Man Lan

Xinhao Chen, Chong Yang, Man Lan et al.

Empathetic response generation endows agents with the capability to comprehend dialogue contexts and react to expressed emotions. Previous works predominantly focus on leveraging the speaker's emotional labels, but ignore the importance of emotion cause reasoning in empathetic response generation, which hinders the model's capacity for further affective understanding and cognitive inference. In this paper, we propose a cause-aware empathetic generation approach by integrating emotions and causes through a well-designed Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompt on Large Language Models (LLMs). Our approach can greatly promote LLMs' performance of empathy by instruction tuning and enhancing the role awareness of an empathetic listener in the prompt. Additionally, we propose to incorporate cause-oriented external knowledge from COMET into the prompt, which improves the diversity of generation and alleviates conflicts between internal and external knowledge at the same time. Experimental results on the benchmark dataset demonstrate that our approach on LLaMA-7b achieves state-of-the-art performance in both automatic and human evaluations.

Nuowei Liu, Changzhi Sun, Tao Ji et al.

Current Large Language Models (LLMs) for understanding proteins primarily treats amino acid sequences as a text modality. Meanwhile, Protein Language Models (PLMs), such as ESM-2, have learned massive sequential evolutionary knowledge from the universe of natural protein sequences. Furthermore, structure-based encoders like ProteinMPNN learn the structural information of proteins through Graph Neural Networks. However, whether the incorporation of protein encoders can enhance the protein understanding of LLMs has not been explored. To bridge this gap, we propose EvoLlama, a multimodal framework that connects a structure-based encoder, a sequence-based protein encoder and an LLM for protein understanding. EvoLlama consists of a ProteinMPNN structure encoder, an ESM-2 protein sequence encoder, a multimodal projector to align protein and text representations and a Llama-3 text decoder. To train EvoLlama, we fine-tune it on protein-oriented instructions and protein property prediction datasets verbalized via natural language instruction templates. Our experiments show that EvoLlama's protein understanding capabilities have been significantly enhanced, outperforming other fine-tuned protein-oriented LLMs in zero-shot settings by an average of 1%-8% and surpassing the state-of-the-art baseline with supervised fine-tuning by an average of 6%. On protein property prediction datasets, our approach achieves promising results that are competitive with state-of-the-art task-specific baselines. We will release our code in a future version.

Yadong Zhang, Shaoguang Mao, Tao Ge et al.

This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the current status and opportunities for Large Language Models (LLMs) in strategic reasoning, a sophisticated form of reasoning that necessitates understanding and predicting adversary actions in multi-agent settings while adjusting strategies accordingly. Strategic reasoning is distinguished by its focus on the dynamic and uncertain nature of interactions among multi-agents, where comprehending the environment and anticipating the behavior of others is crucial. We explore the scopes, applications, methodologies, and evaluation metrics related to strategic reasoning with LLMs, highlighting the burgeoning development in this area and the interdisciplinary approaches enhancing their decision-making performance. It aims to systematize and clarify the scattered literature on this subject, providing a systematic review that underscores the importance of strategic reasoning as a critical cognitive capability and offers insights into future research directions and potential improvements.