AI agents

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

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arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

ComplicitSplat: Downstream Models are Vulnerable to Blackbox Attacks by 3D Gaussian Splat Camouflages

ComplicitSplat is a novel black‑box attack that leverages 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) shading to create viewpoint‑specific camouflage, embedding adversarial content into scene objects that is only visible from certain angles. The method does not require access to model architecture or weights and can successfully fool a range of popular object detectors—including single‑stage, multi‑stage, and transformer‑based models—on both real‑world physical objects and synthetic scenes. This demonstrates that downstream models using 3DGS are vulnerable to adversarial manipulation.

By Matthew Hull, Haoyang Yang, Pratham Mehta, Mansi Phute, Aeree Cho, Haorang Wang, Matthew Lau, Wenke Lee, Wilian Lunardi, Martin Andreoni, Duen Horng Chau
arXiv AI
Sep 10

PV-WM: A Heterogeneous Micro-Macro World Model for Articulated Pedestrian-Vehicle Co-Rollout

PV-WM is a history‑only world model that jointly predicts pedestrian root motion, 15‑joint articulation, and vehicle kinematic states in a synchronized heterogeneous state. It uses recurrent updates to generate pedestrian and vehicle motion chunks, reconstructing vehicle boxes from predicted center, heading, and observed extent, and recomputes pedestrian‑vehicle geometry after each transition. Compared to a one‑shot predictor, PV‑WM reduces Root ADE by 12.7% and MPJPE by 14.8%, and across 824 Waymo contexts it lowers Root ADE by 5.2%, MPJPE by 7.6%, P‑V distance error by 11.9%, and oriented‑box closest‑approach error by 5.8%, while using 57.1% fewer parameters, 96.5% fewer FLOPs, and 25.5% lower p95 latency.

By Haozhuang Chi, Jingsong Liang, Ziying Song, Lei Yang, Shihao Li, Haoruo Zhang, Chen Lv
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

StochBench: A Domain-Specific Benchmark for Stochastic Processes in Lean

StochBench is a new Lean 4 benchmark comprising 450 graduate‑level stochastic‑process problems, each linked to its natural‑language source. It covers a wide range of topics—finite and countable Markov chains, renewal processes, random walks, martingales, stopping times, queues, Brownian motion, stochastic calculus, weak convergence, and Poisson and continuous‑time Markov processes—addressing a field underrepresented in Mathlib. An Opus 4.8‑based agent achieved a 34.9% proof rate (157/450) within a 15‑minute per‑problem limit, demonstrating the benchmark’s difficulty for advanced provers.

By Idan Davidovich, Debargha Ganguly, Vikash Singh, Vipin Chaudhary
arXiv AI
Sep 10

A Multi-Modal Perception Pipeline for Object Detection and Tracking in Autonomous Racing

The paper introduces a multi‑modal late‑fusion perception pipeline for object detection and tracking in autonomous racing. It combines independent detections from cameras, LiDARs, and RADARs to produce timely and robust state estimates of surrounding vehicles. The tracking framework compensates for detection delays and incorporates vehicle dynamics and track layout knowledge, and its effectiveness is confirmed through real‑world experiments in diverse critical scenarios.

By Davide Malvezzi, Michele Pestarino, Vittoria Cavicchioli, Valentina La Gamba, Silvia Severi, Fabio Bagni, Luca Bartoli, Massimiliano Bosi, Francesco Gatti, Micaela Verucchi, Ayoub Raji, Marko Bertogna
arXiv AI
Sep 10

PlannerForge: LLM Agents for Scenario-Based Testing of Motion Planners in Autonomous Driving

PlannerForge is a unified LLM‑agent framework that covers the entire scenario‑based testing pipeline for autonomous driving systems, from scenario generation to ADS assessment, and adds ADS enhancement and benchmarking stages. It was evaluated with ten off‑the‑shelf LLMs across all tasks and five prompt conditions, achieving best‑per‑task scores between 0.88 and 1.00 and matching commercial APIs with open‑source models such as Qwen3.6:35B. The end‑to‑end chaining retains 83% of seed queries for commercial backends and 78% for open‑source, outperforming existing tools like Scenario Factory 2.0 and BM25 in natural‑language generation, attribute realization, and physically valid edits. whyItMatters":"PlannerForge demonstrates that a single LLM‑based system can streamline and improve the fragmented scenario‑based testing workflow for autonomous driving, achieving high performance without domain‑specific fine‑tuning."

By Yuan Gao, Sebastian M\"uller, Mattia Piccinini, Marc Kaufeld, Yuchen Zhang, Finn Rasmus Sch\"afer, Qunying Song, Johannes Betz
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Improving Proficiency and Efficiency of Android GUI Agents via Self-Generating Tool Actions

The paper introduces DroidTool, a framework that enables Android GUI agents to automatically generate and integrate tool actions—Python functions that manipulate application states—into their hybrid action space. DroidTool follows an agentic workflow with stages of proposal, implementation, test generation, execution, and repair, and it constructs relational tests to ensure comprehensive verification. Experiments on benchmarks such as AndroidWorld, B-MoCA, and MobileSafetyBench show that agents using DroidTool’s self-generated tools outperform GUI-only agents by about 4.47% in performance while reducing interactions by roughly 20.05%.

By Juyong Lee, Woogyeol Jin, Kimin Lee
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Inferring the Unspoken: Aligning Embodied Agents with Implicit Preferences

The paper "Inferring the Unspoken: Aligning Embodied Agents with Implicit Preferences" addresses the challenge of natural-language instructions that omit details needed for embodied action. It introduces the Preference-based Planning (PbP) benchmark, comprising 5,000 evaluation groups and 290 preferences across three levels, to systematically evaluate agents’ ability to infer latent user preferences from a few demonstrations. The authors propose the two-stage Inferring the Unspoken (InTU) framework, which first verbalizes inferred preferences from multimodal demonstrations and then generates action plans conditioned on that explicit representation, showing that explicit verbalization improves alignment and robustness compared to direct end-to-end planning.

By Manjie Xu, Xinyi Yang, Wei Liang, Chi Zhang, Yixin Zhu
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Do Web Agents Investigate Before They Decide?

The paper introduces MIRAGE, a benchmark of 750 multi‑step decision tasks designed to test autonomous web agents’ investigative abilities across Wikipedia Forensics, Shopping Admin adjudication, and Reddit Moderation. Each task contains a misleading visible context and a hidden context that holds decisive evidence, allowing performance to be broken down into Investigation, Reasoning, and Decision Accuracy, with an added Investigative Hallucination Rate. Evaluation of eight LLM agents reveals three consistent patterns: agents often reach relevant pages but fail to extract decisive evidence, procedural hints improve investigation but not decision accuracy on Wikipedia tasks, and 12.6% of trajectories include fabricated facts.

By Syed Nazmus Sakib, Nafiul Haque, Tapodhir Karmakar Taton, Shahrear Bin Amin, Shifat E. Arman
arXiv AI
Sep 10

To Mix or To Merge: Toward Multi-Domain Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models

The paper investigates how to apply Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) to large language models across multiple domains. It compares two training paradigms—mixed multi-task RLVR and separate RLVR followed by model merging—using tasks such as math, coding, science, instruction following, and agent. Experiments show that RLVR across domains causes minimal interference and that reasoning-intensive domains can synergize, with insights drawn from information constraints, prediction behavior, and self-verification.

By Haoqing Wang, Xiang Long, Ziheng Li, Yilong Xu, Tingguang Li, Yehui Tang
arXiv AI
Sep 10

AutoFyn Technical Report: Non-Parametric Expert Iteration for Long-Horizon Agents

AutoFyn is a new agent framework based on the Expert Iteration algorithm that updates a frozen model’s persistent state using verified reward signals instead of changing model weights. Each iteration starts with a fresh model session, and only durable information—such as memory files, reports, and repository state—is carried over through explicit interfaces. The system orchestrates exploration, planning, and specialized agents, while a task‑grounded verifier supplies objective rewards that are distilled back into the persistent state to guide the next round. AutoFyn has been applied to olympiad mathematics, data science, and cybersecurity, outperforming baseline models on the 2026 International Mathematical Olympiad, topping the Spider 2.0 dbt benchmark, and generating sixteen maintainer‑confirmed vulnerability advisories across several popular software projects.

By Adib Hasan, Daniel Schaffield, Akashnil Dutta, Tarik Adnan Moon
arXiv AI
Sep 10

SCAFFOLD: Self-Improving Web Agents via Recursive Parametric Skill Abstraction

SCAFFOLD is a self‑improving framework for visual web agents that automatically induces parametric, executable skills from successful trajectories and organizes them into a recursively composed hierarchy. It compresses the skill library using a minimum‑description‑length criterion and behavioral equivalence checks, and periodically distills these skills back into model weights to internalize the abstractions. Experiments on WebArena, VisualWebArena, and Online‑Mind2Web show that SCAFFOLD raises success rates by 11.1–17.2 absolute points over the best skill‑augmented baseline and continues to improve across five self‑improvement iterations without collapsing the library.

By Bowei He, Xiaokun Zhang, Meng Ding, Xue Liu
arXiv AI
Sep 10

The Failure Happens Before the Drift: The Social Dynamics of Values in LLM Agent Societies

The study introduces a World Values Survey–grounded simulation framework to test whether large language model agents can faithfully represent diverse human value systems. In about 4,000 conversations with 1,200 personas across three models, more than half of the agents failed to express their assigned value profiles from the start, and only 2–7% drifted over time. The results show systematic deviations from the intended value distributions and reveal that simulated dialogues differ from human discussions in their balance of stylistic consistency and semantic diversity.

By Farah Atif, Sougata Saha, Monojit Choudhury
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Deep Active Inference with Diffusion Policy and Multiple Timescale World Model for Real-World Exploration and Navigation

The paper presents a deep active inference framework for real‑world robotic navigation that combines a diffusion policy with a multiple‑timescale recurrent state‑space model. The diffusion policy generates diverse candidate actions, while the state‑space model predicts long‑horizon outcomes, allowing the system to select actions that minimize expected free energy. Experiments show higher success rates and fewer collisions, especially in exploration‑heavy scenarios, demonstrating the effectiveness of this unified exploration and goal‑directed approach.

By Riko Yokozawa, Kentaro Fujii, Yuta Nomura, Shingo Murata
arXiv AI
Sep 10

EdgeMem: LLM-Free Agent Memory Construction and Retrieval via Evidence-Preserving Multi-Anchor Hypergraph

EdgeMem is a new agent-memory method that preserves original interaction turns and organizes them using complementary content, temporal, and episodic cues via a multi‑anchor hypergraph. It performs lightweight local processing, returning source evidence directly and reserving LLM use only for final answer generation. Experiments on LoCoMo and LongMemEval‑S demonstrate strong retrieval and memory‑grounded question answering, with EdgeMem achieving the highest strict‑judge score among seven systems on LoCoMo while requiring no generative‑LLM calls for construction and retrieval.

By Zeyang Cui, Jiannong Cao, Zhiyuan Wen, Bo Yuan, Junlan Feng, Shengyuan Chen
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Adapting Technical-Service LLM Agents with Latent Logic Augmentation, Robust Noise Reduction, and Hybrid Reward Modeling

The paper proposes a framework for improving technical‑service large language model agents by integrating latent logic augmentation, robust noise reduction, and hybrid reward modeling. It enhances supervised fine‑tuning data with Planning‑Aware Trajectory Modeling and Reasoning Augmentation, creates dual‑filtered multiple ground truths, and trains the policy using a hybrid reward that combines a reranker with an LLM‑as‑a‑Judge. Applied to real Cloud technical‑service tasks, the adapted Qwen3‑4B model achieves the highest Multi‑ECS score, reduces reward cost, and attains the highest production adoption rate.

By Junzhuo Ma, Chenghuang Shen, Yi Yu, Xingyan Liu, Jing Gu, Hangyi Sun, Guangquan Hu, Jianfeng Liu, Weiting Liu, Pu Mingyue, Wang Yu, Zhengdong Xiao, Rui Xie, Longjiu Luo, Qianrong Wang, Gurong Cui, Honglin Qiao, Wenlian Lu
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

IdeaAMBIG: Benchmarking Implementation-Critical Gaps in Research-Idea Specifications

IdeaAMBIG is a benchmark that evaluates how well research‑idea specifications are ready for implementation. It contains 660 evidence‑grounded instances, including 163 real‑world gaps from reproducibility reports and GitHub issues and 497 synthetic gaps added to codification‑ready references. The benchmark tests three capabilities—codification‑readiness assessment, defect localization, and clarification action generation—across 13 large language models, revealing that defect localization is the main bottleneck while clarification given the defect performs much better.

By Yiling Ma, Yilun Zhao, Sihong Wu, Manasi Patwardhan, Arman Cohan
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

When Does Activation Steering Change What a Model Computes From?

The paper investigates whether modifying a model’s internal activations—through activation steering—actually changes the computational state used in subsequent processing or merely biases the computation toward a desired output. In a controlled state‑tracking task, editing a trace‑supervised register causes the model to apply the next operation to the edited state, confirming that the edit changes the state. However, in two large‑language‑model settings (Qwen and Llama), mean activation steering does not replicate the natural internal configuration used during task execution; steering vectors are far larger than typical natural changes and achieve only a fraction of the effect of full‑layer patching. Thus, a successful steering intervention does not necessarily reproduce the natural target activation at the intervention layer, and should be interpreted as a state change only when later computation actually uses the edited value in the intended semantic way.

By Benjamin Shih, John Winnicki, Eric Darve
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Many-Tier Instruction Hierarchy in LLM Agents

The paper introduces Many-Tier Instruction Hierarchy (ManyIH), a new framework for resolving conflicts among instructions with arbitrarily many privilege levels in large language model agents. It presents ManyIH-Bench, a benchmark featuring 853 agentic tasks that require navigating up to 12 levels of conflicting instructions across 46 real-world agents. Experiments show current models achieve only about 40% accuracy when instruction conflict scales, highlighting a gap in fine-grained, scalable conflict resolution.

By Jingyu Zhang, Tianjian Li, William Jurayj, Hongyuan Zhan, Benjamin Van Durme, Daniel Khashabi
arXiv AI
Sep 10

The convergent laboratory: when AI reasoning, autonomous experiments, high performance and quantum computing reshape chemistry

The article titled "The convergent laboratory: when AI reasoning, autonomous experiments, high performance and quantum computing reshape chemistry" discusses insights from the TPC26 conference, where leaders from academia, national laboratories, and industry examined how AI, autonomous agents, self-driving labs, high‑performance computing, and quantum computing converge to accelerate materials science discovery. It presents firsthand experiences from researchers at the forefront of these technologies and argues that their simultaneous maturation marks a tipping point for transformative advances and productive disruption in chemical sciences.

By Eliu Huerta, Xiaoyun Wang, Geetika Gupta, Edward H. Sargent, Cameron J. Owen, Victor Fung, Abhishek Mitra, Austin Cheng, Emma Bouchard, Shams Mehdi