Jianyun Nie

Bang Liu, Xinfeng Li, Jiayi Zhang et al. · microsoft-research

The advent of large language models (LLMs) has catalyzed a transformative shift in artificial intelligence, paving the way for advanced intelligent agents capable of sophisticated reasoning, robust perception, and versatile action across diverse domains. As these agents increasingly drive AI research and practical applications, their design, evaluation, and continuous improvement present intricate, multifaceted challenges. This book provides a comprehensive overview, framing intelligent agents within modular, brain-inspired architectures that integrate principles from cognitive science, neuroscience, and computational research. We structure our exploration into four interconnected parts. First, we systematically investigate the modular foundation of intelligent agents, systematically mapping their cognitive, perceptual, and operational modules onto analogous human brain functionalities and elucidating core components such as memory, world modeling, reward processing, goal, and emotion. Second, we discuss self-enhancement and adaptive evolution mechanisms, exploring how agents autonomously refine their capabilities, adapt to dynamic environments, and achieve continual learning through automated optimization paradigms. Third, we examine multi-agent systems, investigating the collective intelligence emerging from agent interactions, cooperation, and societal structures. Finally, we address the critical imperative of building safe and beneficial AI systems, emphasizing intrinsic and extrinsic security threats, ethical alignment, robustness, and practical mitigation strategies necessary for trustworthy real-world deployment. By synthesizing modular AI architectures with insights from different disciplines, this survey identifies key research challenges and opportunities, encouraging innovations that harmonize technological advancement with meaningful societal benefit.

Hao Fu, Yan Wang, Ruihua Song et al.

The ability of a dialog system to express consistent language style during conversations has a direct, positive impact on its usability and on user satisfaction. Although previous studies have demonstrated that style transfer is feasible with a large amount of parallel data, it is often impossible to collect such data for different styles. In this paper, instead of manually constructing conversation data with a certain style, we propose a flexible framework that adapts a generic retrieval-based dialogue system to mimic the language style of a specified persona without any parallel data. Our approach is based on automatic generation of stylized data by learning the usage of jargon, and then rewriting the generic conversations to a stylized one by incorporating the jargon. In experiments we implemented dialogue systems with five distinct language styles, and the result shows our framework significantly outperforms baselines in terms of the average score of responses' relevance and style degree, and content diversity. A/B testing on a commercial chatbot shows that users are more satisfied with our system. This study demonstrates the feasibility of building stylistic dialogue systems by simple data augmentation.

Yanru Qu, Ting Bai, Weinan Zhang et al.

This paper studies graph-based recommendation, where an interaction graph is constructed from historical records and is lever-aged to alleviate data sparsity and cold start problems. We reveal an early summarization problem in existing graph-based models, and propose Neighborhood Interaction (NI) model to capture each neighbor pair (between user-side and item-side) distinctively. NI model is more expressive and can capture more complicated structural patterns behind user-item interactions. To further enrich node connectivity and utilize high-order structural information, we incorporate extra knowledge graphs (KGs) and adopt graph neural networks (GNNs) in NI, called Knowledge-enhanced NeighborhoodInteraction (KNI). Compared with the state-of-the-art recommendation methods,e.g., feature-based, meta path-based, and KG-based models, our KNI achieves superior performance in click-through rate prediction (1.1%-8.4% absolute AUC improvements) and out-performs by a wide margin in top-N recommendation on 4 real-world datasets.