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

GTA-RAG: Graph-Trajectory-Augmented Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Turn Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning

arXiv:2608.22479v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enables LLMs to access external knowledge for answering knowledge-intensive questions. For complex multi-hop quest...

By Jun Chen, Yongchao Liu, Pengyu Qiu, Jiajun Zheng, Juelu Zhang, Yujie Zeng, Qin Zhang, Ziyue Qiao, Xiao Luo
arXiv AI
Aug 25

TO-Agents: A Multi-Agent AI Framework for Subjective Preference-Guided Topology Optimization

TO-Agents is a multi‑agent AI framework that translates natural‑language design intent into iterative topology optimization. It converts a human problem description into solver inputs, runs the optimizer, renders 3D topologies, and employs a judge agent to critique and revise results using multiview vision‑language reasoning. Evaluated on a cantilever beam and a phone‑stand design, the system achieved preference‑aligned designs in 60% of trials, outperforming an ablated pipeline by up to six times and enabling end‑to‑end intent‑to‑prototype design with additive manufacturing.

By Isabella A. Stewart, Hongrui Chen, Faez Ahmed
arXiv AI
Aug 25

Designing Benchmarks for Knowledge Work

The paper proposes a new way to describe benchmarks for AI systems that perform knowledge work, outlining four explicit fields: represented activity, tested setting, required work product, and evaluated result. It builds an inventory of 18 work activities from O*NET to enable activity-level reporting across occupations, and evaluates these activities for semantic coherence, algorithm sensitivity, ontology legibility, and human interpretability. The authors apply their framework to three existing benchmarks—GDPval, OfficeQA Pro, and APEX-SWE—to show how different aspects of work can be captured within the same representation.

By Yining Hua, Hongbin Na, Cyrus Ayubcha, Levi Lian
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 25

LoViF 2026 The First Challenge on Unified Removal of Raindrops and Reflections: Methods and Results

arXiv:2608.22723v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This workshop paper comprehensively reviews the First Challenge on Unified Removal of Raindrops and Reflections. The challenge aims to address a freque...

By Zewei He, Xi Tong, Yu Chen, Xingyu Liu, Xin Li, Zepeng Wang, Jiagao Hu, Fuhao Li, Yuxuan Chen, Fei Wang, Daiguo Zhou, Minmin Yi, Chuanrui Zhang, Liwen Zhang, Yeongjin Jeong, Hyunjin Cho, Jiwon Lee, Minsang Kim, Jae Woong Soh, Jin-Hui Jiang, Rong-Lin Jian, Chih-Chung Hsu, Youngjin Oh, Junhyeong Kwon, Junyoung Park, Jae Hyun Park, Sung Ju Lee, Nam Ik Cho, Vishwajeet Shukla, Himanshu Baurai, Zhiqi Zhang, Kui Jiang, Zhaocheng Yu, Runzhe Li, Dawei Fan, Hao Li, Zhanshuo Zhang, Fan Ji, Jiangmeng Li, Xiongxin Tang, Fanjiang Xu, Shangquan Sun, Anh-Kiet Duong, Petra Gomez-Kr\"amer, Jean-Michel Carozza, Ruibo Zhang, Dexiang Hong, Xinyan Liu, Shengeng Tang, Weidong Chen, Tzu-Hsuan Weng, Min-Te Sun
arXiv AI
Aug 25

SRMT: Shared Memory for Multi-agent Lifelong Pathfinding

The paper introduces the Shared Recurrent Memory Transformer (SRMT), a decentralized multi‑agent reinforcement learning framework that uses a global memory workspace for agents to broadcast and query each other’s learned states. SRMT is evaluated on the Partially Observable Multi‑Agent Pathfinding (PO‑MAPF) problem, showing that shared memory enables emergent coordination even with minimal reward guidance and outperforms existing baselines on the Bottleneck task and scales competitively on larger POGEMA maps. The authors provide open‑source code for training and evaluation on GitHub.

By Alsu Sagirova, Yuri Kuratov, Mikhail Burtsev
arXiv AI
Aug 25

Multi-Context Fusion Transformer for Pedestrian Crossing Intention Prediction in Urban Environments

The paper introduces the Multi-Context Fusion Transformer (MFT), a model that predicts pedestrian crossing intentions in urban settings by integrating four types of contextual information—pedestrian behavior, environment, localization, and vehicle motion—through a progressive fusion strategy. MFT uses intra-context attention for reciprocal interactions within each context, cross-context attention to combine these contexts into a global representation, and guided attention mechanisms to refine both context tokens and the global token. Experiments on JAADbeh, JAADall, and PIE datasets show MFT outperforms existing methods with accuracies of 73%, 93%, and 90% respectively, and ablation studies confirm the importance of each network component and input context.

By Yuanzhe Li, Hang Zhong, Steffen M\"uller
arXiv AI
Aug 25

Robust Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Small UAS Separation Assurance under GPS Degradation and Spoofing

The paper presents a robust multi‑agent reinforcement learning framework for small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS) to maintain separation assurance when GPS data is degraded or spoofed. By modeling state observation corruption as a zero‑sum game, the authors derive a closed‑form adversarial perturbation that eliminates iterative inner optimization and can be evaluated in linear time. Integrating this perturbation into a policy‑gradient MARL algorithm yields a counter‑policy that achieves near‑zero collision rates in high‑density simulations even with up to 35% observation corruption, outperforming non‑adversarial baselines.

By Alex Zongo, Filippos Fotiadis, Ufuk Topcu, Peng Wei
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 AI
Aug 25

SkillAlchemy: Open-World Agent Skill Creation

arXiv:2608.23417v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are reusable procedural artifacts that extend language agents with specialized workflows, tool conventions, and domain behaviors at infere...

By Hengjun Wang, Shuyue Wei, Boyi Liu, Jun Yang, Yongxin Tong
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

LongWoF-Bench: Evaluating EvoMap Genes for Verifiable Long-Workflow Tasks

LongWoF-Bench is a new benchmark of 778 machine‑verifiable long‑workflow tasks spanning code generation, agent‑environment synthesis, mathematical reasoning, and rule following. The study shows that EvoMap Genes—structured representations of verifier‑confirmed execution trajectories—outperform the Skill baseline by 8.7–15.5 percentage points across seven models, and for Claude Opus they enable 39 additional task completions while cutting token consumption by 9.9%. The results demonstrate that verified execution experience can be externalized and reused, improving long‑workflow completion without repeatedly discovering new strategies.

By Xiao Zhang, Qumeng Sun, Jihao Li, Yiming Ren, Xiang Liu, Haoyang Zhang, Junjie Wang