Daily Papers

Coherent multi-shot audio-visual video generation requires maintaining consistent identities while depicting evolving states and coordinating sounds across shot boundaries. Although dense captions describe individual shots in detail, they rarely specify which entities persist, how their states change, or which entities and actions produce sounds. To address this limitation, we propose Structured Stateful Relational Scripts (SSRS), a textual supervision representation that separates persistent entity and voice identities from shot-specific visual and auditory states. SSRS explicitly encodes sound-source bindings and temporal relations, while a global audio-visual event sequence connects local actions and sounds, including events that continue across shot boundaries. We further introduce MSAV-Script-100K, a large-scale dataset of curated multi-shot audio-visual videos paired with detailed SSRS annotations, enabling models to learn identity persistence, state transitions, and event continuity from structured supervision. Experiments demonstrate improvements in cross-shot consistency, adherence to specified state changes, and audio-visual alignment, highlighting the effectiveness of our SSRS and MSAV-Script-100K for coherent multi-shot audio-visual generation. Our proposed dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/shenlehan/MSAV-Script-100K{MSAV-Script-100K}.

This paper presents the Relational Machine Calculus (RMC): a simple, foundational model of first-order relational programming. The RMC originates from the Functional Machine Calculus (FMC), which generalizes the lambda-calculus and its standard call-by-name stack machine in two directions. One, "locations", introduces multiple stacks, which enable effect operators to be encoded into the abstraction and application constructs. The second, "sequencing", introduces the imperative notions of "skip" and "sequence", similar to kappa-calculus and concatenative programming languages. The key observation of the RMC is that the first-order fragment of the FMC exhibits a latent duality which, given a simple decomposition of the relevant constructors, can be concretely expressed as an involution on syntax. Semantically, this gives rise to a sound and complete calculus for string diagrams of Frobenius monoids. We consider unification as the corresponding symmetric generalization of beta-reduction. By further including standard operators of Kleene algebra, the RMC embeds a range of computational models: the kappa-calculus, logic programming, automata, Interaction Nets, and Petri Nets, among others. These embeddings preserve operational semantics, which for the RMC is again given by a generalization of the standard stack machine for the lambda-calculus. The equational theory of the RMC (which supports reasoning about its operational semantics) is conservative over both the first-order lambda-calculus and Kleene algebra, and can be oriented to give a confluent reduction relation.

Large Language Models (LLMs) augmented with external tools have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex reasoning tasks. However, existing frameworks rely heavily on natural language reasoning to determine when tools can be invoked and whether their results should be committed, lacking formal guarantees for logical safety and verifiability. We present ToolGate, a forward execution framework that provides logical safety guarantees and verifiable state evolution for LLM tool calling. ToolGate maintains an explicit symbolic state space as a typed key-value mapping representing trusted world information throughout the reasoning process. Each tool is formalized as a Hoare-style contract consisting of a precondition and a postcondition, where the precondition gates tool invocation by checking whether the current state satisfies the required conditions, and the postcondition determines whether the tool's result can be committed to update the state through runtime verification. Our approach guarantees that the symbolic state evolves only through verified tool executions, preventing invalid or hallucinated results from corrupting the world representation. Experimental validation demonstrates that ToolGate significantly improves the reliability and verifiability of tool-augmented LLM systems while maintaining competitive performance on complex multi-step reasoning tasks. This work establishes a foundation for building more trustworthy and debuggable AI systems that integrate language models with external tools.

Knowledge graph engineering often distributes accepted state, observations, constraints, processes, and hypothetical scenarios across artifacts whose combined execution contract remains external. We present PULSE, an Object-Process-Methodology-inspired language that localizes four operational roles and their write effects in one typed runtime. Here, modes denote operational roles rather than modal or deontic logic. The implemented contract fixes evidence non-overwrite, branch isolation, grounded multi-subject timers, guarded state change, and declaration-ranked event ordering over time and space; an external runner still decides whether evidence becomes an authoritative move. GeoSPARQL, SOSA, and SHACL remain generated views. A core calculus gives an effect-confinement lemma and six safety properties. Lean 4 checks kernel analogues for positions, evidence, clocks, monitors, atomicity, and branch source retention; 88 tests, 3,534 bounded checks, and 32 Lean/Python runtime-kernel cases bound the implementation claim to the checked cases. First-author implementations of a standards composition and a separate Sismic statechart reproduce the tested cold-chain trace. Across 37,440 generated temporal traces, PULSE matches a separate workflow and distinguishes ten single-field mutants. On the complete NOAA IBTrACS since1980 subset it agrees with GEOS and an event sweep on 1,476,290 transition-zone pairs, including 4,800 sampled and 12,831 duration-qualified events. Project-specific GeoSPARQL probes measure interface coverage. Overall, the results support contract localization, safety arguments, and trace parity for the tested fragment; language superiority and usability remain outside the evaluation.

Automated research systems increasingly run LLM agents over long horizons, but more inference does not by itself produce more progress: agents replay growing histories, duplicate one another's work, or stop experimenting while token consumption continues. Yet most evaluations use short budgets or benchmarks that saturate early, leaving these failure modes untested. We trace these failures to two choices: where research state lives and who decides what to try next. We introduce Stateless Language Agents (SLAs), built on the principle of stateful search with stateless agents: no agent carries its conversation across invocations; instead, the harness owns the research state (candidate solutions and measured outcomes) and reconstructs a fresh and role-specific context for every invocation. What each agent sees becomes an explicit design choice rather than a history that grows with the run. We implement this principle in the SLA framework, where a stateless Advisor reads harness-summarized evidence across search directions and assigns concrete experiments to parallel Workers. We evaluate SLA against three recent frameworks on software engineering, kernel optimization, and algorithm design at budgets of up to one billion tokens. SLA achieves the best final result on every task and reaches the strongest kernel baseline's final performance with over 84% fewer tokens. Ablations from shared checkpoints show that focused contexts and explicit assignments each contribute to SLA's progress, with effects that can compound over full runs, while the Advisor consumes less than 0.6% of tokens. These results argue for SLAs, which keep durable research state out of agent conversations, and show that short evaluation horizons can misjudge research systems and their components.

In this paper we introduce the olog, or ontology log, a category-theoretic model for knowledge representation (KR). Grounded in formal mathematics, ologs can be rigorously formulated and cross-compared in ways that other KR models (such as semantic networks) cannot. An olog is similar to a relational database schema; in fact an olog can serve as a data repository if desired. Unlike database schemas, which are generally difficult to create or modify, ologs are designed to be user-friendly enough that authoring or reconfiguring an olog is a matter of course rather than a difficult chore. It is hoped that learning to author ologs is much simpler than learning a database definition language, despite their similarity. We describe ologs carefully and illustrate with many examples. As an application we show that any primitive recursive function can be described by an olog. We also show that ologs can be aligned or connected together into a larger network using functors. The various methods of information flow and institutions can then be used to integrate local and global world-views. We finish by providing several different avenues for future research.

It is a notable trend to use Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle complex tasks, e.g., tasks that require a sequence of actions and dynamic interaction with tools and external environments. In this paper, we propose StateFlow, a novel LLM-based task-solving paradigm that conceptualizes complex task-solving processes as state machines. In StateFlow, we distinguish between "process grounding" (via state and state transitions) and "sub-task solving" (through actions within a state), enhancing control and interpretability of the task-solving procedure. A state represents the status of a running process. The transitions between states are controlled by heuristic rules or decisions made by the LLM, allowing for a dynamic and adaptive progression. Upon entering a state, a series of actions is executed, involving not only calling LLMs guided by different prompts, but also the utilization of external tools as needed. Our results show that StateFlow significantly enhances LLMs' efficiency. For instance, StateFlow achieves 13% and 28% higher success rates compared to ReAct in InterCode SQL and ALFWorld benchmark, with 5x and 3x less cost respectively. We also show that StateFlow can be combined with iterative refining methods like Reflexion to further improve performance.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as agents, expected to decompose goals, invoke tools, and verify results in dynamic environments. Realizing these capabilities requires access to agentic data-structured interaction records that couple user intents with tool specifications, argument-grounded calls, and verifiable execution traces. However, collecting such data from human annotators is costly, time-consuming, and difficult to scale. We present a unified framework for synthesizing agentic data using only LLMs, without any human-in-the-loop supervision. This framework decomposes generation into modular pipelines that produce complete interaction records spanning task specifications, tool definitions, policy pseudocode, natural language exchanges, and execution traces. Records conform to strict syntactic and semantic constraints, ensuring machine-parseability and faithful alignment across inputs, outputs, and tool calls. Beyond single tasks, there is support for both multi-task and multi-turn agent interactions, enabling the construction of datasets that reflect the full spectrum of tool-use competencies. To ensure quality and consistency, the framework integrates constrained generation formats, JSON-schema validation, and judge-based filtering. This paper formalizes the schema for agentic records, details the prompt design principles that guide generation, and introduces scalable pipelines for high-quality synthetic data. By providing a reproducible, LLM-only alternative to manual collection, hence advancing the development of agentic LLMs capable of robust tool use.

We present a machine-checked formalization of structurally governed AI workflow architectures and prove that effect-level governance can be imposed without reducing internal computational expressivity. Using Interaction Trees in Rocq 8.19, we define a governance operator G that mediates all effectful directives, including memory access, external calls, and oracle (LLM) queries. Our development compiles with 0 admitted lemmas and consists of 36 modules, ~12,000 lines of Rocq, and 454 theorems. We establishseven properties: (P1) governed Turing completeness, (P2) governed oracle expressivity, (P3) a decidability boundary in which governance predicates are total and closed under Boolean composition while semantic program properties remain non-trivial and undecidable by governance, (P4) goal preservation for permitted executions, (P5) expressive minimality of primitive capabilities (compute, memory, reasoning, external call, observability), (P6) subsumption asymmetry showing structural governance strictly subsumes content-level filtering, and (P7) semantic transparency: on all executions where governance permits, the governed interpretation is observationally equivalent (modulo governance-only events) to the ungoverned interpretation. Together, these results show that governance and computational expressivity are orthogonal dimensions: governance constrains the effect boundary of programs while remaining semantically transparent to internal computation.

The database community has repeatedly advanced the state of the art by recognizing that new workloads demand new system architectures. We argue that long-horizon agentic tasks -- code generation, scientific discovery, hardware design -- are such a workload. These agents explore: they generate artifacts, execute tools, observe failures, branch, and repair over hundreds of steps. This search produces a structured object we call an experience graph: executable artifacts, tool outputs, rewards, sibling comparisons, and causal lineage. Yet existing agent frameworks treat this experience as disposable state -- JSON checkpoints and session logs that cannot be recovered after a crash, queried across users, or materialized into training data. We propose Trellis: a data foundation that treats the experience graph as first-class, governed, queryable database state. The core insight is that search over experience graphs is a database access pattern. Frontier selection is a query, cross-session reuse is vector-seeded graph retrieval, training-data extraction is a materialized view, and reconstructing what an agent knew at any past step is a time-travel query. When the database owns the experience graph, agents become stateless compute, and crash recovery, horizontal scaling, and a closed-loop training flywheel emerge as architectural byproducts. We ground the design in KernelEvolve, a production accelerator-kernel optimizer at Meta, where cross-session reuse reaches a target speedup roughly 10x faster at 52% lower token cost. More broadly, Trellis turns inference-time search from disposable computation into a durable institutional asset: logs made databases reliable; experience graphs may make agents cumulative.

Language models and specialized table embedding models have recently demonstrated strong performance on many tasks over tabular data. Researchers and practitioners are keen to leverage these models in many new application contexts; but limited understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of these models, and the table representations they generate, makes the process of finding a suitable model for a given task reliant on trial and error. There is an urgent need to gain a comprehensive understanding of these models to minimize inefficiency and failures in downstream usage. To address this need, we propose Observatory, a formal framework to systematically analyze embedding representations of relational tables. Motivated both by invariants of the relational data model and by statistical considerations regarding data distributions, we define eight primitive properties, and corresponding measures to quantitatively characterize table embeddings for these properties. Based on these properties, we define an extensible framework to evaluate language and table embedding models. We collect and synthesize a suite of datasets and use Observatory to analyze nine such models. Our analysis provides insights into the strengths and weaknesses of learned representations over tables. We find, for example, that some models are sensitive to table structure such as column order, that functional dependencies are rarely reflected in embeddings, and that specialized table embedding models have relatively lower sample fidelity. Such insights help researchers and practitioners better anticipate model behaviors and select appropriate models for their downstream tasks, while guiding researchers in the development of new models.

The recent breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs) are positioned to transition many areas of software. Database technologies particularly have an important entanglement with LLMs as efficient and intuitive database interactions are paramount. In this paper, we present DB-GPT, a revolutionary and production-ready project that integrates LLMs with traditional database systems to enhance user experience and accessibility. DB-GPT is designed to understand natural language queries, provide context-aware responses, and generate complex SQL queries with high accuracy, making it an indispensable tool for users ranging from novice to expert. The core innovation in DB-GPT lies in its private LLM technology, which is fine-tuned on domain-specific corpora to maintain user privacy and ensure data security while offering the benefits of state-of-the-art LLMs. We detail the architecture of DB-GPT, which includes a novel retrieval augmented generation (RAG) knowledge system, an adaptive learning mechanism to continuously improve performance based on user feedback and a service-oriented multi-model framework (SMMF) with powerful data-driven agents. Our extensive experiments and user studies confirm that DB-GPT represents a paradigm shift in database interactions, offering a more natural, efficient, and secure way to engage with data repositories. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of DB-GPT framework on the future of human-database interaction and outlines potential avenues for further enhancements and applications in the field. The project code is available at https://github.com/eosphoros-ai/DB-GPT. Experience DB-GPT for yourself by installing it with the instructions https://github.com/eosphoros-ai/DB-GPT#install and view a concise 10-minute video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYs4nTDzEhk.

As AI systems evolve from passive models into autonomous active agents capable of initiating actions, collaborating, and delegating tasks, the traditional boundaries of software systems blur. Traditional authorization and delegation frameworks, built around fixed principals, explicit requests, and static scopes, are insufficient to govern agentic systems. Agentic AI demands richer authorization semantics: agents must inherit and delegate permissions, act under time-limited authority, and coordinate through shared protocols. Existing Identity and Access Management (IAM) systems fail to fully capture this notion of agency, lacking mechanisms for recursive delegation, contextual boundaries, and dynamic scoping as executable governance primitives. Unlike access delegation standards such as OAuth 2.0, we treat delegation as a contractual term rather than merely a static token-based consent credential. This paper proposes a compositional governance framework that introduces primitives indispensable for agentic AI. We define types of delegation and their permissions and accountability implications, and we introduce a notion of resource scope attenuation to bound agentic access envelopes. These concepts are expressed as general relational definitions that can be composed into existing authorization domains (e.g., financial systems). To operationalize this composition, we define a compositional operator that overlays new agentic semantics, such as recursive delegation chains, onto existing relational policies without rewriting them. We substantiate this framework through formal proofs and empirical evaluation, showing that it provides a formal yet practical foundation for accountable authorization in agentic AI systems.

We study the problem of procedure planning in instructional videos, which aims to make a goal-oriented sequence of action steps given partial visual state observations. The motivation of this problem is to learn a structured and plannable state and action space. Recent works succeeded in sequence modeling of steps with only sequence-level annotations accessible during training, which overlooked the roles of states in the procedures. In this work, we point out that State CHangEs MAtter (SCHEMA) for procedure planning in instructional videos. We aim to establish a more structured state space by investigating the causal relations between steps and states in procedures. Specifically, we explicitly represent each step as state changes and track the state changes in procedures. For step representation, we leveraged the commonsense knowledge in large language models (LLMs) to describe the state changes of steps via our designed chain-of-thought prompting. For state change tracking, we align visual state observations with language state descriptions via cross-modal contrastive learning, and explicitly model the intermediate states of the procedure using LLM-generated state descriptions. Experiments on CrossTask, COIN, and NIV benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed SCHEMA model achieves state-of-the-art performance and obtains explainable visualizations.

Beyond traditional binary relational facts, n-ary relational knowledge graphs (NKGs) are comprised of n-ary relational facts containing more than two entities, which are closer to real-world facts with broader applications. However, the construction of NKGs remains at a coarse-grained level, which is always in a single schema, ignoring the order and variable arity of entities. To address these restrictions, we propose Text2NKG, a novel fine-grained n-ary relation extraction framework for n-ary relational knowledge graph construction. We introduce a span-tuple classification approach with hetero-ordered merging and output merging to accomplish fine-grained n-ary relation extraction in different arity. Furthermore, Text2NKG supports four typical NKG schemas: hyper-relational schema, event-based schema, role-based schema, and hypergraph-based schema, with high flexibility and practicality. The experimental results demonstrate that Text2NKG achieves state-of-the-art performance in F1 scores on the fine-grained n-ary relation extraction benchmark. Our code and datasets are publicly available.

Online resources such as WikiHow compile a wide range of scripts for performing everyday tasks, which can assist models in learning to reason about procedures. However, the scripts are always presented in a linear manner, which does not reflect the flexibility displayed by people executing tasks in real life. For example, in the CrossTask Dataset, 64.5% of consecutive step pairs are also observed in the reverse order, suggesting their ordering is not fixed. In addition, each step has an average of 2.56 frequent next steps, demonstrating "branching". In this paper, we propose the new challenging task of non-sequential graph script induction, aiming to capture optional and interchangeable steps in procedural planning. To automate the induction of such graph scripts for given tasks, we propose to take advantage of loosely aligned videos of people performing the tasks. In particular, we design a multimodal framework to ground procedural videos to WikiHow textual steps and thus transform each video into an observed step path on the latent ground truth graph script. This key transformation enables us to train a script knowledge model capable of both generating explicit graph scripts for learnt tasks and predicting future steps given a partial step sequence. Our best model outperforms the strongest pure text/vision baselines by 17.52% absolute gains on F1@3 for next step prediction and 13.8% absolute gains on Acc@1 for partial sequence completion. Human evaluation shows our model outperforming the WikiHow linear baseline by 48.76% absolute gains in capturing sequential and non-sequential step relationships.

In the world of Harry Potter, when Dumbledore's mind is overburdened, he extracts memories into a Pensieve to be revisited later. In the world of AI, while we possess the Pensieve-mature databases and retrieval systems, our models inexplicably lack the "wand" to operate it. They remain like a Dumbledore without agency, passively accepting a manually engineered context as their entire memory. This work finally places the wand in the model's hand. We introduce StateLM, a new class of foundation models endowed with an internal reasoning loop to manage their own state. We equip our model with a suite of memory tools, such as context pruning, document indexing, and note-taking, and train it to actively manage these tools. By learning to dynamically engineering its own context, our model breaks free from the architectural prison of a fixed window. Experiments across various model sizes demonstrate StateLM's effectiveness across diverse scenarios. On long-document QA tasks, StateLMs consistently outperform standard LLMs across all model scales; on the chat memory task, they achieve absolute accuracy improvements of 10% to 20% over standard LLMs. On the deep research task BrowseComp-Plus, the performance gap becomes even more pronounced: StateLM achieves up to 52% accuracy, whereas standard LLM counterparts struggle around 5%. Ultimately, our approach shifts LLMs from passive predictors to state-aware agents where reasoning becomes a stateful and manageable process.

The synergy between symbolic knowledge, often represented by Knowledge Graphs (KGs), and the generative capabilities of neural networks is central to advancing neurosymbolic AI. A primary bottleneck in realizing this potential is the difficulty of automating KG construction, which faces challenges related to output reliability, consistency, and verifiability. These issues can manifest as structural inconsistencies within the generated graphs, such as the formation of disconnected isolated islands of data or the inaccurate conflation of abstract classes with specific instances. To address these challenges, we propose HyDRA, a Hybrid-Driven Reasoning Architecture designed for verifiable KG automation. Given a domain or an initial set of documents, HyDRA first constructs an ontology via a panel of collaborative neurosymbolic agents. These agents collaboratively agree on a set of competency questions (CQs) that define the scope and requirements the ontology must be able to answer. Given these CQs, we build an ontology graph that subsequently guides the automated extraction of triplets for KG generation from arbitrary documents. Inspired by design-by-contracts (DbC) principles, our method leverages verifiable contracts as the primary control mechanism to steer the generative process of Large Language Models (LLMs). To verify the output of our approach, we extend beyond standard benchmarks and propose an evaluation framework that assesses the functional correctness of the resulting KG by leveraging symbolic verifications as described by the neurosymbolic AI framework, SymbolicAI. This work contributes a hybrid-driven architecture for improving the reliability of automated KG construction and the exploration of evaluation methods for measuring the functional integrity of its output. The code is publicly available.

Most agent frameworks are built around the language model: a conversation loop comes first, then tools, then rules, and finally a logging layer bolted on for observability, with state persisted as retrievable "memory." We describe ActiveGraph, a runtime that inverts this arrangement. The append-only event log is the source of truth; the working graph is a deterministic projection of that log; and behaviors--ordinary functions, classes, LLM-backed routines, or logic attached to typed edges--react to changes in the graph and emit new events. No component instructs another; coordination happens entirely through the shared graph. This single design decision yields three properties that retrieval-and-summarization memory systems do not provide: deterministic replay of any run from its log, cheap forking that branches a run at any event without re-executing the shared prefix, and end-to-end lineage from a high-level goal down to the individual model call that produced each artifact. We present the architecture, a determinism contract that makes replay sound, and a worked diligence example whose full causal structure is reconstructable from the log alone. We discuss--without claiming to demonstrate--why this substrate is unusually well suited to self-improving agents, and how it extends the BabyAGI lineage and prior graph-memory research.

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) are valuable tools for representing relationships between entities in a structured format. Traditionally, these knowledge bases are queried to extract specific information. However, question-answering (QA) over such KGs poses a challenge due to the intrinsic complexity of natural language compared to the structured format and the size of these graphs. Despite these challenges, the structured nature of KGs can provide a solid foundation for grounding the outputs of Large Language Models (LLMs), offering organizations increased reliability and control. Recent advancements in LLMs have introduced reasoning methods at inference time to improve their performance and maximize their capabilities. In this work, we propose integrating these reasoning strategies with KGs to anchor every step or "thought" of the reasoning chains in KG data. Specifically, we evaluate both agentic and automated search methods across several reasoning strategies, including Chain-of-Thought (CoT), Tree-of-Thought (ToT), and Graph-of-Thought (GoT), using GRBench, a benchmark dataset for graph reasoning with domain-specific graphs. Our experiments demonstrate that this approach consistently outperforms baseline models, highlighting the benefits of grounding LLM reasoning processes in structured KG data.

We extend the simply-typed guarded lambda-calculus with discrete probabilities and endow it with a program logic for reasoning about relational properties of guarded probabilistic computations. This provides a framework for programming and reasoning about infinite stochastic processes like Markov chains. We demonstrate the logic sound by interpreting its judgements in the topos of trees and by using probabilistic couplings for the semantics of relational assertions over distributions on discrete types. The program logic is designed to support syntax-directed proofs in the style of relational refinement types, but retains the expressiveness of higher-order logic extended with discrete distributions, and the ability to reason relationally about expressions that have different types or syntactic structure. In addition, our proof system leverages a well-known theorem from the coupling literature to justify better proof rules for relational reasoning about probabilistic expressions. We illustrate these benefits with a broad range of examples that were beyond the scope of previous systems, including shift couplings and lump couplings between random walks.

Recent advances in language model (LM) agents and function calling have enabled autonomous, feedback-driven systems to solve problems across various digital domains. To better understand the unique limitations of LM agents, we introduce RefactorBench, a benchmark consisting of 100 large handcrafted multi-file refactoring tasks in popular open-source repositories. Solving tasks within RefactorBench requires thorough exploration of dependencies across multiple files and strong adherence to relevant instructions. Every task is defined by 3 natural language instructions of varying specificity and is mutually exclusive, allowing for the creation of longer combined tasks on the same repository. Baselines on RefactorBench reveal that current LM agents struggle with simple compositional tasks, solving only 22% of tasks with base instructions, in contrast to a human developer with short time constraints solving 87%. Through trajectory analysis, we identify various unique failure modes of LM agents, and further explore the failure mode of tracking past actions. By adapting a baseline agent to condition on representations of state, we achieve a 43.9% improvement in solving RefactorBench tasks. We further extend our state-aware approach to encompass entire digital environments and outline potential directions for future research. RefactorBench aims to support the study of LM agents by providing a set of real-world, multi-hop tasks within the realm of code.

Smart-contract vulnerabilities often arise from inconsistencies between business paths that should correspond to one another, such as single and batch entry points, direct and adapter-based flows, quote and execution paths, or inverse operations such as buy and sell. Existing analyzers are effective for many local syntactic and data-flow patterns, but they provide limited support for bugs whose oracle is relational: whether two semantically paired paths preserve compatible guards, state transitions, value flows, and failure behavior. This paper introduces chiral analysis, a relational model that treats paired business paths as implicit specifications for each other. We formalize chiral relations as static analogues of metamorphic relations, derive obligations over guards, actors, state, value, ordering, failure behavior, and external interactions, and report a vulnerability when a violated obligation has security impact. We implement this idea in ChiralDetector, a Solidity prototype that extracts business paths, ranks candidate pairs with static facts, applies LLM-based semantic filtering and detection, and validates and deduplicates findings. In a preliminary evaluation on the Phi protocol, ChiralDetector reduced 3,217 statically ranked path pairs to 1,643 semantic candidates, produced 101 deduplicated finding groups, and retained 44 strict-validator positives that manually collapsed to 13 effective unique issues. These include cross-art Merkle proof reuse, fee unit mismatches, public state-tracking helpers, and refund propagation gaps. The results suggest that chiral analysis can expose business-logic bug classes that are difficult to express as single-function rules while providing a structured way to control LLM cost and validator precision.

LLM agents increasingly rely on reusable skills, capability packages that combine instructions, control flow, constraints, and tool calls. In most current agent systems, however, skills are still represented by text-heavy artifacts, including SKILL.md-style documents and structured records whose machine-usable evidence remains embedded largely in natural-language descriptions. This poses a challenge for skill-centered agent systems: managing skill collections and using skills to support agent both require reasoning over invocation interfaces, execution structure, and concrete side effects that are often entangled in a single textual surface. An explicit representation of skill knowledge may therefore help make these artifacts easier for machines to acquire and leverage. Drawing on Memory Organization Packets, Script Theory, and Conceptual Dependency from Schank and Abelson's classical work on linguistic knowledge representation, we introduce what is, to our knowledge, the first structured representation for agent skill artifacts that disentangles skill-level scheduling signals, scene-level execution structure, and logic-level action and resource-use evidence: the Scheduling-Structural-Logical (SSL) representation. We instantiate SSL with an LLM-based normalizer and evaluate it on a corpus of skills in two tasks, Skill Discovery and Risk Assessment, and superiorly outperform the text-only baselines: in Skill Discovery, SSL improves MRR from 0.573 to 0.707; in Risk Assessment, it improves macro F1 from 0.744 to 0.787. These findings reveal that explicit, source-grounded structure makes agent skills easier to search and review. They also suggest that SSL is best understood as a practical step toward more inspectable, reusable, and operationally actionable skill representations for agent systems, rather than as a finished standard or an end-to-end mechanism for managing and using skills.

We demonstrate CEDAR, an application for automating data science (DS) tasks with an agentic setup. Solving DS problems with LLMs is an underexplored area that has immense market value. The challenges are manifold: task complexities, data sizes, computational limitations, and context restrictions. We show that these can be alleviated via effective context engineering. We first impose structure into the initial prompt with DS-specific input fields, that serve as instructions for the agentic system. The solution is then materialized as an enumerated sequence of interleaved plan and code blocks generated by separate LLM agents, providing a readable structure to the context at any step of the workflow. Function calls for generating these intermediate texts, and for corresponding Python code, ensure that data stays local, and only aggregate statistics and associated instructions are injected into LLM prompts. Fault tolerance and context management are introduced via iterative code generation and smart history rendering. The viability of our agentic data scientist is demonstrated using canonical Kaggle challenges.

Procedural text, which describes entities and their interactions as they undergo some process, depicts entities in a uniquely nuanced way. First, each entity may have some observable discrete attributes, such as its state or location; modeling these involves imposing global structure and enforcing consistency. Second, an entity may have properties which are not made explicit but can be effectively induced and tracked by neural networks. In this paper, we propose a structured neural architecture that reflects this dual nature of entity evolution. The model tracks each entity recurrently, updating its hidden continuous representation at each step to contain relevant state information. The global discrete state structure is explicitly modeled with a neural CRF over the changing hidden representation of the entity. This CRF can explicitly capture constraints on entity states over time, enforcing that, for example, an entity cannot move to a location after it is destroyed. We evaluate the performance of our proposed model on QA tasks over process paragraphs in the ProPara dataset and find that our model achieves state-of-the-art results.

We present Turn, a compiled, actor-based programming language -- statically typed for schema inference, dynamically typed at the value level -- for agentic software: programs that reason and act autonomously by delegating inference to large language models (LLMs). Existing approaches augment general-purpose languages with frameworks, encoding critical invariants (bounded context, typed inference output, credential isolation, durable state) as application-level conventions rather than language guarantees. Turn introduces five language-level constructs that address this gap. Cognitive Type Safety makes LLM inference a typed primitive: the compiler generates a JSON Schema from a struct definition and the VM validates model output before binding. The confidence operator enables deterministic control flow gated on model certainty. Turn's actor-based process model, derived from Erlang, gives each agent an isolated context window, persistent memory, and mailbox. A capability-based identity system returns opaque, unforgeable handles from the VM host, ensuring raw credentials never enter agent memory. Finally, compile-time schema absorption (use schema::<protocol>) synthesizes typed API bindings from external specifications at compile time; the openapi adapter is shipped with graphql, fhir, and mcp in active development. We describe the language design, type rules, schema semantics, and a Rust-based bytecode VM, and evaluate Turn against representative agentic workloads. Turn is open source at https://github.com/ekizito96/Turn.

Relational structures such as schema linking and schema encoding have been validated as a key component to qualitatively translating natural language into SQL queries. However, introducing these structural relations comes with prices: they often result in a specialized model structure, which largely prohibits using large pretrained models in text-to-SQL. To address this problem, we propose RASAT: a Transformer seq2seq architecture augmented with relation-aware self-attention that could leverage a variety of relational structures while inheriting the pretrained parameters from the T5 model effectively. Our model can incorporate almost all types of existing relations in the literature, and in addition, we propose introducing co-reference relations for the multi-turn scenario. Experimental results on three widely used text-to-SQL datasets, covering both single-turn and multi-turn scenarios, have shown that RASAT could achieve state-of-the-art results across all three benchmarks (75.5% EX on Spider, 52.6% IEX on SParC, and 37.4% IEX on CoSQL).

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has introduced a new type of programming: natural language programming. By writing prompts that direct LLMs to perform natural language processing, code generation, reasoning, etc., users are writing code in natural language -- natural language code -- for the LLM to execute. An emerging area of research enables interoperability between natural language code and formal languages such as Python. We present a novel programming abstraction, shared program state, that removes the manual work required to enable interoperability between natural language code and program state. With shared program state, programmers can write natural code that directly writes program variables, computes with program objects, and implements control flow in the program. We present a schema for specifying natural function interfaces that extend programming systems to support natural code and leverage this schema to specify shared program state as a natural function interface. We implement shared program state in the Nightjar programming system. Nightjar enables programmers to write Python programs that contain natural code that shares the Python program state. We show that Nightjar programs achieve comparable or higher task accuracy than manually written implementations (+4-19%), while decreasing the lines of code by 39.6% on average. The tradeoff to using Nightjar is that it may incur runtime overhead (0.4-4.3x runtime of manual implementations).

Extending Large Language Models (LLMs) to advanced applications requires reliable structured output generation. Existing methods which often rely on rigid JSON schemas, can lead to unreliable outputs, diminished reasoning capabilities, and increased computational overhead, limiting LLMs' adaptability for complex tasks. We introduce Meaning Typed Prompting (MTP), a technique for efficient structured output generation that integrates types, meanings, and abstractions, such as variables and classes, into the prompting process. By utilizing expressive type definitions, MTP enhances output clarity and reduces dependence on complex abstractions, simplifying development, and improving implementation efficiency. This enables LLMs to understand relationships and generate structured data more effectively. Empirical evaluations on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that MTP outperforms existing frameworks in accuracy, reliability, consistency, and token efficiency. We present Semantix, a framework that implements MTP, providing practical insights into its application.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) have enabled increasingly capable digital agents for computer use. However, real-world tasks are often long-horizon and involve evolving contexts containing accumulated observations, intermediate edits, failed attempts, and partially completed executions. Existing agents typically operate over raw interaction history, making task progress difficult to interpret, verify, and recover, which ultimately limits reliable long-horizon execution. In this paper, we argue that addressing this challenge requires explicitly structuring both the agent's state and workflow around a unified causal representation of task progress. We present StructAgent, a state-centered framework that introduces a unified state for maintaining compact, verifiable task progress and a structured workflow that regulates progress through verifier-backed state transitions. Building on this design, StructAgent further enables explicit progress checkpointing, evidence-driven task completion, targeted failure recovery, and tool-supported execution, while ensuring that all progress updates remain grounded in verification. Extensive experiments demonstrate that StructAgent consistently improves a wide range of LLM and VLM backbones on long-horizon computer-use tasks. On OSWorld-Verified, it improves Qwen3.5-9B from 27.0\% to 46.9\% success rate and Qwen3.5-27B from 31.6\% to 62.2\%, while achieving a new open-source state of the art of 78.9\% with MiniMax-M3. Moreover, the same framework generalizes beyond desktop environments to Minecraft, demonstrating the generality of our design.

Agent skills extend LLM agents with reusable procedures, tools, and domain-specific workflows, but their safety depends on resolving dependencies among interacting instructions. We introduce SkillLogic, a framework for analyzing logical relations in skill files and constructing executable tests from them. Our taxonomy covers eight relation types, including preconditions that gate valid actions, constraints that limit how allowed actions may be performed, and fallbacks that specify recovery behavior after failure. Using SkillLogic, we scan over 5000 public skills and find that 70% contain at least one logical relation. We then construct SLBench, an 86-case executable benchmark from high-confidence, high-impact, and locally testable relations. Evaluating Codex and Claude Code across six LLM backbones shows unsafe rates up to 70%, with violations leading to privacy leaks, unsafe configuration changes, and incomplete cleanup. The human audit attributes failures to both agent capability gaps and low-salience skill text. We further show that SLGuard, a lightweight inference-time scaffold, reduces violations by 63% on targeted cases. Our results establish logical-relation following as a distinct reliability challenge for skill-guided agents.

Tool use has become central to modern LLM agents, yet interface design is rarely isolated as an experimental variable. This paper studies whether schema based tool contracts and structured validation diagnostics improve reliability under strict interaction budgets. We evaluate three conditions that preserve identical tool semantics and information content: free form documentation, JSON Schema specifications, and JSON Schema with structured diagnostics. We implement a deterministic software engineering sandbox with logs, metrics, configurations, and repository tasks, and evaluate a fully crossed pilot with one open local model, three seeds, three interface conditions, and four budgets. We report end task success, interface misuse, execution failures, semantic misuse, recovery behavior, and overhead. In this pilot, success remains zero across conditions, while schema conditions reduce interface misuse but not semantic misuse. The evidence supports a precise interpretation that interface formalization improves contract adherence, but semantic action quality and timeout sensitive tasks remain dominant bottlenecks under constrained local inference.

We introduce the AutoGRAMS framework for programming multi-step interactions with language models. AutoGRAMS represents AI agents as a graph, where each node can execute either a language modeling instruction or traditional code. Likewise, transitions in the graph can be governed by either language modeling decisions or traditional branch logic. AutoGRAMS supports using variables as memory and allows nodes to call other AutoGRAMS graphs as functions. We show how AutoGRAMS can be used to design highly sophisticated agents, including self-referential agents that can modify their own graph. AutoGRAMS's graph-centric approach aids interpretability, controllability, and safety during the design, development, and deployment of AI agents. We provide our framework as open source at https://github.com/autograms/autograms .

We propose STRuCT-LLM, a unified framework for training large language models (LLMs) to perform structured reasoning over both relational and graph-structured data. Our approach jointly optimizes Text-to-SQL and Text-to-Cypher tasks using reinforcement learning (RL) combined with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) supervision. To support fine-grained optimization in graph-based parsing, we introduce a topology-aware reward function based on graph edit distance. Unlike prior work that treats relational and graph formalisms in isolation, STRuCT-LLM leverages shared abstractions between SQL and Cypher to induce cross-formalism transfer, enabling SQL training to improve Cypher performance and vice versa - even without shared schemas. Our largest model (QwQ-32B) achieves substantial relative improvements across tasks: on semantic parsing, Spider improves by 13.5\% and Text2Cypher by 73.1\%. The model also demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization, improving performance on downstream tabular QA (TableBench: 8.5\%) and knowledge graph QA (CR-LT-KGQA: 1.7\%) without any QA-specific supervision. These results demonstrate both the effectiveness of executable queries as scaffolds for structured reasoning and the synergistic benefits of jointly training on SQL and Cypher (code available at https://github.com/bouv/STRuCT-LLM).

Recent text-to-SQL systems powered by large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in translating natural language queries into SQL. However, these systems often struggle with complex database structures and domain-specific queries, as they primarily focus on enhancing logical reasoning and SQL syntax while overlooking the critical need for comprehensive database understanding. To address this limitation, we propose DB-Explore, a novel framework that systematically aligns LLMs with database knowledge through automated exploration and instruction synthesis. DB-Explore constructs database graphs to capture complex relational schemas, leverages GPT-4 to systematically mine structural patterns and semantic knowledge, and synthesizes instructions to distill this knowledge for efficient fine-tuning of LLMs. Our framework enables comprehensive database understanding through diverse sampling strategies and automated instruction generation, bridging the gap between database structures and language models. Experiments conducted on the SPIDER and BIRD benchmarks validate the effectiveness of DB-Explore, achieving an execution accuracy of 52.1% on BIRD and 84.0% on SPIDER. Notably, our open-source implementation, based on the Qwen2.5-coder-7B model, outperforms multiple GPT-4-driven text-to-SQL systems in comparative evaluations, and achieves near state-of-the-art performance with minimal computational cost.

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly act as autonomous agents executing complex, long-running procedural skills. Existing agent runtimes maintain execution by continually appending observations, actions, and intermediate reasoning traces to an ever-growing conversation history, causing latency degradation and context-poisoning failures over long horizons. We present SKILL.state, a runtime architecture that replaces append-only conversational history with an explicit, mutable execution state. At each execution step, the model receives only the immutable skill specification, the current structured execution state, and the latest observation. Intermediate reasoning is discarded immediately after producing a validated state update, preventing prompt growth with execution history. Across diverse datasets, models, and execution environments, SKILL. state improves task accuracy while substantially reducing cumulative token consumption. Our results demonstrate that explicit execution state is an effective and architecture-agnostic abstraction for scalable long-horizon agent skills.

Large language models can repeat an instruction while failing to keep obeying it. We study this recall-compliance dissociation in long-horizon dialogue and define State Integrity Collapse: a model preserves a stated constraint in memory but stops applying it to later turns. We introduce StateTrack-Bench, a controlled suite of conversations covering numerical, format, role/persona, factual-memory, and logical-rule constraints. Across seven provider-pinned model snapshots and five dialogue-depth probes, strict joint retention ranges from 62.4% to 100.0%, with degradation concentrated in symbolic constraints and in one especially brittle model. A forked recall audit shows that 88.6% of observed failures are behavioral-drift failures rather than ordinary forgetting; excluding the brittle outlier preserves this diagnosis (84.4% of failures). Extended evaluations at depths up to 50 turns confirm that the dissociation persists beyond the core benchmark, while Structured State Anchoring recovers up to 24.4 points on immutable constraints. The results show that reliability cannot be inferred from single-turn instruction following alone; evaluation must track whether remembered constraints remain operational as dialogue state grows. Code and artifacts are available at: https://github.com/xzzvsxd/StateTrack.

Large language model (LLM) agents are evolving from conversational assistants into autonomous systems that execute long-horizon tasks through reasoning, tool use, code generation, and workspace manipulation. As agents increasingly operate over persistent environments and multi-step workflows, they face challenges analogous to those addressed by transactional database systems: reliable execution, consistent outcomes, safe concurrency, and durable state management. We introduce the concept of an agentic transaction and propose an ACID-compliant agent system framework that reinterprets the classical ACID properties for agent execution through four semantic guarantees: Semantic Atomicity, Semantic Consistency, Semantic Isolation, and Semantic Durability. Together, these properties provide a principled foundation for building reliable agent systems despite model uncertainty and dynamic execution environments. To instantiate this framework, we develop an ACID-compliant data agent that realizes these guarantees through transactional exploration-execution-validation cycles, transactional skill hubs, confidence divergence-based validation, semantic dependency-aware isolation, and transaction-aware semantic state management. Experimental results on widely used benchmarks show that our system achieves a 10.6% improvement over state-of-the-art agents, including Claude Code. This work opens a broader research agenda on extending transactional principles and system architectures toward building trustworthy, scalable, and self-evolving AI agent systems.

Existing LLM agent frameworks lack formal semantics: there is no principled way to determine whether an agent configuration is well-formed or will terminate. We present λ_A, a typed lambda calculus for agent composition that extends the simply-typed lambda calculus with oracle calls, bounded fixpoints (the ReAct loop), probabilistic choice, and mutable environments. We prove type safety, termination of bounded fixpoints, and soundness of derived lint rules, with partial Coq mechanization (1,567 lines, 43 completed proofs). As a practical application, we derive a lint tool that detects structural configuration errors directly from the operational semantics. An evaluation on 835 real-world GitHub agent configurations shows that 94.1% are structurally incomplete under λ_A, with YAML-only lint precision at 54%, rising to 96--100% under joint YAML+Python AST analysis on 175 samples. This gap quantifies, for the first time, the degree of semantic entanglement between declarative configuration and imperative code in the agent ecosystem. We further show that five mainstream paradigms (LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, OpenAI SDK, Dify) embed as typed λ_A fragments, establishing λ_A as a unifying calculus for LLM agent composition.

Conversational agents are increasingly deployed in knowledge-intensive settings, where correct behavior depends on retrieving and applying domain-specific knowledge from large, proprietary, and unstructured corpora during live interactions with users. Yet most existing benchmarks evaluate retrieval or tool use independently of each other, creating a gap in realistic, fully agentic evaluation over unstructured data in long-horizon interactions. We introduce τ-Knowledge, an extension of τ-Bench for evaluating agents in environments where success depends on coordinating external, natural-language knowledge with tool outputs to produce verifiable, policy-compliant state changes. Our new domain, τ-Banking, models realistic fintech customer support workflows in which agents must navigate roughly 700 interconnected knowledge documents while executing tool-mediated account updates. Across embedding-based retrieval and terminal-based search, even frontier models with high reasoning budgets achieve only sim25.5% pass^1, with reliability degrading sharply over repeated trials. Agents struggle to retrieve the correct documents from densely interlinked knowledge bases and to reason accurately over complex internal policies. Overall, τ-Knowledge provides a realistic testbed for developing agents that integrate unstructured knowledge in human-facing deployments.

Always-on agents are systems whose future behavior depends on durable state accumulated across earlier interactions. We treat them as persistent-state systems: the operative system includes retrievable memories, but also task ledgers, permissions, credentials, commitments, provenance and audit records, shared state, trigger conditions, and externally committed effects linked to those records. The survey reads the literature through six diagnostic axes for each state item, authority, scope, mutability, provenance, recoverability, and actionability, and through a lifecycle in which state is written, validated, organized, retrieved, acted upon, updated, forgotten, audited, and sometimes rolled back. Across a 435-work coded corpus, treated as a scoped map rather than an exhaustive census, the literature concentrates more heavily on accumulating and retrieving state than on governing, recovering, or relinquishing it. We therefore introduce the Always-On Evaluation Protocol (AOEP-v0), a pilot evaluation contract that makes these governance requirements concrete by scoring state mutation and recovery obligations rather than answer quality alone. The resulting agenda connects always-on agents to databases, distributed systems, formal methods, capability security, and machine unlearning.

Agentic AI denotes an architectural transition from stateless, prompt-driven generative models toward goal-directed systems capable of autonomous perception, planning, action, and adaptation through iterative control loops. This paper examines this transition by connecting foundational intelligent agent theories, including reactive, deliberative, and Belief-Desire-Intention models, with contemporary LLM-centric approaches such as tool invocation, memory-augmented reasoning, and multi-agent coordination. The paper presents three primary contributions: (i) a reference architecture for production-grade LLM agents that separates cognitive reasoning from execution using typed tool interfaces; (ii) a taxonomy of multi-agent topologies, together with their associated failure modes and mitigation approaches; and (iii) an enterprise hardening checklist that incorporates governance, observability, and reproducibility considerations. Through an analysis of emerging industry platforms, including Kore.ai, Salesforce Agentforce, TrueFoundry, ZenML, and LangChain, the study identifies a convergence toward standardized agent loops, registries, and auditable control mechanisms. It is argued that the subsequent phase of agentic AI development will parallel the maturation of web services, relying on shared protocols, typed contracts, and layered governance structures to support scalable and composable autonomy. The persistent challenges related to verifiability, interoperability, and safe autonomy remain key areas for future research and practical deployment.

Large language models often struggle with complex long-horizon analytical tasks over unstructured tables, which typically feature hierarchical and bidirectional headers and non-canonical layouts. We formalize this challenge as Deep Tabular Research (DTR), requiring multi-step reasoning over interdependent table regions. To address DTR, we propose a novel agentic framework that treats tabular reasoning as a closed-loop decision-making process. We carefully design a coupled query and table comprehension for path decision making and operational execution. Specifically, (i) DTR first constructs a hierarchical meta graph to capture bidirectional semantics, mapping natural language queries into an operation-level search space; (ii) To navigate this space, we introduce an expectation-aware selection policy that prioritizes high-utility execution paths; (iii) Crucially, historical execution outcomes are synthesized into a siamese structured memory, i.e., parameterized updates and abstracted texts, enabling continual refinement. Extensive experiments on challenging unstructured tabular benchmarks verify the effectiveness and highlight the necessity of separating strategic planning from low-level execution for long-horizon tabular reasoning.

Communicating state machines provide a formal foundation for distributed computation. Unfortunately, they are Turing-complete and, thus, challenging to analyse. In this paper, we classify restrictions on channels which have been proposed to work around the undecidability of verification questions. We compare half-duplex communication, existential B-boundedness, and k-synchronisability. These restrictions do not prevent the communication channels from growing arbitrarily large but still restrict the power of the model. Each restriction gives rise to a set of languages so, for every pair of restrictions, we check whether one subsumes the other or if they are incomparable. We investigate their relationship in two different contexts: first, the one of communicating state machines, and, second, the one of communication protocol specifications using high-level message sequence charts. Surprisingly, these two contexts yield different conclusions. In addition, we integrate multiparty session types, another approach to specify communication protocols, into our classification. We show that multiparty session type languages are half-duplex, existentially 1-bounded, and 1-synchronisable. To~show this result, we provide the first formal embedding of multiparty session types into high-level message sequence charts.

Planning and acting to solve `real' tasks using large language models (LLMs) in interactive environments has become a new frontier for AI methods. While recent advances allowed LLMs to interact with online tools, solve robotics tasks and many more, long range reasoning tasks remain a problem for LLMs. Existing methods to address this issue are very resource intensive and require additional data or human crafted rules, instead, we propose a simple method based on few-shot in-context learning alone to enhance `chain-of-thought' with state-tracking for planning and acting with LLMs. We show that our method establishes the new state-of-the-art on Alfworld for in-context learning methods (+14\% over the previous best few-shot in-context learning method) and performs on par with methods that use additional training data and additional tools such as code-execution. We also demonstrate that our enhanced `chain-of-states' allows the agent to both solve longer horizon problems and to be more efficient in number of steps required to solve a task. We show that our method works across a variety of LLMs for both API-based and open source ones. Finally, we also conduct ablation studies and show that `chain-of-thoughts' helps state-tracking accuracy, while a json-structure harms overall performance. We open-source our code and annotations at https://github.com/ai-nikolai/StateAct.

Relational databases are central to modern data management, yet most data exists in unstructured forms like text documents. To bridge this gap, we leverage large language models (LLMs) to automatically synthesize a relational database by generating its schema and populating its tables from raw text. We introduce SQUiD, a novel neurosymbolic framework that decomposes this task into four stages, each with specialized techniques. Our experiments show that SQUiD consistently outperforms baselines across diverse datasets. Our code and datasets are publicly available at: https://github.com/Mushtari-Sadia/SQUiD.

Tool use enables large language models (LLMs) to access external information, invoke software systems, and act in digital environments beyond what can be solved from model parameters alone. Early research mainly studied whether a model could select and execute a correct single tool call. As agent systems evolve, however, the central problem has shifted from isolated invocation to multi-tool orchestration over long trajectories with intermediate state, execution feedback, changing environments, and practical constraints such as safety, cost, and verifiability. We comprehensively review recent progress in multi-tool LLM agents and analyzes the state of the art in this rapidly developing area. First, we unify task formulations and distinguish single-call tool use from long-horizon orchestration. Then, we organize the literature around six core dimensions: inference-time planning and execution, training and trajectory construction, safety and control, efficiency under resource constraints, capability completeness in open environments, and benchmark design and evaluation. We further summarize representative applications in software engineering, enterprise workflows, graphical user interfaces, and mobile systems. Finally, we discuss major challenges and outline future directions for building reliable, scalable, and verifiable multi-tool agents.

Recent progress in pretraining language models on large textual corpora led to a surge of improvements for downstream NLP tasks. Whilst learning linguistic knowledge, these models may also be storing relational knowledge present in the training data, and may be able to answer queries structured as "fill-in-the-blank" cloze statements. Language models have many advantages over structured knowledge bases: they require no schema engineering, allow practitioners to query about an open class of relations, are easy to extend to more data, and require no human supervision to train. We present an in-depth analysis of the relational knowledge already present (without fine-tuning) in a wide range of state-of-the-art pretrained language models. We find that (i) without fine-tuning, BERT contains relational knowledge competitive with traditional NLP methods that have some access to oracle knowledge, (ii) BERT also does remarkably well on open-domain question answering against a supervised baseline, and (iii) certain types of factual knowledge are learned much more readily than others by standard language model pretraining approaches. The surprisingly strong ability of these models to recall factual knowledge without any fine-tuning demonstrates their potential as unsupervised open-domain QA systems. The code to reproduce our analysis is available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/LAMA.

Data synthesis is gaining momentum as a privacy-enhancing technology. While single-table tabular data generation has seen considerable progress, current methods for multi-table data often lack the flexibility and expressiveness needed to capture complex relational structures. In particular, they struggle with long-range dependencies and complex foreign-key relationships, such as tables with multiple parent tables or multiple types of links between the same pair of tables. We propose a generative model for relational data that generates the content of a relational dataset given the graph formed by the foreign-key relationships. We do this by learning a deep generative model of the content of the whole relational database by flow matching, where the neural network trained to denoise records leverages a graph neural network to obtain information from connected records. Our method is flexible, as it can support relational datasets with complex structures, and expressive, as the generation of each record can be influenced by any other record within the same connected component. We evaluate our method on several benchmark datasets and show that it achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of synthetic data fidelity.

The emergence of AI agents powered by large language models (LLMs) marks a pivotal shift toward the Agentic Web, a new phase of the internet defined by autonomous, goal-driven interactions. In this paradigm, agents interact directly with one another to plan, coordinate, and execute complex tasks on behalf of users. This transition from human-driven to machine-to-machine interaction allows intent to be delegated, relieving users from routine digital operations and enabling a more interactive, automated web experience. In this paper, we present a structured framework for understanding and building the Agentic Web. We trace its evolution from the PC and Mobile Web eras and identify the core technological foundations that support this shift. Central to our framework is a conceptual model consisting of three key dimensions: intelligence, interaction, and economics. These dimensions collectively enable the capabilities of AI agents, such as retrieval, recommendation, planning, and collaboration. We analyze the architectural and infrastructural challenges involved in creating scalable agentic systems, including communication protocols, orchestration strategies, and emerging paradigms such as the Agent Attention Economy. We conclude by discussing the potential applications, societal risks, and governance issues posed by agentic systems, and outline research directions for developing open, secure, and intelligent ecosystems shaped by both human intent and autonomous agent behavior. A continuously updated collection of relevant studies for agentic web is available at: https://github.com/SafeRL-Lab/agentic-web.

This study introduces Conversation Routines (CR), a structured prompt engineering framework for developing task-oriented dialog systems using Large Language Models (LLMs). While LLMs demonstrate remarkable natural language understanding capabilities, engineering them to reliably execute complex business workflows remains challenging. The proposed CR framework enables the development of Conversation Agentic Systems (CAS) through natural language specifications, embedding task-oriented logic within LLM prompts. This approach provides a systematic methodology for designing and implementing complex conversational workflows while maintaining behavioral consistency. We demonstrate the framework's effectiveness through two proof-of-concept implementations: a Train Ticket Booking System and an Interactive Troubleshooting Copilot. These case studies validate CR's capability to encode sophisticated behavioral patterns and decision logic while preserving natural conversational flexibility. Results show that CR enables domain experts to design conversational workflows in natural language while leveraging custom functions (tools) developed by software engineers, creating an efficient division of responsibilities where developers focus on core API implementation and domain experts handle conversation design. While the framework shows promise in accessibility and adaptability, we identify key challenges including computational overhead, non-deterministic behavior, and domain-specific logic optimization. Future research directions include CR evaluation methods based on prompt engineering frameworks driven by goal-oriented grading criteria, improving scalability for complex multi-agent interactions, and enhancing system robustness to address the identified limitations across diverse business applications.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved unprecedented performances in various applications, yet evaluating them is still challenging. Existing benchmarks are either manually constructed or are automatic, but lack the ability to evaluate the thought process of LLMs with arbitrary complexity. We contend that utilizing existing relational databases based on the entity-relationship (ER) model is a promising approach for constructing benchmarks as they contain structured knowledge that can be used to question LLMs. Unlike knowledge graphs, which are also used to evaluate LLMs, relational databases have integrity constraints that can be used to better construct complex in-depth questions and verify answers: (1) functional dependencies can be used to pinpoint critical keywords that an LLM must know to properly answer a given question containing certain attribute values; and (2) foreign key constraints can be used to join relations and construct multi-hop questions, which can be arbitrarily long and used to debug intermediate answers. We thus propose ERBench, which uses these integrity constraints to convert any database into an LLM benchmark. ERBench supports continuous evaluation as databases change, multimodal questions, and various prompt engineering techniques. In our experiments, we construct LLM benchmarks using databases of multiple domains and make an extensive comparison of contemporary LLMs. We show how ERBench can properly evaluate any LLM by not only checking for answer correctness, but also effectively verifying the rationales by looking for the right keywords.

For industrial-scale text-to-SQL, supplying the entire database schema to Large Language Models (LLMs) is impractical due to context window limits and irrelevant noise. Schema linking, which filters the schema to a relevant subset, is therefore critical. However, existing methods incur prohibitive costs, struggle to trade off recall and noise, and scale poorly to large databases. We present AutoLink, an autonomous agent framework that reformulates schema linking as an iterative, agent-driven process. Guided by an LLM, AutoLink dynamically explores and expands the linked schema subset, progressively identifying necessary schema components without inputting the full database schema. Our experiments demonstrate AutoLink's superior performance, achieving state-of-the-art strict schema linking recall of 97.4\% on Bird-Dev and 91.2\% on Spider-2.0-Lite, with competitive execution accuracy, i.e., 68.7\% EX on Bird-Dev (better than CHESS) and 34.9\% EX on Spider-2.0-Lite (ranking 2nd on the official leaderboard). Crucially, AutoLink exhibits exceptional scalability, maintaining high recall, efficient token consumption, and robust execution accuracy on large schemas (e.g., over 3,000 columns) where existing methods severely degrade-making it a highly scalable, high-recall schema-linking solution for industrial text-to-SQL systems.

Text-to-SQL parsing has achieved remarkable progress under the Full Schema Assumption. However, this premise fails in real-world enterprise environments where databases contain hundreds of tables with massive noisy metadata. Rather than injecting the full schema upfront, an agent must actively identify and verify only the relevant subset, giving rise to the Unknown Schema scenario we study in this work. To address this, we propose TRUST-SQL (Truthful Reasoning with Unknown Schema via Tools). We formulate the task as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process where our autonomous agent employs a structured four-phase protocol to ground reasoning in verified metadata. Crucially, this protocol provides a structural boundary for our novel Dual-Track GRPO strategy. By applying token-level masked advantages, this strategy isolates exploration rewards from execution outcomes to resolve credit assignment, yielding a 9.9% relative improvement over standard GRPO. Extensive experiments across five benchmarks demonstrate that TRUST-SQL achieves an average absolute improvement of 30.6% and 16.6% for the 4B and 8B variants respectively over their base models. Remarkably, despite operating entirely without pre-loaded metadata, our framework consistently matches or surpasses strong baselines that rely on schema prefilling.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced Text-to-SQL performance, existing benchmarks predominantly focus on Western contexts and simplified schemas, leaving a gap in real-world, non-Western applications. We present IndicDB, a multilingual Text-to-SQL benchmark for evaluating cross-lingual semantic parsing across diverse Indic languages. The relational schemas are sourced from open-data platforms, including the National Data and Analytics Platform (NDAP) and the India Data Portal (IDP), ensuring realistic administrative data complexity. IndicDB comprises 20 databases across 237 tables. To convert denormalized government data into rich relational structures, we employ an iterative three-agent framework (Architect, Auditor, Refiner) to ensure structural rigor and high relational density (11.85 tables per database; join depths up to six). Our pipeline is value-aware, difficulty-calibrated, and join-enforced, generating 15,617 tasks across English, Hindi, and five Indic languages. We evaluate cross-lingual semantic parsing performance of state-of-the-art models (DeepSeek v3.2, MiniMax 2.7, LLaMA 3.3, Qwen3) across seven linguistic variants. Results show a 9.00% performance drop from English to Indic languages, revealing an "Indic Gap" driven by harder schema linking, increased structural ambiguity, and limited external knowledge. IndicDB serves as a rigorous benchmark for multilingual Text-to-SQL. Code and data: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/multilingualText2Sql-Indic--DDCC/

Relational reasoning is the ability to infer relations that jointly bind multiple entities, attributes, or variables. This ability is central to scientific reasoning, but existing evaluations of relational reasoning in large language models often focus on structured inputs such as tables, graphs, or synthetic tasks, and do not isolate the difficulty introduced by higher-arity relational binding. We study this problem through the lens of Relational Complexity (RC), which we define as the minimum number of independent entities or operands that must be simultaneously bound to apply a relation. RC provides a principled way to vary reasoning difficulty while controlling for confounders such as input size, vocabulary, and representational choices. Building on RC, we introduce REL, a generative benchmark framework spanning algebra, chemistry, and biology that varies RC within each domain. Across frontier LLMs, performance degrades consistently and monotonically as RC increases, even when the total number of entities is held fixed. This failure mode persists with increased test-time compute and in-context learning, suggesting a limitation tied to the arity of the required relational binding rather than to insufficient inference steps or lack of exposure to examples. Our results identify a regime of higher-arity reasoning in which current models struggle, and motivate re-examining benchmarks through the lens of relational complexity.

Providing Large Language Models with relevant contextual knowledge at inference time has been shown to greatly improve the quality of their generations. This is often achieved by prepending informative passages of text, or 'contexts', retrieved from external knowledge bases to their input. However, processing additional contexts online incurs significant computation costs that scale with their length. State Space Models (SSMs) offer a promising solution by allowing a database of contexts to be mapped onto fixed-dimensional states from which to start the generation. A key challenge arises when attempting to leverage information present across multiple contexts, since there is no straightforward way to condition generation on multiple independent states in existing SSMs. To address this, we leverage a simple mathematical relation derived from SSM dynamics to compose multiple states into one that efficiently approximates the effect of concatenating raw context tokens. Since the temporal ordering of contexts can often be uninformative, we enforce permutation-invariance by efficiently averaging states obtained via our composition algorithm across all possible context orderings. We evaluate our resulting method on WikiText and MSMARCO in both zero-shot and fine-tuned settings, and show that we can match the strongest performing baseline while enjoying on average 5.4x speedup.

Structured knowledge bases (KBs) are the backbone of many know\-ledge-intensive applications, and their automated construction has received considerable attention. In particular, open information extraction (OpenIE) is often used to induce structure from a text. However, although it allows high recall, the extracted knowledge tends to inherit noise from the sources and the OpenIE algorithm. Besides, OpenIE tuples contain an open-ended, non-canonicalized set of relations, making the extracted knowledge's downstream exploitation harder. In this paper, we study the problem of mapping an open KB into the fixed schema of an existing KB, specifically for the case of commonsense knowledge. We propose approaching the problem by generative translation, i.e., by training a language model to generate fixed-schema assertions from open ones. Experiments show that this approach occupies a sweet spot between traditional manual, rule-based, or classification-based canonicalization and purely generative KB construction like COMET. Moreover, it produces higher mapping accuracy than the former while avoiding the association-based noise of the latter.

Answering complex real-world questions often requires accurate retrieval from textual knowledge graphs (TKGs). The scarcity of annotated data, along with intricate topological structures, makes this task particularly challenging. As the nature of relational path information could enhance the inference ability of Large Language Models (LLMs), efficiently retrieving more complex relational path information from TKGs presents another key challenge. To tackle these challenges, we first develop a Dataset for LLMs Complex Reasoning over Textual Knowledge Graphs (RiTeK) with a broad topological structure coverage.We synthesize realistic user queries that integrate diverse topological structures, relational information, and complex textual descriptions. We conduct rigorous expert evaluation to validate the quality of our synthesized queries. And then, we introduce an enhanced Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) method, Relational MCTS, to automatically extract relational path information from textual graphs for specific queries. Our dataset mainly covers the medical domain as the relation types and entity are complex and publicly available. Experimental results indicate that RiTeK poses significant challenges for current retrieval and LLM systems, while the proposed Relational MCTS method enhances LLM inference ability and achieves state-of-the-art performance on RiTeK.

Our goal is to create a convenient natural language interface for performing well-specified but complex actions such as analyzing data, manipulating text, and querying databases. However, existing natural language interfaces for such tasks are quite primitive compared to the power one wields with a programming language. To bridge this gap, we start with a core programming language and allow users to "naturalize" the core language incrementally by defining alternative, more natural syntax and increasingly complex concepts in terms of compositions of simpler ones. In a voxel world, we show that a community of users can simultaneously teach a common system a diverse language and use it to build hundreds of complex voxel structures. Over the course of three days, these users went from using only the core language to using the naturalized language in 85.9\% of the last 10K utterances.

Evaluating text-to-SQL systems remains largely fragile: correctness is typically judged by executing predicted and gold SQL queries on a single static database, even though the same queries may behave differently under alternative database instances. This raises a broader language modeling question: Can large language models synthesize semantically meaningful, schema-consistent relational data directly from a natural language question? If so, such generation can serve as a controlled mechanism for stress-testing text-to-SQL systems beyond fixed benchmark databases. We introduce SynSQL, a framework that synthesizes test databases conditioned on question-schema alignment rather than gold SQL queries. SynSQL decomposes the task into three stages: (1) schema selection, (2) question-guided data synthesis, and (3) constraint-aware critique with iterative refinement, framing database construction as structured generation under semantic and relational constraints. Across ten text-to-SQL models on Spider, BIRD, and Spider 2.0, SynSQL-generated databases reveal performance drops of 3-14% compared to static evaluation, exposing errors masked by benchmark artifacts. We further analyze generation quality, constraint adherence, and failure modes, highlighting both the promise and limitations of LLMs in structured data synthesis. Our findings position synthetic database generation as a new lens for studying LLM reasoning, controllability, and robustness in structured environments.

By integrating tools from external APIs, Large Language Models (LLMs) have expanded their promising capabilities in a diverse spectrum of complex real-world tasks. However, testing, evaluation, and analysis of LLM tool use remain in their early stages. Most existing benchmarks rely on manually collected test cases, many of which cannot be automatically checked for semantic correctness and instead depend on static methods such as string matching. Additionally, these benchmarks often overlook the complex interactions that occur between sequential API calls, which are common in real-world applications. To fill the gap, in this paper, we introduce StateGen, an automated framework designed to generate diverse coding tasks involving sequential API interactions. StateGen combines state-machine-based API constraint solving and validation, energy-based sampling, and control-flow injection to generate executable programs. These programs are then translated into human-like natural language task descriptions through a collaboration of two LLM agents. Utilizing StateGen, we construct StateEval, a benchmark encompassing 120 verified test cases spanning across three representative scenarios: Session Service, Tensor Operation, and ElevenLabs MCP. Experimental results confirm that StateGen can effectively generate challenging and realistic API-oriented tasks, highlighting areas for improvement in current LLMs incorporating APIs.We make our framework and benchmark publicly available to support future research.

The rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLM) and subsequent Agentic AI technologies requires systematic architectural guidance for building sophisticated, production-grade systems. This paper presents an approach for architecting such systems using design patterns derived from enterprise distributed systems standards, formal methods, and industry practice. We classify these patterns into three tiers: LLM Agents (task-specific automation), Agentic AI (adaptive goal-seekers), and Agentic Communities (organizational frameworks where AI agents and human participants coordinate through formal roles, protocols, and governance structures). We focus on Agentic Communities - coordination frameworks encompassing LLM Agents, Agentic AI entities, and humans - most relevant for enterprise and industrial applications. Drawing on established coordination principles from distributed systems, we ground these patterns in a formal framework that specifies collaboration agreements where AI agents and humans fill roles within governed ecosystems. This approach provides both practical guidance and formal verification capabilities, enabling expression of organizational, legal, and ethical rules through accountability mechanisms that ensure operational and verifiable governance of inter-agent communication, negotiation, and intent modeling. We validate this framework through a clinical trial matching case study. Our goal is to provide actionable guidance to practitioners while maintaining the formal rigor essential for enterprise deployment in dynamic, multi-agent ecosystems.

We present a new way of embedding functional languages into the Coq proof assistant by using meta-programming. This allows us to develop the meta-theory of the language using the deep embedding and provides a convenient way for reasoning about concrete programs using the shallow embedding. We connect the deep and the shallow embeddings by a soundness theorem. As an instance of our approach, we develop an embedding of a core smart contract language into Coq and verify several important properties of a crowdfunding contract based on a previous formalisation of smart contract execution in blockchains.

In everyday life, humans often plan their actions by following step-by-step instructions in the form of goal-oriented scripts. Previous work has exploited language models (LMs) to plan for abstract goals of stereotypical activities (e.g., "make a cake"), but leaves more specific goals with multi-facet constraints understudied (e.g., "make a cake for diabetics"). In this paper, we define the task of constrained language planning for the first time. We propose an overgenerate-then-filter approach to improve large language models (LLMs) on this task, and use it to distill a novel constrained language planning dataset, CoScript, which consists of 55,000 scripts. Empirical results demonstrate that our method significantly improves the constrained language planning ability of LLMs, especially on constraint faithfulness. Furthermore, CoScript is demonstrated to be quite effective in endowing smaller LMs with constrained language planning ability.

The advancement of Text-to-SQL systems is currently hindered by the scarcity of high-quality training data and the limited reasoning capabilities of models in complex scenarios. In this paper, we propose a holistic framework that addresses these issues through a dual-centric approach. From a Data-Centric perspective, we construct an iterative data factory that synthesizes RL-ready data characterized by high correctness and precise semantic-logic alignment, ensured by strict verification. From a Model-Centric perspective, we introduce a novel Agentic Reinforcement Learning framework. This framework employs a Diversity-Aware Cold Start stage to initialize a robust policy, followed by Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to refine the agent's reasoning via environmental feedback. Extensive experiments on BIRD and Spider benchmarks demonstrate that our synergistic approach achieves state-of-the-art performance among single-model methods.

Existing LLM-driven knowledge graph (KG) construction methods predominantly employ stateless batch processing pipelines, exhibiting structural deficiencies in cross-chunk semantic relation capture, entity disambiguation, and construction process interpretability. These limitations undermine KG quality, retrieval precision, and deployment trust in high-stakes domains. We propose RAGA (Reading And Graph-building Agent), an LLM-based autonomous KG construction and retrieval fusion framework. RAGA provides an atomic toolset supporting full KG lifecycle CRUD operations and embeds a Read-Search-Verify-Construct cognitive constraint into a ReAct tool loop. A KG-vector synchronization mechanism enables hybrid symbolic-vector retrieval, while evidence-anchored verification links every knowledge entry to its source text for auditable provenance. Preliminary experiments on a subset of the QASPER scientific QA dataset indicate that RAGA's fusion retrieval outperforms zero-shot baselines, with KG integration providing measurable gains in both answer and evidence quality. The framework design and experimental baseline serve as a reference for agent-driven autonomous KG construction.

Tables are prevalent in real-world databases, requiring significant time and effort for humans to analyze and manipulate. The advancements in large language models (LLMs) have made it possible to interact with tables using natural language input, bringing this capability closer to reality. In this paper, we present TableGPT, a unified fine-tuned framework that enables LLMs to understand and operate on tables using external functional commands. It introduces the capability to seamlessly interact with tables, enabling a wide range of functionalities such as question answering, data manipulation (e.g., insert, delete, query, and modify operations), data visualization, analysis report generation, and automated prediction. TableGPT aims to provide convenience and accessibility to users by empowering them to effortlessly leverage tabular data. At the core of TableGPT lies the novel concept of global tabular representations, which empowers LLMs to gain a comprehensive understanding of the entire table beyond meta-information. By jointly training LLMs on both table and text modalities, TableGPT achieves a deep understanding of tabular data and the ability to perform complex operations on tables through chain-of-command instructions. Importantly, TableGPT offers the advantage of being a self-contained system rather than relying on external API interfaces. Moreover, it supports efficient data process flow, query rejection (when appropriate) and private deployment, enabling faster domain data fine-tuning and ensuring data privacy, which enhances the framework's adaptability to specific use cases.

Loop invariants are fundamental to reasoning about programs with loops. They establish properties about a given loop's behavior. When they additionally are inductive, they become useful for the task of formal verification that seeks to establish strong mathematical guarantees about program's runtime behavior. The inductiveness ensures that the invariants can be checked locally without consulting the entire program, thus are indispensable artifacts in a formal proof of correctness. Finding inductive loop invariants is an undecidable problem, and despite a long history of research towards practical solutions, it remains far from a solved problem. This paper investigates the capabilities of the Large Language Models (LLMs) in offering a new solution towards this old, yet important problem. To that end, we first curate a dataset of verification problems on programs with loops. Next, we design a prompt for exploiting LLMs, obtaining inductive loop invariants, that are checked for correctness using sound symbolic tools. Finally, we explore the effectiveness of using an efficient combination of a symbolic tool and an LLM on our dataset and compare it against a purely symbolic baseline. Our results demonstrate that LLMs can help improve the state-of-the-art in automated program verification.

Relational databases often suffer from uninformative descriptors of table contents, such as ambiguous columns and hard-to-interpret values, impacting both human users and Text-to-SQL models. This paper explores the use of large language models (LLMs) to generate informative column descriptions as a semantic layer for relational databases. Using the BIRD-Bench development set, we created ColSQL, a dataset with gold-standard column descriptions generated and refined by LLMs and human annotators. We evaluated several instruction-tuned models, finding that GPT-4o and Command R+ excelled in generating high-quality descriptions. Additionally, we applied an LLM-as-a-judge to evaluate model performance. Although this method does not align well with human evaluations, we included it to explore its potential and to identify areas for improvement. More work is needed to improve the reliability of automatic evaluations for this task. We also find that detailed column descriptions significantly improve Text-to-SQL execution accuracy, especially when columns are uninformative. This study establishes LLMs as effective tools for generating detailed metadata, enhancing the usability of relational databases.

In many use-cases, information is stored in text but not available in structured data. However, extracting data from natural language text to precisely fit a schema, and thus enable querying, is a challenging task. With the rise of pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs), there is now an effective solution to store and use information extracted from massive corpora of text documents. Thus, we envision the use of SQL queries to cover a broad range of data that is not captured by traditional databases by tapping the information in LLMs. To ground this vision, we present Galois, a prototype based on a traditional database architecture, but with new physical operators for querying the underlying LLM. The main idea is to execute some operators of the the query plan with prompts that retrieve data from the LLM. For a large class of SQL queries, querying LLMs returns well structured relations, with encouraging qualitative results. Preliminary experimental results make pre-trained LLMs a promising addition to the field of database systems, introducing a new direction for hybrid query processing. However, we pinpoint several research challenges that must be addressed to build a DBMS that exploits LLMs. While some of these challenges necessitate integrating concepts from the NLP literature, others offer novel research avenues for the DB community.

Graph and multi-agent orchestration frameworks make production large language model (LLM) workflows practical, but they do not by themselves solve conversational continuity when users maintain several interdependent objectives. This conceptual systems paper focuses on the high-complexity end of that design space, where goals can be suspended, resumed, revised, and invalidated by actions in other goals. We introduce the Goal-Oriented Dialogue Runtime (GODR), a framework-neutral design pattern that treats goals, task frames, lifecycle state, invalidation rules, and resumption contracts as first-class runtime objects while delegating bounded execution to graph runtimes, agents, tools, or application programming interfaces (APIs). GODR is not proposed as a replacement for workflow graphs in simple guided processes; it is intended for complex, multi-domain, interruptible conversations where objective continuity cannot be recovered reliably from agent identity, chat history, or execution-graph position alone. The paper formalizes the problem, proposes runtime objects and architecture-selection criteria, and frames evaluation as an agenda for future empirical validation rather than as a measured performance claim.

Large language models are increasingly used within larger systems ("LLM agents"). These make a sequence of LLM calls, each call providing the LLM with a combination of instructions, observations, and interaction history. The design of the encoded information and its structure play a central role in the quality of the resulting system, leading to efforts spent on context engineering. It is therefore critical to communicate the composition of the LLM context in a system, and how it evolves over time. Yet, no standard exists for doing so: context construction is typically conveyed through informal prose, ad hoc diagrams, or direct inspection of code, none of which precisely capture how a prompt evolves across interaction steps or how two context representation strategies differ. To remedy this, we introduce the Agentic Context Description Language (ACDL), a language for specifying the structure and dynamics of LLM input contexts in a precise, readable, and standard manner, along with visualizations. ACDL provides constructs for specifying context aspects such as role message sequences, dynamic content, time-indexed references, and conditional or iterative structure, capturing the full architecture of a prompt independently of any particular implementation. ACDL diagrams can be hand drawn on a whiteboard, or written in formal language which can then be rendered. We describe the language, demonstrate it by documenting several existing systems and their variants, and encourage the community to adopt it for describing LLM systems context, both in day-to-day communication and in papers. Tooling, examples and documentation are available at www.acdlang.org.

Modern LLM agents increasingly rely on dynamic structured generation, such as tool calling and response protocols. Unlike traditional structured generation with static structures, these workloads vary both across requests and within a request, posing new challenges to existing engines. We present XGrammar-2, a structured generation engine for dynamic agentic workloads. Our design is based on two key ideas: first-class support for tag-triggered structure switching, and fine-grained reuse across requests with different output structures. Concretely, XGrammar-2 introduces TagDispatch for dynamic structural dispatching and Cross-Grammar Cache for substructure-level cache reuse across grammars. It further improves efficiency with an Earley-based adaptive token mask cache, just-in-time compilation, and repetition state compression. Experiments show that XGrammar-2 achieves over 6x faster compilation than prior structured generation engines, and incurs near-zero end-to-end overhead in modern LLM serving systems.

Language environments such as web browsers, code terminals, and interactive simulations emit raw text rather than states, and provide none of the runtime structure that MDP analysis requires. No explicit state space, no observation-to-state mapping, no certified transitions, and no termination criterion. We introduce the State-Centric Decision Process (SDP), a runtime framework that constructs these missing inputs by having the agent build them, predicate by predicate, as it acts. At each step the agent commits to a natural-language predicate describing how the world should look, takes an action to make it true, and checks the observation against it. Predicates that pass become certified states, and the resulting trajectory carries the four objects language environments do not provide, namely a task-induced state space, an observation-to-state mapping, certified transitions, and a termination criterion. We evaluate SDP on five benchmarks spanning planning, scientific exploration, web reasoning, and multi-hop question answering. SDP achieves the best training-free results on all five, with the advantage widening as the horizon grows. The certified trajectories additionally support analyses unavailable to reactive agents, including per-predicate credit assignment, failure localization, partial-progress measurement, and modular operator replacement.

Vibe coding produces correct, executable code at speed, but leaves no record of the structural commitments, dependencies, or evidence behind it. Reviewers cannot determine what invariants were assumed, what changed, or why a regression occurred. This is not a generation failure but a control failure: the dominant artifact of AI-assisted development (code plus chat history) performs dimension collapse, flattening complex system topology into low-dimensional text and making systems opaque and fragile under change. We propose Agentic Consensus: a paradigm in which the consensus layer C, an operable world model represented as a typed property graph, replaces code as the primary artifact of engineering. Executable artifacts are derived from C and kept in correspondence via synchronization operators Phi (realize) and Psi (rehydrate). Evidence links directly to structural claims in C, making every commitment auditable and under-specification explicit as measurable consensus entropy rather than a silent guess. Evaluation must move beyond code correctness toward alignment fidelity, consensus entropy, and intervention distance. We propose benchmark task families designed to measure whether consensus-based workflows reduce human intervention compared to chat-driven baselines.

Embedding-based methods for reasoning in knowledge hypergraphs learn a representation for each entity and relation. Current methods do not capture the procedural rules underlying the relations in the graph. We propose a simple embedding-based model called ReAlE that performs link prediction in knowledge hypergraphs (generalized knowledge graphs) and can represent high-level abstractions in terms of relational algebra operations. We show theoretically that ReAlE is fully expressive and provide proofs and empirical evidence that it can represent a large subset of the primitive relational algebra operations, namely renaming, projection, set union, selection, and set difference. We also verify experimentally that ReAlE outperforms state-of-the-art models in knowledge hypergraph completion, and in representing each of these primitive relational algebra operations. For the latter experiment, we generate a synthetic knowledge hypergraph, for which we design an algorithm based on the Erdos-R'enyi model for generating random graphs.

Lifting low-level or legacy code into a domain-specific language (DSL) improves our ability to understand it, enables deeper formal reasoning, and facilitates safe modification. We present the CoCompiler, a bidirectional compiler and lifter between C and Lustre, a synchronous dataflow language used for reactive systems. The key insight behind the CoCompiler is that writing a compiler as a relation, rather than as a traditional function, yields a DSL lifter "for free". We implement this idea by rewriting the verified Lustre-to-C compiler V\'elus in the Walrus relational programming language. This solves what we call the vertical lifting problem, translating canonical C into Lustre. To address the complementary horizontal problem-handling real-world C outside the compiler's image-we apply semantic-preserving canonicalization passes in Haskell. The resulting tool, the CoCompiler, supports lifting real reactive C code into Lustre and onward into graphical behavioral models. Our approach is modular, language-agnostic, and fast to implement, demonstrating that relational programming offers a practical foundation for building DSL lifters by repurposing existing compilers.

AI agents have experienced a paradigm shift, from early dominance by reinforcement learning (RL) to the rise of agents powered by large language models (LLMs), and now further advancing towards a synergistic fusion of RL and LLM capabilities. This progression has endowed AI agents with increasingly strong abilities. Despite these advances, to accomplish complex real-world tasks, agents are required to plan and execute effectively, maintain reliable memory, and coordinate smoothly with other agents. Achieving these capabilities involves contending with ever-present intricate information, operations, and interactions. In light of this challenge, data structurization can play a promising role by transforming intricate and disorganized data into well-structured forms that agents can more effectively understand and process. In this context, graphs, with their natural advantage in organizing, managing, and harnessing intricate data relationships, present a powerful data paradigm for structurization to support the capabilities demanded by advanced AI agents. To this end, this survey presents a first systematic review of how graphs can empower AI agents. Specifically, we explore the integration of graph techniques with core agent functionalities, highlight notable applications, and identify prospective avenues for future research. By comprehensively surveying this burgeoning intersection, we hope to inspire the development of next-generation AI agents equipped to tackle increasingly sophisticated challenges with graphs. Related resources are collected and continuously updated for the community in the Github link.

Real-world databases are predominantly relational, comprising multiple interlinked tables that contain complex structural and statistical dependencies. Learning generative models on relational data has shown great promise in generating synthetic data and imputing missing values. However, existing methods often struggle to capture this complexity, typically reducing relational data to conditionally generated flat tables and imposing limiting structural assumptions. To address these limitations, we introduce RelDiff, a novel diffusion generative model that synthesizes complete relational databases by explicitly modeling their foreign key graph structure. RelDiff combines a joint graph-conditioned diffusion process across all tables for attribute synthesis, and a 2K+SBM graph generator based on the Stochastic Block Model for structure generation. The decomposition of graph structure and relational attributes ensures both high fidelity and referential integrity, both of which are crucial aspects of synthetic relational database generation. Experiments on 11 benchmark datasets demonstrate that RelDiff consistently outperforms prior methods in producing realistic and coherent synthetic relational databases. Code is available at https://github.com/ValterH/RelDiff.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are increasingly evolving into agentic architectures where large language models autonomously coordinate multi-step reasoning, dynamic memory management, and iterative retrieval strategies. Despite rapid industrial adoption, current research lacks a systematic understanding of Agentic RAG as a sequential decision-making system, leading to highly fragmented architectures, inconsistent evaluation methodologies, and unresolved reliability risks. This Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) paper provides the first unified framework for understanding these autonomous systems. We formalize agentic retrieval-generation loops as finite-horizon partially observable Markov decision processes, explicitly modeling their control policies and state transitions. Building upon this formalization, we develop a comprehensive taxonomy and modular architectural decomposition that categorizes systems by their planning mechanisms, retrieval orchestration, memory paradigms, and tool-invocation behaviors. We further analyze the critical limitations of traditional static evaluation practices and identify severe systemic risks inherent to autonomous loops, including compounding hallucination propagation, memory poisoning, retrieval misalignment, and cascading tool-execution vulnerabilities. Finally, we outline key doctoral-scale research directions spanning stable adaptive retrieval, cost-aware orchestration, formal trajectory evaluation, and oversight mechanisms, providing a definitive roadmap for building reliable, controllable, and scalable agentic retrieval systems.

Long-horizon agents continuously accumulate interaction history during task execution, yet the importance of past interactions changes as the agent state evolves. Existing context management methods largely compress history based on fixed windows, periodic schedules, or current relevance, overlooking a more fundamental question: when has a past interaction become safe to replace? Premature compression may remove information still needed for future actions, while overly conservative retention leads to substantial context overhead. To address this, we propose State Conditioned Compression (StateComp), a framework that determines when historical interactions can be safely compressed according to the current agent state. StateComp constructs KEEP and READY supervision through a two-stage annotation procedure and trains an imbalance-aware router on hidden representations from a frozen language model. A bounded state representation further reduces the cost of evaluating long histories, while adjacent READY interactions are grouped into continuous spans and replaced with compact summaries during execution. Experiments on WorkBuddyBench show that StateComp reduces total agent and summarization tokens by 52.27% while maintaining task performance, and achieves a 12.67-fold speedup in representation extraction.

Task-oriented dialogue requires maintaining and updating information across turns, yet language models expose no explicit belief-state object. We study how conversational state is represented, updated, and used inside eight instruction-tuned language models from four families on MultiWOZ and SGD. Structure and values separate: which domains, slots, and requests are active is linearly readable just before the model acts, whereas exact values are far more readable where the user stated them. After a user changes a value, both values remain accessible at their mentions, and causal interventions show that both continue to influence the model's action. In natural closed-loop interaction, query failures separate into cases of weak structural support, incorrect value resolution, and failure to deploy otherwise-supported constraints, with targeted interventions producing systematically different repair behavior across these cases. These findings motivate a state-action controller that starts from the base model action and selectively edits it using structural readouts, without requiring a complete predicted belief state as an intermediate representation. On held-out MultiWOZ interaction across five models, it raises the base model exact-query accuracy from .318 to .621 and task success from .272 to .371 at negligible added cost. Overall, reliable interaction requires not only retaining conversational information, but resolving which available constraints currently apply and ensuring that they govern action.

Advances in large language models have enabled agentic AI systems that can reason, plan, and interact with external tools to execute multi-step workflows, while public blockchains have evolved into a programmable substrate for value transfer, access control, and verifiable state transitions. Their convergence introduces a high-stakes systems challenge: designing standard, interoperable, and secure interfaces that allow agents to observe on-chain state, formulate transaction intents, and authorize execution without exposing users, protocols, or organizations to unacceptable security, governance, or economic risks. This survey systematizes the emerging landscape of agent-blockchain interoperability through a systematic literature review, identifying 317 relevant works from an initial pool of over 3000 records. We contribute a five-part taxonomy of integration patterns spanning read-only analytics, simulation and intent generation, delegated execution, autonomous signing, and multi-agent workflows; a threat model tailored to agent-driven transaction pipelines that captures risks ranging from prompt injection and policy misuse to key compromise, adversarial execution dynamics, and multi-agent collusion; and a comparative capability matrix analyzing more than 20 representative systems across 13 dimensions, including custody models, permissioning, policy enforcement, observability, and recovery. Building on the gaps revealed by this analysis, we outline a research roadmap centered on two interface abstractions: a Transaction Intent Schema for portable and unambiguous goal specification, and a Policy Decision Record for auditable, verifiable policy enforcement across execution environments. We conclude by proposing a reproducible evaluation suite and benchmarks for assessing the safety, reliability, and economic robustness of agent-mediated on-chain execution.

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external tools to complete complex real-world tasks. However, reliable tool-use planning remains challenging due to the limitations of implicit reasoning and the evolving nature of real-world execution environments. Existing tool-use agents typically rely on LLMs to infer tool compositions from textual descriptions, which can lead to inefficient exploration and unreliable execution in complex tasks. To address these challenges, we model tool relations at the schema level and construct a directed Tool--Schema Hypergraph, in which tools are represented as hyperedges from their required input-schema nodes to their output-schema nodes. Furthermore, we propose HyperAgent, a Tool--Schema Hypergraph-guided framework for dynamic planning and execution. Given a task, HyperAgent first extracts a task-relevant tool context graph and uses it to guide the construction of a schema-aware Task DAG. During execution, HyperAgent dynamically realizes each subtask by constructing a state-conditioned tool support graph through deficit-oriented expansion, which identifies unresolved requirements and retrieves supporting producer tools according to the current agent state. Experiments on AppWorld demonstrate that HyperAgent improves task completion performance while reducing redundant API calls, LLM interactions, and token consumption compared with existing agent baselines.

Large language models have demonstrated outstanding performance on a wide range of tasks such as question answering and code generation. On a high level, given an input, a language model can be used to automatically complete the sequence in a statistically-likely way. Based on this, users prompt these models with language instructions or examples, to implement a variety of downstream tasks. Advanced prompting methods can even imply interaction between the language model, a user, and external tools such as calculators. However, to obtain state-of-the-art performance or adapt language models for specific tasks, complex task- and model-specific programs have to be implemented, which may still require ad-hoc interaction. Based on this, we present the novel idea of Language Model Programming (LMP). LMP generalizes language model prompting from pure text prompts to an intuitive combination of text prompting and scripting. Additionally, LMP allows constraints to be specified over the language model output. This enables easy adaption to many tasks while abstracting language model internals and providing high-level semantics. To enable LMP, we implement LMQL(short for Language Model Query Language), which leverages the constraints and control flow from an LMP prompt to generate an efficient inference procedure that minimizes the number of expensive calls to the underlying language model. We show that LMQL can capture a wide range of state-of-the-art prompting methods in an intuitive way, especially facilitating interactive flows that are challenging to implement with existing high-level APIs. Our evaluation shows that we retain or increase the accuracy on several downstream tasks, while also significantly reducing the required amount of computation or cost in the case of pay-to-use APIs (26-85% cost savings).

We consider learning representations of entities and relations in KBs using the neural-embedding approach. We show that most existing models, including NTN (Socher et al., 2013) and TransE (Bordes et al., 2013b), can be generalized under a unified learning framework, where entities are low-dimensional vectors learned from a neural network and relations are bilinear and/or linear mapping functions. Under this framework, we compare a variety of embedding models on the link prediction task. We show that a simple bilinear formulation achieves new state-of-the-art results for the task (achieving a top-10 accuracy of 73.2% vs. 54.7% by TransE on Freebase). Furthermore, we introduce a novel approach that utilizes the learned relation embeddings to mine logical rules such as "BornInCity(a,b) and CityInCountry(b,c) => Nationality(a,c)". We find that embeddings learned from the bilinear objective are particularly good at capturing relational semantics and that the composition of relations is characterized by matrix multiplication. More interestingly, we demonstrate that our embedding-based rule extraction approach successfully outperforms a state-of-the-art confidence-based rule mining approach in mining Horn rules that involve compositional reasoning.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into automated, multi-stage pipelines, risk patterns that arise from unvalidated trust between processing stages become a practical concern. This paper presents a mechanism-centered taxonomy of 41 recurring risk patterns in commercial LLMs. The analysis shows that inputs are often interpreted non-neutrally and can trigger implementation-shaped responses or unintended state changes even without explicit commands. We argue that these behaviors constitute architectural failure modes and that string-level filtering alone is insufficient. To mitigate such cross-stage vulnerabilities, we recommend zero-trust architectural principles, including provenance enforcement, context sealing, and plan revalidation, and we introduce "Countermind" as a conceptual blueprint for implementing these defenses.

Relational learning typically predicts from a database state, but decision making asks a different question: how will that state change under an action? In operational systems, the answer depends on system-specific dynamics that may not be visible in the database itself. We view each such system as a relational "world" and ask whether a model can infer how it behaves from observed executions. We introduce TabWM (Tabular World Model) and WorldRel, a generator of executable relational worlds for pretraining. Given executions from an unseen world, TabWM uses them as context to predict the sparse structured edits caused by a new action without parameter updates. Across 512 held-out worlds, complete-edit F1 rises from 0.016 with no observed executions to 0.685 with 64, where a correct edit must match its operation, relational location, and value. Because these predictions are explicit relational edits, they can be applied recursively to imagine candidate futures and compare actions before they are taken. Broader search over these predicted futures improves the realized return of selected action sequences. Together, these results suggest that relational dynamics can be learned in context, broadening relational learning from modeling system state to modeling how that state changes under action.

Deploying accurate Text-to-SQL systems at the enterprise level faces a difficult trilemma involving cost, security and performance. Current solutions force enterprises to choose between expensive, proprietary Large Language Models (LLMs) and low-performing Small Language Models (SLMs). Efforts to improve SLMs often rely on distilling reasoning from large LLMs using unstructured Chain-of-Thought (CoT) traces, a process that remains inherently ambiguous. Instead, we hypothesize that a formal, structured reasoning representation provides a clearer, more reliable teaching signal, as the Text-to-SQL task requires explicit and precise logical steps. To evaluate this hypothesis, we propose Struct-SQL, a novel Knowledge Distillation (KD) framework that trains an SLM to emulate a powerful large LLM. Consequently, we adopt a query execution plan as a formal blueprint to derive this structured reasoning. Our SLM, distilled with structured CoT, achieves an absolute improvement of 8.1% over an unstructured CoT distillation baseline. A detailed error analysis reveals that a key factor in this gain is a marked reduction in syntactic errors. This demonstrates that teaching a model to reason using a structured logical blueprint is beneficial for reliable SQL generation in SLMs.

How do transformer language models memorize factual associations? A common view casts internal weight matrices as associative memories over pairs of embeddings, requiring parameter counts that scale linearly with the number of facts. We develop a theoretical and empirical account of an alternative, geometric form of memorization in which learned embeddings encode relational structure directly, and the MLP plays a qualitatively different role. In a controlled setting where a single-layer transformer must memorize random bijections from subjects to a shared attribute set, we prove that a logarithmic embedding dimension suffices: subject embeddings encode linear superpositions of their associated attribute vectors, and a small MLP acts as a relation-conditioned selector that extracts the relevant attribute via ReLU gating, and not as an associative key-value mapping. We extend these results to the multi-hop setting -- chains of relational queries such as ``Who is the mother of the wife of x?'' -- providing constructions with and without chain-of-thought that exhibit a provable capacity-depth tradeoff, complemented by a matching information-theoretic lower bound. Empirically, gradient descent discovers solutions with precisely the predicted structure. Once trained, the MLP transfers zero-shot to entirely new bijections when subject embeddings are appropriately re-initialized, revealing that it has learned a generic selection mechanism rather than memorized any particular set of facts.

AI Agent, powered by large language models (LLMs) as its cognitive core, is an intelligent agentic system capable of autonomously controlling and determining the execution paths under user's instructions. With the burst of capabilities of LLMs and various plugins, such as RAG, text-to-image/video/3D, etc., the potential of AI Agents has been vastly expanded, with their capabilities growing stronger by the day. However, at the intersection between AI and web3, there is currently no ideal agentic framework that can seamlessly integrate web3 applications into AI agent functionalities. In this paper, we propose Eliza, the first open-source web3-friendly Agentic framework that makes the deployment of web3 applications effortless. We emphasize that every aspect of Eliza is a regular Typescript program under the full control of its user, and it seamlessly integrates with web3 (i.e., reading and writing blockchain data, interacting with smart contracts, etc.). Furthermore, we show how stable performance is achieved through the pragmatic implementation of the key components of Eliza's runtime. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ai16z/eliza.

Stateful personal agents increasingly maintain long-term user profiles, episodic memories, and reusable skills. This persistence turns conversational sycophancy into a state-writing failure: accepted user-centric claims can be committed as lasting preferences, background facts, or workflows and later reused after the original conversation is gone. We call this persistent sycophancy and introduce the Personal Agent Sycophancy Benchmark (PASB), a 1,600-task benchmark that traces whether a conversational claim is accepted, written into durable agent state, and reused in a later neutral query. Unlike prior benchmarks that provide pre-written memories, PASB evaluates real agents (Hermes-Agent and OpenClaw) that decide what to store. It isolates the write process by combining four scenario framings with four temporal delivery patterns and separating a five-turn persist stage from a cleared three-turn query stage, ensuring downstream effects arise only from durable state. Across twelve models, the commit boundary is the key inflection point: downstream failure increases from 45.0% in session-only episodes to 71.9% after commitment, a consistent increase of 27.0 percentage points. Committed claims exhibit three write-time patterns: status promotion, attribution removal, and scope broadening. These patterns become stronger under memory-like or procedural framing, repeated reinforcement, and even across domain boundaries. These results show that agent sycophancy is fundamentally a state-writing governance problem. Once user content is committed to durable memory, safety must govern what agents write, not only what they say. PASB identifies the write-time controls needed to gate risky commits while preserving the source, role, and scope of stored content beyond response-level mitigations.

Most existing Large Language Model (LLM)-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) rely on predefined workflows, where human engineers enumerate task states in advance and specify routing rules and contextual injections accordingly. Such workflow-driven designs are essentially rule-based decision trees, which suffer from two fundamental limitations: they require substantial manual effort to anticipate and encode possible task states, and they cannot exhaustively cover the state space of complex real-world tasks. To address these issues, we propose an Information-Flow-Orchestrated Multi-Agent Paradigm via Agent-to-Agent (A2A) Communication from CORAL, in which a dedicated information flow orchestrator continuously monitors task progress and dynamically coordinates other agents through the A2A toolkit using natural language, without relying on predefined workflows. We evaluate our approach on the general-purpose benchmark GAIA, using the representative workflow-based MAS OWL as the baseline while controlling for agent roles and underlying models. Under the pass@1 setting, our method achieves 63.64% accuracy, outperforming OWL's 55.15% by 8.49 percentage points with comparable token consumption. Further case-level analysis shows that our paradigm enables more flexible task monitoring and more robust handling of edge cases. Our implementation is publicly available at: https://github.com/Coral-Protocol/Beyond-Rule-Based-Workflows

Agentic large language model (LLM) systems are commonly implemented as an LLM in a loop with Planning, Memory, Tools, and Control Flow. This application-focused view connects agentic LLM research with deployable systems and leaves open how such systems should be evaluated beyond end-to-end task success. Building on this view, we define agentic cognitive depth as a trajectory-level profile across five operational criteria. The profile contains context sensitivity (C), temporal continuity (T), multimodal coordination (M), adaptive interaction (A), and metacognitive monitoring (Mc). The first four criteria measure how well Control Flow, Memory, Tools, and Planning are used across a trajectory. The fifth measures whether the system monitors and regulates the full run. For each criterion, we give operational proxies and a perturbation procedure, then connect the profile to the agent's world model. We provide the structure needed to extend benchmarks such as GAIA, SWE-bench, WebArena, and TRIP-Bench with per-criterion diagnostics. Symbolic verifiers, structured memory, planner coupling, and tool constraints provide practical ways to build and test these capacities.

Scripting interfaces enable users to automate tasks and customize software workflows, but creating scripts traditionally requires programming expertise and familiarity with specific APIs, posing barriers for many users. While Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate code from natural language queries, runtime code generation is severely limited due to unverified code, security risks, longer response times, and higher computational costs. To bridge the gap, we propose an offline simulation framework to curate a software-specific skillset, a collection of verified scripts, by exploiting LLMs and publicly available scripting guides. Our framework comprises two components: (1) task creation, using top-down functionality guidance and bottom-up API synergy exploration to generate helpful tasks; and (2) skill generation with trials, refining and validating scripts based on execution feedback. To efficiently navigate the extensive API landscape, we introduce a Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based link prediction model to capture API synergy, enabling the generation of skills involving underutilized APIs and expanding the skillset's diversity. Experiments with Adobe Illustrator demonstrate that our framework significantly improves automation success rates, reduces response time, and saves runtime token costs compared to traditional runtime code generation. This is the first attempt to use software scripting interfaces as a testbed for LLM-based systems, highlighting the advantages of leveraging execution feedback in a controlled environment and offering valuable insights into aligning AI capabilities with user needs in specialized software domains.

Existing benchmarks do not test language agents on their interaction with human users or ability to follow domain-specific rules, both of which are vital for deploying them in real world applications. We propose tau-bench, a benchmark emulating dynamic conversations between a user (simulated by language models) and a language agent provided with domain-specific API tools and policy guidelines. We employ an efficient and faithful evaluation process that compares the database state at the end of a conversation with the annotated goal state. We also propose a new metric (pass^k) to evaluate the reliability of agent behavior over multiple trials. Our experiments show that even state-of-the-art function calling agents (like gpt-4o) succeed on <50% of the tasks, and are quite inconsistent (pass^8 <25% in retail). Our findings point to the need for methods that can improve the ability of agents to act consistently and follow rules reliably.

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have produced highly capable and controllable systems. This creates unprecedented opportunities for structured reasoning as well as collaboration among multiple AI systems and humans. To fully realize this potential, it is essential to develop a principled way of designing and studying such structured interactions. For this purpose, we introduce the conceptual framework of Flows: a systematic approach to modeling complex interactions. Flows are self-contained building blocks of computation, with an isolated state, communicating through a standardized message-based interface. This modular design allows Flows to be recursively composed into arbitrarily nested interactions, with a substantial reduction of complexity. Crucially, any interaction can be implemented using this framework, including prior work on AI--AI and human--AI interactions, prompt engineering schemes, and tool augmentation. We demonstrate the potential of Flows on the task of competitive coding, a challenging task on which even GPT-4 struggles. Our results suggest that structured reasoning and collaboration substantially improve generalization, with AI-only Flows adding +21 and human--AI Flows adding +54 absolute points in terms of solve rate. To support rapid and rigorous research, we introduce the aiFlows library. The library comes with a repository of Flows that can be easily used, extended, and composed into novel, more complex Flows. The aiFlows library is available at https://github.com/epfl-dlab/aiflows. Data and Flows for reproducing our experiments are available at https://github.com/epfl-dlab/cc_flows.

Knowledge Graphs (KG) provide us with a structured, flexible, transparent, cross-system, and collaborative way of organizing our knowledge and data across various domains in society and industrial as well as scientific disciplines. KGs surpass any other form of representation in terms of effectiveness. However, Knowledge Graph Engineering (KGE) requires in-depth experiences of graph structures, web technologies, existing models and vocabularies, rule sets, logic, as well as best practices. It also demands a significant amount of work. Considering the advancements in large language models (LLMs) and their interfaces and applications in recent years, we have conducted comprehensive experiments with ChatGPT to explore its potential in supporting KGE. In this paper, we present a selection of these experiments and their results to demonstrate how ChatGPT can assist us in the development and management of KGs.

Natural Language to SQL (NL2SQL) has seen significant advancements with large language models (LLMs). However, these models often depend on closed-source systems and high computational resources, posing challenges in data privacy and deployment. In contrast, small language models (SLMs) struggle with NL2SQL tasks, exhibiting poor performance and incompatibility with existing frameworks. To address these issues, we introduce Feather-SQL, a new lightweight framework tailored for SLMs. Feather-SQL improves SQL executability and accuracy through 1) schema pruning and linking, 2) multi-path and multi-candidate generation. Additionally, we introduce the 1+1 Model Collaboration Paradigm, which pairs a strong general-purpose chat model with a fine-tuned SQL specialist, combining strong analytical reasoning with high-precision SQL generation. Experimental results on BIRD demonstrate that Feather-SQL improves NL2SQL performance on SLMs, with around 10% boost for models without fine-tuning. The proposed paradigm raises the accuracy ceiling of SLMs to 54.76%, highlighting its effectiveness.

Organizing a large-scale knowledge graph into a typed property graph requires structural decisions -- which entities become nodes, which properties become edges, and what schema governs these choices. Existing approaches embed these decisions in pipeline code or extract relations ad hoc, producing schemas that are tightly coupled to their construction process and difficult to reuse for downstream ontology-level tasks. We present an ontology-oriented approach in which the schema is designed from the outset for ontology analysis, entity disambiguation, domain customization, and LLM-guided extraction -- not merely as a byproduct of graph building. The core mechanism is intrinsic-relational routing, which classifies every property as either intrinsic or relational and routes it to the corresponding schema module. This routing produces a declarative schema that is portable across storage backends and independently reusable. We instantiate the approach on the January 2026 Wikidata dump. A rule-based cleaning stage identifies a 34.6M-entity core set from the full dump, followed by iterative intrinsic-relational routing that assigns each property to one of 94 modules organized into 8 categories. With tool-augmented LLM support and human review, the schema reaches 93.3% category coverage and 98.0% module assignment among classified entities. Exporting this schema yields a property graph with 34.0M nodes and 61.2M edges across 38 relationship types. We validate the ontology-oriented claim through five applications that consume the schema independently of the construction pipeline: ontology structure analysis, benchmark annotation auditing, entity disambiguation, domain customization, and LLM-guided extraction.

Text-to-SQL systems powered by Large Language Models have excelled on academic benchmarks but struggle in complex enterprise environments. The primary limitation lies in their reliance on static schema representations, which fails to resolve semantic ambiguity and scale effectively to large, complex databases. To address this, we propose APEX-SQL, an Agentic Text-to-SQL Framework that shifts the paradigm from passive translation to agentic exploration. Our framework employs a hypothesis-verification loop to ground model reasoning in real data. In the schema linking phase, we use logical planning to verbalize hypotheses, dual-pathway pruning to reduce the search space, and parallel data profiling to validate column roles against real data, followed by global synthesis to ensure topological connectivity. For SQL generation, we introduce a deterministic mechanism to retrieve exploration directives, allowing the agent to effectively explore data distributions, refine hypotheses, and generate semantically accurate SQLs. Experiments on BIRD (70.65% execution accuracy) and Spider 2.0-Snow (51.01% execution accuracy) demonstrate that APEX-SQL outperforms competitive baselines with reduced token consumption. Further analysis reveals that agentic exploration acts as a performance multiplier, unlocking the latent reasoning potential of foundation models in enterprise settings. Ablation studies confirm the critical contributions of each component in ensuring robust and accurate data analysis.

This report overviews our ongoing work in enriching chain-of-thoughts datasets requiring arithmetical reasoning with the integration of non-parametric components, such as a calculator. We conduct an analysis of prominent relevant datasets such as GSM8K, Ape210K, AQuA-RAT, and MathQA and propose a machine-processable HTML-like format specifically tailored for working with semi-structured chains. By converting the datasets into this unified format, we enable the effective integration of large language models and symbolic systems, empowering them to tackle arithmetical reasoning tasks more efficiently.

LLM-based agents have demonstrated strong capabilities in data-intensive analytical tasks, yet their outputs are rarely verifiable: a reliance on linear text trajectories makes their reasoning difficult to audit. In particular, deterministic computations over raw data and semantic deductions over natural-language claims are often entangled in an unstructured stream, leaving numerical conclusions hard to reproduce and qualitative judgments hard to inspect. To address this, we propose VeriGraph, a traceable neuro-symbolic reasoning framework that enables agents to construct an explicit heterogeneous evidence directed acyclic graph (DAG) during execution. VeriGraph introduces three evidence-expansion primitives, namely computational, grounding, and derivational expansion, to connect raw data, interpreter variables, computed results, and natural-language claims in a unified graph. Under this formulation, structural traceability is reduced to graph reachability from raw data sources to terminal claims, while semantic support is measured by claim-level evidence evaluation. To improve graph construction, we further design a graph-based policy optimization strategy with a composite reward that jointly supervises answer correctness, computational integrity, and derivational coherence. Experiments on four benchmarks show that VeriGraph-8B achieves the highest overall score among all baselines. More importantly, VeriGraph produces auditable evidence graphs with substantially stronger claim grounding, achieving a 87.61\% Grounding Rate under our claim-level evidence support evaluation. These results suggest that explicit evidence-graph construction is a promising path toward verifiable data-analytic agents. Our code is available at https://github.com/ignorejjj/VeriGraph.

Why do we need another AI to help the AI? We argue you don't. Stateless LLM sessions impose re-orientation costs on iterative, session-heavy workflows. Prior work addresses cross-session memory through retrieval-augmented approaches: store history, embed it, retrieve by semantic similarity. Cross-session memory is a state management problem, not a search problem. Similarity search fails for named entity resolution within bounded vocabulary contexts because beliefs about a shared technical domain are semantically proximate by construction. A single user is the simplest bounded vocabulary context; engineering teams converge on the same property through shared codebases and terminology. We present Tenure, a local-first proxy that maintains a typed belief store with epistemic status, versioned supersession, and scope isolation, injecting curated context into every LLM session through precision-first retrieval. Hard scope isolation provides a structural guarantee: the right beliefs surface, and only within the boundaries the user has authorized. Tenure's typed schema converts extracted facts into imperative instructions via a why it matters field, making injected beliefs directly actionable rather than raw material for the model to re-derive. A controlled evaluation on 72 retrieval cases demonstrates the gap. Cosine similarity over dense embeddings achieves mean precision of 0.12. Alias-weighted BM25 maintains mean precision of 1.0, passing 72/72 cases versus 8/72 for cosine similarity on the same corpus. Hybrid retrieval typically solves vocabulary mismatch between disparate authors; Tenure eliminates this structurally: query and belief authors are the same person, and an alias enrichment flywheel continuously indexes their specific vocabulary. Under multi-turn topic drift this worsens: the vector backend produces drift scores of 0.43--0.50 on noise-critical turns where BM25 maintains 0.

Task-oriented dialogue generation is challenging since the underlying knowledge is often dynamic and effectively incorporating knowledge into the learning process is hard. It is particularly challenging to generate both human-like and informative responses in this setting. Recent research primarily focused on various knowledge distillation methods where the underlying relationship between the facts in a knowledge base is not effectively captured. In this paper, we go one step further and demonstrate how the structural information of a knowledge graph can improve the system's inference capabilities. Specifically, we propose DialoKG, a novel task-oriented dialogue system that effectively incorporates knowledge into a language model. Our proposed system views relational knowledge as a knowledge graph and introduces (1) a structure-aware knowledge embedding technique, and (2) a knowledge graph-weighted attention masking strategy to facilitate the system selecting relevant information during the dialogue generation. An empirical evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of DialoKG over state-of-the-art methods on several standard benchmark datasets.

Query rewriting is one of the most effective techniques for coping with poorly written queries before passing them down to the query optimizer. Manual rewriting is not scalable, as it is error-prone and requires deep expertise. Similarly, traditional query rewriting algorithms can only handle a small subset of queries: rule-based techniques do not generalize to new query patterns and synthesis-based techniques cannot handle complex queries. Fortunately, the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs), equipped with broad general knowledge and advanced reasoning capabilities, has created hopes for solving some of these previously open problems. In this paper, we present GenRewrite, the first holistic system that leverages LLMs for query rewriting. We introduce the notion of Natural Language Rewrite Rules (NLR2s), and use them as hints to the LLM but also a means for transferring knowledge from rewriting one query to another, and thus becoming smarter and more effective over time. We present a novel counterexample-guided technique that iteratively corrects the syntactic and semantic errors in the rewritten query, significantly reducing the LLM costs and the manual effort required for verification. GenRewrite speeds up 22 out of 99 TPC queries (the most complex public benchmark) by more than 2x, which is 2.5x--3.2x higher coverage than state-of-the-art traditional query rewriting and 2.1x higher than the out-of-the-box LLM baseline.

The effectiveness of LLM-based agents is often limited not by model capacity alone, but by how efficiently contextual information is utilized at runtime. Existing agent frameworks rely on rigid, syntax-heavy state representations such as nested JSON, which require models to devote a substantial portion of their limited attention to syntactic processing rather than semantic reasoning. In this paper, we propose Fat-Cat, a document-driven agent architecture that improves the signal-to-noise ratio of state management. By integrating three key components: (1) a Semantic File System that represents agent state as Markdown documents aligned with common pre-training corpora, (2) a Textual Strategy Evolution module that accumulates task-solving knowledge without parameter updates, and (3) a Closed-Loop Watcher that monitors reasoning trajectories to reduce hallucinations. Extensive reasoning, retrieval, and coding benchmarks, Fat-Cat consistently improves agent performance. It enables the Kimi-k2 model to outperform the proprietary GPT-4o baseline on HotPotQA. Replacing the document-based state with JSON leads to performance drop, while empirically validating the critical necessity of document-driven state modeling over rigid syntax. The code is available at https://github.com/answeryt/Fat-Cat.

Prompted models have demonstrated impressive few-shot learning abilities. Repeated interactions at test-time with a single model, or the composition of multiple models together, further expands capabilities. These compositions are probabilistic models, and may be expressed in the language of graphical models with random variables whose values are complex data types such as strings. Cases with control flow and dynamic structure require techniques from probabilistic programming, which allow implementing disparate model structures and inference strategies in a unified language. We formalize several existing techniques from this perspective, including scratchpads / chain of thought, verifiers, STaR, selection-inference, and tool use. We refer to the resulting programs as language model cascades.

Knowledge Graph Foundation Models (KGFMs) are at the frontier for deep learning on knowledge graphs (KGs), as they can generalize to completely novel knowledge graphs with different relational vocabularies. Despite their empirical success, our theoretical understanding of KGFMs remains very limited. In this paper, we conduct a rigorous study of the expressive power of KGFMs. Specifically, we show that the expressive power of KGFMs directly depends on the motifs that are used to learn the relation representations. We then observe that the most typical motifs used in the existing literature are binary, as the representations are learned based on how pairs of relations interact, which limits the model's expressiveness. As part of our study, we design more expressive KGFMs using richer motifs, which necessitate learning relation representations based on, e.g., how triples of relations interact with each other. Finally, we empirically validate our theoretical findings, showing that the use of richer motifs results in better performance on a wide range of datasets drawn from different domains.

Enterprise back office workflows require agentic systems that are auditable, policy-aligned, and operationally predictable, capabilities that generic multi-agent setups often fail to deliver. We present POLARIS (Policy-Aware LLM Agentic Reasoning for Integrated Systems), a governed orchestration framework that treats automation as typed plan synthesis and validated execution over LLM agents. A planner proposes structurally diverse, type checked directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), a rubric guided reasoning module selects a single compliant plan, and execution is guarded by validator gated checks, a bounded repair loop, and compiled policy guardrails that block or route side effects before they occur. Applied to document centric finance tasks, POLARIS produces decision grade artifacts and full execution traces while reducing human intervention. Empirically, POLARIS achieves a micro F1 of 0.81 on the SROIE dataset and, on a controlled synthetic suite, achieves 0.95 to 1.00 precision for anomaly routing with preserved audit trails. These evaluations constitute an initial benchmark for governed Agentic AI. POLARIS provides a methodological and benchmark reference for policy-aligned Agentic AI. Keywords Agentic AI, Enterprise Automation, Back-Office Tasks, Benchmarks, Governance, Typed Planning, Evaluation

Looped language models have shown promising results on reasoning benchmarks, yet their potential for agentic tool use remains largely unexplored. We study this question in compositional tool-calling settings, where models must coordinate multiple API calls, maintain intermediate state, and preserve dependencies across tool interactions. We evaluate native and retrofitted looped language models on API-Bank, BFCL, and NESTful, comparing looped and non-looped models trained under matched supervised fine-tuning recipes and varying recurrent depth at inference time. In controlled experiments, recurrent computation generally benefits compositional and dependency-aware tool use, while providing smaller and more model-dependent gains on isolated API invocation. Accuracy on multi-step tool use generally increases with recurrent depth; adaptive inference, however, achieves a more favorable compute-performance trade-off by allocating additional computation only when needed. Our results suggest that looped language models are a promising architecture for agentic systems that require reliable planning, coordination, and execution of compositional tool use workflows.

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled the development of increasingly complex agentic and multi-agent systems capable of planning, tool use and task decomposition. However, empirical evidence shows that many of these systems suffer from fundamental reliability issues, including hallucinated actions, unexecutable plans and brittle coordination. Crucially, these failures do not stem from limitations of the underlying models themselves, but from the absence of explicit architectural structure linking goals, capabilities and execution. This paper presents a declarative, model-independent architectural layer for grounded agentic workflows that addresses this gap. The proposed layer, referred to as DALIA (Declarative Agentic Layer for Intelligent Agents), formalises executable capabilities, exposes tasks through a declarative discovery protocol, maintains a federated directory of agents and their execution resources, and constructs deterministic task graphs grounded exclusively in declared operations. By enforcing a clear separation between discovery, planning and execution, the architecture constrains agent behaviour to a verifiable operational space, reducing reliance on speculative reasoning and free-form coordination. We present the architecture and design principles of the proposed layer and illustrate its operation through a representative task-oriented scenario, demonstrating how declarative grounding enables reproducible and verifiable agentic workflows across heterogeneous environments.

The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has catalyzed a shift towards autonomous agents capable of complex reasoning and tool use. However, current agent architectures are frequently constructed using imperative, ad hoc patterns. This results in brittle systems plagued by difficulties in state management, error handling, and concurrency. This paper introduces Monadic Context Engineering (MCE), a novel architectural paradigm leveraging the algebraic structures of Functors, Applicative Functors, and Monads to provide a formal foundation for agent design. MCE treats agent workflows as computational contexts where cross-cutting concerns, such as state propagation, short-circuiting error handling, and asynchronous execution, are managed intrinsically by the algebraic properties of the abstraction. We demonstrate how Monads enable robust sequential composition, how Applicatives provide a principled structure for parallel execution, and crucially, how Monad Transformers allow for the systematic composition of these capabilities. This layered approach enables developers to construct complex, resilient, and efficient AI agents from simple, independently verifiable components. We further extend this framework to describe Meta-Agents, which leverage MCE for generative orchestration, dynamically creating and managing sub-agent workflows through metaprogramming. Project Page: https://github.com/yifanzhang-pro/monadic-context-engineering.

Long-term memory remains a structural weakness of AI agents. The dominant approach, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), relies on embedding-based similarity search, which is opaque by construction, difficult to audit, and bounded by the theoretical limits of vector representations. We present the Memory-Orchestrated Semantic System (MOSS), an agentic memory architecture in which the agent drives retrieval over a structured relational database. MOSS is model-agnostic, storage-agnostic, and API-agnostic: it runs on any relational engine, connects to any LLM provider (or to deterministic non-LLM processes), and deploys on any infrastructure, local or cloud. Its retrieval execution is symbolic and reproducible (once a query is formulated, no LLM participates in the retrieval loop) and every step of the system, from indexing to answer formulation, is logged and inspectable, making MOSS auditable by construction. Rather than imposing an external ontology, MOSS derives its conceptual vocabulary from the corpus itself. We report on a longitudinal deployment unique in the agentic-memory literature: a year of continuous production over an individual scholar's working corpus--a conversational corpus reaching back to October 2024 (some 44 million tokens, retroactively indexed) comprising 110,183 segments, alongside 163,494 catalogued documents, 569 inductively derived concepts, 322,662 concept annotations, and eleven metadata graphs totaling approximately five million relations--across four successive infrastructure generations. While the present case is that of a single researcher, the architecture is in no way specific to one person: it serves a team, an institution, or any entity that accumulates knowledge over time. We argue that auditable, sovereign, structurally unbounded memory is a precondition for AI agents intended to accompany a person or an organization over years rather than sessions.

Web applications are critical to modern software ecosystems, yet ensuring their reliability remains challenging due to the complexity and dynamic nature of web interfaces. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in automating complex tasks, but limitations persist in handling dynamic navigation flows and complex form interactions. This paper presents an automated system for generating test cases for two key aspects of web application testing: site navigation and form filling. For site navigation, the system employs screen transition graphs and LLMs to model navigation flows and generate test scenarios. For form filling, it uses state graphs to handle conditional forms and automates Selenium script generation. Key contributions include: (1) a novel integration of graph structures and LLMs for site navigation testing, (2) a state graph-based approach for automating form-filling test cases, and (3) a comprehensive dataset for evaluating form-interaction testing. Experimental results demonstrate the system's effectiveness in improving test coverage and robustness, advancing the state of web application testing.

The drive toward automating cellular network operations has grown with the increasing complexity of these systems. Despite advancements, full autonomy currently remains out of reach due to reliance on human intervention for modeling network behaviors and defining policies to meet target requirements. Network Digital Twins (NDTs) have shown promise in enhancing network intelligence, but the successful implementation of this technology is constrained by use case-specific architectures, limiting its role in advancing network autonomy. A more capable network intelligence, or "telecommunications brain", is needed to enable seamless, autonomous management of cellular network. Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as potential enablers for this vision but face challenges in network modeling, especially in reasoning and handling diverse data types. To address these gaps, we introduce Hermes, a chain of LLM agents that uses "blueprints" for constructing NDT instances through structured and explainable logical steps. Hermes allows automatic, reliable, and accurate network modeling of diverse use cases and configurations, thus marking progress toward fully autonomous network operations.

Synthetic data has become increasingly important for training large language models, especially when real data is scarce, expensive, or privacy-sensitive. Many such generation tasks require coordinated multi-agent workflows, where specialized agents collaborate to produce data that is higher quality, more diverse, and structurally richer. However, existing frameworks for multi-agent synthesis often depend on a centralized orchestrator, creating scalability bottlenecks, or are hardcoded for specific domains, limiting flexibility. We present Matrix, a decentralized framework that represents both control and data flow as serialized messages passed through distributed queues. This peer-to-peer design eliminates the central orchestrator. Each task progresses independently through lightweight agents, while compute-intensive operations, such as LLM inference or containerized environments, are handled by distributed services. Built on Ray, Matrix scales to tens of thousands of concurrent agentic workflows and provides a modular, configurable design that enables easy adaptation to a wide range of data generation workflows. We evaluate Matrix across diverse synthesis scenarios, such as multi-agent collaborative dialogue, web-based reasoning data extraction, and tool-use trajectory generation in customer service environments. In all cases, Matrix achieves 2--15times higher data generation throughput under identical hardware resources, without compromising output quality.

In this article, we introduce a new parameterized family of topological invariants, taking the form of candidate decompositions, for multi-parameter persistence modules. We prove that our candidate decompositions are controllable approximations: when restricting to modules that can be decomposed into interval summands, we establish theoretical results about the approximation error between our candidate decompositions and the true underlying module in terms of the standard interleaving and bottleneck distances. Moreover, even when the underlying module does not admit such a decomposition, our candidate decompositions are nonetheless stable invariants; small perturbations in the underlying module lead to small perturbations in the candidate decomposition. Then, we introduce MMA (Multipersistence Module Approximation): an algorithm for computing stable instances of such invariants, which is based on fibered barcodes and exact matchings, two constructions that stem from the theory of single-parameter persistence. By design, MMA can handle an arbitrary number of filtrations, and has bounded complexity and running time. Finally, we present empirical evidence validating the generalization capabilities and running time speed-ups of MMA on several data sets.