LLM Agent & Embodied VLA

Effective real-world multi-agent collaboration requires not only accurate planning but also the ability to reason about collaborators' intents -- a crucial capability for avoiding miscoordination and redundant communication under partial observable environments. Due to their strong planning and reasoning capabilities, large language models (LLMs) have emerged as promising autonomous agents for collaborative task solving. However, existing collaboration frameworks for LLMs overlook their reasoning potential for dynamic intent inference, and thus produce inconsistent plans and redundant communication, reducing collaboration efficiency. To bridge this gap, we propose CoBel-World, a novel framework that equips LLM agents with a collaborative belief world -- an internal representation jointly modeling the physical environment and collaborators' mental states. CoBel-World enables agents to parse open-world task knowledge into structured beliefs via a symbolic belief language, and perform zero-shot Bayesian-style belief updates through LLM reasoning. This allows agents to proactively detect potential miscoordination (e.g., conflicting plans) and communicate adaptively. Evaluated on challenging embodied benchmarks (i.e., TDW-MAT and C-WAH), CoBel-World significantly reduces communication costs by 22-60% and improves task completion efficiency by 4-28% compared to the strongest baseline. Our results show that explicit, intent-aware belief modeling is essential for efficient and human-like collaboration in LLM-based multi-agent systems.

Utilizing large language models (LLMs) for tool planning has emerged as a promising avenue for developing general AI systems, where LLMs automatically schedule external tools (e.g., vision models) to tackle complex tasks based on task descriptions. To push this paradigm toward practical applications, it is crucial for LLMs to consider tool execution costs (e.g., execution time) for tool planning. Unfortunately, prior studies overlook the tool execution costs, leading to the generation of expensive plans whose costs outweigh their benefits in terms of task performance. To fill this gap, we propose the Cost-Aware Tool Planning with LLMs (CATP-LLM) framework, which for the first time provides a coherent design to empower LLMs for cost-aware tool planning. Specifically, To facilitate efficient concurrent tool execution and cost reduction, we design a tool planning language to enhance the LLM for creating multi-branch non-sequential plans. Moreover, we propose a cost-aware offline reinforcement learning algorithm to fine-tune the LLM to optimize the performance-cost trade-off in tool planning. In the lack of public cost-related datasets, we further present OpenCATP, the first dataset for cost-aware planning, which comprises 11,100 evaluation samples from diverse tasks. Extensive experiments show that CATP-LLM outperforms GPT-4 even when using Llama2-7B as its backbone, with the average improvement of 1.5%-93.9% in terms of plan quality.

Designing control policies to ensure robust network services is essential to modern digital infrastructure. However, the dominant paradigm for network optimization relies on designing specialist policies based on handcrafted rules or deep learning models, leading to poor generalization across diverse tasks and environments. In contrast, large language models (LLMs), pretrained on Internet-scale corpora, provide a rich and unified knowledge base that encodes fundamental networking principles. Combined with their emergent abilities in generalization to unseen scenarios, LLMs offer a transformative foundation for generalist network policies that can generalize across diverse tasks and environments with minimal adaptation. In this paper, we present Trailblazer, the first systematic framework to realize such a generalist policy for networking. Trailblazer incorporates a network alignment scheme to ground the LLM in specific networking tasks, and an adaptive policy collaboration mechanism that offloads simple control cases from the LLM to a lightweight policy for computational efficiency. Through extensive simulations and large-scale real-world online evaluation on Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok), Trailblazer, powered by a single LLM, demonstrates stronger cross-task and cross-environment generalization than conventional specialist policies. Our results validate LLMs as the foundation for generalist network policies, and position Trailblazer as the first step toward the generalist-driven paradigm that enables strong generalization with minimal efforts in policy design.

Many networking tasks now employ deep learning (DL) to solve complex prediction and optimization problems. However, current design philosophy of DL-based algorithms entails intensive engineering overhead due to the manual design of deep neural networks (DNNs) for different networking tasks. Besides, DNNs tend to achieve poor generalization performance on unseen data distributions/environments. Motivated by the recent success of large language models (LLMs), this work studies the LLM adaptation for networking to explore a more sustainable design philosophy. With the powerful pre-trained knowledge, the LLM is promising to serve as the foundation model to achieve "one model for all tasks" with even better performance and stronger generalization. In pursuit of this vision, we present NetLLM, the first framework that provides a coherent design to harness the powerful capabilities of LLMs with low efforts to solve networking problems. Specifically, NetLLM empowers the LLM to effectively process multimodal data in networking and efficiently generate task-specific answers. Besides, NetLLM drastically reduces the costs of fine-tuning the LLM to acquire domain knowledge for networking. Across three networking-related use cases - viewport prediction, adaptive bitrate streaming and cluster job scheduling, we showcase that the NetLLM-adapted LLM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms.