AI agents

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

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arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

SkillBloat: Token Amplification Attacks via Skill Injection in LLM Coding Agents

The paper "SkillBloat: Token Amplification Attacks via Skill Injection in LLM Coding Agents" investigates how agent skills—task‑specific instructions, scripts, and resources—can be exploited to create a trusted instruction channel that enables token amplification attacks. It introduces a two‑phase framework, SkillBloat, which first screens a library of attack‑type conditions across multiple amplification mechanisms and then refines the strongest candidate through LLM‑guided full‑document skill rewriting. Evaluated on a real‑world skill benchmark, SkillBloat achieves an average best amplification of 5.4184×–10.1455× across multiple coding‑agent target configurations, and an ablation study shows that the second‑stage refinement consistently improves performance over the initial screening alone.

By Yuanjin Zheng, Jingbang Chen
arXiv AI
Aug 25

CausalSmith: A Formally Grounded, Self-Improving Agentic Framework for Automated Research in Causal Inference

CausalSmith is a framework that automates theoretical research in causal inference by integrating a Lean proof assistant with a self‑improving agentic pipeline. It uses Causalean, a Lean library of over 7,000 machine‑checked declarations, and a pipeline that selects topics, proposes results, formalizes statements, constructs proofs, and audits them against informal claims. The system’s artifacts and source code are publicly available on GitHub.

By Jiyuan Tan, Vasilis Syrgkanis
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

Benchmarking and Boosting Multilingual Capabilities of LVLMs via OCR-Centric Reinforcement Learning

The paper introduces PM4Bench, a multimodal, multilingual, multi-task benchmark built on a strictly parallel 10‑language corpus, allowing fair cross‑lingual comparison of Large Vision‑Language Models (LVLMs). It also proposes a vision setting that embeds textual inputs directly into images to better mimic real deployment scenarios. Experiments show OCR performance drives cross‑lingual gaps, leading to an OCR‑centric GRPO training strategy that improves multilingual VQA and reduces disparities without costly supervision.

By Junyuan Gao, Jiahe Song, Jiang Wu, Runchuan Zhu, Guanlin Shen, Shasha Wang, Xingjian Wei, Haote Yang, Weijia Li, Bin Wang, Lijun Wu, Conghui He
arXiv AI
Aug 25

Time-Series Retrieval for Grounding Multimodal Language Models in Remaining Useful Life Prediction

The paper explores remaining useful life (RUL) estimation using multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that are grounded through time‑series retrieval. It proposes a framework that retrieves historically similar degradation segments, combines them with the test trajectory into a visual comparison artifact, and processes this via a structured multimodal prompt. Experiments on the FD001 partition of the C‑MAPSS benchmark show that retrieval consistently improves RUL prediction, with greater benefits for larger MLLMs, while also revealing current limitations in practical prognostics and health management (PHM) settings.

By Valeriu Dimidov, Rapha\"el Frank
arXiv AI
Aug 25

ST-EVO: Towards Generative Spatio-Temporal Evolution of Multi-Agent Communication Topologies

ST‑EVO is a new framework for Large Language Model‑powered Multi‑Agent Systems that introduces a spatio‑temporal evolution of communication topologies. It uses a flow‑matching based scheduler to enable dialogue‑wise communication scheduling and incorporates uncertainty perception and self‑feedback to refine its scheduling over time. Experiments on nine benchmarks show that ST‑EVO outperforms existing methods, improving accuracy by roughly 5% to 25%.

By Xingjian Wu, Xvyuan Liu, Junkai Lu, Siyuan Wang, Xiangfei Qiu, Yang Shu, Jilin Hu, Chenjuan Guo, Bin Yang
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

PropUQ-MAS: Propagation-Aware Uncertainty Quantification for LLM Multi-Agent Systems

PropUQ-MAS is a framework for uncertainty quantification in large language model (LLM) multi‑agent systems that models the system as a communication‑structured graph. It estimates the reliability of each step by combining local uncertainty with uncertainty inherited from upstream messages, addressing the risk of error propagation in inter‑agent communication. Experiments show consistent improvements in UQ metrics, with average gains of +6.10% in AUROC and +47.58% in PRR.

By Yaokun Liu, Yifan Liu, Daniel Yue Zhang, Ruichen Yao, Zelin Li, Dong Wang