He Tian

Lanlan Qiu, Xiao Pu, Yeqi Feng et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in role-playing conversations and providing emotional support as separate research directions. However, there remains a significant research gap in combining these capabilities to enable emotionally supportive interactions with virtual characters. To address this research gap, we focus on anime characters as a case study because of their well-defined personalities and large fan bases. This choice enables us to effectively evaluate how well LLMs can provide emotional support while maintaining specific character traits. We introduce ChatAnime, the first Emotionally Supportive Role-Playing (ESRP) dataset. We first thoughtfully select 20 top-tier characters from popular anime communities and design 60 emotion-centric real-world scenario questions. Then, we execute a nationwide selection process to identify 40 Chinese anime enthusiasts with profound knowledge of specific characters and extensive experience in role-playing. Next, we systematically collect two rounds of dialogue data from 10 LLMs and these 40 Chinese anime enthusiasts. To evaluate the ESRP performance of LLMs, we design a user experience-oriented evaluation system featuring 9 fine-grained metrics across three dimensions: basic dialogue, role-playing and emotional support, along with an overall metric for response diversity. In total, the dataset comprises 2,400 human-written and 24,000 LLM-generated answers, supported by over 132,000 human annotations. Experimental results show that top-performing LLMs surpass human fans in role-playing and emotional support, while humans still lead in response diversity. We hope this work can provide valuable resources and insights for future research on optimizing LLMs in ESRP. Our datasets are available at https://github.com/LanlanQiu/ChatAnime.

Abe Bohan Hou, Hongru Du, Yichen Wang et al.

Can we simulate a sandbox society with generative agents to model human behavior, thereby reducing the over-reliance on real human trials for assessing public policies? In this work, we investigate the feasibility of simulating health-related decision-making, using vaccine hesitancy, defined as the delay in acceptance or refusal of vaccines despite the availability of vaccination services (MacDonald, 2015), as a case study. To this end, we introduce the VacSim framework with 100 generative agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs). VacSim simulates vaccine policy outcomes with the following steps: 1) instantiate a population of agents with demographics based on census data; 2) connect the agents via a social network and model vaccine attitudes as a function of social dynamics and disease-related information; 3) design and evaluate various public health interventions aimed at mitigating vaccine hesitancy. To align with real-world results, we also introduce simulation warmup and attitude modulation to adjust agents' attitudes. We propose a series of evaluations to assess the reliability of various LLM simulations. Experiments indicate that models like Llama and Qwen can simulate aspects of human behavior but also highlight real-world alignment challenges, such as inconsistent responses with demographic profiles. This early exploration of LLM-driven simulations is not meant to serve as definitive policy guidance; instead, it serves as a call for action to examine social simulation for policy development.

Can Zheng, Yuhan Cao, Xiaoning Dong et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language understanding, code generation, and complex planning. Simultaneously, Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have garnered attention for their potential to enable cooperation among distributed agents. However, from a multi-party perspective, MAS could be vulnerable to malicious agents that exploit the system to serve self-interests without disrupting its core functionality. This work explores integrity attacks where malicious agents employ subtle prompt manipulation to bias MAS operations and gain various benefits. Four types of attacks are examined: \textit{Scapegoater}, who misleads the system monitor to underestimate other agents' contributions; \textit{Boaster}, who misleads the system monitor to overestimate their own performance; \textit{Self-Dealer}, who manipulates other agents to adopt certain tools; and \textit{Free-Rider}, who hands off its own task to others. We demonstrate that strategically crafted prompts can introduce systematic biases in MAS behavior and executable instructions, enabling malicious agents to effectively mislead evaluation systems and manipulate collaborative agents. Furthermore, our attacks can bypass advanced LLM-based monitors, such as GPT-4o-mini and o3-mini, highlighting the limitations of current detection mechanisms. Our findings underscore the critical need for MAS architectures with robust security protocols and content validation mechanisms, alongside monitoring systems capable of comprehensive risk scenario assessment.

Qinchen Yang, Zhiqing Hong, Dongjiang Cao et al.

Textual description of a physical location, commonly known as an address, plays an important role in location-based services(LBS) such as on-demand delivery and navigation. However, the prevalence of abnormal addresses, those containing inaccuracies that fail to pinpoint a location, have led to significant costs. Address rewriting has emerged as a solution to rectify these abnormal addresses. Despite the critical need, existing address rewriting methods are limited, typically tailored to correct specific error types, or frequently require retraining to process new address data effectively. In this study, we introduce AddrLLM, an innovative framework for address rewriting that is built upon a retrieval augmented large language model. AddrLLM overcomes aforementioned limitations through a meticulously designed Supervised Fine-Tuning module, an Address-centric Retrieval Augmented Generation module and a Bias-free Objective Alignment module. To the best of our knowledge, this study pioneers the application of LLM-based address rewriting approach to solve the issue of abnormal addresses. Through comprehensive offline testing with real-world data on a national scale and subsequent online deployment, AddrLLM has demonstrated superior performance in integration with existing logistics system. It has significantly decreased the rate of parcel re-routing by approximately 43\%, underscoring its exceptional efficacy in real-world applications.