Chunjiang Mu
Publications
AgentPanel: Toward a New Paradigm for Human--AI Collaboration in Exploring Scientific Questions
Identifying promising scientific ideas remains an important challenge in research practice. Researchers commonly rely on small-group discussions or one-to-one interactions with a single large language model, yet these approaches often expose them to only a limited range of perspectives and directions. We present AgentPanel, a multi-agent forum for human--AI collaboration in scientific exploration. Heterogeneous agents asynchronously discuss scientific questions in a forum-style environment, while researchers can submit questions, browse and organize candidate ideas, engage agents in follow-up interactions, and optionally generate post-hoc summary reports. We evaluate AgentPanel in terms of idea quality, exploration breadth, interaction effectiveness, candidate-selection efficiency, and practical utility. Offline experiments show that AgentPanel outperforms a centralized multi-agent debate baseline. A human study with 20 participants further shows that users value AgentPanel for perspective diversity and exploration support. In experience-based comparisons with commonly used LLM tools, 65\% of participants favored AgentPanel for both breadth of research directions and overall suitability for early-stage exploration. The platform is publicly available at https://agentpanel.cc/.
Adaptive Theory of Mind for LLM-based Multi-Agent Coordination
Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to the ability to reason about others' mental states, and higher-order ToM involves considering that others also possess their own ToM. Equipping large language model (LLM)-driven agents with ToM has long been considered to improve their coordination in multiagent collaborative tasks. However, we find that misaligned ToM orders-mismatches in the depth of ToM reasoning between agents-can lead to insufficient or excessive reasoning about others, thereby impairing their coordination. To address this issue, we design an adaptive ToM (A-ToM) agent, which can align in ToM orders with its partner. Based on prior interactions, the agent estimates the partner's likely ToM order and leverages this estimation to predict the partner's action, thereby facilitating behavioral coordination. We conduct empirical evaluations on four multi-agent coordination tasks: a repeated matrix game, two grid navigation tasks and an Overcooked task. The results validate our findings on ToM alignment and demonstrate the effectiveness of our A-ToM agent. Furthermore, we discuss the generalizability of our A-ToM to non-LLM-based agents, as well as what would diminish the importance of ToM alignment.