ICLR 2025 论文列表

This paper studies Learning from Imperfect Human Feedback (LIHF), addressing the potential irrationality or imperfect perception when learning from comparative human feedback. Building on evidences that human's imperfection decays over time (i.e., humans learn to improve), we cast this problem as a concave-utility continuous-action dueling bandit but under a restricted form of corruption: i.e., the corruption scale is decaying over time as $t^{\rho-1}$ for some ``imperfection rate'' $\rho \in [0, 1]$. With $T$ as the total number of iterations, we establish a regret lower bound of $ \Omega(\max\{\sqrt{T}, T^{\rho}\})$ for LIHF, even when $\rho$ is known. For the same setting, we develop the Robustified Stochastic Mirror Descent for Imperfect Dueling (RoSMID) algorithm, which achieves nearly optimal regret $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\max\{\sqrt{T}, T^{\rho}\})$. Core to our analysis is a novel framework for analyzing gradient-based algorithms for dueling bandit under corruption, and we demonstrate its general applicability by showing how this framework can be easily applied to obtain corruption-robust guarantees for other popular gradient-based dueling bandit algorithms. Our theoretical results are validated by extensive experiments.

The impact of communication on decision-making systems has been extensively studied under the assumption of dedicated communication channels. We instead consider communicating through actions, where the message is embedded into the actions of an agent which interacts with the environment in a Markov decision process (MDP) framework. We conceptualize the MDP environment as a finite-state channel (FSC), where the actions of the agent serve as the channel input, while the states of the MDP observed by another agent (i.e., receiver) serve as the channel output. Here, we treat the environment as a communication channel over which the agent communicates through its actions, while at the same time, trying to maximize its reward. We first characterize the optimal information theoretic trade-off between the average reward and the rate of reliable communication in the infinite-horizon regime. Then, we propose a novel framework to design a joint control/coding policy, termed Act2Comm, which seamlessly embeds messages into actions. From a communication perspective, Act2Comm functions as a learning-based channel coding scheme for non-differentiable FSCs under input-output constraints. From a control standpoint, Act2Comm learns an MDP policy that incorporates communication capabilities, though at the cost of some control performance. Overall, Act2Comm effectively balances the dual objectives of control and communication in this environment. Experimental results validate Act2Comm's capability to enable reliable communication while maintaining a certain level of control performance.

We present a benchmark for Planning And Reasoning Tasks in humaN-Robot collaboration (PARTNR) designed to study human-robot coordination in household activities. PARTNR tasks exhibit characteristics of everyday tasks, such as spatial, temporal, and heterogeneous agent capability constraints. We employ a semi-automated task generation pipeline using Large Language Models (LLMs), incorporating simulation-in-the-loop for the grounding and verification. PARTNR stands as the largest benchmark of its kind, comprising 100,000 natural language tasks, spanning 60 houses and 5,819 unique objects. We analyze state-of-the-art LLMs on PARTNR tasks, across the axes of planning, perception and skill execution. The analysis reveals significant limitations in SoTA models, such as poor coordination and failures in task tracking and recovery from errors. When LLMs are paired with 'real' humans, they require 1.5x as many steps as two humans collaborating and 1.1x more steps than a single human, underscoring the potential for improvement in these models. We further show that fine-tuning smaller LLMs with planning data can achieve performance on par with models 9 times larger, while being 8.6x faster at inference. Overall, PARTNR highlights significant challenges facing collaborative embodied agents and aims to drive research in this direction.

Language models (LMs) can be directed to perform user- and context-dependent tasks by using labeled examples or natural language prompts. But selecting examples or writing prompts can be challenging---especially in tasks that require users to precisely articulate nebulous preferences or reason about complex edge cases. For such tasks, we introduce **Generative Active Task Elicitation (GATE)**, a method for using *LMs themselves* to guide the task specification process. GATE is a learning framework in which models elicit and infer human preferences through free-form, language-based interaction with users. We identify prototypical challenges that users face when specifying preferences, and design three preference modeling tasks to study these challenges: content recommendation, moral reasoning, and email validation. In preregistered experiments, we show that LMs that learn to perform these tasks using GATE (by interactively querying users with open-ended questions) obtain preference specifications that are more informative than user-written prompts or examples. GATE matches existing task specification methods in the moral reasoning task, and significantly outperforms them in the content recommendation and email validation tasks. Users additionally report that interactive task elicitation requires less effort than prompting or example labeling and surfaces considerations that they did not anticipate on their own. Our findings suggest that LM-driven elicitation can be a powerful tool for aligning models to complex human preferences and values.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant capabilities in natural language processing and reasoning, yet their effectiveness in autonomous planning has been under debate. While existing studies have utilized LLMs with external feedback mechanisms or in controlled environments for planning, these approaches often involve substantial computational and development resources due to the requirement for careful design and iterative backprompting. Moreover, even the most advanced LLMs like GPT-4 struggle to match human performance on standard planning benchmarks, such as the Blocksworld, without additional support. This paper investigates whether LLMs can independently generate long-horizon plans that rival human baselines. Our novel enhancements to Algorithm-of-Thoughts (AoT), which we dub AoT+, help achieve state-of-the-art results in planning benchmarks out-competing prior methods and human baselines all autonomously.

With remarkable advancements, large language models (LLMs) have attracted significant efforts to develop LLM-based agents capable of executing intricate multi-step decision-making tasks. Existing approaches predominantly build upon the external performance measure to guide the decision-making process but the reliance on the external performance measure as prior is problematic in real-world scenarios, where such prior may be unavailable, flawed, or even erroneous. For genuine autonomous decision-making for LLM-based agents, it is imperative to develop rationality from their posterior experiences to judge the utility of each decision independently. In this work, we propose RaDAgent (Rational Decision-Making Agent), which fosters the development of its rationality through an iterative framework involving Experience Exploration and Utility Learning. Within this framework, Elo-based Utility Learning is devised to assign Elo scores to individual decision steps to judge their utilities via pairwise comparisons. Consequently, these Elo scores guide the decision-making process to derive optimal outcomes. Experimental results on the Game of 24, WebShop, ToolBench and RestBench datasets demonstrate RaDAgent’s superiority over baselines, achieving about 7.8% improvement on average. Besides, RaDAgent also can reduce costs (ChatGPT API calls), highlighting its effectiveness and efficiency.

The potential of large language models (LLMs) as decision support tools is increasingly being explored in fields such as business, engineering, and medicine, which often face challenging tasks of *decision-making under uncertainty*. In this paper, we show that directly prompting LLMs on these types of decision-making problems can yield poor results, especially as the problem complexity increases. To aid in these tasks, we propose DeLLMa (Decision-making Large Language Model assistant), a framework designed to enhance decision-making accuracy in uncertain environments. DeLLMa involves a multi-step reasoning procedure that integrates recent best practices in scaling *inference-time reasoning*, drawing upon principles from decision theory and utility theory, to provide an accurate and human-auditable decision-making process. We validate our procedure on multiple realistic decision-making environments, demonstrating that DeLLMa can consistently enhance the decision-making performance of leading language models, and achieve up to a 40% increase in accuracy over competing methods. Additionally, we show how performance improves when scaling compute at test time, and carry out human evaluations to benchmark components of DeLLMa.

LLM-driven multi-agent collaboration (MAC) systems have demonstrated impressive capabilities in automatic software development at the function level. However, their heavy reliance on human design limits their adaptability to the diverse demands of real-world software development. To address this limitation, we introduce EvoMAC, a novel self-evolving paradigm for MAC networks. Inspired by traditional neural network training, EvoMAC obtains text-based environmental feedback by verifying the MAC network's output against a target proxy and leverages a novel textual backpropagation to update the network. To extend coding capabilities beyond function-level tasks to more challenging software-level development, we further propose RSD-Bench, a requirement-oriented software development benchmark, which features complex and diverse software requirements along with automatic evaluation of requirement correctness. Our experiments show that: i) The automatic requirement-aware evaluation in RSD-Bench closely aligns with human evaluations, validating its reliability as a software-level coding benchmark. ii) EvoMAC outperforms previous SOTA methods on both the software-level RSD-Bench and the function-level HumanEval benchmarks, reflecting its superior coding capabilities.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led to a growing interest in developing LLM-based agents for automating web tasks. However, these agents often struggle with even simple tasks on real-world websites due to their limited capability to understand and process complex web page structures. In this work, we introduce LCoW, a framework for Learning language models to Contextualize complex Web pages into a more comprehensible form, thereby enhancing decision making by LLM agents. LCoW decouples web page understanding from decision making by training a separate contextualization module to transform complex web pages into comprehensible format, which are then utilized by the decision-making agent. We demonstrate that our contextualization module effectively integrates with LLM agents of various scales to significantly enhance their decision-making capabilities in web automation tasks. Notably, LCoW improves the success rates of closed-source LLMs (e.g., Gemini-1.5-flash, GPT-4o, Claude-3.5-Sonnet) by an average of 15.6%, and demonstrates a 23.7% average improvement in success rates for open-source LMs (e.g., Llama-3.1-8B, Llama-3.1-70B) on the WorkArena benchmark. Moreover, the Gemini-1.5-flash agent with LCoW achieves state-of-the-art results on the WebShop benchmark, outperforming human experts. The relevant code materials are available at our project page: https://lcowiclr2025.github.io.