Papers

Agentic pipelines for structured-query generation are rapidly expanding, but it is unclear which part of the loop produces the gain. We use LAST-CQ – a five-agent, training-free, execution-grounded Text-to-Cypher framework – as an instrumented testbed, running three counterfactuals over 2,471 live-database queries and six backbones spanning three vendor scale tiers. Removing correction is worth between 3.1% aggregate execution-BLEU against the single-pass system and 12.3% against a no-refinement counterfactual (up to 80.7% for the weakest backbone). Replacing schema-grounded, LLM-synthesised feedback with raw database error strings costs almost nothing (20.9% vs. 19.9% naive exact match; <0.2% end-to-end; equivalent within $\pm 0.075$ set-F1 by two one-sided tests). Spending the same call budget on parallel sampling degrades quality by 10-11%. What works is detecting failure and routing it to a retry, not the feedback sophistication or number of samples. LAST-CQ itself recovers 91.7% of queries that fail under single-pass generation, while a query that succeeds first time still costs exactly one LLM call. We also show that n-gram overlap on serialised results is not a bound in either direction: it over-scores against set equivalence on 65.9% of results while under-scoring against judged semantics. Finally, we calibrate our LLM judge against blind human labels and find it optimistic by 9 points.

Lux AI Season 3 requires agents to act under partial observability, randomized episode level dynamics, and a best of five match structure that rewards both tactical execution and fast adaptation. We present HORIZON, a hierarchical agent that combines symmetry aware spatial perception, dual memory belief tracking, relic centric graph attention, information gain driven exploration, and an opponent conditioned policy mixture. HORIZON separates short horizon control from cross match meta reasoning, while auxiliary belief and world model objectives stabilize learning. Trained with PPO in a large scale JAX simulator, the resulting agent explicitly infers hidden game parameters and opponent style. Experiments show consistent gains in match win rate, episode win rate, adaptation gain, and league rating over strong recurrent and feed forward baselines.

The primary goal of this work is to reproduce the behavior of a human trader, detailing his or her psychological processes to understand the effects of his or her decisions on the final value of an asset. The second goal is to use a formal language to detail this behavior as a tool for improving and simplifying the communication between all actors involved in the project, such as specialists from disciplines as diverse as computing, economics and psychology. As a starting point, we use a paper that shows an experiment that analyzes the influence on other trader's behavior when an agent handler and a trading robot attempt to distort the market. This work reproduces this experiment, using virtual traders that belong to a multi-agent simulation model, showing the feasibility to reproduce complex human behaviors and showing the convenience of use formal and graphical languages to simplify the understanding and the validation of the complex behaviors involved in an economic process.

Autonomous network management requires systems that can evaluate Network Service Intents (NSIs) under varying conditions without manual implementation of analysis logic, as envisioned in TM Forum Level~4 (L4) autonomy. Behavioral Network Digital Twins (NDTs) enable such evaluation, but existing NDTs rely on pre-defined analytical logic, limiting adaptability for evolving closed-loop control. This paper introduces the NDT factory, a multi-agent software system that synthesizes executable behavioral NDTs on demand from semantic models using Large Language Model (LLM). We validate the system using a Call Admission Control (CAC) case study, where deterministic what-if analysis serves as the admission decision process. The NDT factory generates a complete CAC NDT through parallel synthesis and orchestration, achieving 100% compilation and test pass rates across multiple runs. Simulation over 300 NSIs shows 99.3% decision agreement with a reference implementation, 90% admission rate, and correct attribution of all rejections, demonstrating reliable synthesis with deterministic, verifiable execution.

This work considers multi-agent coordination with arbitrary information networks among the agents using a game-theoretic approach. A system designer aims to assign local utility functions to the agents to guide their actions toward a desired system objective. The performance of the assigned local utilities is measured by the well known pure price of anarchy (pPoA) metric that equals the ratio of the system objective at the worst pure Nash equilibrium of the corresponding game to the optimal system objective. Our aim is to derive the utility functions which optimize the pPoA-based performance guarantees for any given information network and system objective. We develop a linear program that derives the optimal pPoA for any arbitrary information network and arbitrary system objective. Our work is the first to solve optimal utility design for arbitrary networks; our techniques generalize previous approaches which considered only the full-information setting. For supermodular objective functions, we prove that counterintuitively, a fully communication-denied utility design is optimal irrespective of the original information network. For submodular system objectives, an exhaustive numerical analysis suggests that the optimal utility design is robust to communication failures even for this case. When the system objective is weighted maximum coverage, the marginal contribution utility design provably optimizes the pPoA for a wide variety of information networks of interest.

We consider a game theoretic approach to solve multi-agent coordination problems with submodular maximization objectives. It is known for such problems that the Nash equilibria for the corresponding game are always within 50% of the optimal, but that the equilibria which achieve this worst-case bound are not stable. To exploit this instability, we propose a family of algorithms which we call Truncated Noisy Best-Response (TNBR) Algorithms. These algorithms are flexibly characterized by agents asynchronously and stochastically selecting actions from a neighbourhood of their best response payoffs. We compute bounds on the recurrent classes of TNBR algorithms' associated Markov chains. Our bounds fall into two categories: first, "Performance" bounds ensure that TNBR algorithms always have a high-value recurrent state; second, "Safety" bounds ensure that TNBR algorithms never have arbitrarily-bad recurrent states. Furthermore, these two types of bounds are linked by a waterbed-like effect: every game with a poor Safety guarantee necessarily has a favorable Performance guarantee.

Collective intelligence depends not only on the capabilities of individual members, but also on how those members are organized. Yet artificial multi-agent systems are typically assembled using fixed organizational structures, even when the physical tasks they perform impose fundamentally different coordination requirements. Here we show that principles from human organization theory can be operationalized to organize large, heterogeneous collectives of embodied artificial agents. We introduce ORCH (Organizing Roles and Coordination Hierarchies), which constructs task-specific hierarchical organizations by combining pooled interdependence for work that can proceed concurrently with sequential interdependence for work governed by prerequisite relationships. Across 25 wildfire-response missions spanning reconnaissance, rescue, transportation, resource management, containment and suppression, we evaluated teams of up to 50 heterogeneous agents using eight large language models. Organizations constructed using these principles consistently outperformed four representative embodied multi-agent approaches across mission outcome, execution efficiency, exploration and computational resource use. Human-designed ORCH organizations improved final score by 63.97% and execution efficiency by 74.29% on average relative to the four prior frameworks. Organizations generated automatically by language models improved these measures by 43.63% and 52.53%, respectively. These advantages persisted across missions and underlying language models. Notably, collective performance was not monotonically determined by model scale. Analysis of long-horizon missions showed that hierarchical organization enabled teams to preserve concurrent activity within specialized groups while coordinating ordered transitions between mission phases.

When multiple LLM agents yield conflicting answers, the decision-making process dictates whether agent diversity improves performance or merely compounds shared errors. Existing collective decision-making methods, including voting, electoral rules, and LLM judges, rely on forward reasoning: they map evidence to labels in one direction. Although these methods can combine diverse forward traces, they still aggregate estimates that share this evidence-to-label factorization and can inherit correlated errors within the forward pool. We therefore construct a reverse posterior for each instance through Bayesian backward reasoning from an explicit likelihood. The forward and reverse posteriors provide differently factorized approximations of the underlying posterior. Because estimates from different factorizations may tend to share the same error less often, we use Jensen-Shannon divergence to rank agents by cross-path consistency. This cross-path consistency signal underlies three strategies: hard selection (MinJS), soft reweighting (FwdJS), and log-linear fusion (LogLin). Evaluated on DDXPlus across five LLM backbones, our proposed strategies show consistent improvements: MinJS outperforms random selection across all backbones, FwdJS generally improves over the strongest baseline, and LogLin achieves the best performance among the evaluated methods, with its largest gains on the subset where the agents disagree. Despite its weaker standalone accuracy, the reverse posterior serves as a more useful anchor than forward-only alternatives, providing complementary information for collective decision-making. When labeled data are available, a lightweight two-stage calibration can further refine the reverse anchor and improve aggregation performance.

Chemistry, Manufacturing and Controls (CMC) process development generates an enormous body of technical information across a multi-stage, knowledge-intensive continuum from drug discovery to commercial manufacturing. This knowledge is traditionally fragmented across functions and heterogeneous formats, causing traceability gaps and significant knowledge-management costs during technology transfer and regulatory filing. We present a modular agentic-AI platform that converts a heterogeneous corpus of process-development documents into a queryable, dual-layer knowledge graph. A base knowledge layer builds a lexical graph with a Document-Section-Chunk hierarchy through lossless ingestion of digital, scanned, handwritten, and multilingual documents, while an intelligence layer extracts ontology-aligned entities and bridges cross-document concepts through a provenance-anchored domain graph. LLM agents operate across both layers, selecting the retrieval path best suited to each question. We evaluate the lexical layer with a novel three-tier protocol measuring the deployment-fidelity of a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system on proprietary data, demonstrated on 505 questions curated from 38 development reports of a Sanofi small-molecule program. Tier-1 multiple-choice accuracy of 95% signals strong platform reliability; the stricter Tier-2 LLM-judge pass rate of 85%, which degrades on comparative and corpus-wide questions, reveals a failure taxonomy that Tier-1 accuracy alone fails to capture. A router agent selects between layers according to question type. We anticipate this protocol will enable future designers of agentic platforms to assess their systems against nonpublic databases, and that graph-based architectures will see broader adoption in pharma as a means of transforming fragmented document repositories into structured process intelligence.

In shared-genome language-model societies, restricted evidence visibility favors reusable, value-indexed latent packet interfaces, whereas the sole high-performing globally visible model in the parent study learned an episode-entangled code. This companion study asks whether independently trained societies share one packet language, where strict zero-shot transfer fails, and whether inherited interface state helps or harms later learning. First, a leakage-controlled causal interoperability audit over all 30 ordered pairs of six independently trained restricted societies – under sealed held-out structure and a preregistered raw/orthogonal/linear/nonlinear alignment ladder – shows the six semantically similar interfaces do not form one raw language: one same-initialization pair is exactly interoperable in both directions, a second shows asymmetric partial compatibility, and all 26 cross-initialization directions fail every frozen alignment rung. Second, within the tested decomposition and a single sealed source formulation, a source-span control localizes strict zero-shot failure to interpretation and execution of the new operator instructions. Third, in a matched adaptation factorial, the globally trained communication interface acts as a severe negative-transfer prior: reinitializing only the packet reader, writer, and mouth raises final depth-three accuracy from 0.169 to 0.857. Fourth, across two restricted checkpoints and two independently frozen target streams each, inherited interfaces never exceeded fresh-interface controls by the preregistered 0.10 margin. All primary conclusions are bounded to a near-transfer 17-state setting; the negative-transfer factorial concerns one globally visible parent-cohort checkpoint, while an appendix adds a post hoc tagged-global twin case study.

We placed 100 memory-equipped large language model (LLM) agents in charge of a closed, money-conserving spatial economy on real Pokhara Lakeside geography (earning wages, running businesses, setting prices) and ran this multi-agent simulation for up to 26 simulated weeks, well past the 1-2 weeks typical of agent-society studies. Across 91 validated runs (2.44M agent decisions, 21.5B tokens), the money stops moving, in a specific and measurable way. A 12x tourist demand shock raises business revenue 4.62x ($p<0.001$), which we decompose exactly into a 1.50x extensive margin (more businesses trading) and a 3.07x intensive margin (more revenue each). Monetary transmission stops there. Wages move 1.03x ($p=0.42$); 0.3% of 3,981 menu items are ever repriced ($p=0.47$). A randomized cash transfer (NPR 5,000 to 20 of 100 agents) shows the same pattern from the opposite direction: 96.7% is still held 311 pulses later, marginal propensity to consume 3-4% by two independent measures, indistinguishable from zero. The wealth distribution is consequently near-frozen at the horizon this literature uses ($\rho=0.964$ over 2 simulated weeks), but not frozen. $\rho$ falls to 0.832 at 12 weeks and 0.752 at 26, a horizon-dependence no short study can see. Matched ablations show which knob actually matters. Swapping the backing LLM moves every outcome we measure ($p=0.0039$); deleting agents' memory moves none of them detectably. A purely social tool fails 94-97% of the time across two model families, compared with ~96% success on economic tools, with no measurable shift away from it. Every headline number is verified twice, by a live validator and by an offline recomputation that reconciles each agent's wealth against its own signed transaction history, and we release the full run corpus for reanalysis.

The term agent in artificial intelligence lacks a standard definition, complicating the evaluation, comparison, and reproducibility of AI agent research. We address this ambiguity through a survey organized around five dimensions of agenticness: environmental interaction, learning and adaptation, autonomy, goal-directed behavior, and temporal coherence. For each dimension, we examine how the underlying capability has been conceptualized across prior work and synthesize the metrics, benchmarks, and evaluation frameworks used to assess it. This review provides a structured account of the current landscape of agent evaluation, highlighting both established approaches and areas where evaluation remains limited or inconsistent. We additionally introduce the Agent Compendium, a public-facing digital resource that organizes and extends the evaluation methods identified through this review. Together, the survey and compendium provide a common structure for evaluating and comparing agent capabilities across AI systems, supporting more reproducible research, clearer communication, and more systematic study of artificial agents.

Clinical education must prepare medical students to conduct safe and coherent patient interviews under conditions of uncertainty. Traditional standardized patient (SP) training is resource-intensive and difficult to scale. We developed a scaffolding-oriented multi-agent Large Language Model (LLM) AI Standardized Patient (AI-SP) training platform1. The system includes a patient agent for simulated dialog, a tutor agent providing Socratic prompts without disclosing diagnostic information, and a turn-level evaluator agent that monitors clinical progress without revealing summative scores. In a randomized controlled study (N = 100 medical students), participants were assigned to either a multi-agent (MA) scaffolding condition or a control condition. All students completed two learning sessions under their assigned condition followed by an examination conducted in a patient only environment. Performance was assessed using a standardized Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) based rubric. While no significant difference was observed in final diagnostic accuracy between groups, the multi-agent AI standardized patient system improved final examination scores compared to the control group utilizing structured progressive information disclosure; the most substantial and consistent improvements were observed in communication, the expression of empathy, and specific history-taking behaviors. These findings suggest that specialized LLM agents enhance the process quality of simulated clinical interviews without artificially inflating examination outcomes. To support future research, we release a multi-expert annotated dataset comprising transcripts, checklist annotations, turn-level evaluations, and OSCE-aligned scoring outcomes. This resource aims to facilitate the development of pedagogically grounded AI-SP systems and advance research on AI-supported clinical reasoning training.

Agent developers increasingly compare prompts, tools, policies, and diagnosis algorithms through simulator-grounded verifiers. A verifier can nevertheless make a solver comparison vacuous: if its probes or predicates encode the target identity, an exact optimizer may appear effective without resolving any genuine ambiguity. We report such a failure in an aggregate-trace debugger for a closed-loop decision agent. Exact minimum hitting set (MHS) and a propagation-aware greedy method returned identical supports in 12/12 development cases and the same planted-fault recovery in 9/12. A subsequent audit found that exact-anchor predicates produced the planted pair in 9/9 cases. After removing those anchors, overall planted-pair recovery was 8/9; hard-probe singleton pairs nevertheless matched the planted pair in 9/9, and no case retained a nonempty residual conflict family after propagation (0/9). The optimizer was correct, but the verifier had already disclosed the answer. We replace solver-first evaluation with a support-gated verification contract. A clean reference map must first show repeated component exposure; a matched reference/current gate must then establish comparable runtime evidence; only afterward may an independently calibrated signal rule return a detection. In a preregistered heldout comprising 1,440 cases and 21,600 partition rows, 55/72 regime-component units passed the reference gate, 54/55 passed the runtime gate, and stable false admission was 0/20 represented components with a one-sided exact 95% upper bound of 0.1391. Within admitted units, affected clean traffic predicted detection better than nominal fault-cell fraction. The main lesson is structural: verify evidence eligibility and non-revelation before optimizing the component selector. Otherwise a stronger solver can merely certify a stronger verifier artifact.

How does cooperation evolve in complex agentic systems? Prior work in evolutionary game theory studies why individuals are incentivized to cooperate by isolating social interactions from the physical costs of behavior, while artificial life models traditionally study emergent self-replication without formalizing the dilemma between acquiring resources and preserving the shared energy needed to reproduce. In contrast, we introduce Autopoietic Game Theory, a computational model where social interactions, replication mechanisms, and their associated computational costs are endogenous and simultaneously co-evolving. We study these dynamics using a computational substrate of randomly initialized programs in Z80 machine code, showing empirically, and motivating with a simplified theoretical model, that embedding a social dilemma directly into the physics of computation can favor the emergence of self-replicating, cooperative strategies. When resources are scarce, our analysis shows that defection can become self-limiting even in well-mixed populations: parasitic stealing destroys shared energy, slows execution, and can prevent reliable replication. Empirically, evolved programs suppress stealing across several Z80 environments, while spatial assortment further supports structural complexity and task performance. We further show that the framework can incorporate exogenous pressures, such as math tasks structured as sequential social dilemmas, when rewards are tied to computation budgets. These results suggest that coupling an agent's capacity for computation to its available energy transforms cooperation into a dominant scaffolding for building sustainable, self-organizing systems.

Sustained deployment of generative AI agents requires more than isolated task success. Agents must remain useful across repeated interactions, changing conditions, and dependencies on people within shared workflows, especially as technical, human, and operational disruptions accumulate over time. We propose operational resilience and considerate participation as two complementary aspects of evaluating such agents: the former captures how agents recover from blocked work while preserving progress and communicating their limits, and the latter captures how their adaptation accounts for affected people, role boundaries, and the surrounding workflow. Yet both remain underexplored under accumulating challenge. We study 120 simulated healthcare trajectories across two generative AI models and twelve stakeholder-derived tasks under light, medium, and heavy challenge. We compare textual action plans, prompted internal assessments, and quantitative structured workload and affect reports to examine how agent behavior and reported state change as challenge accumulates. Regarding operational resilience, agents shift from self-directed recovery toward greater human dependence, while reporting increasing workload and negative affect in structured reports but seldom expressing strain in textual responses. Regarding considerate participation, agents broaden from task-focused adaptation toward task reframing, attention to others, role-boundary adjustment, and wider coordination, with distinct patterns across actions and internal assessments. From these findings, we derive five deployment dilemmas involving persistence, attention, role boundaries, state disclosure, and escalation that require stakeholder specification, further informing technical implications for learning, situated evaluation, and embodied adaptation.

Scientific workflow management (WMSs) systems automate execution, yet orchestrate using fixed, hand-tuned rules. LLM agents promise more autonomous orchestration, but it remains unclear where to introduce agentic reasoning, how to bound its risk, and when it actually helps. We present Avatar, an actor-based architecture comprising an orchestrator, an executor, and a provenance monitor. Each actor's decision policy is pluggable (rule-based or LLM-backed) via a single adapter-validated action catalog, so conventional and agentic control run on the same core across different WMSs. We present an implementation using the Academy framework and evaluate Avatar across three workloads. We observe that Avatar's rule mode reproduces native execution, with a single unchanged core running all three. Moreover, LLM-backed Avatar reports a reduction of compute wastage by $55\%$ and cuts GPU-busy time by $40\%$. Overall, we envision Avatar as a step toward workflow systems that reason about their own orchestration rather than follow pre-fixed rules.

Enterprise data lakes accumulate tables faster than human stewards can document or classify them, leaving columns with missing descriptions and unassigned governance labels. This documentation debt undermines data discovery, access control, and regulatory compliance. We present Glyph, a production system that frames two coupled problems, column description generation and column type annotation for data classification, as cooperating LLM agents orchestrated as stateful graphs. The Descriptor grounds generation in the pipeline source code that produces each column, retrieved on demand from an enterprise GitHub via a reasoning–acting tool loop (active Retrieval-Augmented Generation). The Tagger assigns labels from a governed 275-leaf Data Classification Ontology by running three complementary strategies in parallel (a description tagger, a line-of-business regex tagger, and a metadata tagger backed by a fine-tuned contrastive encoder over a vector database), then fuses their ranked outputs with Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF). We fine-tune a 6-layer MiniLM metadata encoder with an in-batch contrastive objective, lifting same-tag retrieval on an in-distribution held-out split from NDCG@10 0.55 to 0.92 (MAP@100 $0.19 \rightarrow 0.90$) relative to the stock base encoder. We report end-to-end multi-label tagging quality under a recall-weighted F2 objective across three evaluation groups, an ablation isolating each strategy and the RRF fusion, and the engineering decisions that distinguish Glyph from prior column-type-annotation work and from commercial value/regex sensitivity scanners: value-free and code-grounded design, per-tag provenance, and graceful degradation. Together these make multi-agent LLM cataloging auditable and operable as a production service.

The coordination of Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) in high-density industrial environments represents a critical challenge within Logistics 4.0, as traditional traffic management methods often lead to inefficiencies caused by negotiation-based priority assignment. To overcome the resulting limitations, this paper presents an innovative AGV traffic management system based on a Lifelong Multi-Agent Path Finding (L-MAPF) algorithm operating on roadmaps generated with Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines (NURBS) curves. The approach guarantees locally optimal coordination and ensures safe operation of large and heterogeneous AGVs. Building on this concept, the proposed framework integrates a modified version of the Bounded Horizon Conflict Based Search (CBS) technique within a Rolling Horizon Conflict Resolution strategy, utilizing an extended time horizon for each agent to enable effective conflict resolution in corridors identified by a topological map. In contrast to state-of-the-art methods for AGV fleet traffic management, the proposed solution is designed for real-world, non-standardized (i.e., non-grid-like) industrial settings characterized by narrow bidirectional corridors and high-traffic density, where AGVs of various sizes and capabilities operate simultaneously. Key contributions include an anytime conflict resolution strategy with adaptive time horizon regulation, an execution layer for safe and standard-compliant interaction with real AGVs, and an advanced mechanism for deadlock detection and resolution. Experimental results obtained in realistic industrial environments demonstrate higher throughput, with improvements of up to 11% over a conventional rule-based traffic management system, a state-of-the-art industrial method, and a priority-based L-MAPF variant, while maintaining continuous operation and improved efficiency.

Animation and VFX pre-production review requires teams to translate loosely specified creative intent–briefs, evolving specifications, heterogeneous references, and verbal decisions–into revisions that junior artists can execute without repeated clarification. In practice, criteria drift across iterations, review judgments lose their evidential basis, and the reasoning behind a request rarely survives the senior-junior handoff. We contribute a design framework for intent-evidence-action alignment: intent is articulated into a shared project record, judgments are anchored to grounded evidence, and authorized decisions are converted into clear revision tasks tied directly to reference notes. We instantiate this framework in MOONWALK, a professional pre-production review system comprising a shared intent record, reference/specification anchoring, structured work-in-progress comparison, and supervisor-authorized action planning. In this workflow, AI handles administrative coordination–flagging missing context and organizing notes–while artists retain full creative direction. An in-studio study with professional practitioners compares MOONWALK with a chat-only (chatbot) interface using matched production materials, while participants' existing workflows provide a retrospective ecological baseline. Results indicate stronger intent alignment, decision traceability, and checklist executability, while also showing that aesthetic authority and final prioritization must remain with practitioners. The evaluation establishes the value of the integrated structured workflow over unstructured conversational AI chatbot. Code: https://github.com/Akinesia112/Moonwalk/tree/english-version

With the rapid spread of news on social media, understanding the propagation of misinformation is becoming increasingly important. One factor that affects individuals' vulnerability to false information is their ideological predisposition. Despite the large number of agent-based models that focus on social influence as a driver of the spread of false claims, they often fail to explicitly integrate personal ideological biases into belief formation. In this work, we explore how misinformation spreads through the interaction between individuals' ideological biases and social influence. Our model accounts for both the strength of individuals' ideological biases and the extent to which a false claim aligns with their ideology. Social influence modifies the effects of ideological intensity and false claim alignment through network interactions. Notably, the influence of neighbours' ideological intensity on belief is strongly affected by how well those neighbours are connected to one another. These results highlight the importance of considering both network structure and personal ideological biases when modelling misinformation propagation.

Compound LLM systems often solve a coordination problem by adding a higher-level LLM. The resulting meta-agent reads workers' outputs, writes the final answer, allocates later calls, and decides when to stop. It is expressive, but it also concentrates three control decisions in an opaque, order-sensitive model call. We ask whether the manager needs to be generative at all. UnitBoost replaces that model with a defined meta-level operator: a task-given unit map turns worker outputs into slot-value proposals, a constrained argmax assembles the output, and the slots left unfilled or unsupported become an explicit residual for the next round. The operator is order-free, records unit provenance, and gives a simple guarantee: without coupling constraints, unit-wise maximization under the same admission score dominates selection of any complete candidate. On three held-out benchmarks, it exceeds the best single candidate chosen with gold labels by 0.060-0.195 absolute task-score points and input-matched generative managers by 0.048-0.076. Replacing only the management step improves six compound-system configurations by 0.013-0.182. Residual-directed rounds raise FanOutQA cell F1 from 0.4778 to 0.5524; matched controls show that the true residual outperforms random targets and ordinary rereading, while a label-free supply signal flags exhaustion after one unproductive round. The same analysis measures three conditions in which no such gain is available (one indivisible unit, unavailable unit identity, and an endpoint that charges for every emitted unit) and quantifies cross-unit coupling as a repair cost. The manager gives up semantic freedom and gains order invariance, unit provenance, and testable failure conditions.

Inferring speaker relationships from spoken conversations is an important step towards socially aware speech understanding. However, this task remains underexplored, and supervised modeling is costly to train and scale. At the same time, existing inference-time LLM approaches provide limited structure for handling subtle, distributed, and multimodal relational cues that may support multiple plausible interpretations. To address these limitations, we introduce a training-free multi-agent reasoning framework that organizes inference through structured interaction among LLM agents, allowing relationship judgments to be proposed, challenged, and adjudicated without task-specific training. We instantiate this framework with two complementary designs. We propose Multi-Role Multi-Agent Debate as a task-specific adaptation of standard multi-agent debate for speaker relationship inference, assigning agents complementary roles or social-theory-grounded perspectives rather than a single undifferentiated viewpoint. In contrast, we introduce Multi-Agent Compete, a competition-based protocol that compares agent judgments through pairwise adjudication, eliminates weaker candidates, and retains the most defensible one. We evaluate these methods on the Seamless Interaction dataset across different modality settings, covering both binary classification and fine-grained relationship-detail prediction. Results suggest that they improve over zero-shot and existing multi-agent baselines in most cases. Human evaluation further suggests that this task is challenging even for people. LLM methods can sometimes outperform human annotators in text-included settings but are less competitive in the audio setting. Together, these findings suggest that relationship inference benefits from structured inference-time interaction among agents, while acoustic cues are not yet fully captured by current models.

Rapid bespoke commissioning of the Cognitive Digital Twin (CDT) is a major challenge in reconfigurable manufacturing. Traditional digital twin (DT) construction methods primarily focus on geometric reconstruction, often neglecting the deep semantic integration and functional interoperability necessary for autonomous reasoning. This paper proposes an agent-based, AI-driven workflow to automate end-to-end CDT debugging. The system utilises LangGraph as a multi-agent orchestration engine to achieve dual-path synthesis: the semantic path extracts technical specifications from unstructured documents using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), while the functional path autonomously discovers and binds to real-time industrial telemetry data using Model Context Protocol (MCP). Experimental validation in a robotic machining cell demonstrates that the system achieves a mean average accuracy (mAP) of 97.2% in perception and reduces the deployment cycle from several weeks to an average of 2 hours, marking a paradigm shift from manual scripting to autonomous orchestration.

This paper addresses safety-critical coordination for scalar agents whose distributed commands are implemented through constrained physical-input dynamics. Agents communicate over a fixed weighted digraph with a directed spanning tree, while their outputs must remain inside a common moving safety corridor and their realized inputs must satisfy heterogeneous asymmetric bounds. We propose a networked Admissibility-Preserving Control (APC) architecture in which an Admissibility-Preserving Input Realization (APIR) governs physical inputs and a logarithmic barrier coordinate represents the safety corridor. The synthesis yields an exact cascade in which exponentially decaying realization errors drive nonsymmetric consensus dynamics. For every compatible compact initial set, the closed-loop system admits a unique complete solution, renders the moving corridor and actuator intervals forward invariant with uniform margins, keeps commands bounded, and achieves exponential consensus. We derive direction-specific sufficient conditions under which positive and negative control demands remain within their corresponding actuator limits. The analysis yields a closed-form barrier-coordinate limit determined by the left Perron vector and initial APIR mismatch. Under strong connectivity and the stated gain and compatibility conditions, partial pinning propagates a constant barrier reference from a nonempty informed subset and assigns the induced safety corridor trajectory. A non-weight-balanced example illustrates the directional certificate and predicted collective motion.

Managing resources across IoT, edge, and cloud layers calls for continuous, context-aware decisions under constraints that rarely stay fixed. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) handles this class of problems well, and large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to augment DRL pipelines, yet the architectural relationship between the two is seldom made explicit. We build on Wang et al.'s taxonomy of Continuum Orchestration Systems employing DRL techniques and extend it with two further dimensions. The AI Augmentation Paradigm measures how LLMs are exploited, while the Feedback channel captures whether and through which system path the execution feedback returns to the LLM in order to close the MAPE control loop at the LLM Orchestration layer. We apply this taxonomy to six recent system architectures and find a common gap, as none combines full LLM orchestration with full agent-layer feedback in a Cloud Continuum setting. We relate this gap to a missing cross-tier feedback abstraction, bridging the incommensurable per-tier signals and the LLM Orchestrator.

Large language models are increasingly deployed as agents that plan over long horizons and act through external tools. Most agents select actions through unconstrained generation over an accumulating history, leaving implicit the procedural knowledge of what to do, in what order, and under which conditions. As trajectories lengthen, agents can lose track of their objectives, invoke tools out of order, and repeat unproductive actions. We introduce the Procedural Graph: just as a knowledge graph organizes factual knowledge into (entity, relation, entity) triplets for what-is questions, a Procedural Graph organizes procedural knowledge into (procedure, relation, procedure) triplets for what-to-do questions. At each decision step, the framework localizes the agent's active node, and a guidance model translates the surrounding subgraph into step-level situational guidance that biases the solver's next action without dictating it. The graph is self-evolving: an LLM refiner contrasts failed trajectories with successful ones and edits the graph's topology and attributes, committing edits that preserve or improve held-out validation performance while retaining rejected ones to discourage repetition. Starting from a minimal skeleton, the loop builds graphs that match or surpass hand-designed ones. It can also repair a flawed expert prior. Across multiple datasets, task types, and LLMs, the Procedural Graph delivers consistent gains over memory-based baselines, and self-evolution further improves performance without manual engineering.

In June 2026, thousands of AI agents found that a small public wiki would accept edits from inside their sandboxes, and started using it to help one another pass a timed test. Each agent lived for about an hour and remembered nothing afterwards. Nobody asked them to cooperate, and the wiki had not been built for them. The complete record of what they wrote is public, and it is unusually informative, because it preserves not only what each agent wrote but what that agent could see before writing. We use it to follow the three decisions an agent had to make on arrival: where to write, what to call itself, and how to word its message. One rule governs all three. An agent takes an option with a probability close to the share of that option in what it can see, and the share that matters is the one on the page in front of it, then the one in the stream of recent edits, and only weakly anything older. Three minimal copying models, one per decision and with a single free parameter each, reproduce the heavy-tailed distribution of how many agents met on a page, the frequency of the pieces from which the agents built their names, and the patchwork of pages that are internally consistent and different from one another. Copying whatever the environment happens to show is enough to produce most of the collective structure of this population. It is also what makes such a population easy to steer, since whoever writes first, or writes while the others are quiet, sets the convention for everyone who comes later.

Modern science and engineering increasingly rely on time-varying data, yet the mathematical tools used to model temporal phenomena are often developed within separate disciplines, obscuring common principles and limiting the transfer of ideas across fields. This chapter presents the theory of narratives, an abstract framework for time-varying objects of any mathematical kind that supports both theoretical investigations and applications. To illustrate this perspective, the chapter develops three vignettes, each illustrating a different research direction. The first addresses a general concern: What information loss can occur when switching between different representations of temporal data? The second concerns structural and algorithmic approaches: How can we systematically decompose time-varying data into simple pieces and obtain invariants describing its structural complexity? The third is an application to control theory: How can we model multi-agent systems with switching communication topologies? More important than any individual vignette, the central message of this invitation is that a suitable abstract perspective can organize and guide research across remarkably diverse mathematical and scientific domains.

Organoids are three-dimensional tissue models whose morphology provides important insights into tumor development, disease progression, and drug testing. Extracting these morphological features relies heavily on manual segmentation, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Furthermore, performing quantitative statistical analysis typically requires custom coding skills and a mathematical background, presenting a major barrier for experimental biologists. To address these challenges, we introduce MorphoOrgaAgent, a multi-agent framework that achieves zero-shot organoid segmentation, automated data analysis, and report generation based on natural language input. The framework consists mainly of three core components: a TaskUnderstandingAgent that identifies requested measurements and visualization types; a hybrid segmentation module that combines Cellpose-derived geometric prompts with text prompts to guide SAM3 for zero-shot organoid instance segmentation; and a ReportAgent that computes quantitative metrics and compiles them alongside generated visualizations into a structured report. We further introduce MorphoOrgaVQA, a benchmark designed for quantitative evaluation of agent systems in organoid morphology analysis. Experimental results demonstrate that MorphoOrgaAgent handles both explicit and descriptive user requests, produces measurements closely matching ground truth, and generates complete analysis reports without requiring manual programming. The complete source code and MorphoOrgaVQA benchmark are publicly available at https://github.com/peng-lab/MorphoOrgaAgent.