AI Assistants Overassist
arXiv:2607. 21306v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as tutors and thought partners, helping users reason through problems.
The paper introduces a framework to evaluate large language models (LLMs) on their ability to conduct full scientific inquiry cycles, combining hypothesis generation, reasoning, and exploration. By extending the Countdown task into a mathematical environment, the authors assess how LLMs probe systems, collect observations, and infer relationships, examining exploration strategies and causal discovery. Experiments across seven LLMs and various prompting methods show limited inherent inquiry skills, but structured guidance inspired by educational scaffolding markedly improves performance.
arXiv:2607. 21306v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as tutors and thought partners, helping users reason through problems.
arXiv:2610.35609v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modeling the latent, multi-step reasoning processes of learners is a core challenge for adaptive tutoring systems, which often rely on simple right/w...
arXiv:2509. 26306v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Existing multi-agent learning approaches have developed interactive training environments to explicitly promote collaboration among multiple Large Language Models (LLMs), thereby constructing stronger multi-agent systems (MAS).
arXiv:2607. 28638v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As large language model (LLM) agents increasingly learn from experience, they primarily rely on trajectory-level reflection to extract insights.
The paper presents the first dataset that captures how humans learn and use mechanisms in unfamiliar environments, using ARC‑AGI‑3 as a testbed. It includes 144 trajectories from 64 participants across 25 public games, each paired with time‑synchronized actions and think‑aloud audio, and 250 trajectories from large language model agents with and without harnesses. The dataset is annotated for mechanism triggers, action purposes, errors, and recovery, enabling a comparison of human and LLM cognition, highlighting differences in hypothesis testing, exploration, and use of qualitative representations.
The paper introduces a computational model that encodes symbolic knowledge as mental programs combining natural language and source code, and uses LLM-guided Bayesian learning to sequentially infer these programs. It demonstrates that this approach satisfies data‑efficiency, uncertainty handling, and flexibility, reproducing human inductive learning and active inquiry behaviors such as anchoring and garden‑pathing. In contrast, pure LLMs and classic Bayesian models either fail the task, do not match human behavior, or require prohibitive computational resources.
The paper introduces T2T (Thickening-to-Thinning), a dynamic reward framework for large language models that mimics human learning by separating exploration and consolidation phases. During incorrect attempts, T2T encourages exploration to broaden the search space, while after correct solutions it applies length penalties to promote concise reasoning. Experiments on mathematical benchmarks across five mainstream LLMs show that T2T outperforms standard GRPO and recent baselines, improving overall reasoning performance.
arXiv:2606. 18257v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While LLMs show promise in automating educational content creation, their ability to generate questions that stimulate higher-order thinking remains understudied.
arXiv:2606. 04751v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents in scientific tasks.
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) improves the reasoning capabilities of large language models, but prompt groups with identical rollout rewards consume generation budget without effective learning signals. Pre-rollout prompt selection can reduce this waste by screening prompts before rollout generation.
The paper introduces MENTOR, a multi‑agent framework that provides on‑policy pedagogical intervention to address zero‑reward collapse in reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards. MENTOR diagnoses failures in real time and generates targeted prompts to guide the learning agent, integrating seamlessly with existing policy optimization pipelines such as GRPO. Experiments on math and code generation tasks show that MENTOR significantly reduces collapse, achieving up to 78.3% relative gains on Llama‑3.2‑3B‑Instruct.
The paper reviews and categorizes large language models that combine step‑by‑step reasoning with interactive search, treating retrieval as an action within an iterative agentic loop. It analyzes these systems along four architectural axes—retrieval coupling, controller design, knowledge source, and grounding strictness—while also considering the learning signal as a cross‑cutting factor. The authors conduct controlled ablations and benchmark analyses to clarify how design choices affect search, stopping, and grounding behavior, aiming to provide a unified perspective for future research.