two key limitations: (1) heavy reliance on manually crafted prompts that are difficult to scale, and (2) inadequate handling of unstructured item metadata that complicates preference inference. We present AGP (Auto-Guided Prompt Refinement), a novel framework that automatically optimizes user profile generation prompts for personalized reranking. AGP introduces two key innovations: (1) position-aware feedback mechanisms for precise ranking correction, and (2) batched training with aggregated feedback to enhance generalization.

ActionStudio: A Lightweight Framework for Data and Training of Large Action Models

Action models are essential for enabling autonomous agents to perform complex tasks. However, training large action models remains challenging due to the diversity of agent environments and the complexity of agentic data. Despite growing interest, existing infrastructure provides limited support for scalable, agent-specific fine-tuning. We present ActionStudio, a lightweight and extensible data and training framework designed for large action models. ActionStudio unifies heterogeneous agent trajectories through a standardized format, supports diverse training paradigms including LoRA, full fine-tuning, and distributed setups, and integrates robust preprocessing and verification tools. We validate its effectiveness across both public and realistic industry benchmarks, demonstrating strong performance and practical scalability. We open-sourced code and data at https://github.com/SalesforceAIResearch/xLAM to facilitate research in the community.

PersonaBench: Evaluating AI Models on Understanding Personal Information through Accessing (Synthetic) Private User Data

Personalization is critical in AI assistants, particularly in the context of private AI models that work with individual users. A key scenario in this domain involves enabling AI models to access and interpret a user's private data (e.g., conversation history, user-AI interactions, app usage) to understand personal details such as biographical information, preferences, and social connections. However, due to the sensitive nature of such data, there are no publicly available datasets that allow us to assess an AI model's ability to understand users through direct access to personal information. To address this gap, we introduce a synthetic data generation pipeline that creates diverse, realistic user profiles and private documents simulating human activities. Leveraging this synthetic data, we present PersonaBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate AI models' performance in understanding personal information derived from simulated private user data. We evaluate Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines using questions directly related to a user's personal information, supported by the relevant private documents provided to the models. Our results reveal that current retrieval-augmented AI models struggle to answer private questions by extracting personal information from user documents, highlighting the need for improved methodologies to enhance personalization capabilities in AI.

Disentangled VAD Representations via a Variational Framework for Political Stance Detection

The stance detection task aims to categorise the stance regarding specified targets. Current methods face challenges in effectively integrating sentiment information for stance detection. Moreover, the role of highly granular sentiment labelling in stance detection has been largely overlooked. This study presents a novel stance detection framework utilizing a variational autoencoder (VAE) to disentangle latent emotional features-value, arousal, and dominance (VAD)-from political discourse on social media. This approach addresses limitations in current methods, particularly in in-target and cross-target stance detection scenarios. This research uses an advanced emotional annotation tool to annotate seven-class sentiment labels for P-STANCE. Evaluations on benchmark datasets, including P-STANCE and SemEval-2016, reveal that PoliStance-VAE achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing models like BERT, BERTweet, and GPT-4o. PoliStance-VAE offers a robust and interpretable solution for stance detection, demonstrating the effectiveness of integrating nuanced emotional representations. This framework paves the way for advancements in natural language processing tasks, particularly those requiring detailed emotional understanding.

Training Large Recommendation Models via Graph-Language Token Alignment

Recommender systems (RS) have become essential tools for helping users efficiently navigate the overwhelming amount of information on e-commerce and social platforms. However, traditional RS relying on Collaborative Filtering (CF) struggles to integrate the rich semantic information from textual data. Meanwhile, large language models (LLMs) have shown promising results in natural language processing, but directly using LLMs for recommendation introduces challenges, such as ambiguity in generating item predictions and inefficiencies in scalability. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to train Large Recommendation models via Graph-Language Token Alignment. By aligning item and user nodes from the interaction graph with pretrained LLM tokens, GLTA effectively leverages the reasoning abilities of LLMs. Furthermore, we introduce Graph-Language Logits Matching (GLLM) to optimize token alignment for end-to-end item prediction, eliminating ambiguity in the free-form text as recommendation results. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of GLTA, with ablation studies validating each component.

Strategic priorities for transformative progress in advancing biology with proteomics and artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming scientific research, including proteomics. Advances in mass spectrometry (MS)-based proteomics data quality, diversity, and scale, combined with groundbreaking AI techniques, are unlocking new challenges and opportunities in biological discovery. Here, we highlight key areas where AI is driving innovation, from data analysis to new biological insights. These include developing an AI-friendly ecosystem for proteomics data generation, sharing, and analysis; improving peptide and protein identification and quantification; characterizing protein-protein interactions and protein complexes; advancing spatial and perturbation proteomics; integrating multi-omics data; and ultimately enabling AI-empowered virtual cells.

Rumor Detection by Multi-task Suffix Learning based on Time-series Dual Sentiments

The widespread dissemination of rumors on social media has a significant impact on people's lives, potentially leading to public panic and fear. Rumors often evoke specific sentiments, resonating with readers and prompting sharing. To effectively detect and track rumors, it is essential to observe the fine-grained sentiments of both source and response message pairs as the rumor evolves over time. However, current rumor detection methods fail to account for this aspect. In this paper, we propose MSuf, the first multi-task suffix learning framework for rumor detection and tracking using time series dual (coupled) sentiments. MSuf includes three modules: (1) an LLM to extract sentiment intensity features and sort them chronologically; (2) a module that fuses the sorted sentiment features with their source text word embeddings to obtain an aligned embedding; (3) two hard prompts are combined with the aligned vector to perform rumor detection and sentiment analysis using one frozen LLM. MSuf effectively enhances the performance of LLMs for rumor detection with only minimal parameter fine-tuning. Evaluating MSuf on four rumor detection benchmarks, we find significant improvements compared to other emotion-based methods.

TACO: Learning Multi-modal Action Models with Synthetic Chains-of-Thought-and-Action

While open-source multi-modal language models perform well on simple question answering tasks, they often fail on complex questions that require multiple capabilities, such as fine-grained recognition, visual grounding, and reasoning, and that demand multi-step solutions. We present TACO, a family of multi-modal large action models designed to improve performance on such complex, multi-step, and multi-modal tasks. During inference, TACO produces chains-of-thought-and-action (CoTA), executes intermediate steps by invoking external tools such as OCR, depth estimation and calculator, then integrates both the thoughts and action outputs to produce coherent responses. To train TACO, we create a large dataset of over 1M synthetic CoTA traces generated with GPT-4o and Python programs. We then experiment with various data filtering and mixing techniques and obtain a final subset of 293K high-quality CoTA examples. This dataset enables TACO to learn complex reasoning and action paths, surpassing existing models trained on instruction tuning data with only direct answers. Our model TACO outperforms the instruction-tuned baseline across 8 benchmarks, achieving a 3.6% improvement on average, with gains of up to 15% in MMVet tasks involving OCR, mathematical reasoning, and spatial reasoning. Training on high-quality CoTA traces sets a new standard for complex multi-modal reasoning, highlighting the need for structured, multi-step instruction tuning in advancing open-source mutli-modal models' capabilities.

Graph-Sequential Alignment and Uniformity: Toward Enhanced Recommendation Systems

Graph-based and sequential methods are two popular recommendation paradigms, each excelling in its domain but lacking the ability to leverage signals from the other. To address this, we propose a novel method that integrates both approaches for enhanced performance. Our framework uses Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based and sequential recommenders as separate submodules while sharing a unified embedding space optimized jointly. To enable positive knowledge transfer, we design a loss function that enforces alignment and uniformity both within and across submodules. Experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms using either approach alone and achieves state-of-the-art results. Our implementations are publicly available at https://github.com/YuweiCao-UIC/GSAU.git.