Gurusha Juneja

Gurusha Juneja, Subhabrata Dutta, Soumen Chakrabarti et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) prompted to generate chain-of-thought (CoT) exhibit impressive reasoning capabilities. Recent attempts at prompt decomposition toward solving complex, multi-step reasoning problems depend on the ability of the LLM to simultaneously decompose and solve the problem. A significant disadvantage is that foundational LLMs are typically not available for fine-tuning, making adaptation computationally prohibitive. We believe (and demonstrate) that problem decomposition and solution generation are distinct capabilites, better addressed in separate modules, than by one monolithic LLM. We introduce DaSLaM, which uses a decomposition generator to decompose complex problems into subproblems that require fewer reasoning steps. These subproblems are answered by a solver. We use a relatively small (13B parameters) LM as the decomposition generator, which we train using policy gradient optimization to interact with a solver LM (regarded as black-box) and guide it through subproblems, thereby rendering our method solver-agnostic. Evaluation on multiple different reasoning datasets reveal that with our method, a 175 billion parameter LM (text-davinci-003) can produce competitive or even better performance, compared to its orders-of-magnitude larger successor, GPT-4. Additionally, we show that DaSLaM is not limited by the solver's capabilities as a function of scale; e.g., solver LMs with diverse sizes give significant performance improvement with our solver-agnostic decomposition technique. Exhaustive ablation studies evince the superiority of our modular finetuning technique over exorbitantly large decomposer LLMs, based on prompting alone.

Rounak Saha, Gurusha Juneja, Dayita Chaudhuri et al.

A number of scientific conferences and journals have recently enacted policies that prohibit LLM usage by peer reviewers, except for polishing, paraphrasing, and grammar correction of otherwise human-written reviews. But, are these policies enforceable? To answer this question, we assemble a dataset of peer reviews simulating multiple levels of human-AI collaboration, and evaluate five state-of-the-art detectors, including two commercial systems. Our analysis shows that all detectors misclassify a non-trivial fraction of LLM-polished reviews as AI-generated, thereby risking false accusations of academic misconduct. We further investigate whether peer-review-specific signals, including access to the paper manuscript and the constrained domain of scientific writing, can be leveraged to improve detection. While incorporating such signals yields measurable gains in some settings, we identify limitations in each approach and find that none meets the accuracy standards required for identifying AI use in peer reviews. Importantly, our results suggest that recent public estimates of AI use in peer reviews through the use of AI-text detectors should be interpreted with caution, as current detectors misclassify mixed reviews (collaborative human-AI outputs) as fully AI generated, potentially overstating the extent of policy violations.

Gurusha Juneja, Subhabrata Dutta, Tanmoy Chakraborty

Despite demonstrating emergent reasoning abilities, Large Language Models (LLMS) often lose track of complex, multi-step reasoning. Existing studies show that providing guidance via decomposing the original question into multiple subproblems elicits more robustness in LLM reasoning -- a decomposer generates the subproblems, and a solver solves each of these subproblems. However, these techniques fail to accommodate coordination between the decomposer and the solver modules (either in a single model or different specialized ones) -- the decomposer does not keep track of the ability of the solver to follow the decomposed reasoning. In this paper, we propose LM2 to address these challenges. LM2 modularizes the decomposition, solution, and verification into three different language models. The decomposer module identifies the key concepts necessary to solve the problem and generates step-by-step subquestions according to the reasoning requirement. The solver model generates the solution to the subproblems that are then checked by the verifier module; depending upon the feedback from the verifier, the reasoning context is constructed using the subproblems and the solutions. These models are trained to coordinate using policy learning. Exhaustive experimentation suggests the superiority of LM2 over existing methods on in- and out-domain reasoning problems, outperforming the best baselines by $8.1\%$ on MATH, $7.71\%$ on JEEBench, and $9.7\%$ on MedQA problems (code available at https://github.com/LCS2-IIITD/Language_Model_Multiplex).

Gurusha Juneja, Dylan Lu, Saaket Agashe et al.

Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to track others epistemic state, makes humans efficient collaborators. AI agents need the same capacity in multi agent settings, yet existing benchmarks mostly test literal ToM by asking direct belief questions. The ability act optimally on implicit beliefs in embodied environments, called functional ToM, remains largely untested. We introduce EnactToM, an evolving benchmark of 300 embodied multi-agent tasks set in a 3D household with partial observability, private information, and constrained communication. Each task is formally verified for solvability and required epistemic depth, and new tasks are generated increase difficulty as models improve. On the hard split, all seven evaluated frontier models score 0.0% Pass^3 on functional task completion, while averaging 45.0% on literal belief probes. Manual analysis traces 93% of sampled failures to epistemic coordination breakdowns such as withheld information, ignored partner constraints, and misallocated messages, providing a concrete target for future work.

Gurusha Juneja, Alon Albalak, Wenyue Hua et al.

The proliferation of LLM-based agents has led to increasing deployment of inter-agent collaboration for tasks like scheduling, negotiation, resource allocation etc. In such systems, privacy is critical, as agents often access proprietary tools and domain-specific databases requiring strict confidentiality. This paper examines whether LLM-based agents demonstrate an understanding of contextual privacy. And, if instructed, do these systems preserve inference time user privacy in non-adversarial multi-turn conversation. Existing benchmarks to evaluate contextual privacy in LLM-agents primarily assess single-turn, low-complexity tasks where private information can be easily excluded. We first present a benchmark - MAGPIE comprising 158 real-life high-stakes scenarios across 15 domains. These scenarios are designed such that complete exclusion of private data impedes task completion yet unrestricted information sharing could lead to substantial losses. We then evaluate the current state-of-the-art LLMs on (a) their understanding of contextually private data and (b) their ability to collaborate without violating user privacy. Empirical experiments demonstrate that current models, including GPT-4o and Claude-2.7-Sonnet, lack robust understanding of contextual privacy, misclassifying private data as shareable 25.2\% and 43.6\% of the time. In multi-turn conversations, these models disclose private information in 59.9\% and 50.5\% of cases even under explicit privacy instructions. Furthermore, multi-agent systems fail to complete tasks in 71\% of scenarios. These results underscore that current models are not aligned towards both contextual privacy preservation and collaborative task-solving.

Gurusha Juneja, Deepak Nathani, William Yang Wang

Process Reward Models (PRMs) enhance reasoning ability of LLMs by providing step-level supervision. However, their widespread adoption is limited due to expensive manual step-level annotation and poor generalization of static training data to novel errors. We introduce Adversarially Trained PRMs (\texttt{APRM}), where a Generator ($G$) learns to produce reasoning errors to deceive a PRM ($R$), while $R$ concurrently learns to detect them. This interaction yields progressively harder negatives for $R$, improving its robustness and generalization to novel errors without requiring manual step-level labels. Averaged across diverse mathematical reasoning benchmarks, \texttt{APRM} improves solver accuracy by $+3.4$ percentage points (pp) over the strongest PRM baseline. \texttt{APRM} achieves gains of $+5.3$ pp on out-of-distribution tasks.

Gurusha Juneja, Jayanth Naga Sai Pasupulati, Alon Albalak et al.

A core challenge for autonomous LLM agents in collaborative settings is balancing robust privacy understanding and preservation alongside task efficacy. Existing privacy benchmarks only focus on simplistic, single-turn interactions where private information can be trivially omitted without affecting task outcomes. In this paper, we introduce MAGPIE (Multi-AGent contextual PrIvacy Evaluation), a novel benchmark of 200 high-stakes tasks designed to evaluate privacy understanding and preservation in multi-agent collaborative, non-adversarial scenarios. MAGPIE integrates private information as essential for task resolution, forcing agents to balance effective collaboration with strategic information control. Our evaluation reveals that state-of-the-art agents, including GPT-5 and Gemini 2.5-Pro, exhibit significant privacy leakage, with Gemini 2.5-Pro leaking up to 50.7% and GPT-5 up to 35.1% of the sensitive information even when explicitly instructed not to. Moreover, these agents struggle to achieve consensus or task completion and often resort to undesirable behaviors such as manipulation and power-seeking (e.g., Gemini 2.5-Pro demonstrating manipulation in 38.2% of the cases). These findings underscore that current LLM agents lack robust privacy understanding and are not yet adequately aligned to simultaneously preserve privacy and maintain effective collaboration in complex environments.

Gurusha Juneja, Gautam Jajoo, Nagarajan Natarajan et al.

Given a task in the form of a basic description and its training examples, prompt optimization is the problem of synthesizing the given information into a text prompt for a large language model. Humans solve this problem by also considering the different facets that define a task (e.g., counter-examples, explanations, analogies) and including them in the prompt. However, it is unclear whether existing algorithmic approaches, based on iteratively editing a given prompt or automatically selecting a few in-context examples, can cover the multiple facets required to solve a complex task. In this work, we view prompt optimization as that of learning multiple facets of a task from a set of training examples. We exploit structure in the prompt optimization problem and break down a prompt into loosely coupled semantic sections. The proposed algorithm, UniPrompt, (1) clusters the input space and uses clustered batches so that each batch likely corresponds to a different facet of the task, and (2) utilizes a feedback mechanism to propose adding, editing or deleting a section, which in turn is aggregated over a batch to capture generalizable facets. Empirical evaluation on multiple datasets and a real-world task shows that prompts generated using \shortname{} obtain higher accuracy than human-tuned prompts and those from state-of-the-art methods. In particular, our algorithm can generate long, complex prompts that existing methods are unable to generate. Code for UniPrompt is available at https://aka.ms/uniprompt.

Gurusha Juneja, Sukrit Kumar

Diffusion models when conditioned on text prompts, generate realistic-looking images with intricate details. But most of these pre-trained models fail to generate accurate images when it comes to human features like hands, teeth, etc. We hypothesize that this inability of diffusion models can be overcome through well-annotated good-quality data. In this paper, we look specifically into improving the hand-object-interaction image generation using diffusion models. We collect a well annotated hand-object interaction synthetic dataset curated using Prompt-Propose-Verify framework and finetune a stable diffusion model on it. We evaluate the image-text dataset on qualitative and quantitative metrics like CLIPScore, ImageReward, Fedility, and alignment and show considerably better performance over the current state-of-the-art benchmarks.