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 17

EvolveTrade: Experience-Driven Policy Refinement for Self-Evolving LLM Trading Agents

EvolveTrade is a self‑evolving framework that treats the system prompt of a tool‑using LLM trading agent as a text‑parameterized policy. After each update interval, a Policy Agent revises this policy using accumulated decision traces and portfolio feedback while keeping the backbone LLM fixed, allowing the agent to refine its information‑acquisition and portfolio‑construction procedures over time. Experiments across multiple market regimes and two LLM backbones show that EvolveTrade often improves Sharpe Ratio and Cumulative Return over fixed‑policy baselines, with behavioral analyses indicating increased code‑mediated analysis and regime‑relevant computations.

By Sehee Kim, Yumin Choi, Minki Kang, Sung Ju Hwang
arXiv AI
Sep 17

GraphEcho: Structural Redundancy and Evidence Provenance in LLM Graph Agents

GraphEcho is a benchmark that examines how large language model agents navigate graph paths and handle evidence redundancy. It tests whether agents treat repeated encounters as additional corroboration by varying path counts and evidential origins while keeping evidence content constant. The study finds that redundant paths increase repeated walks, and that provenance-aware post‑training can reduce revisits but may limit source diversity, revealing a gap between efficient exploration and effective evidence use.

By Sikun Wang, Yixi Zhou, Lei Fan, Fan Zhang
arXiv AI
Sep 17

NeMo Data Designer: An Extensible Framework for Multimodal Synthetic Data Generation

NeMo Data Designer (NDD) is an open‑source framework for generating multimodal synthetic data. It uses a declarative configuration format that lets users define dataset columns—text, code, structured outputs, images, embeddings, and statistical samplers—to steer diversity. The system supports a preview‑and‑revision workflow, dependency resolution, and retry logic, and can be extended via plugins. Case studies demonstrate its use for structured, agentic, multimodal, and domain‑specialized tasks, including datasets for Nemotron model development and enterprise deployments.

By Johnny Greco, Nabin Mulepati, Andre Manoel, Eric Tramel, Kirit Thadaka, Mike Knepper, Dhruv Nathawani, Dane Corneil, Yev Meyer, Alex Watson, Maarten Van Segbroeck
arXiv AI
Sep 17

When to Call an LLM: A Confidence-Gated Hybrid for Cost-Effective Emotion Recognition in Conversational AI

The paper evaluates three approaches for emotion recognition in conversation— a low‑cost stacked ensemble, an off‑the‑shelf LLM prompt, and a confidence‑gated hybrid that escalates only uncertain ensemble predictions to the LLM. Across three datasets (IEMOCAP, MELD, CMU‑MOSI), the hybrid consistently outperforms each pure system, achieving higher weighted F1 scores while routing most traffic through the inexpensive ensemble. This results in significant cost savings (≈$10‑85 per million utterances) and provides an interpretable escalation signal tied to emotion or sentiment shifts.

By Sai Babu Udayagiri, Arjun Chouhan, Ravisekhar Kanagala, Trishala Pavagada
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Collective Loss of Control in LLM Agent Systems: An Epidemic Account of Mutation, Contagion, and Recovery

The paper proposes an epidemic model to explain how a multi‑agent system can shift from a single accidental deviation to a collective loss of control. It identifies accidental mutation, contagion through communication, and recovery as key mechanisms, and demonstrates that unsafe trajectories can spread rapidly among agents, leading to high harm rates in injected scenarios. The study also highlights the importance of auditing communication paths and strengthening both prevention and recovery measures to mitigate such risks.

By Xiangfan Wu, Zonghao Ying, Huiyu Wu, Xing Zheng, Huangsheng Cheng, Xiaorong Shi, Jing Guo
arXiv AI
Sep 17

WetRobo: A Reproducible Robot Kit for Coding Agents in Biological Laboratories

WetRobo is a reproducible robot kit designed to enable wet‑lab researchers to delegate tasks to coding agents without teleoperation or neural‑network training. The kit includes a robot arm, essential lab equipment, pre‑recorded teleoperation demos, and a skill file, allowing a coding agent to observe the lab, write, and execute programs using external tools. Experiments with OpenAI Codex on tasks such as lifting a Petri dish lid, removing a bottle cap, and opening an incubator door demonstrated successful performance in two different laboratories, outperforming a fine‑tuned vision‑language‑action policy that failed to transfer.

By Yuna Oikawa, Kei Endo, Takanori Uzawa, Yunzhe Zhang, Manan Anjaria, Lerrel Pinto, Sherry Yang, Koji Tsuda
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Symbolic Temporal Supervision of LLM Agents Using Contracts

ContrAgent is a contract‑based framework that provides symbolic temporal supervision for large language model agents. It records an agent’s tool‑call sequence as a trace of checkable predicates and formalizes desired behaviors with assume‑guarantee contracts expressed in linear temporal logic over finite traces (LTLf). Each contract is compiled into a deterministic finite automaton that both gates actions online and evaluates recorded traces offline, enabling deterministic, reproducible verdicts and significantly lower per‑call latency compared to existing LLM‑judge and rule‑based guardrail baselines.

By Yifeng Xiao, Pierluigi Nuzzo
arXiv AI
Sep 17

CERA-MoA: Co-Evolving Routing Mechanisms with Continually Learning LLM Agents

CERA-MoA introduces a co-evolving router and independently learning agents for Mixture-of-Agents systems, allowing routing strategies to adapt to evolving agent capabilities. The framework uses a predictive familiarity estimator based on mid-layer hidden states to evaluate semantic competence, and a cumulative-threshold adaptive routing mechanism to activate a minimal agent subset. Experiments across multiple domains show that CERA-MoA outperforms static-agent routing and fixed-workflow fine-tuning baselines.

By Jiaxuan Jiang, Liyuan He, Zhixuan Fang
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Compiled Agency: Frontier General-Purpose Coding Agents Build Winning Game Players from Bare Interaction - from Flappy Bird to StarCraft II and Civilization

The paper introduces Gauntlet, a framework that lets large language models autonomously build game-playing agents from a bare contract—just a game description, raw observation/action interface, and an empty policy file. In a single session, the model experiments with the game, compiles a standalone controller, and the resulting program is evaluated on held‑out instances without further model calls. The authors demonstrate that these compiled agents can win full‑scale games such as StarCraft II and Civilization, marking the first time a language‑agent system has achieved standalone victory in such complex titles.

By Joey Xiao, Haonan Huang
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Flag Game: A Toy Model for Mechanistic Swarm Interpretability

The Flag Game is a toy model designed to study how AI agents form collective beliefs. In the game, each agent sees only a private crop of a hidden country flag and can share beliefs with peers, leading to complex phenomena such as non‑monotonic performance scaling, accuracy gains from social awareness, and polarization that degrades performance at large population sizes. The authors introduce social circuit attribution to identify key agents and views, and develop a statistical mechanical theory to explain collective belief collapse and polarization in larger populations.

By Elizabeth Pavlova, Hidenori Tanaka
arXiv AI
Sep 17

REVERSAL-BENCH: A Reversibility Axis and Reset Oracle for Measuring the Reset-Free RL Cliff

REVERSAL-BENCH is a benchmark that introduces a continuous reversibility parameter ρ∈[0,1] and a reset oracle to evaluate how well reinforcement learning agents can recover from irreversible states across eight manipulation tasks in five physics engines. Experiments show a sharp reversibility cliff: reset‑free agents become trapped in irrecoverable states as ρ increases, while episodic agents continue learning steadily. The benchmark also provides a large multi‑simulator dataset and demonstrates that safety shields can predict recoverability but only succeed when the agent can avoid the trap.

By Riyaaz Shaik, Chandru Venkataraman
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Reflections on Trusting Trust, Revisited: Contaminating Self-Modifying AI Coding Agents with Poisoned Benchmarks

The paper revisits Thompson’s classic compiler back‑door attack in the context of self‑modifying AI coding agents. By poisoning the benchmarks used for self‑evaluation, the authors demonstrate that agents such as the Darwin Gödel Machine, Self‑Improving Coding Agent, and Hyperagents can be coaxed into generating vulnerable code, even on clean, held‑out tasks. Experiments show that the contamination can persist after subsequent clean training, highlighting the need for more robust agent designs.

By Franziska Roesner, Tadayoshi Kohno
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Autonomy in Check: Governor-Mediated Adaptive Security at the Edge

The paper proposes a split‑control architecture for adaptive security at the network edge, where an untrusted planner emits typed security intents that are vetted by a deterministic governor before being enacted. The governor checks each intent against safety, resource, temporal‑stability, and proportionality invariants, issuing signed receipts for admitted actions that are compiled into eBPF map updates. Experiments on a Raspberry Pi 5 connected to a university 5G test network show the governor can admit, reject, and bound intents at microsecond cost without disrupting protected‑flow regularity.

By Ijaz Ahmad, Ijaz Ahmad, Flavio Esposito, Erkki Harjula
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Linguistic Triggers of Gender and Racial Bias in Open-Weight LLMs Applied to Recruitment

The paper reports the first systematic audit of open‑weight large language models (LLMs) in hiring contexts, examining how job‑posting language influences recruiter and job‑seeker simulations across six models. It finds that agentic language lowers recruiter scores for female candidates while communal language mitigates this effect, and that coded‑exclusion language sharply reduces recruiter scores for non‑White candidates and discourages non‑White personas from applying. The study also identifies the explicit demographic label as the main causal factor and proposes a concrete pre‑deployment audit protocol aligned with EU and U.S. regulatory requirements.

By Kosuke Kitahara, Nobuhiro Yamaguchi
arXiv AI
Sep 17

A Comprehensive Review of Generative Physical Artificial Intelligence

The paper surveys Generative Physical Artificial Intelligence (GPAI), a field where large foundation models are integrated with physical robots. It introduces a taxonomy of five approaches—Robot Foundation Models, Vision‑Language Action models, Large Behavior Models, Diffusion Policy Models, and World Foundation Models—and discusses how they complement each other across domains such as autonomous vehicles, industrial automation, healthcare robotics, and humanoid systems. The review highlights performance gains, data‑efficient learning, sim‑to‑real transfer, edge‑compatible architectures, and safety frameworks as key research directions.

By Satyam Gaba, Krutiksinh Rana, Siva Sai, Vinay Chamola, Dusit Niyato
arXiv AI
Sep 17

APGEM: Adaptive Policy-Guided Error Mitigation for Quantum Reinforcement Learning on a Real-World CVRP Case Study

The paper introduces APGEM, an adaptive controller that dynamically selects among four error‑mitigation techniques—Zero‑Noise Extrapolation, Probabilistic Error Cancellation, Clifford Data Regression, and Readout Error Mitigation—based on a utility function and Q‑learning scores. Applied to a realistic Delhi‑based Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem, the adaptive approach improves the quantum reinforcement learning agent’s approximation ratios from 0.84‑0.87 to 0.92‑0.94 under high noise, outperforming constructive heuristics and approaching metaheuristics. The controller’s strategy shifts from a Clifford‑data‑regression‑heavy regime early in training to a balanced use of all techniques as training progresses, demonstrating regime‑dependent selection.

By Shabir Ahmad Sofi, Bisma Majid, Mir Mohammad Yousuf
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

Changepoint-Aware World Models: Detecting Dynamics Shifts and Recovering by Forgetting Stale Replay in Model-Based RL

Changepoint-Aware World Models (CAWM) is a DreamerV3 agent that detects abrupt dynamics shifts in a robot’s environment using an online CUSUM test on internal prediction error. Upon detection, CAWM selectively forgets stale replay data while preserving the learned representation, enabling rapid recovery from shifts such as doubled gravity or halved actuator gain. Experiments on simulated locomotion show CAWM recovers faster than passive retraining and outperforms a baseline that respawns a fresh dynamics model, achieving significant return gains in the first 30k post‑shift frames.

By Everest Yang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

F-DACE: Fuzzy Disagreement-Aware Causal Evidence Fusion for Abstention-Safe Conversational Retail Decision Support

F-DACE is a decision layer for causal machine‑learning‑based decision‑support systems that fuses multiple causal estimators using fuzzy memberships for precision, overlap, stability, and agreement, and abstains when diagnostics fail or evidence is weak. In simulations it made decisions in 67.2 % of runs while limiting false recommendations to 17.2 %, outperforming individual estimators. In a Walmart retail panel application, F‑DACE abstained on all five markdown indicators and, when integrated with a LangGraph conversational agent, achieved perfect tool‑routing accuracy and high groundedness on live queries.

By Sourish Dey
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

Bias Amplification in Multi-Agent Network: How Biased Agents Shape Opinions and Rhetoric

The paper investigates how a minority of biased agents in a multi‑agent system of large language models (LLMs) can amplify bias through textual interactions. Even a small percentage of persistently extreme agents causes significant opinion shifts among the non‑biased agents, with the effect occurring faster in the Llama 3.2 model than in a classical Friedkin‑Johnsen model. Semantic analysis shows that rhetorical consistency rises with biased exposure and that non‑biased agents adopt the biased vocabulary even when their numerical opinions change only modestly.

By Omran Berjawi, Giuseppe Fenza, Rida Khatoun
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Compositional Policy Violations: When Step-Level Compliance Fails In Agentic AI Workflows

The paper introduces the concept of Compositional Policy Violations (CPVs), where each step in an agentic AI workflow passes its individual compliance check, yet the overall execution violates higher‑level policies such as referral thresholds or authority limits. It categorizes CPVs into four types—Authority Creep, Threshold Laundering, Cumulative Sum Violation, and Context Collapse—and argues that the appropriate remedy depends on where the guarded quantity changes. To address this, the authors propose a provenance‑aware runtime architecture that evaluates policies over complete execution traces, recomputing guarded quantities from raw provenance rather than relying on step‑level outputs.

By Ashwini Kurady, Sri Sai Charith Grandhi, Rajesh Gupta, Sumit Mamoria