Daily Papers

Recent advances in embodied agents with multimodal perception and reasoning capabilities based on large vision-language models (LVLMs), excel in autonomously interacting either real or cyber worlds, helping people make intelligent decisions in complex environments. However, the current works are normally optimized by golden action trajectories or ideal task-oriented solutions toward a definitive goal. This paradigm considers limited user-oriented factors, which could be the reason for their performance reduction in a wide range of personal assistant applications. To address this, we propose Chain-of-User-Thought (COUT), a novel embodied reasoning paradigm that takes a chain of thought from basic action thinking to explicit and implicit personalized preference thought to incorporate personalized factors into autonomous agent learning. To target COUT, we introduce SmartAgent, an agent framework perceiving cyber environments and reasoning personalized requirements as 1) interacting with GUI to access an item pool, 2) generating users' explicit requirements implied by previous actions, and 3) recommending items to fulfill users' implicit requirements. To demonstrate SmartAgent's capabilities, we also create a brand-new dataset SmartSpot that offers a full-stage personalized action-involved environment. To our best knowledge, our work is the first to formulate the COUT process, serving as a preliminary attempt towards embodied personalized agent learning. Our extensive experiments on SmartSpot illuminate SmartAgent's functionality among a series of embodied and personalized sub-tasks. We will release code and data upon paper notification at https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/SmartAgent.

Current Large Language Model (LLM) agents demonstrate strong reasoning and tool use capabilities, but often lack self-awareness, failing to balance these approaches effectively. This imbalance leads to Tool Overuse, where models unnecessarily rely on external tools for tasks solvable with parametric knowledge, increasing computational overhead. Inspired by human metacognition, we introduce SMART (Strategic Model-Aware Reasoning with Tools), a paradigm that enhances an agent's self-awareness to optimize task handling and reduce tool overuse. To support this paradigm, we introduce SMART-ER, a dataset spanning three domains, where reasoning alternates between parametric knowledge and tool-dependent steps, with each step enriched by rationales explaining when tools are necessary. Through supervised training, we develop SMARTAgent, a family of models that dynamically balance parametric knowledge and tool use. Evaluations show that SMARTAgent reduces tool use by 24% while improving performance by over 37%, enabling 7B-scale models to match its 70B counterpart and GPT-4o. Additionally, SMARTAgent generalizes to out-of-distribution test data like GSM8K and MINTQA, maintaining accuracy with just one-fifth the tool calls. These highlight the potential of strategic tool use to enhance reasoning, mitigate overuse, and bridge the gap between model size and performance, advancing intelligent and resource-efficient agent designs.