Adaptive Thinking via Mode Policy Optimization for Social Language Agents
This addresses the need for more efficient and flexible social language agents, though it appears incremental by building on existing methods like GRPO.
The paper tackles the problem of language agents lacking dynamic reasoning depth in social intelligence simulation by proposing an Adaptive Mode Learning (AML) framework, which achieves 15.6% higher task performance than GPT-4o and outperforms GRPO by 7.0% with 32.8% shorter reasoning chains.
Effective social intelligence simulation requires language agents to dynamically adjust reasoning depth, a capability notably absent in current studies. Existing methods either lack this kind of reasoning capability or enforce Long Chain-of-Thought reasoning uniformly across all scenarios, resulting in excessive token usage and inflexible social simulation. To address this, we propose an $\textbf{A}$daptive $\textbf{M}$ode $\textbf{L}$earning ($\textbf{AML}$) framework in this paper, aiming to improve the adaptive thinking ability of language agents in dynamic social interactions. To this end, we first identify hierarchical thinking modes ranging from intuitive response to deep deliberation based on the cognitive control theory. We then develop the $\textbf{A}$daptive $\textbf{M}$ode $\textbf{P}$olicy $\textbf{O}$ptimization ($\textbf{AMPO}$) algorithm to optimize the context-aware mode switching and reasoning. Our framework advances existing research in three key aspects: (1) Multi-granular thinking mode design, (2) Context-aware mode switching across social interaction, and (3) Token-efficient reasoning via depth-adaptive processing. Extensive experiments on social intelligence benchmarks verify that AML achieves 15.6% higher task performance than GPT-4o. Notably, our AMPO outperforms GRPO by 7.0% with 32.8% shorter reasoning chains, demonstrating the advantage of adaptive thinking mode selection and optimization mechanism in AMPO over GRPO's fixed-depth solution.