United States

There has been a rising interest in utilizing tools in applications of autonomous agents based on large language models (LLMs) to address intricate real-world tasks. To develop LLMbased agents, it usually requires LLMs to understand many tool functions from different tool documentations. However, these documentations could be diverse, redundant, or incomplete, which immensely affects the capability of LLMs in using tools. Current LLMs exhibit satisfactory instruction-following capabilities based on instruction-following fine-tuning process. Motivated by this, in this paper, we introduce EASYTOOL, a framework transforming diverse and lengthy tool documentation into a unified and concise tool instruction to fully leverage instruction-following capabilities of LLMs for easier tool usage. EASYTOOL purifies essential information from extensive tool documentation of different sources, and elaborates a unified interface (i.e., tool instruction) to offer standardized tool descriptions and functionalities for LLM-based agents. Extensive experiments on multiple different tasks demonstrate that EASYTOOL can significantly reduce token consumption and improve the performance of LLM-based agents on tool utilization in real-world scenarios. Our code is available in supplemental materials. Our code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/JARVIS/tree/main/easytool.

NAACL 2025

EASYTOOL: Enhancing LLM-based Agents with Concise Tool Instruction

tool instruction

tool utilization

llm-based agents

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Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Synthetic data generation has become an increasingly popular way of training models without the need for large, manually labeled datasets. For tasks like text embedding, synthetic data offers diverse and scalable training examples, significantly reducing the cost of human annotation. However, most current approaches rely heavily on proprietary models like GPT-4, which are expensive and inefficient for generating large-scale embedding data. In this paper, we introduce SPEED, a framework that aligns open-source small models (8B) to efficiently generate large-scale synthetic embedding data. Through supervised fine-tuning, preference optimization, and self-improvement, SPEED enables small open-source models to produce high-quality data. Remarkably, SPEED uses only less than 1/10 of the GPT API calls, outperforming the state-of-the-art embedding model E5_mistral when both are trained solely on their synthetic data. Using this efficient generator, we conduct a comprehensive study on how various factors within the alignment pipeline impact data quality and reveal the scaling law for synthetic embedding data. Our codes and models are released in https://github.com/haon-chen/SPEED.

Little Giants: Synthesizing High-Quality Embedding Data at Scale

Data scarcity is a major challenge in Few-shot Continual Relation Extraction (FCRE), where models must learn new relations from limited data while retaining past knowledge. Current methods, restricted by minimal data streams, struggle with catastrophic forgetting and overfitting. To overcome this, we introduce a novel *data augmentation strategy* that transforms single input sentences into complex texts by integrating both old and new data. Our approach sharpens model focus, enabling precise identification of word relationships based on specified relation types. By embedding adversarial training effects and leveraging new training perspectives through special objective functions, our method enhances model performance significantly. Additionally, we explore Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) in Few-shot Continual Learning. Our extensive experiments uncover fascinating behaviors of SAM across tasks and offer valuable insights for future research in this dynamic field.

Mutual-pairing Data Augmentation for Fewshot Continual Relation Extraction

Fine-tuning is a key approach for adapting language models to specific downstream tasks, but updating all model parameters becomes impractical as model sizes increase. Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods, such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), address this challenge by introducing additional adaptation parameters into pre-trained weight matrices. However, LoRA's performance varies across different insertion points within the model, highlighting potential parameter inefficiency due to unnecessary insertions. To this end, we propose SSMLoRA (**S**tate **S**pace **M**odel **L**ow-**R**ank **A**daptation) , an extension of LoRA that incorporates a State Space Model (SSM) to interconnect low-rank matrices. SSMLoRA ensures that performance is maintained even with sparser insertions. SSMLoRA allows the model to not only map inputs to a low-rank space for better feature extraction but also leverage the computations from the previous low-rank space. Our method achieves comparable performance to LoRA on the General Language Understanding Evaluation (GLUE) benchmark while using only half the parameters. Additionally, due to its structure, SSMLoRA shows promise in handling tasks with longer input sequences.

SSMLoRA: Enhancing Low-Rank Adaptation with State Space Model

Recently, sharing key-value (KV) cache across layers has been found effective in efficient inference of large language models (LLMs). To systematically investigate different techniques of cross-layer KV sharing, we propose a unified framework that covers several recent methods and their novel variants. We conduct comprehensive experiments on all the configurations of the framework, evaluating their generation throughput and performance in language modeling and downstream tasks. We find that when reducing the size of the KV cache by 2×, most configurations can achieve higher throughput than standard transformers while maintaining competitive performance. When further reducing the size of the KV cache, however, pairing queries of all layers with KVs of upper layers performs better, at the expense of additional training cost and prefilling latency. We hope that this work will help users make more informed choices of cross-layer KV sharing approaches and facilitate future research on efficient LLM inference.

A Systematic Study of Cross-Layer KV Sharing for Efficient LLM Inference

The rise of powerful large language models (LLMs) has spurred a new trend in building LLM-based autonomous agents for solving complex tasks, especially multi-agent systems. Despite the remarkable progress, we notice that existing works are heavily dependent on human-designed frameworks, which greatly limits the functional scope and scalability of agent systems. How to automatically extend the specialized agent to multi-agent systems to improve task-solving capability still remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we introduce EVOAGENT, a generic method to automatically extend specialized agents to multi-agent systems via the evolutionary algorithm, thereby improving the effectiveness of LLM-based agents in solving tasks. Specifically, we consider the existing agent frameworks as the initial individual and then apply a series of evolutionary operators (e.g., mutation, crossover, selection, etc.) to generate multiple agents with diverse settings. Experimental results across various tasks show that EVOAGENT can significantly enhance the tasksolving capability of LLM-based agents, and can be generalized to any LLM-based agent framework to extend them into multi-agent systems. Resources are available at https://evo-agent.github.io/.

EvoAgent: Towards Automatic Multi-Agent Generation via Evolutionary Algorithms

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to the development of benchmarks that consider temporal dynamics, however, there remains a gap in understanding how well these models can generalize across temporal contexts due to the inherent dynamic nature of language and information. This paper introduces the concept of temporal generalization in LLMs, including bias in past and future generalizations. Then we introduce FreshBench, a new evaluation framework that employs fresh text and event prediction for assessing LLMs' temporal adaptability, ensuring the evaluation process free from data leakage and subjective bias. The experiment shows significant temporal biases and a decline in performance over time.

Is Your LLM Outdated? A Deep Look at Temporal Generalization

Natural Language Inference (NLI) is crucial for evaluating models' Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and reasoning abilities. The development of NLI, in part, has been driven by the creation of large datasets, which require significant human effort. This has spurred interest in semi-supervised learning (SSL) that leverages both labeled and unlabeled data. However, the absence of hypotheses and class labels in NLI tasks complicates SSL. Prior work has used class-specific fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) to generate hypotheses and assign pseudo-labels but discarded many LLM-constructed samples during training to ensure the quality. In contrast, we propose to leverage all LLM-constructed samples by handling potentially noisy samples by injecting the moments of labeled samples during training to properly adjust the level of noise. Our method outperforms strong baselines on multiple NLI datasets in low-resource settings.

Leveraging Moment Injection for Enhanced Semi-supervised Natural Language Inference with Large Language Models

We examine the pre-training dynamics of language models, focusing on their ability to copy text from preceding context—a fundamental skill for various LLM applications, including in-context learning (ICL) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). We propose a novel perspective that Transformer-based language models develop copying abilities similarly to grokking, which refers to sudden generalization on test set long after the model fit to the training set. Our experiments yield three arguments: (1) The pre-training loss decreases rapidly, while the context copying ability of models initially lags and then abruptly saturates. (2) The speed of developing copying ability is independent of the number of tokens trained, similarly to how grokking speed is unaffected by dataset size as long as the data distribution is preserved. (3) Induction heads, the attention heads responsible for copying, form from shallow to deep layers during training, mirroring the development of circuits in deeper layers during grokking. We contend that the connection between grokking and context copying can provide valuable insights for more effective language model training, ultimately improving in-context performance. For example, we demonstrated that techniques that enhance grokking, such as regularization, either accelerate or enhance the development of context copying.

Language Models ``Grok'' to Copy

Recent advancements in large language models have revolutionized text generation with their remarkable capabilities. These models can produce controlled texts that closely adhere to specific requirements when prompted appropriately. However, designing an optimal prompt to control multiple attributes simultaneously can be challenging. A common approach is to linearly combine single-attribute models, but this strategy often overlooks attribute overlaps and can lead to conflicts. Therefore, we propose a novel combination strategy inspired by the Law of Total Probability and Conditional Mutual Information Minimization on generative language models. This method has been adapted for single-attribute control scenario and is termed the Palette of Language Models due to its theoretical linkage between attribute strength and generation style, akin to blending colors on an artist's palette. Moreover, positive correlation and attribute enhancement are advanced as theoretical properties to guide a rational combination strategy design. We conduct experiments on both single control and multiple control settings, and achieve surpassing results.

Palette of Language Models: A Solver for Controlled Text Generation

We study the post-training of large language models (LLMs) with human preference data. Recently, direct preference optimization and its variants have shown considerable promise in aligning language models, eliminating the need for reward models and online sampling. Despite these benefits, these methods rely on explicit assumptions about the Bradley-Terry (BT) model, which makes them prone to overfitting and results in suboptimal performance, particularly on reasoning-heavy tasks. To address these challenges, we propose a principled preference fine-tuning algorithm called InfoPO, which effectively and efficiently aligns large language models using preference data. InfoPO eliminates the reliance on the BT model and prevents the likelihood of the chosen response from decreasing. Extensive experiments confirm that InfoPO consistently outperforms established baselines on widely used open benchmarks, particularly in reasoning tasks.

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Little Giants: Synthesizing High-Quality Embedding Data at Scale

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