Yongchang Li

Nan Sun, Bo Mao, Yongchang Li et al.

Current service robots suffer from limited natural language communication abilities, heavy reliance on predefined commands, ongoing human intervention, and, most notably, a lack of proactive collaboration awareness in human-populated environments. This results in narrow applicability and low utility. In this paper, we introduce AssistantX, an LLM-powered proactive assistant designed for autonomous operation in realworld scenarios with high accuracy. AssistantX employs a multi-agent framework consisting of 4 specialized LLM agents, each dedicated to perception, planning, decision-making, and reflective review, facilitating advanced inference capabilities and comprehensive collaboration awareness, much like a human assistant by your side. We built a dataset of 210 real-world tasks to validate AssistantX, which includes instruction content and status information on whether relevant personnel are available. Extensive experiments were conducted in both text-based simulations and a real office environment over the course of a month and a half. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, showing that AssistantX can reactively respond to user instructions, actively adjust strategies to adapt to contingencies, and proactively seek assistance from humans to ensure successful task completion. More details and videos can be found at https://assistantx-agent.github.io/AssistantX/.

Yongchang Li, Yujin Zhu, Tao Yan et al.

As real-world knowledge is constantly evolving, ensuring the timeliness and accuracy of a model's knowledge is crucial. This has made knowledge editing in large language models increasingly important. However, existing knowledge editing methods face several challenges, including parameter localization coupling, imprecise localization, and a lack of dynamic interaction across layers. In this paper, we propose a novel knowledge editing method called Knowledge Neuronal Ensemble (KNE). A knowledge neuronal ensemble represents a group of neurons encoding specific knowledge, thus mitigating the issue of frequent parameter modification caused by coupling in parameter localization. The KNE method enhances the precision and accuracy of parameter localization by computing gradient attribution scores for each parameter at each layer. During the editing process, only the gradients and losses associated with the knowledge neuronal ensemble are computed, with error backpropagation performed accordingly, ensuring dynamic interaction and collaborative updates among parameters. Experimental results on three widely used knowledge editing datasets show that the KNE method significantly improves the accuracy of knowledge editing and achieves, or even exceeds, the performance of the best baseline methods in portability and locality metrics.