AI agents

Tool use, function calling, orchestration and the protocols that let models act rather than only answer.

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arXiv AI

Sep 18

Coding Agents with an Obstacle-Aware Harness for Safe Robot Manipulation

The paper introduces SafeHarness, an obstacle‑aware framework that improves the safety of coding agents for robot manipulation. By decomposing tasks into route planning and contact execution, the harness enables the agent to prioritize collision avoidance, achieving 71.9% task success and 87.5% collision avoidance—significantly better than prior methods. The study demonstrates that safety constraints can be effectively integrated into language‑model‑driven robot controllers.

By Bingxin Xu, Yuzhang Shang, Zhen Dong, Emilio Ferrara

llms agents robotics benchmarks safety

arXiv AI

Sep 18

Architectural Design, Not Only Model Intelligence, Governs Multi-Agent LLM Performance

The paper argues that the architecture of multi‑agent large language model (LLM) frameworks, rather than just the intelligence of the underlying models, largely determines system performance. It introduces a taxonomy of architectural dimensions—such as orchestration, memory, planning interfaces, specialization, and communication topology—and presents MAFBench, a unified evaluation suite. An empirical study across nine frameworks, keeping the LLM constant, reveals six design principles and shows that choices like orchestration and communication topology can dramatically affect latency, accuracy, and coordination success.

By Abdelghny Orogat, Ana Rostam, Essam Mansour

llms agents benchmarks

arXiv AI

Sep 18

Semantic Feature Analysis: Improving Agents Without Searching Over Rollouts

Semantic Feature Analysis (SFA) is a method that refines agent specifications without performing any rollout-based search. It analyzes existing execution traces, clusters workflow node outputs, extracts semantic feature classes via an extended subject‑verb‑object schema, ranks these features with a decision tree, and injects the most impactful features back into the system prompt. Evaluations on four benchmarks show that SFA consistently outperforms five prompt‑optimisation algorithms and a single‑reflection baseline, especially when rollout costs are high.

By Yuval David, Fabiana Fournier, Lior Limonad, Hadar Mulian

agents benchmarks

arXiv AI

Sep 18

Faithful, Not Corrective: Model Capability Governs Message-Format Effects in Multi-Hop Agent Relays

The study investigates how different message formats affect the fidelity of information as it passes through multiple LLM agent relays. Using a controlled testbed, the authors encode twelve atomic facts in five formats (free natural language, precision‑instructed NL, JSON, triples, key‑value) across six hops and evaluate recall against programmatic ground truth. Results show that strong relays maintain near‑lossless recall for all formats, while weaker relays exhibit significant format‑dependent recall loss, and that any injected error is faithfully propagated across all formats without causing collateral damage.

By Sicheng Zeng

llms agents

arXiv AI

Sep 18

BuildBench: Benchmarking LLM Agents on Compiling Real-World Open-Source Software

BuildBench introduces a realistic benchmark for evaluating large language model agents on the task of compiling open‑source software (OSS). It includes diverse OSS projects that lack clear build instructions, have undocumented dependencies, and may require source patching or script modification. The authors also present OSS‑BUILD‑AGENT, a baseline LLM‑based agent that retrieves build instructions effectively and achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on the benchmark.

By Zehua Zhang, Ati Priya Bajaj, Divij Handa, Siyu Liu, Arvind S Raj, Hongkai Chen, Hulin Wang, Yibo Liu, Zion Leonahenahe Basque, Souradip Nath, Vishal Juneja, Nikhil Chapre, Tiffany Bao, Yan Shoshitaishvili, Adam Doup\'e, Chitta Baral, Ruoyu Wang

llms agents benchmarks

arXiv AI

Sep 18

MAS-Shield: A Defense Framework for Secure and Efficient LLM MAS

MAS-Shield is a defense framework for Large Language Model–based Multi-Agent Systems that uses a coarse‑to‑fine filtering pipeline. It first selects critical agents, then applies lightweight auditing to most cases, and finally escalates only suspicious signals to a heavyweight committee. Experiments show a 92.5% recovery rate against adversarial attacks and a latency reduction of over 70% compared to existing methods.

By Kaixiang Wang, Zhaojiacheng Zhou, Bunyod Suvonov, Jiong Lou, Zihan Wang, Yuxiang Zheng, Yidan Lin, Wutong Zhang, Xianghan Kong, Chentao Wu, Jie Li

llms agents safety

arXiv AI

Sep 18

VLM-CAD: VLM-Optimized Collaborative Agent Design Workflow for Analog Circuit Sizing

The paper introduces VLM-CAD, a workflow that uses Vision Language Models (VLMs) for analog circuit sizing while mitigating spatial blindness and logical hallucinations. It incorporates a neuro‑symbolic parsing module, Image2Net, to convert schematics into topological graphs and JSON, and an Explainable Trust Region Bayesian Optimization method, ExTuRBO, to guide design decisions with sensitivity evidence. Experiments on 12 sizing tasks across six circuits and four technology platforms show a Strict Pass@1 of 23.3% and a Relaxed Pass@1 of 91.7%.

By Guanyuan Pan, Shuai Wang, Yugui Lin, Tiansheng Zhou, Pietro Li\`o, Zhenxin Zhao, Yaqi Wang

llms agents multimodal safety

arXiv AI

Sep 18

StarVLA-$\alpha$: Reducing Complexity in Vision-Language-Action Systems

StarVLA-α is a streamlined Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) model that reduces architectural and pipeline complexity to facilitate systematic study of VLA design choices. By employing a strong VLM backbone and minimal design, it achieves competitive performance across multiple benchmarks (LIBERO, SimplerEnv, RoboTwin, RoboCasa) and outperforms the baseline π₀.₅ by 20% on the RoboChallenge benchmark. The authors plan to release the code to support future VLA research.

By Jinhui Ye, Ning Gao, Senqiao Yang, Jinliang Zheng, Zixuan Wang, Yuxin Chen, Pengguang Chen, Yilun Chen, Shu Liu, Jiaya Jia

agents robotics multimodal benchmarks

arXiv Machine Learning

Sep 18

Robust Federated Q-Learning with Almost No Communication

The paper introduces Robust Fed-Q, a federated Q‑learning algorithm designed for settings where multiple agents interact with a shared Markov Decision Process and communicate through a central server. It combines model‑based and model‑free reinforcement learning techniques with a median‑of‑means strategy from robust statistics to handle a small fraction of adversarial agents. The authors prove that Robust Fed-Q achieves exact convergence to the optimal value function with high probability, attains near‑optimal finite‑time rates that benefit from collaboration, and requires only “~O(1)” communication rounds per guarantee.

By Sreejeet Maity, Aritra Mitra

agents reinforcement-learning safety

arXiv Machine Learning

Sep 18

MILER: Semantic Mid-Level Representation for Sim-to-Real Reinforcement Learning in Unstructured Autonomous Driving

MILER is an end‑to‑end reinforcement learning framework that achieves zero‑shot sim‑to‑real transfer for autonomous driving in unstructured environments. It uses a custom semantic mid‑level representation (MLR) simulator for offline training, and during deployment it processes real camera and LiDAR data with BEVFusion to produce a compatible bird’s‑eye‑view representation. The policy’s actions are applied via a trajectory‑alignment strategy, allowing the system to drive 17.3 km on a 3.0 km test track without human intervention, all running on a Jetson AGX Orin.

By Thomas Steinecker, Denis Trescher, Alexander Bienemann, Thorsten Luettel, Mirko Maehlisch

agents reinforcement-learning robotics safety

arXiv Machine Learning

Sep 18

OPTED: On-Policy Fine-Tuning for End-to-End Driving using a Render-Free Teacher

OPTED is a method for on‑policy fine‑tuning of end‑to‑end driving models that separates reinforcement learning from the policy update. A privileged teacher trained with RL on vectorized inputs (HD‑maps and bounding boxes) supervises the pre‑trained student during closed‑loop post‑training. Applied to the camera‑based models TransFuser and VaVAM in AlpaSim, OPTED boosts driving scores by 1.6× and 9.5×, respectively, while requiring roughly three orders of magnitude fewer simulator interactions than direct RL post‑training.

By Damiano Da Col, Maximilian Igl, Peter Karkus, Kashyap Chitta, Boris Ivanovic, Marco Pavone, Konrad Schindler, Christos Sakaridis

agents reinforcement-learning robotics fine-tuning safety

arXiv Computation and Language

Sep 18

DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash: Pushing the Limits of KV Cache Compression

DeepSeek‑V4.1‑Flash is a multimodal Mixture‑of‑Experts model with 552 B backbone parameters that supports contexts of up to one million tokens. It uses a Causal Encoder‑Decoder architecture that activates 16 B parameters per token during decoding but only 8 B during prefill, improving cost efficiency for agentic workloads. The model introduces cross‑layer KV cache reuse via Compressed Sparse Attention 2 and FP4 KV caching, reducing its global KV cache footprint to 890 bytes per token and its persistent footprint to roughly one‑eighth of the previous version, while still delivering superior performance after pretraining on a 45 T‑token multimodal corpus.

By DeepSeek-AI, :, Anyi Xu, B. Li, Bangcai Lin, Bing Xue, BingCheng Xian, Bingzheng Xu, Bochao Wu, Bowei Zhang, Boyi Deng, C. C. Yu, Chao Jin, Chaofan Lin, Chen Dong, Chenbing Wang, Chenfan Feng, Chengda Lu, Chenggang Zhao, Chengqi Deng, Chengyuan Zhang, Chenhao Xu, Chenqi Zhao, Chenze Shao, Chuhao Wang, Chuqi Zhang, Damai Dai, Dejian Yang, Deli Chen, Di Huang, Di Wu, Donghao Li, Erhang Li, Eric Fu, F. Zhou, Fangwei Zhou, Fangyun Lin, Fangzhou Yuan, Feiyu Xia, Fucong Dai, Guangbo Hao, Guanglin Li, Guanting Chen, Guoai Cao, Guofan Fan, Guolai Meng, Guowei Li, Haichuan Zhang, Haiyang Ma, Haiyang Shen, Han Li, Han Yu, Han Zhang, Hangyuan Deng, Hanwei Xu, Hanxiang Xu, Hanxun Zhong, Hao Guo, Hao Jiang, Hao Li, Hao Qin, Haodong Wen, Haofen Liang, Haofeng Huang, Haohua Liu, Haoling Zhang, Haoming Luo, Haoran Yang, Haotian Xu, Haotian Yuan, Haoting Huang, Haowen Luo, Haoyang Cai, Haoyu Chen, Haozhe Ji, Hengran Zhang, Hengrui Wang, Hengxu Wu, Honghui Ding, Hongxuan Tang, Huadong Wang, Huanqi Cao, Huazuo Gao, Hui Qu, Hui Zeng, J. Yang, J. H. Jin, J. H. Zhang, J. X. Zou, Jia Yu, Jiahui Zhou, Jiajun Chen, Jialiang Huang, Jialin Zhao, Jiamin Tang, Jian Zhou, Jianan Tong, Jianwen Li, Jiaqi Zhu, Jiarui Wang, Jiasheng Ye, Jiashi Li, Jiaxin Xu, Jiaying Ding, Jibai Lu, Jiewen Hu, Jin Yan, Jincheng Zhai, Jingchang Chen, Jingcheng Hu, Jingli Zhou, Jingsheng Xu, Jingting Xiang, Jingyan Yun, Jingyang Yuan, Jingyuan Cheng, Jinhua Zhu, Jinpeng Wang, Jinyi Chen, Jinyi Hu, Jiping Yu, Jueliang Guo, Junbo Pei, Junbo Sun, Junguang Jiang, Junjie Qiu, Junkang Zhou, Junqi Liu, Junren Li, Junxian Li, Junxiao Song, Junyi Guo, Kai Dong, Kaifeng Chen, Kaige Gao, Kang Guan, Kangdong Yuan, Ke Hong, Ke Xu, Kefan Zhao, Kexin Ji, Kexin Zhang, Kexing Zhou, Kuai Yu, Lan Zhang, Lean Wang, Lecong Zhang, Lei Wang, Letian Gao, Liang Zhao, Liansheng Xu, Lihua Guo, Lingxiao Luo, Lingyue Fu, Litao Deng, Litong Wang, Liyue Zhang, Longhao Chen, Lu Chen, Luotian Huang, Luyao Ma, Luyao Wang, M. S. Di, Max Mei, Menghao Ye, Miao Cui, Mingchuan Zhang, Minghua Zhang, Minghui Tang, Mingjing Zhang, Mingqi Wei, Mingshu Chen, Mingxing Liu, Mingxu Zhou, Mingyu Xu, Mingyu Yang, Mingze Wang, Muyang Chen, Ni Shentu, Ning Wang, Niufang Ning, Panpan Huang, Peixin Cong, Peiyi Wang, Peiyuan Xin, Pengfei Ren, Pengfei Yan, Pengle Zhang, Qi Kang, Qi Tang, Qiancheng Wang, Qiang Li, Qihao Zhu, Qingyang Li, Qinyu Chen, Qiushi Du, Qizhou Guo, Rongxian Xu, Rui Ding, Rui Hu, Rui Tian, Rui Yu, Ruidong Zhu, Ruifan Xu, Ruihan Yang, Ruihang Xia, Ruijie Lu, Ruilin Geng, Ruipeng Hong, Ruiqi Ge, Ruisong Zhang, Ruize Sun, Ruizhe Pan, Runji Wang, Runqian Chen, Runxin Xu, Ruohong Tian, Ruomeng Shen, Ruoyu Zhang, Ryan X., S. H. Liu, Shanghao Lu, Shangyan Zhou, Shanhuang Chen, Shaofei Cai, Shaoheng Nie, Shaoyuan Chen, Shengding Hu, Shengkai Lin, Shengwen Ran, Shengyu Liu, Shengyuan Jia, Shi Bai, Shi Feng, Shicheng Xu, Shichun Liu, Shiqiang Hu, Shirong Ma, Shiyu Wang, Shiyuan Feng, Shufan Gong, Shuhan Lin, Shuiping Yu, Shunfeng Zhou, Shuo Yang, Shuomeng Wang, Shuting Guo, Shuting Pan, Shuying Yu, Sinuo Cao, Siyi Lin, Sizhe Chen, Songyang Chen, Songyang Zhou, Tao Ni, Tao Yun, Tian Jin, Tian Pei, Tian Ye, Tianle Lin, Tianran Ji, Tianyi Cui, Tianyuan Yue, Tingting Yu, Tongrui Xiong, Wangding Zeng, Wei Liu, Wei Zhang, Weibin Xu, Weihao Zeng, Weilin Zhao, Wen Liu, Wenfeng Liang, Wenjie Pang, Wenjing Luo, Wenjing Yao, Wenjun Gao, Wenkai Shao, Wenkai Yang, Wenli Zhang, Wenlu Wang, Wenlve Huang, Wenqian Yan, Wentao Zhang, Xi Gao, Xiang He, Xiang Li, Xiangli Li, Xiangwen Wang, Xiangying Zhang, Xiankui Wei, Xiao Bi, Xiaodong Liu, Xiaohan Wang, Xiaojian Qu, Xiaokang Chen, Xiaokang Zhang, Xiaotao Nie, Xiaoyao Zou, Xiaoyuan Li, Xicheng Guo, Xieting Chu, Xin Cheng, Xin Liu, Xin Xie, Xinbo Xu, Xingchao Liu, Xingchen Liu, Xingkai Yu, Xingyou Li, Xintong Yao, Xinyang Chen, Xinyong Jiang, Xinyu Yang, Xinyu Yang, Xu Chen, Xuanyu Wang, Xubei Zhong, Xuecheng Su, Xuejie Liu, Xuheng Lin, Xujie Fan, Xuncheng Zhao, Xuwei Fu, Y. C. Yan, Y. H. Jiang, Y. T. Wu, Y. W. M., Y. Z. Wang, Yafei Gao, Yang Yang, Yang Zhang, Yanru Ma, Yanwen Huang, Yao Li, Yao Li, Yao Meng, Yao Zhao, Yaofeng Sun, Yaohui Wang, Yaoyang Ye, Yehang Yin, Yexinrui Wu, Yi Qian, Yi Tao, Yi Yu, Yichao Zhang, Yichen Jiang, Yicheng Wang, Yifan Ding, Yifan Shi, Yifeng Peng, Yifeng Zhai, Yijia Wu, Yiliang Xiong, Yilun Wang, Ying He, Ying Zhou, Yingjia Luo, Yinmin Zhong, Yiping Wang, Yisong Wang, Yixiang Zhang, Yixiao Chen, Yixuan Tan, Yixuan Wei, Yiyang Ma, Yiyao Yang, Yiyuan Liu, Yizai Cai, Yizhen Wei, Yizhi Wang, Yonglun Yang, Yongqi Zhuo, Yongqiang Guo, Yongtong Wu, Yu Wu, Yu Zhang, Yuan Bian, Yuan Cheng, Yuan Ou, Yuan Sun, Yuanfan Xu, Yuanhang Sun, Yuanhao Li, Yuchen Liu, Yuchen Yao, Yudong Han, Yuduan Wang, Yuhan Wu, Yuhao Meng, Yuheng Zou, YuKun Li, Yunchuan Wang, Yunfan Xiao, Yunfan Xiong, Yupeng Chen, Yuqian Cao, Yuqian Wang, Yuqing Chen, Yushun Zhang, Yutong Lin, Yuwei Xiao, Yuxian Gu, Yuxiang Chen, Yuxiang Huang, Yuxiang Luo, Yuxiang You, Yuxin Chen, Yuxin Xiang, Yuxuan Liu, Yuxuan Zhou, Yuyang Zhou, Yuzhe Guo, Yuzhen Huang, Yuzhuo Bai, Z. Y. Z., Zanlin Ni, Zehao Wang, Zehua Zhao, Zehui Ren, Zejun Zhao, Zhangli Sha, Zhanying Wang, Zhaochen Zhang, Zhaoshuai Du, Zhe Fu, Zhean Xu, Zhenda Xie, Zheng Liu, Zhengyan Zhang, Zhenhua Dong, Zhewen Hao, Zhibang Wang, Zhibin Gou, Zhicheng Ma, Zhihao Li, Zhihong Shao, Zhihuan Huang, Zhijie Li, Zhirui Lu, Zhixian Huang, Zhixuan Chen, Zhixuan Chen, Zhixuan Pan, Zhiyu Wu, Zhizhou Ren, Zhu He, Zhuoshu Li, Zhuping Zhang, Zian Xu, Zihao Wang, Zihui Gu, Zijia Zhu, Zili Zhang, Zilin Li, Zilong Hou, Zilong Lyu, Ziqiao Wang, Ziwei Xie, Ziya Zhang, Ziyi Gao, Zizheng Pan, Zonglin Li, Zongqing Yao, Zui Chen, Zuofan Wu, Chenchen Ling, Chengyu Hou, Chong Chen, D. Li, Di Qi, Dongjie Ji, Fang Wei, Fanyi Xia, Fei Xie, Feiyi Tan, Hailong Guo, Haiyan Zhai, Hui Zhou, Huihui Tan, Huijie Li, Jia Luo, Jia Song, Jialu Cai, Jian Liang, Jiangting Zhou, Jiaqi Gao, Jiayi Shao, Jie Chen, Jieyu Yang, Jin Chen, Jingde Zhang, Jingzi Zhou, Jinqian Wang, Jinyang Liu, JinZhao Sun, Junhua Ling, Junmin Zheng, Kaicheng Yang, Ke Xu, Le Su, Leyi Xia, Liangfeng Ding, Lin Zhuo, Linwang Ma, Linyan Zhu, Liyu Cai, Luqi Yao, M. K. Zhang, Meng Li, Miao Lin, Miaojun Wang, Min Zhang, Mingming Li, Mingming Wang, Mingze Yin, Minmin Han, Nan Cao, Ning Wang, Ningxin Ma, Panpan Wang, Peihan Lin, Peng Sun, Peng Zhang, Qian Ying, Qiang Xiang, Qiao Wang, Qingmiao Mao, Qiwei Jiang, Rongli Jin, Ruyi Chen, Sha Tao, Shangmian Sun, Shaoqing Wu, Shichao Zou, Si Lei, Tianyang Zhang, Tianyu Sun, Tingting Yin, W. L. Xiao, Wei An, Wei Li, Wei Wang, Weiwei Lin, Wenqing Hou, X. Lin, Xiangfei Meng, Xianzhu Huang, Xiao Peng, Xiaoqian Li, Xiaoting Zhang, Xiaowen Sun, Xiaoxiang Wang, Xiaoyu Ye, Xinrou Zhang, Xinyu Zhang, Xue Cao, Xueyin Chen, Yanan Zhou, Yanhong Xu, Yao Xia, Yao Xu, Yi Shao, Yihong Zhang, Yiling Ma, Ying Tang, Yining Lou, Yiru Chen, Yishi Piao, Yixuan Chen, Yong Xiong, Yuchen Xuan, Yuehan Yang, Yuer Xu, Yukun Zha, Yunxian Ma, Yuping Lin, Yuting Yan, Yutong Xie, Yuwen Sheng, Yuxuan Zhu, Zekai Zhang, Zhe Ju, Zhenzhen Lin, Zheren Gao, Zheyang Sun, Zhigang Yan, Zhongyu Wu, Zi Wang, Zihua Qu, Ziling Yan, Ziyi Wan

agents efficiency multimodal

arXiv Computation and Language

Sep 18

Towards Safer RAG: Only Agents Capable of System 2 Thinking may Access Untrusted Documents

The paper examines how deliberative (System 2) reasoning affects a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) model’s vulnerability to knowledge‑poisoning attacks. Using two metrics—Cordon Rate and Leakage Rate—it evaluates six model configurations on 200 SciFact questions. Results show that enabling reasoning lowers both Cordon and Leakage Rates for DeepSeek‑V4‑Flash, indicating reduced behavioral impact from poisoned evidence, though overall attack success increases.

By Mehrdad Ghassabi, Audrina Ebrahimi, Sadra Hakim, Hamidreza Baradaran Kashani

llms rag agents

arXiv Computer Vision

Sep 18

WZPlanner: Safe End-to-End Path Planning for Autonomous Driving in Work Zones

The paper introduces WZPlanner, a new dataset and model for safe autonomous driving in work zones. The dataset, WorkZonePlan, contains over 149,000 synthetic and 5,000 real-world samples with 3D annotations for lane and work zone boundaries, plus 228 evaluation routes in CARLA. The proposed BoundaryFormer (BF) and its enhanced BF++ variants jointly predict lane/work‑zone boundaries and driving trajectories, achieving higher Driving Scores while being significantly smaller than competing models.

By Nishad Sahu (Raj), Changzhong Qian (Raj), Guangzhou Cai (Raj), Shounak Sural (Raj), Ragunathan (Raj), Rajkumar

llms agents robotics multimodal

arXiv Computer Vision

Sep 18

AI Smart Glasses for Wearable Intelligence: From Egocentric Sensing to Agentic Personalization

The paper surveys the evolution of smart glasses into AI smart glasses, framing them as wearable intelligence platforms that integrate egocentric sensing, resource-aware computing, intelligent reasoning, multimodal interaction, and real-world constraints for personalized assistance. It organizes the discussion into four dimensions: hardware foundations, wearable intelligence, interaction design, and application scenarios across healthcare, accessibility, learning, daily life, tourism, and industry. The authors identify five cross-cutting research challenges—next-generation hardware, trustworthy egocentric intelligence, lifelong personalized memory, proactive intelligence, and embodied foundation models—to guide future work.

By Xu Yuan, Yi Wang, Zhuohang Jiang, Haohao Qu, Yujuan Ding, Shanru Lin, Guoliang Xing, Hongxia Yang, Jiannong Cao, Qing Li, Wenqi Fan

agents robotics multimodal

arXiv Computer Vision

Sep 18

Navi-Agent: Unlocalized Monocular Navigation Agent

Navi-Agent is a zero‑shot Vision‑Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN‑CE) agent that builds a coordinate‑free spatial state from visual observations and motion history. It represents this state as a navigation topology with nodes as visual places and edges as motion transitions, enabling observation‑based self‑localization, task progress verification, and recovery. Experiments on a zero‑shot VLN‑CE benchmark and real‑world robot platforms demonstrate that Navi‑Agent achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance among geometry‑constrained methods while remaining competitive with geometry‑based approaches.

By Wenyuan Xie, Mengyang Hong, Yongzhong Wang, Yanbiao Ji, Yijin Zhou, Shaokai Wu, Shalayiding Sirejiding, Huayi Zhou, Yi-Chao Chen, Ma Ling, Yue Ding, Hongtao Lu

agents robotics multimodal benchmarks

arXiv Computer Vision

Sep 18

SalsaAgent: A multimodal embodied language model for interactive dance generation

SalsaAgent is a multimodal embodied language model that generates expressive, full‑body salsa follower motions in response to a human leader and music. The approach treats partner interaction as nonverbal token passing, extending a large language model’s vocabulary to include discrete motion, pairwise relation, and audio tokens. A two‑stage token‑to‑diffusion pipeline, combined with full‑body and pairwise‑relation tokenizers and alignment with automatically derived text descriptions of skeleton dynamics, yields improved motion quality, spatial coordination, and music‑partner synchrony compared to prior baselines.

By Payam Jome Yazdian, Zoe Stanley, Angelica Lim

llms agents diffusion robotics multimodal

arXiv Computer Vision

Sep 18

HunyuanOCR-1.5: Making Lightweight OCR VLMs Faster and Better

HunyuanOCR-1.5 is a lightweight, end‑to‑end OCR‑specialized vision‑language model that unifies document parsing, text spotting, information extraction, text‑image translation, and multi‑image document understanding. It builds on the HunyuanOCR‑1.0 architecture, improving efficiency with DFlash‑based OCR decoding for faster inference (6.37× Transformer speedup, 2.14× under vLLM) and enhancing capability through an Agentic Data Flow system that autonomously constructs high‑quality training data for long‑tail OCR tasks. The model achieves top‑tier performance on OmniDocBench v1.6 and sets new milestones in ancient‑script OCR, chart/table parsing, multilingual parsing, and hallucination evaluation, while remaining lightweight for deployment.

By Gengluo Li, Xingyu Wan, Shangpin Peng, Weinong Wang, Hao Feng, Yongkun Du, Binghong Wu, Zheng Ruan, Zhiqiong Lu, Liang Wu, Pengyuan Lyu, Huawen Shen, Zibin Lin, Shijing Hu, Jieneng Yang, Hongbing Wen, Guanghua Yu, Hong Liu, Bochao Wang, Can Ma, Han Hu, Chengquan Zhang, Yu Zhou

llms agents computer-vision multimodal safety

arXiv Statistics ML

Sep 18

Portfolio-Based Constrained Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization for Materials Design

The paper presents a portfolio-based approach to constrained multi-objective Bayesian optimization for materials design, framing acquisition‑function selection as an adaptive policy problem. Two controllers—UCB‑Bandit, a modified UCB multi‑armed bandit, and Agentic‑Switch, a multi‑agent system powered by a large language model—were tested against fixed‑policy baselines on synthetic benchmarks and two real materials design case studies. The adaptive policies achieved competitive results in cumulative feasibility counts and feasible hypervolume improvement, outperforming individual acquisition functions that excelled only in a single metric.

By Sushant Sinha, Christofer Hardcastle, Robert Robinson, Shakti Prasad Padhy, Brent Vela, Douglas Allaire, Raymundo Arroyave

llms agents reinforcement-learning benchmarks

arXiv AI

Sep 18

Do AI Agents Understand Computer Architecture?

The paper investigates whether AI agents truly understand computer architecture by comparing their performance when the same 15‑dimensional accelerator design space is presented either as meaningful architectural knobs or as anonymous variables. Using the AutoTuring framework, the authors find that agents with architectural knowledge outperform blind agents on a nine‑kernel FP16 GEMM benchmark, yet a critic loop can largely recover this advantage. The study highlights that architectural knowledge and structured critique act as substitutes rather than complements in improving agent performance.

By Ambika Sharan, Grigory Chirkov, Soheil Abbasloo

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