Taraneh Ghandi

Taraneh Ghandi, Hamidreza Mahyar, Shachar Klaiman

The use of knowledge graphs for grounding agents in real-world Q&A applications has become increasingly common. Answering complex queries often requires multi-hop reasoning and the ability to navigate vast relational structures. Standard approaches rely on prompting techniques that steer large language models to reason over raw graph context, or retrieval-augmented generation pipelines where relevant subgraphs are injected into the context. These, however, face severe limitations with enterprise-scale KGs that cannot fit in even the largest context windows available today. We present GraphWalk, a problem-agnostic, training-free, tool-based framework that allows off-the-shelf LLMs to reason through sequential graph navigation, dramatically increasing performance across different tasks. Unlike task-specific agent frameworks that encode domain knowledge into specialized tools, GraphWalk equips the LLM with a minimal set of orthogonal graph operations sufficient to traverse any graph structure. We evaluate whether models equipped with GraphWalk can compose these operations into correct multi-step reasoning chains, where each tool call represents a verifiable step creating a transparent execution trace. We first demonstrate our approach on maze traversal, a problem non-reasoning models are completely unable to solve, then present results on graphs resembling real-world enterprise knowledge graphs. To isolate structural reasoning from world knowledge, we evaluate on entirely synthetic graphs with random, non-semantic labels. Our benchmark spans 12 query templates from basic retrieval to compound first-order logic queries. Results show that tool-based traversal yields substantial and consistent gains over in-context baselines across all model families tested, with gains becoming more pronounced as scale increases, precisely where in-context approaches fail catastrophically.

Maciej Besta, Shriram Chandran, Robert Gerstenberger et al.

We introduce MBTI-in-Thoughts, a framework for enhancing the effectiveness of Large Language Model (LLM) agents through psychologically grounded personality conditioning. Drawing on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), our method primes agents with distinct personality archetypes via prompt engineering, enabling control over behavior along two foundational axes of human psychology, cognition and affect. We show that such personality priming yields consistent, interpretable behavioral biases across diverse tasks: emotionally expressive agents excel in narrative generation, while analytically primed agents adopt more stable strategies in game-theoretic settings. Our framework supports experimenting with structured multi-agent communication protocols and reveals that self-reflection prior to interaction improves cooperation and reasoning quality. To ensure trait persistence, we integrate the official 16Personalities test for automated verification. While our focus is on MBTI, we show that our approach generalizes seamlessly to other psychological frameworks such as Big Five, HEXACO, or Enneagram. By bridging psychological theory and LLM behavior design, we establish a foundation for psychologically enhanced AI agents without any fine-tuning.

Taraneh Ghandi, Hamidreza Pourreza, Hamidreza Mahyar

Image captioning is a research area of immense importance, aiming to generate natural language descriptions for visual content in the form of still images. The advent of deep learning and more recently vision-language pre-training techniques has revolutionized the field, leading to more sophisticated methods and improved performance. In this survey paper, we provide a structured review of deep learning methods in image captioning by presenting a comprehensive taxonomy and discussing each method category in detail. Additionally, we examine the datasets commonly employed in image captioning research, as well as the evaluation metrics used to assess the performance of different captioning models. We address the challenges faced in this field by emphasizing issues such as object hallucination, missing context, illumination conditions, contextual understanding, and referring expressions. We rank different deep learning methods' performance according to widely used evaluation metrics, giving insight into the current state of the art. Furthermore, we identify several potential future directions for research in this area, which include tackling the information misalignment problem between image and text modalities, mitigating dataset bias, incorporating vision-language pre-training methods to enhance caption generation, and developing improved evaluation tools to accurately measure the quality of image captions.