@conference {2025,
	title = {Measuring and Mitigating Rapport Bias of Large Language Models under Multi-Agent Social Interactions},
	booktitle = {Proceedings of ICLR},
	year = {2026},
	address = {Rio de Janeiro, Brazil},
	abstract = {Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in multi-agent systems (MAS) as components of collaborative intelligence, where peer interactions dynamically shape individual decision-making. Although prior work has focused on conformity bias, we extend the analysis to examine how LLMs form trust from previous impressions, resist misinformation, and integrate peer input during interaction, key factors for achieving collective intelligence under complex social dynamics. We present KAIROS, a benchmark simulating quiz contests with peer agents of varying reliability, offering fine-grained control over conditions such as expert-novice roles, noisy crowds, and adversarial peers. LLMs receive both historical interactions and current peer responses, allowing systematic investigation into how trust, peer action, and self-confidence influence decisions. As for mitigation strategies, we evaluate prompting, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning, Group Relative Policy Optimisation (GRPO), across multiple models. Our results reveal that GRPO with multi-agent context combined with outcome-based rewards and unconstrained reasoning achieves the best overall performance, but also decreases the robustness to social influence compared to Base models. The code and datasets are available at: https://github.com/declare-lab/KAIROS},
	url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18321},
	author = {M. Song and T. D. Pala and W. Jin and A. Zadeh and C. Li and D. Herremans and S. Poria}
}
@conference {2026,
	title = {PromptDistill: Query-based Selective Token Retention in Intermediate Layers for Efficient Large Language Model Inference},
	booktitle = {19th International Natural Language Generation Conference (INLG)},
	year = {2026},
	month = {10/2026},
	abstract = {As large language models (LLMs) tackle increasingly complex tasks and longer documents, their inference cost becomes a major bottleneck. To address this, we propose PromptDistill, a novel, training-free method that improves inference efficiency while preserving generation quality. PromptDistill identifies and retains the most informative tokens by leveraging early-layer attention, preserving their hidden states while reducing computation in later layers. Unlike previous methods such as H2O, SnapKV, and GemFilter, which perform compression only after full input processing, or ignore contextual dependencies, PromptDistill dynamically allocates computation to relevant tokens while maintaining global context. Experiments on LLaMA 3.1 8B, Phi 3.5 Mini, Qwen2 7B/14B, Phi 3 128k across LongBench, InfBench, and Needle in a Haystack demonstrate that PromptDistill achieves substantial efficiency gains with minimal quality loss. With a single-stage selection strategy, it outperforms GemFilter, H2O, and SnapKV, achieving an overall 1\% to 5\% performance improvement with faster inference. Additionally, we explore multi-stage selection, which further improves efficiency while maintaining strong generation performance. These results demonstrate the adaptability of LLM hidden representations and provide valuable insights into optimizing inference for long-context scenarios. Link to codes will be added after anonymous review.},
	url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23274},
	author = {W. Jin and M. Song and T. D. Pala and C.Y. Ken and D. Herremans and S. Poria}
}
@article {2025,
	title = {Demystifying deep search: a holistic evaluation with hint-free multi-hop questions and factorised metrics},
	journal = {arXiv:2510.05137},
	year = {2025},
	url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05137},
	author = {M. Song and R. Liu and Wang, Xinyu and Jiang, Yong and Xie, Pengjun and Huang, Fei and Zhou, Jingren and D. Herremans and S. Poria}
}
