AI agents

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

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arXiv AI
Aug 28

SIGMA: Structured Noise-Effect-Aware Grouped Multi-Agent Aggregation

SIGMA is a hierarchical framework for cooperative multi‑agent reinforcement learning that addresses structured noise effects—local correlations in noise-induced decision impacts among agents with strong task dependencies. It groups agents into adaptive local structures using density‑based clustering, aggregates intra‑group representations to smooth deviations, and then applies inter‑group attention to integrate information while respecting heterogeneous contributions. Experiments on noisy‑observation StarCraft II tasks confirm that SIGMA improves robustness to observation noise without sacrificing performance in clean environments.

By Li Mingqian
arXiv AI
Aug 28

MACGen: Toward Functionally Correct and Secure Code Generation via Multi-Agent Collaboration

MACGen is a multi‑agent framework designed to produce code that is both functionally correct and secure. It orchestrates four specialized agents—planner, security advisor, coder, and reviewer—each receiving only structured artifacts from the previous stage, thereby enforcing role specialization and limiting context bloat. The approach yields significant improvements on benchmark datasets, outperforming direct prompting by 19.61 and 10.57 percentage points on average.

By Miseon Yu, Jaehoon Choi, Younghan Lee, Yunheung Paek
arXiv AI
Aug 28

SWE-Prime: Fewer Trajectories, Better Performance

SWE-Prime introduces a two-stage supervised fine-tuning data selection process for large language models tackling software issues. The first stage filters entire trajectories by quality and representativeness, while the second stage selects meaningful semantic segments based on contribution, learnability, and risk. Experiments on SWE-Bench Pro and Verified demonstrate that training on just 10% of trajectories chosen by SWE-Prime surpasses full-dataset training, achieving up to 12.2% and 24.2% performance gains.

By Dewu Zheng, Ruizhe Ye, Yanlin Wang, Yang Ye, Hongyu Zhang, Ensheng Shi, Xilin Liu, Yuchi Ma, Jianxing Yu, Zibin Zheng
arXiv AI
Aug 28

From Atomic to Agentic: Towards Interpretable Evaluation of LLMs' Agentic Mathematical Capabilities

The paper introduces a new benchmark that evaluates large language models (LLMs) on their agentic mathematical reasoning rather than just final answers. It aligns problem‑solving behaviors with a taxonomy of reusable mathematical atomic capabilities and includes planning, action, and feedback tasks in both textual and multimodal settings. Experiments show that models with similar end‑to‑end accuracy can have very different agentic profiles, highlighting the importance of process‑level evaluation.

By Jiayi Kuang, Yinghui Li, Yunze Song, Keyu Chen, Zhifeng Shen, Yangning Li, Yidong Wang, Di Yin, Ruizhi Qiao, Xing Sun, Kai Jin, Ying Shen, Liang Lin, Philip S. Yu
arXiv AI
Aug 28

From Sound to Symptom: Real-Time Respiratory Signal Understanding for Conversational Healthcare Agents

The paper introduces HealthCUES, a real‑time streaming pipeline that extracts and analyzes cough and throat‑clearing events from live spoken conversations. It detects coughs within sub‑second latency, distinguishes cough subtypes (dry, wet, barking, whooping), differentiates coughing from throat clearing, and estimates temporal boundaries, all while gating alerts based on conversational context. The system, built on Qwen3Omni, achieves high accuracy (93% F1 for cough detection) and low latency (340 ms) and has been validated by healthcare professionals for telehealth use.

By Tanmay Laud, Herprit Mahal, Subhabrata Mukherjee
arXiv AI
Aug 28

CIFQA: A Deterministic Tool-Grounded Multi-Agent LLM Framework for Financial Query Answering

CIFQA is a deterministic, tool‑grounded multi‑agent framework that separates language understanding from numerical execution for financial question answering. It assigns specialized agents for interpretation, routing, parameter extraction, computation planning, and response generation, while deterministic Python tools perform the calculations. On a fixed‑deposit benchmark, CIFQA achieves 95.54% accuracy on calculation‑intensive queries and 90.87% overall, outperforming larger LLM baselines and showing that architecture, not scale, drives numerical reliability.

By Kunjesh Parekh, Anil Kumar Tiwari, Divya Saxena
arXiv AI
Aug 28

Beyond Factual QA: Mentorship-Oriented Question Answering over Long-Form Multilingual Content

The paper introduces MentorQA, a multilingual dataset and evaluation framework for mentorship-oriented question answering derived from long‑form videos. It contains nearly 9,000 QA pairs across four languages and defines evaluation dimensions such as clarity, alignment, and learning value that extend beyond factual accuracy. Experiments show that Multi‑Agent QA pipelines outperform other architectures, especially on complex topics and low‑resource languages, while automated LLM‑based evaluation shows variable alignment with human judgments.

By Parth Bhalerao, Diola Dsouza, Ruiwen Guan, Oana Ignat
arXiv AI
Aug 28

Safety Does Not Compose: Non-Decaying Loop State for Autonomous LLM Agents

The paper demonstrates that safety mechanisms for autonomous large language model agents fail to compose across iterative loops, as trajectory‑scoped monitors cannot detect attacks whose evidence is spread over multiple iterations. It introduces LoopHarness, a system that maintains a persistent, non‑decaying safety state across loops, bounding unauthorized actions with a constant that does not grow with the number of iterations. The authors provide a comprehensive evaluation protocol, including attacks that require cross‑iteration evidence, module ablations, and adaptive white‑box red‑team testing.

By Chenhao Wu, Haoxuan Jia, Yang Liu, Yingguang Yang, Yuhan Lin, Chongyang Zhang, Hao Zheng, Yulin Huang, Jianshen Zhang, Yongzhi Qi, Shang Luo, Kefu Xu, Jifeng Zhu, Bin Chong
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

Diffusion Policies for Short-Horizon Planning in Robot Crowd Navigation

The paper introduces Planning Diffusion Policy Optimization (PDPO), an offline‑to‑online reinforcement‑learning framework that employs a diffusion policy to produce short‑horizon action chunks for robot crowd navigation. PDPO is pretrained on collision‑avoidance demonstrations and fine‑tuned online with PPO, generating five‑step action sequences applied in a receding‑horizon manner. The authors also identify a benchmark artifact where agents can leave the valid domain without explicit boundary constraints, and they mitigate this by treating boundary violations as collisions, leading to improved success rates over strong baselines.

By Wendong Li, Jochen Garcke
arXiv AI
Aug 28

A Contract-Centered Architecture for Scalable and Manageable Agentic Runtimes

The paper proposes a contract‑centered architecture for agentic runtimes, defining four shared responsibility objects—Skill, Harness, Scaffold, and an external data substrate—to manage capabilities, runtime, control boundaries, and data governance in enterprise AI deployments. It introduces a falsifiable hypothesis (P1) about cost‑aware capability‑capacity separability and outlines six measurable design conditions, proposing a cluster‑period randomized crossover experiment to test the hypothesis. The work presents a contract‑bounded runtime architecture, a source‑preserving data substrate, and a measurement protocol, though no implementation or empirical results are reported.

By Yaxiao Liu, Pengbo Liu, Yiwen Liu, Yihua Guan, Zhenghe Hou, Jiaxing Song
arXiv AI
Aug 28

When Text Misleads: Inconsistent-Aware Reasoning for Audio-Grounded Dialogue

The paper introduces ContraTalk, a benchmark that tests whether dialogue models truly use acoustic cues or rely on transcript shortcuts. It formalizes cross‑modal disagreement, creates conflict and consistent QA examples, and proposes an Audio Twin representation to expose acoustic evidence to models. Experiments show that while text‑only LLMs perform well on consistent cases, they falter on conflict cases, and AudioLLMs only partially mitigate this issue.

By Yen-Ju Lu, Yuzhe Wang, Yaohan Guan, Xiluo He, Jiarui Hai, Mingrui Liang, Kaavya Chaparala, Thomas Thebaud, Laureano Moro-Velazquez, Najim Dehak, Jesus Villalba
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

BTS-AgentBench: A Deterministic, Replayable Pipeline from Read-Only Telemetry Logs to Agent Benchmarks

BTS-AgentBench is a deterministic, replayable pipeline that transforms read‑only telemetry logs from industrial sites into executable multi‑turn agent benchmarks. The method normalizes BTS metadata and raw histories into a read‑only tool store, compiles static tasks with tool‑derived gold answers and evidence, and lifts retained tasks into typed, bounded operator‑facing episodes. The 532‑row release includes clarifications, goal revision, timestamp policy, quality‑gated reporting, and evidence attribution, and the construction process reproduces all released train/dev/test artifacts exactly.

By Jeong-Yoon Kim
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

TraceBench: Controlled Evaluation of LLM Agents for Time-Series Root-Cause Attribution

TraceBench is a simulation-based framework that generates controlled root‑cause attribution tasks for time‑series data. In each task, an LLM agent must determine whether a system parameter was altered during a simulation of a physical dynamical system and identify the altered parameter. The authors evaluated four LLM agents on tasks derived from three interpretable mechanical systems, finding that agents perform better with domain context, rely mainly on numerical console output, and struggle more when required to produce Python scripts for labeling than when submitting direct predictions.

By Tommaso Bendinelli, Artur Dox, Christian Holz
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

4DSynth: Controllable Procedural World Synthesis for Dynamic Embodied Simulation

4DSynth is a controllable procedural system that transforms natural-language descriptions, blueprint masks, or single photographs into editable 4D environments featuring explicit geometry, animated actors, collision-free trajectories, and physics-ready simulation states. The system unifies animation, camera planning, rendering, and task generation within a single geometry-grounded representation, enabling scalable creation of dynamic embodied simulation scenes. Using 4DSynth, the authors built 4DSynth-Nav, an interactive navigation benchmark that demonstrates the reproducibility and tunability of procedural failures across vision‑language models.

By Zehao Qi, Haochen Luo, Jia-Wang Bian, Zeyu Ma, Shuyang Sun
arXiv AI
Aug 28

Persona-Execution Separation: An Architecture Pattern for Evolving LLM Agents under Execution Audit

The paper introduces Persona‑Execution Separation (PES), an architecture pattern that splits an LLM agent’s persona—its instructions, tone, and self‑presentation—from its execution—stateful, auditable work—by placing them in distinct trust domains linked through a governed contract bridge. PES allows the persona to evolve freely while keeping execution traceable, using mechanisms such as an approval matrix, data‑loss‑prevention exceptions, and continuous identity. A pilot implementation on a regulated digital‑employee platform demonstrated that PES successfully decouples persona drift from execution audit, preventing re‑validation or fingerprinting of hard‑asserted fields.

By Yisen Xi
arXiv AI
Aug 28

The Artificial Experimentalist: Discovery and Control of Self-Organizing Phenomena with Autotelic Reinforcement Learning

The paper introduces a closed‑loop framework using autotelic reinforcement learning to explore and manipulate complex systems, specifically Lenia, a continuous cellular automaton. An agent called CARL autonomously samples diverse goals and learns a goal‑conditioned policy that intervenes with minimal, local perturbations. CARL demonstrates three key abilities: discovering stable solitons more efficiently than heuristic baselines, steering existing solitons with few interventions, and enabling humans to guide solitons through maze environments in real time via high‑level commands. The agents generalize zero‑shot to out‑of‑distribution conditions, suggesting a path toward artificial experimentalist agents that can discover and control emergent phenomena.

By Marko Cvjetko, Benedikt Hartl, Michael Levin, Cl\'ement Moulin-Frier, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer
arXiv AI
Aug 28

AgentJudgeBench: A Multi-Difficulty Benchmark for Evaluating LLM Judges on Agentic Tool-Calling

AgentJudgeBench is a new benchmark that evaluates the reliability of large language model (LLM) judges on agentic tool‑calling tasks involving workflow directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). It contains 3,808 instances across six DAG topologies and three difficulty tiers, tested with five generators (3B–70B open‑weight models and GPT‑5.4) and six judges (20B to frontier scale) under both paired‑with‑and‑without‑ground‑truth conditions. The study finds that judge alignment degrades with task difficulty, ground‑truth exposure can sometimes hurt alignment, and structured evaluation rubrics provide modest improvements, revealing a structural ceiling that model capacity alone cannot surpass.

By Abhigya Verma, Amit Kumar Saha, Seganrasan Subramanian, Sai Harshitha Aluru
arXiv AI
Aug 28

Large Models for Battery Prognostics and Health Management: A Review and Future Roadmap

The article reviews how Large Models (LMs) based on Transformer architectures and self‑supervised pre‑training can address longstanding challenges in Battery Prognostics and Health Management (BPHM). It surveys LM applications across data scarcity, generalization, interpretability, and system automation, and outlines a roadmap for future research, including collaborative data ecosystems, validation, trustworthiness, and efficient deployment. The review aims to guide researchers and practitioners in developing next‑generation battery management systems that are safe, reliable, and autonomous throughout battery lifecycles.

By Jiale Liu, Huan Wang, Weicheng Wang, Rong Zhu, Qiqi Wang, Min Xie
arXiv AI
Aug 28

PICasso: An AI-Enabled Design Framework for Autonomous Optimization of Silicon Photonic Devices

PICasso is an AI‑enabled framework that converts natural‑language specifications into manufacturable silicon photonic integrated circuits (PICs) through a structured pipeline of NL → YAML → GDS, PDK‑aware knowledge injection, automated placement and routing, DRC/LVS validation, and SAX‑based photonic simulation. The authors introduce PIC‑Set, a benchmark of 36 parameterized PIC design tasks, and evaluate several large language models (LLMs) using new metrics such as structural and functional Spec@k, optimization efficiency, and robustness. Across the benchmark, PICasso markedly improves specification satisfaction, achieving up to 92.7% structural Spec@3 and 52% functional Spec@3, while reducing mean insertion loss from 4.98 dB to 3.25 dB through simulation‑guided optimization.

By Deepak Vungarala, Deniz Najafi, Abdulrahman Aljoudi, Zahra Ghanaatian, Navid Khoshavi, Gourav Datta, Arman Roohi, Mahdi Nikdast, Shaahin Angizi
arXiv AI
Aug 28

Leveraging Large Language Models for Systematic Literature Review of Disease Spread Models

The paper presents a pipeline that uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract information from 536 peer‑reviewed agent‑based modeling papers for systematic literature reviews (SLRs). GPT‑4.1 achieves about 77.95% paper‑level accuracy, while GPT‑5.0 reaches 81.67%. Field‑level accuracy varies widely, and the study notes that agreement between LLMs can signal output quality, with low agreement indicating hallucinations and high agreement with low accuracy suggesting noise in the human dataset.

By Orhan Yagizer Cinar, Timur Emre Ozkose, Emma Von Hoene, Amira Roess, Taylor Anderson, Hamdi Kavak