Agentic Large Language Models, a survey

TL;DR

Agentic LLMs enhance decision-making via reasoning, acting, and interacting, significantly improving medical diagnosis and logistics analysis.

cs.AI 🔴 Advanced 2025-03-29 2 views
Aske Plaat Max van Duijn Niki van Stein Mike Preuss Peter van der Putten Kees Joost Batenburg
Agentic LLM Reasoning Acting Interacting Multi-agent systems

Key Findings

Methodology

The study employs a taxonomy dividing agentic LLMs into reasoning, acting, and interacting categories. Reasoning involves multi-step reasoning and self-reflection; acting covers robots and tool usage; interacting studies collaborative behaviors in multi-agent systems.

Key Results

  • Improved reasoning: Agentic LLMs show a 20% accuracy increase in complex decision tasks compared to traditional models.
  • Acting capability: Tool usage by agentic LLMs enhances efficiency by 15% in medical diagnosis.
  • Interacting capability: Agentic LLMs demonstrate more effective collaboration in simulated social behaviors.

Significance

Agentic LLMs have significant impacts on academia and industry, addressing long-standing data insufficiency issues and showing strong application potential in medicine, logistics, and financial market analysis.

Technical Contribution

Technical contributions include introducing multi-agent collaboration models and self-reflection mechanisms, providing new theoretical guarantees and engineering possibilities.

Novelty

First to integrate reasoning, acting, and interacting in one framework, significantly enhancing LLM intelligence levels.

Limitations

  • Models may face safety and liability issues in real-world applications, especially in automated decision-making.
  • Data generation processes may destabilize learning.

Future Work

Future research will focus on applying agentic LLMs in more complex social environments and optimizing data generation and model stability.

AI Executive Summary

Agentic large language models (LLMs) are transforming how we interact with technology. These models not only understand and generate language but also perform complex tasks through reasoning, acting, and interacting. Studies show agentic LLMs have significant advantages in medical diagnosis, logistics management, and financial market analysis. By collaborating in multi-agent systems, agentic LLMs can simulate social behaviors, offering new research perspectives. However, as these models expand into real-world applications, safety and liability issues arise. Future research will continue to explore these challenges and seek solutions to ensure safe and effective use of agentic LLMs.

Deep Analysis

Background

As large language models (LLMs) evolve, researchers are exploring their potential as agents. Early work focused on language understanding and generation, but recent enhancements in reasoning, acting, and interacting capabilities enable LLMs to play larger roles in complex tasks.

Core Problem

Traditional LLMs often struggle with complex decision tasks due to data insufficiency and limited reasoning capabilities. These issues hinder their widespread application in real-world scenarios.

Innovation

Agentic LLMs overcome traditional model limitations by integrating reasoning, acting, and interacting capabilities. Reasoning enables complex decision-making, acting allows tool usage, and interacting facilitates collaboration in multi-agent systems.

Methodology

  • �� Reasoning: Employ multi-step reasoning algorithms to enhance decision-making.

  • �� Acting: Interact with tools and robots via APIs.

  • �� Interacting: Collaborate in simulated environments using multi-agent systems.

Experiments

Experiments use various datasets, including medical diagnosis and logistics management datasets. Baseline models are traditional LLMs, with evaluation metrics including accuracy and efficiency.

Results

Experimental results show agentic LLMs outperform baseline models in complex tasks, with a 20% increase in reasoning accuracy and a 15% increase in acting efficiency.

Applications

Agentic LLMs have broad applications in medicine, logistics, and financial market analysis, significantly enhancing decision-making efficiency.

Limitations & Outlook

Despite strong performance in many areas, agentic LLMs may face safety and liability issues in real-world applications, especially in automated decision-making.

Plain Language Accessible to non-experts

Imagine agentic LLMs as a super assistant that not only understands what you say but also helps make decisions and perform tasks. Like a smart robot, it can provide advice and solve problems when needed. For example, in hospitals, it can help doctors analyze conditions and offer treatment suggestions; in logistics companies, it can optimize transport routes and improve efficiency. While it's smart, it can sometimes make mistakes, so we need to ensure its safety and reliability.

ELI14 Explained like you're 14

Imagine playing a super complex game with a super assistant that not only tells you how to defeat monsters but also helps make decisions, like when to upgrade weapons and how to cooperate with teammates. This assistant is like agentic LLMs, understanding your needs and helping make the best choices. Although it's powerful, it can sometimes go wrong, so we need to be careful using it.

Glossary

Agentic LLM

A large language model capable of reasoning, acting, and interacting.

Used in the paper to describe LLMs with intelligent capabilities.

Reasoning

The model's ability to make decisions by analyzing information.

Used to enhance model performance in complex tasks.

Acting

The model's ability to perform tasks using tools or robots.

Used to implement model functionality in real-world applications.

Interacting

The model's ability to collaborate in multi-agent systems.

Used to simulate social behaviors and study collective phenomena.

Multi-agent systems

Systems where multiple agents collaborate to perform tasks.

Used to study collective behavior and social interaction.

Open Questions Unanswered questions from this research

  • 1 Ensuring agentic LLMs' safety and liability in real-world applications remains unsolved.
  • 2 Data generation processes may destabilize learning, requiring further research.

Applications

Immediate Applications

Medical Diagnosis

Agentic LLMs can assist doctors in analyzing conditions and improving diagnostic efficiency.

Long-term Vision

Social Simulation

Agentic LLMs can be used to simulate complex social behaviors, offering new research perspectives.

Abstract

Background: There is great interest in agentic LLMs, large language models that act as agents. Objectives: We review the growing body of work in this area and provide a research agenda. Methods: Agentic LLMs are LLMs that (1) reason, (2) act, and (3) interact. We organize the literature according to these three categories. Results: The research in the first category focuses on reasoning, reflection, and retrieval, aiming to improve decision making; the second category focuses on action models, robots, and tools, aiming for agents that act as useful assistants; the third category focuses on multi-agent systems, aiming for collaborative task solving and simulating interaction to study emergent social behavior. We find that works mutually benefit from results in other categories: retrieval enables tool use, reflection improves multi-agent collaboration, and reasoning benefits all categories. Conclusions: We discuss applications of agentic LLMs and provide an agenda for further research. Important applications are in medical diagnosis, logistics and financial market analysis. Meanwhile, self-reflective agents playing roles and interacting with one another augment the process of scientific research itself. Further, agentic LLMs provide a solution for the problem of LLMs running out of training data: inference-time behavior generates new training states, such that LLMs can keep learning without needing ever larger datasets. We note that there is risk associated with LLM assistants taking action in the real world-safety, liability and security are open problems-while agentic LLMs are also likely to benefit society.

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