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Nov 9

AgentBetta: Verification-Driven Adaptive Configuration of an AI Nano-Agent through Selective Expansion and Verified Contraction

Large language model agents are typically deployed with predefined configurations, although the required model capability, context, tools, permissions, memory, and computational resources can vary substantially across tasks. This study develops and evaluates AgentBetta, an adaptive AI Nano-Agent framework that represents these factors as an executable configuration and updates them through verification-driven diagnosis, selective expansion, and verification-based counterfactual contraction. The evaluation distinguishes controlled mechanism validation from external agent comparisons. On the AB-ConfigBench benchmark, AgentBetta achieved 91.38% verified success while reducing median context allocation from 64,000 to 8,000 context characters and median tool exposure from five tools to zero compared with the fully provisioned configuration. The configuration-deficiency diagnosis achieved a macro-F1 score of 0.819 with precision of 1.000 across the evaluated dimensions, and selective expansion avoided unnecessary changes to unrelated configuration dimensions. Post-success contraction preserved verification outcomes in 56.41% of evaluated one-dimension contraction probes, indicating that some successful configurations contained removable capability under the tested conditions. External evaluations indicate that adaptive configuration can improve the balance between verified task completion and capability exposure; however, the results vary across benchmarks and agent families. In particular, the cross-family replication did not reproduce the primary-backbone accuracy ordering, and specialized systems remained advantageous for certain task domains. These results support interpreting AgentBetta as a configuration-adaptation mechanism that regulates capability allocation and inference expenditure rather than as a universal replacement for specialized agent architectures.

  • 1 authors
·
Sep 19

Knowledge-Aware Iterative Retrieval for Multi-Agent Systems

We introduce a novel large language model (LLM)-driven agent framework, which iteratively refines queries and filters contextual evidence by leveraging dynamically evolving knowledge. A defining feature of the system is its decoupling of external sources from an internal knowledge cache that is progressively updated to guide both query generation and evidence selection. This design mitigates bias-reinforcement loops and enables dynamic, trackable search exploration paths, thereby optimizing the trade-off between exploring diverse information and maintaining accuracy through autonomous agent decision-making. Our approach is evaluated on a broad range of open-domain question answering benchmarks, including multi-step tasks that mirror real-world scenarios where integrating information from multiple sources is critical, especially given the vulnerabilities of LLMs that lack explicit reasoning or planning capabilities. The results show that the proposed system not only outperforms single-step baselines regardless of task difficulty but also, compared to conventional iterative retrieval methods, demonstrates pronounced advantages in complex tasks through precise evidence-based reasoning and enhanced efficiency. The proposed system supports both competitive and collaborative sharing of updated context, enabling multi-agent extension. The benefits of multi-agent configurations become especially prominent as task difficulty increases. The number of convergence steps scales with task difficulty, suggesting cost-effective scalability.

  • 1 authors
·
Mar 17, 2025

Profiling a Frontier Agent with EBench: From Direct Control to Harness with Policy

Frontier multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can control robots without robot-specific training, but how their capabilities compare and interact with post-trained vision-language-action (VLA) and world action model (WAM) policies across manipulation demands remains to be thoroughly evaluated. In this report, we evaluate GPT-6-Astra on EBench as the core of an agent that controls a robot through an agent harness under the same visual and proprioceptive observation protocol as post-trained policies. We study two agent configurations: direct control, in which the agent generates waypoint commands directly, and harness with policy, in which it can also invoke a post-trained VLA or WAM policy for action execution. Under direct control, the agent achieves competitive overall performance relative to post-trained policies. It leads on short-horizon tasks and exhibits the least performance variation across generalization dimensions, whereas it underperforms post-trained policies on long-horizon tasks, tabletop manipulation, and high-precision contact-rich tasks. In the harness with policy, invoking a post-trained VLA or WAM combines the complementary strengths of both components, raising overall task success to the level of the strongest compared post-trained policies while substantially reducing token cost. However, performance remains below the per-task upper bound of the standalone components due to suboptimal policy invocation, fixed-instruction execution without subgoals, and grasp disruption when the agent resumes control. Overall, our study characterizes the capability boundary of a frontier MLLM agent and suggests directions for improving future agent harness design. Project page: https://internrobotics.github.io/EBench-Astra-Tech-Report/

  • 15 authors
·
Oct 25

How Generation Architecture Shapes Code Complexity in Multi-Agent LLM Systems: A Paired Study on HumanEval

Large-language-model code generation has shifted from single-shot prompting to multi-agent orchestrations - analyst, coder, tester, and debugger pipelines - and is evaluated almost exclusively on functional correctness. Whether these architectures also affect the structural complexity of the code they produce, and which orchestration layers carry the cost, remains largely unexamined: prior work has documented prompt-level effects on code complexity, but the architecture-level question is open. We compare six widely-used multi-agent configurations (Basic, AC, ACT, Debugger, AC+Debugger, ACT+Debugger) under two models from the GPT-4o family across all 164 HumanEval tasks - 1,968 paired observations - using the five RADON complexity metrics (SLOC, cyclomatic complexity, and Halstead Volume, Difficulty, and Effort). We apply a paired non-parametric statistical pipeline (Friedman omnibus, Wilcoxon signed-rank post-hoc with Holm correction, Kendall's W and matched-pairs rank-biserial effect sizes) in both all-completions and passing-only conditions. The six architectures collapse into two indistinguishable complexity clusters separated by a 50-130% gap, the same partition in both models and under both conditions; among the architectural layers, the analyst-coder split inflates complexity, the runtime debugger does not - and on the analyst-coder background actively deflates it - and the tester re-inflates it. The heavy cluster's additional complexity buys no pass@1 advantage: the leanest architectures match or beat the heaviest on accuracy. Architectural elaboration in LLM code generation should therefore be justified by measured benefit on the dimensions that matter, not assumed.

  • 1 authors
·
May 28

Auditing Agent Harness Safety

LLM agents increasingly run inside execution harnesses that dispatch tools, allocate resources, and route messages between specialized components. However, a harness can return a correct, benign answer over a trajectory that accesses unauthorized resources or leaks context to the wrong agent. Output-level evaluation cannot see these failures, yet most safety benchmarks score only final outputs or terminal states, even though many violations occur mid-trajectory rather than at termination. The central question is whether the harness respects user intent, permission boundaries, and information-flow constraints throughout execution. To address this gap, we propose HarnessAudit, a framework that audits full execution trajectories across boundary compliance, execution fidelity, and system stability, with a focus on multi-agent harnesses where these risks are most pronounced. We further introduce HarnessAudit-Bench, a benchmark of 210 tasks across eight real-world domains, instantiated in both single-agent and multi-agent configurations with embedded safety constraints. Evaluating ten harness configurations across frontier models and three multi-agent frameworks, we find that: (i) task completion is misaligned with safe execution, and violations accumulate with trajectory length; (ii) safety risks vary across domains, task types, and agent roles; (iii) most violations concentrate in resource access and inter-agent information transfer; and (iv) multi-agent collaboration expands the safety risk surface, while harness design sets the upper bound of safe deployment.

ucsbai UCSB AI Group
·
May 13 2

Revisiting Multi-Agent Debate as Test-Time Scaling: A Systematic Study of Conditional Effectiveness

The remarkable growth in large language model (LLM) capabilities has spurred exploration into multi-agent systems, with debate frameworks emerging as a promising avenue for enhanced problem-solving. These multi-agent debate (MAD) approaches, where agents collaboratively present, critique, and refine arguments, potentially offer improved reasoning, robustness, and diverse perspectives over monolithic models. Despite prior studies leveraging MAD, a systematic understanding of its effectiveness compared to self-agent methods, particularly under varying conditions, remains elusive. This paper seeks to fill this gap by conceptualizing MAD as a test-time computational scaling technique, distinguished by collaborative refinement and diverse exploration capabilities. We conduct a comprehensive empirical investigation comparing MAD with strong self-agent test-time scaling baselines on mathematical reasoning and safety-related tasks. Our study systematically examines the influence of task difficulty, model scale, and agent diversity on MAD's performance. Key findings reveal that, for mathematical reasoning, MAD offers limited advantages over self-agent scaling but becomes more effective with increased problem difficulty and decreased model capability, while agent diversity shows little benefit. Conversely, for safety tasks, MAD's collaborative refinement can increase vulnerability, but incorporating diverse agent configurations facilitates a gradual reduction in attack success through the collaborative refinement process. We believe our findings provide critical guidance for the future development of more effective and strategically deployed MAD systems.

  • 6 authors
·
May 28, 2025 1

Confucius Code Agent: An Open-sourced AI Software Engineer at Industrial Scale

Real-world AI software engineering demands coding agents that can reason over massive repositories, maintain durable memory across and within long sessions, and robustly coordinate complex toolchains at test time. Existing open-source coding agents provide transparency but frequently fall short when pushed to these industrial-scale workloads, while proprietary coding agents offer strong practical performance but limited extensibility, interpretability, and controllability. We present the Confucius Code Agent (CCA), an open-sourced AI software engineer that can operate at an industrial scale. CCA is built atop the Confucius SDK, an open-sourced agent development platform designed around three complementary perspectives: Agent Experience (AX), User Experience (UX), and Developer Experience (DX). The SDK introduces a unified orchestrator with hierarchical working memory for long-context reasoning, a persistent note-taking system for cross-session continual learning, and a modular extension module for robust tool use. Moreover, a meta-agent automates the synthesis, evaluation, and refinement of agent configurations through a build-test-improve loop, enabling rapid agent development on new tasks, environments, and tool stacks. Instantiated on Confucius SDK with these mechanisms, CCA delivers strong performance on real-world software engineering tasks. On SWE-Bench-Pro, CCA achieves a state-of-the-art Resolve@1 performance of 54.3%, substantially improving over prior coding agents. Together, the Confucius SDK and CCA provide a transparent, extensible, and reproducible foundation for AI agents, bridge gaps between research prototypes and production-grade systems, and support agent development and deployment at industrial scale.

metaresearch Meta Research
·
Dec 11, 2025 6

The Fellowship of the LLMs: Multi-Agent Workflows for Synthetic Preference Optimization Dataset Generation

This paper presents synthetic Preference Optimization (PO) datasets generated using multi-agent workflows and evaluates the effectiveness and potential of these workflows in the dataset generation process. PO dataset generation requires two modules: (1) response evaluation, and (2) response generation. In the response evaluation module, the responses from Large Language Models (LLMs) are evaluated and ranked - a task typically carried out by human annotators that we automate using LLMs. We assess the response evaluation module in a 2 step process. In step 1, we assess LLMs as evaluators using three distinct prompting strategies. In step 2, we apply the winning prompting strategy to compare the performance of LLM-as-a-Judge, LLMs-as-a-Jury, and LLM Debate. In each step, we use inter-rater agreement using Cohen's Kappa between human annotators and LLMs. For the response generation module, we compare different configurations for the LLM Feedback Loop using the identified LLM evaluator configuration. We use the win rate (the fraction of times a generation framework is selected as the best by an LLM evaluator) to determine the best multi-agent configuration for generation. After identifying the best configurations for both modules, we use models from the GPT, Gemma, and Llama families to generate our PO datasets using the above pipeline. We generate two types of PO datasets, one to improve the generation capabilities of individual LLM and the other to improve the multi-agent workflow. Our evaluation shows that GPT-4o-as-a-Judge is more consistent across datasets when the candidate responses do not include responses from the GPT family. Additionally, we find that the LLM Feedback Loop, with Llama as the generator and Gemma as the reviewer, achieves a notable 71.8% and 73.8% win rate over single-agent Llama and Gemma, respectively.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 16, 2024

OpenCollab: A Multi-Agent Coding Framework with Programmable Collaboration and Controllable Runtime

Multi-agent coding systems are designed to tackle complex software engineering tasks through collaboration. However, existing evaluations typically assume configured organizations are followed faithfully, whereas reality differs. This behavioral gap, combined with differences in underlying system components, prevents clear attribution of observed gains. To this end, we introduce OpenCollab, a multi-agent coding framework that provides a unified infrastructure for programmable collaboration and controllable runtime. Specifically, OpenCollab unifies organization design, enforces experimental control on a shared runtime, and tracks execution through fine-grained event streams. On this basis, we define Adherence to quantify whether the declared organization is actually realized. Our experiments reveal that agents collaborate very differently across configurations: changing any single dimension shifts Adherence, from 47.2% to as high as 97.2%. Furthermore, extensive agentic coding benchmarks show that a two-coder workflow built on OpenCollab establishes new SOTA performance compared to the mainstream harnesses such as Mini-SWE-agent, Codex CLI, and Claude Code, showing that a well-designed organization can outperform strong existing harnesses, while OpenCollab's single-agent configuration uses the fewest tokens across all evaluated suites. OpenCollab establishes a unified multi-agent infrastructure for easy programmable collaboration and controlled causal evaluation.

  • 15 authors
·
Sep 28

Agentic Neural Networks: Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Systems via Textual Backpropagation

Leveraging multiple Large Language Models(LLMs) has proven effective for addressing complex, high-dimensional tasks, but current approaches often rely on static, manually engineered multi-agent configurations. To overcome these constraints, we present the Agentic Neural Network(ANN), a framework that conceptualizes multi-agent collaboration as a layered neural network architecture. In this design, each agent operates as a node, and each layer forms a cooperative "team" focused on a specific subtask. Agentic Neural Network follows a two-phase optimization strategy: (1) Forward Phase-Drawing inspiration from neural network forward passes, tasks are dynamically decomposed into subtasks, and cooperative agent teams with suitable aggregation methods are constructed layer by layer. (2) Backward Phase-Mirroring backpropagation, we refine both global and local collaboration through iterative feedback, allowing agents to self-evolve their roles, prompts, and coordination. This neuro-symbolic approach enables ANN to create new or specialized agent teams post-training, delivering notable gains in accuracy and adaptability. Across four benchmark datasets, ANN surpasses leading multi-agent baselines under the same configurations, showing consistent performance improvements. Our findings indicate that ANN provides a scalable, data-driven framework for multi-agent systems, combining the collaborative capabilities of LLMs with the efficiency and flexibility of neural network principles. We plan to open-source the entire framework.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 10, 2025

AgentSelect: Benchmark for Narrative Query-to-Agent Recommendation

LLM agents are rapidly becoming the practical interface for task automation, yet the ecosystem lacks a principled way to choose among an exploding space of deployable configurations. Existing LLM leaderboards and tool/agent benchmarks evaluate components in isolation and remain fragmented across tasks, metrics, and candidate pools, leaving a critical research gap: there is little query-conditioned supervision for learning to recommend end-to-end agent configurations that couple a backbone model with a toolkit. We address this gap with AgentSelect, a benchmark that reframes agent selection as narrative query-to-agent recommendation over capability profiles and systematically converts heterogeneous evaluation artifacts into unified, positive-only interaction data. AgentSelectcomprises 111,179 queries, 107,721 deployable agents, and 251,103 interaction records aggregated from 40+ sources, spanning LLM-only, toolkit-only, and compositional agents. Our analyses reveal a regime shift from dense head reuse to long-tail, near one-off supervision, where popularity-based CF/GNN methods become fragile and content-aware capability matching is essential. We further show that Part~III synthesized compositional interactions are learnable, induce capability-sensitive behavior under controlled counterfactual edits, and improve coverage over realistic compositions; models trained on AgentSelect also transfer to a public agent marketplace (MuleRun), yielding consistent gains on an unseen catalog. Overall, AgentSelect provides the first unified data and evaluation infrastructure for agent recommendation, which establishes a reproducible foundation to study and accelerate the emerging agent ecosystem.

  • 10 authors
·
Mar 3

AgentLeak: A Full-Stack Benchmark for Privacy Leakage in Multi-Agent LLM Systems

Multi-agent Large Language Model (LLM) systems create privacy risks that current benchmarks cannot measure. When agents coordinate on tasks, sensitive data passes through inter-agent messages, shared memory, and tool arguments; pathways that output-only audits never inspect. We introduce AgentLeak, to the best of our knowledge the first full-stack benchmark for privacy leakage covering internal channels, spanning 1,000 scenarios across healthcare, finance, legal, and corporate domains, paired with a 32-class attack taxonomy and three-tier detection pipeline. Testing GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Mistral Large, and Llama 3.3 70B across 4,979 traces reveals that multi-agent configurations reduce per-channel output leakage (C1: 27.2% vs 43.2% in single-agent) but introduce unmonitored internal channels that raise total system exposure to 68.9% (OR-aggregated across C1, C2, C5). Internal channels account for most of this gap: inter-agent messages (C2) leak at 68.8%, compared to 27.2% on C1 (output channel). This means that output-only audits miss 41.7% of violations. Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which emphasizes safety alignment in its design, achieves the lowest leakage rates on both external (3.3%) and internal (28.1%) channels, suggesting that model-level safety training may transfer to internal channel protection. Across all five models and four domains, the pattern C2 > C1 holds consistently, confirming that inter-agent communication is the primary vulnerability. These findings underscore the need for coordination frameworks that incorporate internal-channel privacy protections and enforce privacy controls on inter-agent communication.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 11 1

A hierarchical memory architecture overcomes context limits in long-horizon multi-agent computational modeling

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable reasoning capabilities, yet their stateless architecture fundamentally limits deployment in long-horizon research workflows requiring multi-session continuity and quantitative rigor. Here we present Ensemble QSP, a multi-agent framework featuring a three-layer hierarchical memory architecture that keeps injected context bounded and constant in project duration (mid-term project state: median 301 tokens, max 4,050, across 104 runs) by capping each state category and evicting completed work, enabling continuous autonomous operation without context degradation. The system orchestrates five specialist worker agents under domain-expert principal investigators, enforcing physical constraints through physics-based checklists and structured-domain knowledge. Comprehensive benchmarking demonstrates robust autonomous pharmacokinetic-pharmacodynamic model selection without human intervention, consistent result quality across both lower-cost and frontier LLMs, improved PK parameter recovery relative to single-agent baselines, and stable model selection across linguistically diverse prompts of the same task. Feature-level ablation across physiologically based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) models spanning a broad complexity range shows that PI-agent oversight improves debugging efficiency while preserving final accuracy across conditions. The architecture is structurally domain-agnostic, adding a new scientific domain requires only a new PI agent configuration.

  • 2 authors
·
Jul 7

TRiSM for Agentic AI: A Review of Trust, Risk, and Security Management in LLM-based Agentic Multi-Agent Systems

Agentic AI systems, built on large language models (LLMs) and deployed in multi-agent configurations, are redefining intelligent autonomy, collaboration and decision-making across enterprise and societal domains. This review presents a structured analysis of Trust, Risk, and Security Management (TRiSM) in the context of LLM-based agentic multi-agent systems (AMAS). We begin by examining the conceptual foundations of agentic AI, its architectural differences from traditional AI agents, and the emerging system designs that enable scalable, tool-using autonomy. The TRiSM in the agentic AI framework is then detailed through four pillars governance, explainability, ModelOps, and privacy/security each contextualized for agentic LLMs. We identify unique threat vectors and introduce a comprehensive risk taxonomy for the agentic AI applications, supported by case studies illustrating real-world vulnerabilities. Furthermore, the paper also surveys trust-building mechanisms, transparency and oversight techniques, and state-of-the-art explainability strategies in distributed LLM agent systems. Additionally, metrics for evaluating trust, interpretability, and human-centered performance are reviewed alongside open benchmarking challenges. Security and privacy are addressed through encryption, adversarial defense, and compliance with evolving AI regulations. The paper concludes with a roadmap for responsible agentic AI, proposing research directions to align emerging multi-agent systems with robust TRiSM principles for safe, accountable, and transparent deployment.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 4, 2025 2

WideSWE: Can Coding Agents Coordinate Changes Across Repositories?

Coding-agent evaluation has progressed from resolving individual issues to carrying out long-horizon development, yet task completion is still largely assessed within a single codebase. In software ecosystems, many features and bug fixes require coordinated changes across multiple repositories. We introduce WideSWE to evaluate coding agents on such cross-repository tasks. Mining and reviewing changes across 103 software ecosystems yields 120 real-world tasks, balanced between 60 bug fixes and 60 features. We derive prompts from related issues and pull requests. We systematically review and adapt hidden tests to support diverse correct implementations while preserving required behavior and regression checks. Across seven agent configurations, full task success ranges from 10.83% to 42.50%, with the configuration pairing Codex CLI with GPT-5.6-sol achieving the highest rate. Trajectories show agents failing to identify necessary changes, recognizing changes but leaving them unfinished, or modifying the required repositories without fully satisfying the request. To examine whether working on one repository at a time can alleviate these difficulties, we compare it with joint execution under identical prompts. Independent execution mainly recovers omitted work and is less effective at correcting previously attempted but unsuccessful implementations. Joint execution can use information from related repositories to guide implementation and verification. Code is available at https://github.com/ZJU-ACES-ISE/WideSWE.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 26 3

InferenceBench: A Benchmark for Open-Ended LLM Inference Optimization by AI Agents

AI agents are increasingly used to automate research and development tasks, yet existing benchmarks typically evaluate them on prescribed workflows or narrow action spaces. Even nominally open-ended tasks can often be solved by retrieving a well-known recipe and tuning a few hyperparameters, making it unclear whether strong results reflect genuine optimization or memorized solutions. We introduce InferenceBench, where an agent must deploy an OpenAI-compatible inference server and optimize the speed of LLM inference. Each agent receives a target LLM, one H100 GPU, an optimization scenario, and a wall-clock time budget of two hours. Three optimization scenarios isolate distinct bottlenecks of inference (prefill latency, decode latency, and concurrent request throughput) and a fourth balances all three at the same time. Across 15 frontier agent configurations, agents reliably improve over a naive PyTorch baseline (up to 8.08times) and often match or exceed serving engines with default settings (4.05times for vLLM), but still fall below a simple hyperparameter search under the same time budget (up to 11.53times). Qualitative analysis of agent trajectories shows that although agents enumerate many relevant optimization techniques, they overwhelmingly converge on a single inference framework. They test only a few distinct configurations and spend the remaining budget re-measuring, repairing, or optimizing hyperparameters rather than exploring substantially different strategies. This suggests the bottleneck is not domain knowledge, but the ability to propose diverse configurations, evaluate them systematically, and submit the best identified solution. Overall, InferenceBench reflects the ability of agents to operate in an open-ended AI engineering setting, where memorized solutions lead to limited improvements.

  • 3 authors
·
May 19

Vero: Can AI Agents Build Formally Verified Software Repositories?

AI agents are increasingly used for programming, but do not provide any guarantee on the correctness of generated code. Verified code generation, in which an agent produces both an implementation and a machine-checked proof of its specification, offers a stronger path toward trustworthy AI-generated software. Existing benchmarks in this direction either focus on individual functions or only evaluate proof generation with provided implementations. It is still an open question whether agents can make coherent implementation and proof choices across real multi-module codebases. To bridge this gap, we introduce Vero, the first benchmark to evaluate joint implementation and proof synthesis at the repository level. Vero contains 43 multi-module instances sourced from real-world repositories spanning Python, Dafny, Verus, and Coq, and covering diverse domains from cryptographic protocols to distributed systems. Each instance consists of a multi-module Lean 4 repository with predetermined API interfaces, manually curated formal specifications, and reference implementations, supporting both proof-only and code-and-proof evaluation modes. To improve benchmark reliability, Vero also includes an audit mechanism where agents are allowed to formally prove unsatisfiability of provided specification or incorrectness of reference code, which surfaces and corrects latent code and specification errors during curation. We evaluate frontier coding-agent configurations with Lean toolchain access. The strongest agent fully solves only 27 of 43 instances and closes no specifications on the hardest repositories. Vero provides a concrete testbed for measuring progress toward repository-scale verified software synthesis, where current agents still fall short. We release the benchmark, curation pipeline, and evaluation harness at https://github.com/sunblaze-ucb/vero.

  • 11 authors
·
Aug 12

ClawProBench: Trace-Aware Evaluation of AI Agents with Runtime Coverage and Frozen Workplace-Style Holdouts

Agent benchmarks often evaluate only final answers even when agents run on stateful runtimes. We argue this under-specifies what is being evaluated: the proper unit is a declared model-plus-runtime configuration whose failures can occur in evidence acquisition, runtime routing, safety boundaries, or repeated execution. We present ClawProBench, a trace-aware benchmark for runtime-native agent evaluation instantiated on OpenClaw, a live agent runtime with workspace tools and native surfaces for browsing, memory, messaging, scheduling, skills, and subagents. ClawProBench defines two tracks: a 102-scenario full profile with live workspace and native-runtime routing tasks, and a frozen 68-scenario holdout with closed-world JSON output contracts for robust ranking. Trials are scored from execution traces via a safety-gated formula combining correctness, process quality, and efficiency, preserving failure evidence for audit. Our anonymous artifact includes benchmark definitions, scoring code, manifests and sanitized traces. We evaluate 68 configurations on the full profile and 37 on holdout. The top safety-gated average trace score is 0.7671. Native-runtime tasks underperform workspace-live tasks (0.5238 vs. 0.6415). On holdout, pass@k-any outperforms strict three-trial pass (0.6638 vs. 0.2890), while full-profile and holdout rankings show weak alignment (Spearman 0.1300). Rankings based purely on correctness differ substantially from process-aware, safety-gated and strict-pass views. Final-answer leaderboards may hide native-surface weaknesses, one-off successes and trace-local agent failure modes.

  • 1 authors
·
Aug 22 3

SAEScientist-Bench: Can AI Agents Conduct Autonomous SAE Interpretability Research?

While research on recursive self-improvement (RSI) has predominantly automated model training pipelines, reliable autonomous development demands a missing pillar: post-hoc monitoring and auditing to understand what models learn and ensure safe alignment. Mechanistic interpretability tools are essential to bridge this gap, among which Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) serve as a cornerstone by isolating interpretable features for model inspection and steering. In this paper, we introduce SAEScientist-Bench to evaluate whether AI agents can act as scientists utilizing SAE tools for autonomous mechanistic discovery. Given a target concept, an agent designs contrastive probes and navigates a Gemma Scope dictionary of 131K+ features in Gemma-2-9B-IT to discover the optimal feature, evaluated against curated expert reference features anchored on Neuronpedia across activation rank, concept selectivity on contrastive texts, and causal steering. Across 10 agent configurations and 20 tasks, frontier agents demonstrate genuine discovery capabilities and lead different evaluation dimensions, but remain well behind the expert baseline, approaching expert levels on separating target concepts from contrastive controls while lagging substantially in causal generation steering. Further analysis reveals that although agents can design contrasts to rule out spurious candidates, they frequently misinterpret experimental measurements. These results establish experimental model understanding as a measurable capability for closed-loop autonomous AI R&D. Our code is available at https://github.com/Trae1ounG/SAEScientist.

Code4Scene: Benchmarking Coding Agents for Constructing and Editing 3D Scenes

Frontier coding agents can now write and execute code that authors 3D environments, but whether they reliably understand 3D structure and precisely control scene state remains unclear. The generated 3D scene is a persistent, executable artifact: a convincing render can hide incorrect spatial relations, intersecting objects, or unintended modifications. We introduce Code4Scene, a benchmark of 190 Unreal Engine cases built from human-assembled scenes that evaluates coding agents on two complementary settings under a shared execution interface. Construction tests scene-level spatial reasoning from open-ended language specifications, where many realizations are valid; editing tests precise control of scene state, where the agent must recover the target scene from reference images while preserving everything else. Rather than scoring code or rendered views, Code4Scene evaluates the generated engine-native scene for task fulfillment, artifact integrity, and static physical validity, with edits additionally compared against withheld ground truth. Across 14 coding-agent configurations on the 95-case public set, construction and editing performance are strongly correlated but not interchangeable (Spearman ρ= 0.78): Claude Fable 5.1 leads construction, Gemini 3.8 Flash leads editing, and GPT-6 Astra narrowly leads overall. Spatial Composition is the weakest construction category for every agent, while editing remains imprecise: the best Repair F1 is only 0.527, and 35.8% of edits that fully recover the target still introduce unintended changes elsewhere in the scene. These results expose a gap between plausible 3D generation and reliable spatial reasoning and state control.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 28

BioXArena: Benchmarking LLM Agents on Multi-Modal Biomedical Machine Learning Tasks

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly capable of automating components of machine learning development, yet existing biomedical benchmarks mainly focus on question answering, reasoning, and tool usage, or evaluate only narrow aspects of biomedical ML coding. We present BioXArena, a biomedical machine learning benchmark designed to evaluate whether agents can generate task-specific model training pipelines for heterogeneous and multi-modal biomedical datasets. BioXArena contains 76 end-to-end tasks across 9 domains, including sequence modeling, single-cell analysis, structural biology, network biology, chemical biology, perturbation dynamics, phenotype-disease modeling, biomedical imaging, and text-integrated learning. Each task is curated from primary biomedical sources into a unified evaluation framework with hidden labels, held-out graders, and biology-aware metrics normalized to a 0 to 1 scale. Agents are required to write executable code, train predictive models, and generate submissions for private test samples. Most tasks involve multiple input modalities, including tabular data, images, natural language, molecular sequences, omics matrices, and protein structures. We evaluate 11 agent configurations in a standardized 2-hour single-GPU environment. MLEvolve with Gemini-3.1-Pro achieves the highest average score of 0.666, followed by GPT-5.4 with 0.636, while no single agent consistently dominates across all domains. We additionally perform extensive ablation studies, robustness evaluations, scaling analyses, cost analyses, and failure-mode investigations to better understand how model backbones, agent scaffolds, inference budgets, and biomedical domains influence BioML coding performance. We will publicly release all benchmark tasks, graders, execution runners, leaderboard results, and agent trajectories.

  • 14 authors
·
May 14

FDE-Bench: Evaluating End-to-End Delivery from Underspecified Real-World Business Requests

Real-world business requests often leave key requirements unstated because frontline practitioners struggle to articulate rules they know from experience. Forward-deployed engineers (FDEs) must elicit these requirements through dialogue and iteratively optimize solutions until they meet customer acceptance criteria. Existing optimization benchmarks typically start from explicit objectives, while clarification benchmarks often introduce information gaps into existing tasks. We introduce FDE-Bench, the first benchmark built from real customer projects to evaluate agents on end-to-end delivery tasks that require interactive requirement clarification and iterative optimization. Its 49 cases span combinatorial optimization and machine learning. Clarification targets are distilled from discussions between frontline practitioners and FDEs. Agents elicit missing requirements from a simulated customer, and case-specific evaluators assess final artifacts against acceptance criteria using customer-accepted FDE solutions as quality references. Across 18 agent configurations, the highest mean delivery score is only 0.5510, compared with an FDE reference of 1.0. The highest delivery success rate (DSR), defined as the fraction of planned runs reaching this reference, is only 6.12%. These results show that reliable FDE-level end-to-end delivery remains out of reach for the evaluated agents on underspecified real-world business tasks. The benchmark project page is available at https://baidubce.github.io/FM-Agent/FDE-Bench/.

  • 21 authors
·
Oct 9

Beyond Watching and Searching: Benchmarking Agents for Video-centered Deep Research Reports

Deep research agents synthesize open-web evidence into long reports, but current benchmarks do not evaluate research centered on a source video. We introduce Video-Centered Deep Research Report Generation. Given a video and user request, an agent identifies research questions, retrieves external multimodal evidence, and produces an interactive report linked to relevant video moments. This task has direct practical value because it helps users locate relevant moments, verify claims, reproduce demonstrated procedures, and make informed decisions from video content. We present a skill-based workflow and OmniDR-Bench for this task. For evaluation, we propose Omni Atomic Rubric Trees (Omni-ARTs). Each tree contains three dimensions, 23 shared directions, and task-specific atomic binary criteria. The directions test audiovisual grounding, multimodal evidence use, and interactive presentation. Audited Rubric Construction (ARC) builds these trees through independent evidence collection, automated checks, behavioral calibration, and iterative human review. OmniDR-Bench contains 50 Chinese and English tasks across 19 realworld subcategories. It includes 6,414 criteria. Across 18 agent configurations, the best system scores 63.3 out of 100. Current agents still need broader content coverage, stronger causal and logical analysis across modalities, and more accurate citation support. We further analyze models, harnesses, skill configurations, video categories, and research trajectories. The code and data are released at https://github.com/marinero4972/OmniDR-Bench.

Qwen Qwen
·
Oct 21 2

Polymorphic Combinatorial Frameworks (PCF): Guiding the Design of Mathematically-Grounded, Adaptive AI Agents

The Polymorphic Combinatorial Framework (PCF) leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) and mathematical frameworks to guide the meta-prompt enabled design of solution spaces and adaptive AI agents for complex, dynamic environments. Unlike static agent architectures, PCF enables real-time parameter reconfiguration through mathematically-grounded combinatorial spaces, allowing agents to adapt their core behavioral traits dynamically. Grounded in combinatorial logic, topos theory, and rough fuzzy set theory, PCF defines a multidimensional SPARK parameter space (Skills, Personalities, Approaches, Resources, Knowledge) to capture agent behaviors. This paper demonstrates how LLMs can parameterize complex spaces and estimate likely parameter values/variabilities. Using PCF, we parameterized mock caf\'e domains (five levels of complexity), estimated variables/variabilities, and conducted over 1.25 million Monte Carlo simulations. The results revealed trends in agent adaptability and performance across the five complexity tiers, with diminishing returns at higher complexity levels highlighting thresholds for scalable designs. PCF enables the generation of optimized agent configurations for specific scenarios while maintaining logical consistency. This framework supports scalable, dynamic, explainable, and ethical AI applications in domains like customer service, healthcare, robotics, and collaborative systems, paving the way for adaptable and cooperative next-generation polymorphic agents.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 3, 2025

MindTopo: Can Foundation Models Reason in Topological Space?

Spatial reasoning depends not only on metric properties such as distance, angle, and shape, but also on topological relations that remain invariant under continuous deformation. Cognitive science identifies these relations as foundational to spatial understanding, yet foundation-model evaluations largely focus on metric or viewpoint-dependent relations. We introduce MindTopo, a benchmark of topological intuition across five properties grounded in cognitive science and formal topology: continuity, separation, order, enclosure, and knots. MindTopo evaluates each property at two cognitive levels. Reasoning asks a model to identify topological relations or infer how they change. Planning instantiates a foundation model as a closed-loop agent whose policy selects environment actions. MindTopo contains 11,030 instances across 13 procedurally generated task types with controllable difficulty. We benchmark 14 MLLMs and study agent configurations augmented with image and video generation, including 3 video generative models in planning settings. Every MLLM performs better on reasoning than on planning, and the best-performing model remains far below observed human performance. On Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct, supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning improve reasoning more than planning. Generated observations retain local cues and reach plausible endpoints, but audited rollouts do not reliably follow environment dynamics or preserve topology across transitions. Our website is at https://mind-topo.github.io/

  • 12 authors
·
Sep 9

APT: Architectural Planning and Text-to-Blueprint Construction Using Large Language Models for Open-World Agents

We present APT, an advanced Large Language Model (LLM)-driven framework that enables autonomous agents to construct complex and creative structures within the Minecraft environment. Unlike previous approaches that primarily concentrate on skill-based open-world tasks or rely on image-based diffusion models for generating voxel-based structures, our method leverages the intrinsic spatial reasoning capabilities of LLMs. By employing chain-of-thought decomposition along with multimodal inputs, the framework generates detailed architectural layouts and blueprints that the agent can execute under zero-shot or few-shot learning scenarios. Our agent incorporates both memory and reflection modules to facilitate lifelong learning, adaptive refinement, and error correction throughout the building process. To rigorously evaluate the agent's performance in this emerging research area, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark consisting of diverse construction tasks designed to test creativity, spatial reasoning, adherence to in-game rules, and the effective integration of multimodal instructions. Experimental results using various GPT-based LLM backends and agent configurations demonstrate the agent's capacity to accurately interpret extensive instructions involving numerous items, their positions, and orientations. The agent successfully produces complex structures complete with internal functionalities such as Redstone-powered systems. A/B testing indicates that the inclusion of a memory module leads to a significant increase in performance, emphasizing its role in enabling continuous learning and the reuse of accumulated experience. Additionally, the agent's unexpected emergence of scaffolding behavior highlights the potential of future LLM-driven agents to utilize subroutine planning and leverage the emergence ability of LLMs to autonomously develop human-like problem-solving techniques.

  • 2 authors
·
Nov 26, 2024

Re-Evaluating EVMBench: Are AI Agents Ready for Smart Contract Security?

EVMbench, released by OpenAI, Paradigm, and OtterSec, is the first large-scale benchmark for AI agents on smart contract security. Its results -- agents detect up to 45.6% of vulnerabilities and exploit 72.2% of a curated subset -- have fueled expectations that fully automated AI auditing is within reach. We identify two limitations: its narrow evaluation scope (14 agent configurations, most models tested on only their vendor scaffold) and its reliance on audit-contest data published before every model's release that models may have seen during training. To address these, we expand to 26 configurations across four model families and three scaffolds, and introduce a contamination-free dataset of 22 real-world security incidents postdating every model's release date. Our evaluation yields three findings: (1) agents' detection results are not stable, with rankings shifting across configurations, tasks, and datasets; (2) on real-world incidents, no agent succeeds at end-to-end exploitation across all 110 agent-incident pairs despite detecting up to 65% of vulnerabilities, contradicting EVMbench's conclusion that discovery is the primary bottleneck; and (3) scaffolding materially affects results, with an open-source scaffold outperforming vendor alternatives by up to 5 percentage points, yet EVMbench does not control for this. These findings challenge the narrative that fully automated AI auditing is imminent. Agents reliably catch well-known patterns and respond strongly to human-provided context, but cannot replace human judgment. For developers, agent scans serve as a pre-deployment check. For audit firms, agents are most effective within a human-in-the-loop workflow where AI handles breadth and human auditors contribute protocol-specific knowledge and adversarial reasoning. Code and data: https://github.com/blocksecteam/ReEVMBench/.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 10

ARMS: Anchor-Relational Motion Streaming for Seamless Solo-Social Motion Transitions

Generating temporally continuous and socially coherent human motion from text remains a fundamental challenge, particularly in realistic streams where people act alone, enter interactions, and later disengage. Most existing methods generate fixed-length motion clips under static agent configurations, which makes them brittle to solo-social transitions and unsuitable for incremental generation over long horizons. We propose ARMS, an Anchor-Relational Motion Streaming framework that unifies solo motion and human-human interaction within a single causal generative process. ARMS introduces a dynamics-asymmetric representation that decouples per-person temporal evolution from inter-person alignment via a partner-referenced relative-translation term, enabling seamless switching of social coupling without sacrificing long-horizon stability or spatial consistency between agents. On top of a causal latent space, a causal relational diffusion model progressively refines motion segment by segment using only past context, capturing both intra-person temporal dependencies and inter-person relations. Mode-aware relational gating activates or masks cross-agent connections, allowing the same model to support both solo and interaction generation. Experiments show that ARMS improves transition smoothness and social coherence compared to interaction-centric baselines, while also achieving competitive results on human-human interaction benchmarks.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 6

Forgetful but Faithful: A Cognitive Memory Architecture and Benchmark for Privacy-Aware Generative Agents

As generative agents become increasingly sophisticated and deployed in long-term interactive scenarios, their memory management capabilities emerge as a critical bottleneck for both performance and privacy. Current approaches either maintain unlimited memory stores, leading to computational intractability and privacy concerns, or employ simplistic forgetting mechanisms that compromise agent coherence and functionality. This paper introduces the Memory-Aware Retention Schema (MaRS), a novel framework for human-centered memory management in generative agents, coupled with six theoretically-grounded forgetting policies that balance performance, privacy, and computational efficiency. We present the Forgetful but Faithful Agent (FiFA) benchmark, a comprehensive evaluation framework that assesses agent performance across narrative coherence, goal completion, social recall accuracy, privacy preservation, and cost efficiency. Through extensive experimentation involving 300 evaluation runs across multiple memory budgets and agent configurations, we demonstrate that our hybrid forgetting policy achieves superior performance (composite score: 0.911) while maintaining computational tractability and privacy guarantees. Our work establishes new benchmarks for memory-budgeted agent evaluation and provides practical guidelines for deploying generative agents in resource-constrained, privacy-sensitive environments. The theoretical foundations, implementation framework, and empirical results contribute to the emerging field of human-centered AI by addressing fundamental challenges in agent memory management that directly impact user trust, system scalability, and regulatory compliance.

  • 1 authors
·
Dec 13, 2025

A Unified Arena for LLM Agents across Diverse Eurogame

Interactive environments offer a practical way to evaluate large language model (LLM) agents, and competitive games extend this evaluation to decisions shaped by competing goals and other agents' choices. Yet existing evaluations confined to individual games or execution frameworks leave unclear which competitive advantages persist across settings. We introduce DECE (Diverse Eurogame Competitive Environments), a unified arena spanning ten Eurogames with shared interfaces and evaluation protocols. These games combine lasting strategic commitments, competition over shared resources, and multiple routes to victory. Our primary study evaluates 12 model-harness configurations, spanning nine models and four execution harnesses, in 480 three-player matches across ten games. The main and supplementary studies comprise 1,032 completed matches in total. These comparisons reveal broad cross-game ranking agreement alongside game-specific strengths. Matched studies show that the same model can perform differently across execution harnesses, adding another source of variation to these profiles. These performance advantages do not consistently translate into better token or cost efficiency, making resource use an additional consideration when comparing configurations. Together, the findings support evaluating complete agent configurations by both their competitive performance across games and the resources needed to achieve it.

  • 9 authors
·
Oct 25

Evolving Excellence: Automated Optimization of LLM-based Agents

Agentic AI systems built on large language models (LLMs) offer significant potential for automating complex workflows, from software development to customer support. However, LLM agents often underperform due to suboptimal configurations; poorly tuned prompts, tool descriptions, and parameters that typically require weeks of manual refinement. Existing optimization methods either are too complex for general use or treat components in isolation, missing critical interdependencies. We present ARTEMIS, a no-code evolutionary optimization platform that jointly optimizes agent configurations through semantically-aware genetic operators. Given only a benchmark script and natural language goals, ARTEMIS automatically discovers configurable components, extracts performance signals from execution logs, and evolves configurations without requiring architectural modifications. We evaluate ARTEMIS on four representative agent systems: the ALE Agent for competitive programming on AtCoder Heuristic Contest, achieving a 13.6% improvement in acceptance rate; the Mini-SWE Agent for code optimization on SWE-Perf, with a statistically significant 10.1\% performance gain; and the CrewAI Agent for cost and mathematical reasoning on Math Odyssey, achieving a statistically significant 36.9% reduction in the number of tokens required for evaluation. We also evaluate the MathTales-Teacher Agent powered by a smaller open-source model (Qwen2.5-7B) on GSM8K primary-level mathematics problems, achieving a 22\% accuracy improvement and demonstrating that ARTEMIS can optimize agents based on both commercial and local models.

  • 21 authors
·
Dec 9, 2025

Terminus-4B: Can a Smaller Model Replace Frontier LLMs at Agentic Execution Tasks?

Modern coding agents increasingly delegate specialized subtasks to subagents, which are smaller, focused agentic loops that handle narrow responsibilities like search, debugging or terminal execution. This architectural pattern keeps the main agent's context window clean by isolating verbose outputs (e.g. build logs, test results, etc.) within the subagent context. Typically when agents employ subagents for such tasks, they use frontier models as these subagents. In this paper, we investigate whether a finetuned small language model (SLM) can achieve comparable performance to frontier models in the task of agentic terminal execution. We present Terminus-4B, which is a post-trained Qwen3-4B model via Supervised Finetuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) using rubric-based LLM-as-judge reward, specifically for this task. In our extensive evaluation spanning various frontier models, training ablations and main agent configurations, we find that Terminus-4B is able to reduce the token usage of the main agent by up to ~30% compared to the No Subagent baseline with no impact to agent performance on benchmarks like SWE-Bench Pro and our internal SWE-Bench C# benchmark, which tends to be heavy in verbose execution tasks. Furthermore, Terminus-4B improves key metrics showing the main agent relying on the outputs of the subagent and doing fewer terminal execution tasks by itself. We see that our model not only closes the gap between the Vanilla Qwen model and frontier models like Claude Sonnet / Opus / GPT-5.3-Codex, but often even exceeds their performance.

  • 3 authors
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May 3

Coding Agents for Generalized Task and Motion Planning Problems

Task and motion planning (TAMP) problems remain difficult even with full observability and object-centric states because discrete decisions are tightly coupled to geometric, kinematic, and dynamic constraints. Generalized TAMP addresses this difficulty by exploiting regularities across problem instances to reduce planning effort on new instances. However, existing methods require substantial TAMP-specific engineering. We investigate whether coding agents can automate this process by synthesizing programs that generalize across instances. Given a task description and simulator access, each agent chooses how to interact with the environment while developing a program within a fixed synthesis budget. The program is then frozen and evaluated on unseen instances. We evaluate Claude Code (Opus 5) and Codex (GPT-5.6 Sol and GPT-6 Astra) on 28 simulated environments from KinDER and PDDLStream, with object counts beyond those evaluated in the original benchmark. Across all program synthesis methods, we evaluate 980 generated programs on 100 held-out instances each, 98,000 evaluation episodes in total. Overall, we find that coding agents are surprisingly effective at generalized TAMP: all three agent configurations outperform hand-engineered planners, one-shot generation, and an LLM-based generalized planning baseline in mean success (56% to 95% versus 47% for the planners, on the 16 environments where a planner is available). As object counts grow, the agents' programs maintain higher success than the planner, using an order of magnitude less computation per instance on average. Logs show agents using interaction to calibrate physical models, test edge cases, and refine strategies. We release all code, including the full prompts given to the agents. These findings suggest that coding agents are a strong baseline for generalized TAMP.

OpenResearcher: A Fully Open Pipeline for Long-Horizon Deep Research Trajectory Synthesis

Training deep research agents requires long-horizon trajectories that interleave search, evidence aggregation, and multi-step reasoning. However, existing data collection pipelines typically rely on proprietary web APIs, making large-scale trajectory synthesis costly, unstable, and difficult to reproduce. We present OpenResearcher, a reproducible pipeline that decouples one-time corpus bootstrapping from multi-turn trajectory synthesis and executes the search-and-browse loop entirely offline using three explicit browser primitives: search, open, and find, over a 15M-document corpus. Using GPT-OSS-120B as the teacher model, we synthesize over 97K trajectories, including a substantial long-horizon tail with 100+ tool calls. Supervised fine-tuning a 30B-A3B backbone on these trajectories achieves 54.8\% accuracy on BrowseComp-Plus, a +34.0 point improvement over the base model, while remaining competitive on BrowseComp, GAIA, and xbench-DeepSearch. Because the environment is offline and fully instrumented, it also enables controlled analysis, where our study reveals practical insights into deep research pipeline design, including data filtering strategies, agent configuration choices, and how retrieval success relates to final answer accuracy. We release the pipeline, synthesized trajectories, model checkpoints, and the offline search environment at https://github.com/TIGER-AI-Lab/OpenResearcher.

TIGER-Lab TIGER-Lab
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Mar 17 2

Agentic Agile-V: From Vibe Coding to Verified Engineering in Software and Hardware Development

Agentic AI coding systems can inspect repositories, plan implementation steps, edit files, call tools, run tests, and submit pull requests. These capabilities make software and hardware development faster in some settings, but current evidence does not support the simple claim that autonomous code generation automatically improves engineering outcomes. Controlled studies report productivity gains in some enterprise tasks, slowdowns in mature open-source work, moderate but heterogeneous meta-analytic effects, and persistent failures in repository setup, dependency handling, permission gating, and hardware verification. This paper argues that the central problem is no longer prompt engineering; it is engineering process control. It synthesizes evidence from agentic software engineering, GitHub-scale adoption studies, repository-level agent configuration, productivity trials, issue-resolution benchmarks, and hardware/RTL verification research. It proposes Agentic Agile-V, a process framework that uses Agile-V as the lifecycle backbone and a task-level SCOPE-V loop - Specify, Constrain, Orchestrate, Prove, Evolve, and Verify - to convert conversational intent into structured engineering artifacts and acceptance evidence. The paper contributes: (i) a taxonomy of minimum input artifacts for agentic software, firmware, and hardware work; (ii) a conversation-to-contract gate that separates exploratory dialogue from implementation; (iii) risk-adaptive feature, bug-fix, testing, and hardware workflows; and (iv) an evidence-bundle acceptance model for agent-generated artifacts. The paper concludes that agentic AI does not eliminate engineering discipline; it increases the value of requirements, constraints, traceability, independent verification, and human approval.

  • 1 authors
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May 18

Agentic Commerce Bench: Measuring Fraud Detection for Agents That Spend Money

AI agents now hold spend authority and settle payments without per-action human confirmation. The resulting loss is often not a security failure: a counterparty with the correct domain, the correct settlement address and a genuinely delivered service can charge more than it should, and no check keyed on identity will see it. We present three artefacts for measuring and reducing that loss. First, a taxonomy of agentic commerce fraud that separates five observation levels (agent reasoning, wire, settlement rail, counterparty, principal) from the request-level and history-level evidence available at each, and records which levels can observe which attacks. Second, Agentic Commerce Bench (ACB), a benchmark of twenty fraud classes generated from production aggregates, 1,647 catalogued service operations and 1,068 settlements, of which six involve a counterparty that is exactly who it claims to be. Third, gordonguard, an open-source detector stack and offline harness with which an operator can audit an agent configuration, replay hostile counterparties without an account, and run the same detectors inline. Calibrating to a stated false-positive budget on clean training traffic gives a 6.5% clean flag rate, replicated across three independent generations, and leaves eight of twenty classes no better than chance. On the four classes a reasoning layer can observe, a widely used agent security scanner run over its jailbreak-detection panel scores zero on all four, while correctly scoring 1.0 on a jailbreak supplied as a control. A measured median payment of $0.007 places a hard constraint on deployment: one human review costs 143 times the value of the payment it examines.

  • 2 authors
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Sep 26

SINGED: Correct Outputs Do Not Certify Safe Execution in LLM Agents

Tool-using language-model agents select and execute third-party artifacts. Different implementations can return the requested output while producing hidden execution effects that task-, attack-, or choice-based evaluations may miss. We study functional counterfeits: implementations that match benign alternatives on the requested output but add an effect forbidden by the task contract. We introduce SINGED (Source Integrity and the Nonidentifiability Gap in Execution Decisions for LLM Agents), a controlled benchmark covering five primary and two held-out task families. It varies displayed rank, evidence depth, decision policy, model release, and agent configuration, while task and process oracles verify the artifact and execution path. Across 7,549 audited trials, the randomized-rank study finds counterfeit execution in 45% (27/60) of rank-one trials and none at later ranks. Cross-candidate comparison eliminates shallow failures and reduces layered failures from 15.7% to 4.2%, but leaves dependency failures; its benefit is uncertain on unseen effects and public-package structures. Moreover, seven releases with no counterfeit executions when benign alternatives are available execute the counterfeit in 55/175 single-source cells after alternatives are removed. SINGED thus exposes a rank-, evidence-, and choice-sensitive outcome-to-execution gap: evaluation must connect correct outputs to execution paths.

  • 7 authors
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Sep 27

Deep Research Agents: A Systematic Examination And Roadmap

The rapid progress of Large Language Models (LLMs) has given rise to a new category of autonomous AI systems, referred to as Deep Research (DR) agents. These agents are designed to tackle complex, multi-turn informational research tasks by leveraging a combination of dynamic reasoning, adaptive long-horizon planning, multi-hop information retrieval, iterative tool use, and the generation of structured analytical reports. In this paper, we conduct a detailed analysis of the foundational technologies and architectural components that constitute Deep Research agents. We begin by reviewing information acquisition strategies, contrasting API-based retrieval methods with browser-based exploration. We then examine modular tool-use frameworks, including code execution, multimodal input processing, and the integration of Model Context Protocols (MCPs) to support extensibility and ecosystem development. To systematize existing approaches, we propose a taxonomy that differentiates between static and dynamic workflows, and we classify agent architectures based on planning strategies and agent composition, including single-agent and multi-agent configurations. We also provide a critical evaluation of current benchmarks, highlighting key limitations such as restricted access to external knowledge, sequential execution inefficiencies, and misalignment between evaluation metrics and the practical objectives of DR agents. Finally, we outline open challenges and promising directions for future research. A curated and continuously updated repository of DR agent research is available at: {https://github.com/ai-agents-2030/awesome-deep-research-agent}.

  • 12 authors
·
Jun 22, 2025 1

ClawsBench: Evaluating Capability and Safety of LLM Productivity Agents in Simulated Workspaces

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed to automate productivity tasks (e.g., email, scheduling, document management), but evaluating them on live services is risky due to potentially irreversible changes. Existing benchmarks rely on simplified environments and fail to capture realistic, stateful, multi-service workflows. We introduce ClawsBench, a benchmark for evaluating and improving LLM agents in realistic productivity settings. It includes five high-fidelity mock services (Gmail, Slack, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Drive) with full state management and deterministic snapshot/restore, along with 44 structured tasks covering single-service, cross-service, and safety-critical scenarios. We decompose agent scaffolding into two independent levers (domain skills that inject API knowledge via progressive disclosure, and a meta prompt that coordinates behavior across services) and vary both to measure their separate and combined effects. Experiments across 6 models, 4 agent harnesses, and 33 conditions show that with full scaffolding, agents achieve task success rates of 39-64% but exhibit unsafe action rates of 7-33%. On OpenClaw, the top five models fall within a 10 percentage-point band on task success (53-63%), with unsafe action rates from 7% to 23% and no consistent ordering between the two metrics. We identify eight recurring patterns of unsafe behavior, including multi-step sandbox escalation and silent contract modification.

benchflow BenchFlow
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Apr 5 2

AgentDisCo: Towards Disentanglement and Collaboration in Open-ended Deep Research Agents

In this paper, we present AgentDisCo, a novel Disentangled and Collaborative agentic architecture that formulates deep research as an adversarial optimization problem between information exploration and exploitation. Unlike existing approaches that conflate these two processes into a single module, AgentDisCo employs a critic agent to evaluate generated outlines and refine search queries, and a generator agent to retrieve updated results and revise outlines accordingly. The iteratively refined outline is then passed to a downstream report writer that synthesizes a comprehensive research report. The overall workflow supports both handcrafted and automatically discovered design strategies via a meta-optimization harness, in which the generator agent is repurposed as a scoring agent to evaluate critic outputs and generate quality signals. Powerful code-generation agents (e.g., Claude-Code, Codex) systematically explore agent configurations and construct a policy bank, a structured repository of reusable design strategies, enabling the framework to self-refine without extensive human intervention. We evaluate AgentDisCo on three established deep research benchmarks (DeepResearchBench, DeepConsult, DeepResearchGym) using Gemini-2.5-Pro, achieving performance comparable to or surpassing leading closed-source systems. Observing that existing benchmarks inadequately reflect real-world user needs, we introduce GALA (General AI Life Assistants), a benchmark that mines latent research interests from users' historical browsing behavior. We further develop a rendering agent that converts research reports into visually rich poster presentations, and demonstrate an end-to-end product, AutoResearch Your Interest, which delivers personalized deep research recommendations derived from individual browsing histories.

  • 5 authors
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May 11

Witness: Discovery, Deciphering, and Epiphany in Interactive Puzzle Environments

Automated science needs agents that can work out the rules of an unfamiliar environment by interacting with it. Interactive rule-discovery puzzles offer a controlled setting for studying this ability: an agent infers hidden rules through experimentation and uses what it has inferred to reach a stated goal. We ask what limits current language models on these puzzles and whether reinforcement learning (RL) improves performance on rules held out from training. To study both, we introduce WITNESS, a 2D grid-based puzzle environment with ground-truth ASCII observations and controlled access to rules. An agentic pipeline generates games for WitnessGym, the RL training suite, and WitnessBench, comprising public validation and private test games. The validation set separately tests new compositions of trained rule primitives and primitives absent from training. Under a shared harness, the best of 18 frontier proprietary and open-weight models solves only 24\% of private test level slots, with scores sensitive to the observation interface and agent configuration. Providing ground-truth rules raises Opus-5's validation RHAE-L5 (relative human action efficiency over the first five levels) from 59.9 to 97.8, whereas a 27B open-weight model gains only 2.1 points and remains limited even with the rules provided. RL on WitnessGym raises the 27B model's private test RHAE-L5 from 2.1 to 5.4 and yields a mean gain of 4.1 points on four external discovery benchmarks. Together, these results point to rule acquisition as a major difficulty for frontier models like Opus-5 while smaller models further struggle on rule-based execution, and indicate that RL on hidden-rule puzzles transfers to broader rules and real-world tasks beyond training. Benchmark is available at: https://witnessbench.ai

FleetAI Fleet AI Inc.
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Sep 25

TAMAS: Benchmarking Adversarial Risks in Multi-Agent LLM Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities as autonomous agents through tool use, planning, and decision-making abilities, leading to their widespread adoption across diverse tasks. As task complexity grows, multi-agent LLM systems are increasingly used to solve problems collaboratively. However, safety and security of these systems remains largely under-explored. Existing benchmarks and datasets predominantly focus on single-agent settings, failing to capture the unique vulnerabilities of multi-agent dynamics and co-ordination. To address this gap, we introduce Threats and Attacks in Multi-Agent Systems (TAMAS), a benchmark designed to evaluate the robustness and safety of multi-agent LLM systems. TAMAS includes five distinct scenarios comprising 300 adversarial instances across six attack types and 211 tools, along with 100 harmless tasks. We assess system performance across ten backbone LLMs and three agent interaction configurations from Autogen and CrewAI frameworks, highlighting critical challenges and failure modes in current multi-agent deployments. Furthermore, we introduce Effective Robustness Score (ERS) to assess the tradeoff between safety and task effectiveness of these frameworks. Our findings show that multi-agent systems are highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks, underscoring the urgent need for stronger defenses. TAMAS provides a foundation for systematically studying and improving the safety of multi-agent LLM systems.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 6, 2025

OpenART: Scaling Agent Red Teaming via Open-Ended Environment Evolution

AI agents operate in persistent environments where early state changes can influence decisions far into the future. Unlike conventional language-model interactions, agent behavior is mediated through a shared state that is repeatedly modified and reused across long-horizon workflows. Current safety benchmarks often fail to capture these cumulative risks because they focus on short, static tasks. To address these limitations, we introduce OpenART, an open-ended arena for scalable agent red teaming through environment evolution. OpenART provides over 10,000 validated stateful scenarios across 50 domains, drawing from a pool of more than 500,000 tools and skills. These tasks require a median of 97 tool calls and enable unified evaluation across 75 different agent-model configurations. To systematically explore these evolving attack surfaces, we propose the Evolutionary Markov Hypergraph Attack (EMHA). EMHA is a black-box policy that performs feedback-driven environment evolution by coordinating authorized state transitions without requiring parameter updates. Throughout the evaluation, task objectives remain fixed while only the environment state changes. Across all configurations, EMHA achieves a pooled Attack Success Rate (ASR) of 85.0%. Its advantage over instruction-only evolution increases from approximately 2% on simple environments to over 17% on the most complex ones, demonstrating that environment evolution increasingly exposes safety failures as task complexity grows. Furthermore, our analysis shows that the specific runtime implementation of an agent explains a significant portion of safety variation beyond the underlying model's capabilities. These results establish OpenART as a scalable foundation for studying agent safety in complex, evolving environments.

  • 9 authors
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Jul 31 6

StructureClaw: Traceable LLM Agents and an Executable Benchmark for Structural Engineering Workflows

Addressing a structural-engineering request requires more than a single answer; it requires a chain of interdependent artifacts: interpreted requirements, a computable model, validation records, solver outputs, code-check records, and a final report. Evaluations centered on question answering or script generation rarely verify this complete evidence chain and may therefore reward fluent outputs even when the underlying engineering workflow is incomplete, internally inconsistent, or non-executable. To address this limitation, we present StructureClaw, an artifact-centered workbench in which LLM agents operate through governed engineering skills, typed tools, shared artifact state, and local analysis backends. We also introduce StructureClaw-Bench, an executable benchmark of 150 controlled scenarios spanning standard workflow execution, interactive robustness, and multimodal structural-model reconstruction. A scenario succeeds only when all required artifact- and execution-level assertions pass in a single run. Across ten agent-model configurations, each evaluated on the same 50 standard cases, the average Success Rate rises from 56.8% with the generic-skill baseline to 88.6% with the full automatic workflow. The interactive and multimodal evaluations identify two prominent remaining challenges: safe handling of invalid numerical inputs and fixture-consistent reconstruction of structural models. These findings show that artifact-centered evaluation can expose workflow-level failures that are difficult to identify from final responses alone, providing a more rigorous basis for evaluating and improving structural-engineering agents. The code and benchmark are available at https://github.com/structureclaw/structureclaw.

  • 16 authors
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Jul 15

SWE-Chain: Benchmarking Coding Agents on Chained Release-Level Package Upgrades

Coding agents powered by large language models are increasingly expected to perform realistic software maintenance tasks beyond isolated issue resolution. Existing benchmarks have shifted toward realistic software evolution, but they rarely capture continuous maintenance at the granularity of package releases, where changes are bundled, shipped, and inherited by subsequent versions. We present SWE-Chain, a benchmark for evaluating agents on chained release-level package upgrades, where each transition builds on the agent's prior codebase. To produce upgrade specifications, we design a divide-and-conquer synthesis pipeline that aligns release notes with code diffs for each version transition, ensuring the requirements are grounded in actual code changes, informative to agents, and feasible to implement. SWE-Chain contains 12 upgrade chains across 9 real Python packages, with 155 version transitions and 1,660 grounded upgrade requirements. Across nine frontier agent-model configurations, agents achieve an average of 44.8% resolving, 65.4% precision, and 50.2% F1 under the Build+Fix regime, with Claude-Opus-4.7 (Claude Code) leading at 60.8% resolving, 80.6% precision, and 68.5% F1. These results show that SWE-Chain is both feasible and discriminative, and reveal that current agents still struggle to make correct upgrades across chained package releases without breaking existing functionality.

  • 8 authors
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May 13

AutoDesign: Meta-Harness Optimization for Long-Horizon Agentic Design

Transforming multimodal sources into condensed and structured media outputs can be fundamentally conceptualized as a long-horizon agentic process centered on a model-harness system. While an ideal harness system should align with human design priors and accumulate reusable experience through empirical exploration to drive recursive self-improvement, existing paradigms remain static and fall short of this capability. In this paper, we present AutoDesign, a framework that aligns with human design priors, where a meta-harness optimizer guides a code agent to recursively improve harness based on rollout feedback. To instantiate and evaluate this framework, we focus on the academic paper-to-poster generation task and introduce PosterBench, comprising a 100-paper Main Track spanning five disciplines and PosterBench-mini, a shared 10-paper subset for controlled evaluation. On the PosterBench Main Track, AutoDesign achieves the highest score of 78.32, surpassing the closed-source commercial system Claude Design by 7.45 points. Across seven controlled code-agent-model configurations, integrating the learned DesignHarness consistently improves performance, increasing the average PosterBench Score from 54.99 to 67.39 (+12.4%). In a fully autonomous long-horizon loop, it executes 253 tool calls and 11 editing turns within 40 minutes for under $3, reaching average conference-poster quality in human evaluation. A system-blind human study further demonstrates that AutoDesign achieves the highest human preference among evaluated systems.

meituan meituan
·
Aug 12 3

ORAgentBench: Can LLM Agents Solve Challenging Operations Research Tasks End to End?

Large language models are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents for multi-step tasks in executable environments, yet their ability to perform realistic operations research (OR) work remains unclear. Existing OR evaluations often decouple modeling from solving, rely on pre-formalized or text-only instances, and rarely test the full workflow from operational artifacts to validated decisions. In this work, we introduce ORAgentBench, an execution-grounded benchmark for evaluating autonomous agents on challenging end-to-end operations research tasks. It contains 107 human-reviewed tasks across diverse operational scenarios, each packaged in an isolated environment with a natural-language brief, multi-file data, configuration artifacts, and a required submission schema. Agents must write and run solution code, and their submissions are evaluated by hidden validators for schema validity, hard-constraint feasibility, and normalized objective quality. Experiments with fourteen frontier agent-model configurations show that current agents remain far from reliable OR practice. The best agent passes only 35.51% of all tasks and 20.59% of hard tasks, and many feasible submissions still fall below the required quality threshold. Failure analysis further shows that errors are dominated by strategic weaknesses, including missed operational rules, brittle formulations, weak feasible-solution construction, and insufficient solution improvement. OR-specific procedural skills increase hard-task feasibility, but do not reliably improve solution quality or pass rate. These results suggest that progress in OR agents requires moving beyond plausible optimization code toward dependable, high-quality operational decision-making.

  • 8 authors
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Jun 17

T2J-BENCH: Benchmarking Coding Agents on Execution-Grounded PyTorch-to-JAX Repository Migration

Migrating a machine-learning codebase across frameworks--for example from PyTorch to JAX--is a routine but costly engineering task that is fundamentally cross-paradigm: eager, stateful, object-oriented modules must be rewritten as pure, jittable functions over an explicit parameter pytree. We ask whether coding agents can perform such whole-repository migrations correctly, and argue that existing code benchmarks, which grade unit-test pass rates or surface-level similarity to a reference translation, cannot answer this: they neither require the migrated system to behave the same nor prevent a JAX reimplementation from faking equivalence by secretly importing PyTorch itself. We introduce T2J-BENCH, a benchmark of 63 whole-repository PyTorch-to-JAX migration tasks spanning 18 model families across both training and serving, where torch-free checkpoint conversion is itself part of the deliverable. T2J-BENCH grades execution-grounded functional equivalence: each candidate is run inside a separate, torch-free, offline verifier and scored against references frozen from the PyTorch original, under a hard independence gate and a continuous, threshold-free reward. Across twenty off-the-shelf agent--model configurations, the strongest recovers only 0.676 of the reward against a 0.980 oracle, with substantial numeric and behavioral divergence despite high spec pass rates. Finally, we contribute TWINHARNESS, a reference-grounded agent harness that turns the agent's executable PyTorch source into legitimate self-verification feedback; applied to an opus-5 agent it raises the reward from 0.649 to 0.723--the highest of any configuration--using only task-visible resources.

google Google
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Oct 13

ASI-Bench: At the Dawn of Artificial Superintelligence

Artificial superintelligence (ASI) requires AI to move beyond mastering existing knowledge toward exploring the unknown, creating new knowledge, and turning new ideas into verifiable results. However, the capabilities of today's AI systems are still largely built on learning, compressing, and applying existing human knowledge. Accordingly, existing benchmarks primarily test whether AI can produce correct answers based on learned knowledge, or whether it can complete tasks under extensive human guidance. We therefore introduce ASI-Bench, the first benchmark to jointly evaluate AI systems' capabilities of innovative exploration and autonomous scientific execution across general research domains, and the first to progressively withdraw human methodological guidance within the same research project to test how far AI can proceed on its own. Built by over 40 experts with the cost of 31,000+ human hours, ASI-Bench contains 60 project-level research tasks across 11 scientific domains and progressively reduces methodological guidance to test whether AI can independently select methods, conduct research, and produce verifiable results. All tasks undergo expert review, AI-assisted auditing, sandbox execution, and scorer validation. Across 18 state-of-the-art agent--model configurations, the average score drops from 50.91 with full methodological guidance to 29.10 with only the method specified and 26.62 when agents must determine the method themselves. This sharp decline shows that current systems remain heavily dependent on human guidance and are still far from autonomously conducting end-to-end, project-level scientific research. ASI-Bench is open to the world. We invite researchers and builders everywhere to contribute new tasks, challenge the limits of today's AI, and help accelerate humanity's collective path toward artificial superintelligence at https://asibench.apexin.ai/submit.

  • 42 authors
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Aug 17 4

Generalized Agent Iteration: One Formal Framework for Iterative Policy Improvement and Recursive Self-Improvement

When we speak of recursive self-improvement (RSI), are we speaking of a phenomenon, a mechanism, or a prospect? Towards autonomous and evolving intelligence, RSI is being claimed at many scales, while no single framework that formally describes these emerging instances exists. Its counterpart in the classical realm, iterative policy improvement, is characterized by generalized policy iteration (GPI), a framework of broad applicability with well-understood theoretical properties, but only where the update principle and the evaluation base lie outside the agent. In this paper, we propose Generalized Agent Iteration (GAI), a formal framework that describes iterative policy improvement and RSI as two cases of a single learning paradigm. GAI defines the agent as a configuration of modifiable components within a system and models the learning process as a cycle of agent evaluation and agent improvement. Two pivotal dials then distinguish the instances: whether the improving mechanism is part of the agent and whether the standard it is measured against is grounded outside it. The former dial delineates the boundary between GPI and RSI, and the latter determines a system's polarity as anchored, goal drift, or fully self-referential. Moreover, we use these coordinates to place existing systems on the same two axes and make the defects of recursive self-improvement statable one condition at a time. We see this paper as a first step toward exploring a formal characterization of RSI that rests on the classical account, makes existing systems comparable, and provides a principled basis for analyzing and designing new ones.

  • 4 authors
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Sep 10 2

Coding Agents Are Guessing: Measuring Action-Boundary Violations in Underspecified DevOps Instructions

LLM coding agents are increasingly deployed to act autonomously on real production infrastructure. They execute shell commands, modify repositories, and call operational APIs. However, completing a task is not sufficient for safety. A wrong action can cause severe consequences. Existing agent benchmarks largely emphasize task completion, leaving open how agents behave under benign but underspecified instructions. We present UnderSpecBench, a benchmark for measuring action-boundary violations in coding agents (i.e., Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode) on DevOps tasks. UnderSpecBench includes 69 task families grounded in documented incidents, CVEs, or tool behavior and organized across four DevOps capability domains and nine operational control surfaces. To isolate underspecification from task difficulty, each task keeps the same environment and ground-truth safe action while varying the instruction along three axes: intent clarity, target certainty, and blast radius. The resulting 2,208 prompt variants are evaluated with deterministic, side-effect-based oracles that separate Safe Success, Wrong Target, and OverScope outcomes; non-action runs are further classified as clarification, refusal, or deferment. Across five agent x model configurations using OpenCode, Claude Code, and Codex, the evaluation results show that underspecification does not mainly make agents fail; it makes them guess. 55.8-67.8% of runs violate at least one boundary. Target underspecification sharply degrades action quality, while blast-radius cues barely reduce action propensity. These findings show that completion-centric evaluation can overstate safe autonomy and motivate mitigations at the model, harness, and system layer.

  • 7 authors
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Jul 1

Benchmarking LLM Agents for Behaviorally Adequate Test Generation from Software Requirements

As large language model agents increasingly compile natural-language requirements into repository-level code, requirement-to-test generation grows in importance to provide validation constraints (or harness) to guide code generation. Yet it remains unclear whether current agents can generate tests that validate the required behavior when the implementation of that behavior is withheld. Existing test-generation benchmarks mostly focus on white-box testing, whereas the requirement--test-related study usually requires evaluation on semantic alignment between the given documents and the generated tests. We introduce Req2Test-Bench, a benchmark containing 5,086 execution-validated instances recovered from developer-authored behavior-driven development (BDD) artifacts in 8 open-source projects, spanning 5 programming languages and 4 BDD frameworks. Each instance pairs a natural-language requirement in Gherkin with its developer-written Test Implementation. Given the requirement, target interfaces of the required behavior, an agent must generate a complete, potentially multi-file Test Implementation. Evaluation of 8 agent--model--reasoning configurations reveals a substantial gap between execution success and behavioral adequacy, which is measured strictly as kill-completeness: a kill-complete test kills every mutant that the ground-truth test kills. The best-performing configuration, Codex with DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, produces passing tests for 82.8% of instances, yet only 33.8% are behaviorally adequate. We find that (1) scaling up agents yields sharply diminishing returns in behavioral adequacy relative to generation cost; (2) under-specified requirements cause the information gap, including ambiguous setup and implicit expected outcomes; and (3) requirement-grounded harnesses that steer agent non-determinism offer a promising direction for improvement.

  • 6 authors
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Oct 26

FlowCompile: An Optimizing Compiler for Structured LLM Workflows

Structured LLM workflows, where specialized LLM sub-agents execute according to a predefined graph, have become a powerful abstraction for solving complex tasks. Optimizing such workflows, i.e., selecting configurations for each sub-agent to balance accuracy and latency, is challenging due to the combinatorial design space over model choices, reasoning budgets, and workflow structures. Existing cost-aware methods largely treat workflow optimization as a routing problem, selecting a configuration at inference time for each query according to the accuracy-latency objective used during training. We argue that structured LLM workflows can also be optimized from a compilation perspective: before deployment, the system can globally explore the workflow design space and construct a reusable set of workflow-level configurations spanning diverse accuracy-latency trade-offs. Drawing inspiration from machine learning compilers, we introduce FlowCompile, a structured LLM workflow compiler that performs compile-time design space exploration to identify a high-quality, reusable trade-off set. FlowCompile decomposes a workflow into sub-agents, profiles each sub-agent under diverse configurations, and composes these measurements through a structure-aware proxy to estimate workflow-level accuracy and latency. It then identifies diverse high-quality configurations in a single compile-time pass, without retraining or online adaptation. Experiments across diverse workflows and challenging benchmarks show that FlowCompile consistently outperforms heuristically optimized workflow configurations and routing-based baselines, delivering up to 6.4x speedup. The compiled configuration set further serves as a reusable optimization artifact, enabling flexible deployment under varying runtime preferences and supporting downstream selection or routing.

Meta$^2$: Precomputing Reusable Knowledge for Online Harness Evolution in Long-Horizon Agents

Harness optimization improves long-horizon agents by refining the prompts, tools, memory, and hooks around a frozen model. Offline methods can learn from completed trajectories, but deploy one shared harness that may overfit training tasks and cannot react to evidence revealed during a new run. Online evolution can adapt before, during, or after one run through an evolver, but may have to reason about every intervention from scratch or rely on verifier feedback that is usually unavailable at test time. We introduce Meta^2, which moves offline optimization one level up: rather than optimizing a shared harness, it learns reusable knowledge for harness evolution and applies it within each task online. Offline, Meta^2 learns a textual Meta-Skill M by contrasting training rollouts of the same task agent under three configurations: without an evolver, with an evolver guided by the current version of M, and with an evolver given privileged verifier information available only in training. Contrasts in trajectories and outcomes are aggregated across tasks to refine M into reusable guidance on when and how to evolve, when to leave the harness unchanged, and which interventions to avoid. Online, an evolver combines the frozen M with emerging trajectory evidence to decide whether to KEEP the harness unchanged or EVOLVE it through a task-local edit. Each edit applies to the rest of the same run without resetting its environment or progress. Thus, evolution guidance transfers across tasks while harness edits remain task-local, and held-out verifier feedback is never available to the evolver. On two long-horizon benchmarks, Terminal-Bench 2.1 and DeepSWE 1.1, Meta^2 achieves the highest performance among evaluated methods with GPT-5.6-Terra, reaching 81.00% and 44.44%, respectively. Ablations support the value of contrastive evolution guidance and keeping online harness edits task-local.

  • 8 authors
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Nov 2

Metal-Sci: A Scientific Compute Benchmark for Evolutionary LLM Kernel Search on Apple Silicon

We present Metal-Sci, a 10-task benchmark of scientific Apple Silicon Metal compute kernels spanning six optimization regimes (stencils, all-pairs in n-body problems, multi-field Boltzmann, neighbor-list molecular dynamics, multi-kernel PDE, FFT). Each task ships a CPU reference, a roofline-anchored fitness function, and a held-out generalization size. We pair the benchmark with a lightweight harness for automatic kernel search that runtime-compiles each candidate, scores it against the roofline across multiple sizes, and feeds structured compile and per-size correctness diagnostics back to a frozen LLM driving a (1{+}1) evolutionary loop. We report matched single-model sweeps of Claude Opus 4.7, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and GPT 5.5 on M1 Pro: in-distribution self-speedups span 1.00times to 10.7times. Beyond raw speedup, our central methodological claim is structural: the held-out gate scoring function Φ_T (evaluated once at end-of-run on a configuration the agent never sees during search) functions as a cheap mechanical oversight primitive on this automatic search loop, catching e.g. an Opus template <uint D> HMC win that returns wrong samples at unseen dimensions, and a GPT FFT3D best that wins in-distribution at 2.95times speedup but collapses to 0.23times on a 256^3 held-out cube, a silent regression that the in-distribution score alone cannot see. Code at https://github.com/vicgalle/metal-sci-kernels

  • 1 authors
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May 9 1

EvoAgentX: An Automated Framework for Evolving Agentic Workflows

Multi-agent systems (MAS) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for orchestrating large language models (LLMs) and specialized tools to collaboratively address complex tasks. However, existing MAS frameworks often require manual workflow configuration and lack native support for dynamic evolution and performance optimization. In addition, many MAS optimization algorithms are not integrated into a unified framework. In this paper, we present EvoAgentX, an open-source platform that automates the generation, execution, and evolutionary optimization of multi-agent workflows. EvoAgentX employs a modular architecture consisting of five core layers: the basic components, agent, workflow, evolving, and evaluation layers. Specifically, within the evolving layer, EvoAgentX integrates three MAS optimization algorithms, TextGrad, AFlow, and MIPRO, to iteratively refine agent prompts, tool configurations, and workflow topologies. We evaluate EvoAgentX on HotPotQA, MBPP, and MATH for multi-hop reasoning, code generation, and mathematical problem solving, respectively, and further assess it on real-world tasks using GAIA. Experimental results show that EvoAgentX consistently achieves significant performance improvements, including a 7.44% increase in HotPotQA F1, a 10.00% improvement in MBPP pass@1, a 10.00% gain in MATH solve accuracy, and an overall accuracy improvement of up to 20.00% on GAIA. The source code is available at: https://github.com/EvoAgentX/EvoAgentX

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 4, 2025

AgentKernelArena: Generalization-Aware Benchmarking of GPU Kernel Optimization Agents

GPU kernel optimization is increasingly critical for efficient deep learning systems, but writing high-performance kernels still requires substantial low-level expertise. Recent AI coding agents can iteratively read code, invoke compilers and profilers, and refine implementations, yet existing kernel benchmarks evaluate single LLM calls rather than full agent workflows, and none include both kernel-to-kernel optimization and unseen-configuration generalization testing. We present AgentKernelArena, an open-source benchmark for measuring AI coding agents on GPU kernel optimization. The benchmark contains 196 tasks spanning HIP-to-HIP optimization, Triton-to-Triton optimization, and PyTorch-to-HIP translation, and evaluates complete agent workflows in isolated workspaces using gated compilation, correctness, and performance checks, centralized scoring and an unseen-configuration generalization protocol that tests whether optimizations transfer to input configurations the agent never observed. Across production agents including Cursor Agent, Claude Code, and Codex Agent, we find near-perfect compilation and high correctness rates on most task categories, with the strongest configurations achieving mean speedups of up to 6.89x on PyTorch-to-HIP, 6.69x on HIP-to-HIP, and 2.13x on Triton-to-Triton tasks. Our unseen-configuration evaluation shows that HIP-to-HIP and Triton-to-Triton optimizations largely transfer to unseen input shapes, while PyTorch-to-HIP exhibits substantial correctness drops, indicating that agents generating kernels from scratch frequently hardcode shape-specific assumptions. AgentKernelArena is designed as a modular, extensible framework for rigorous evaluation of agentic GPU kernel optimization across agents, tasks, and hardware targets.

  • 14 authors
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May 15

Control-Plane Placement Shapes Forgetting: An Architectural Study of Agent Memory Across Thirteen System Configurations

Where an LLM sits in an agent memory pipeline -- between the recall plane that retrieves stored facts (extensively benchmarked) and the control plane that mutates them via supersede, release, purge (largely untested) -- shapes which forgetting failure modes the system recovers. Comparing thirteen system configurations on a 385-case adversarial surface, we observe three placement regimes with partly complementary coverage: deterministic primitives suffice for lexical/temporal categories but fail canonicalization (5% on identifier-obfuscation, 0% on cross-lingual); inscribe-time LLM recovers canonicalization (100%) but cannot help intent-aware deletion (0% on prefix-collision and compound-fact); a mutation-time hook recovers intent-aware deletion (78-85%) and brightens nearly all categories simultaneously (91.7-93.2% overall, $0.17 per 385-case run, 2.3s/case mutation latency vs. 64-191ms/case deterministic, recall path unchanged). We expose the trade-off via ForgetEval, a 1000-case templated suite plus a 385-case adversarial layer (132 hand-crafted + 253 LLM-drafted oracle-validated) scored by deterministic substring match, paired with a six-method Adapter Protocol with honest N/A scoring that lets heterogeneous memory stores enter in 130 lines. Admission is corroborated by 10-annotator IAA (Fleiss' kappa = 0.958) and a 77-case external-authored subset (four blind contributors) that replicates the canonicalization asymmetry and amplifies the joint-placement lift (+27.8 pt). Production failures are predominantly forgetting failures rather than recall failures, yet existing benchmarks measure only recall. ForgetEval and all adapters are released under MIT.

  • 1 authors
·
Jun 15

Foam-Agent 2.0: An End-to-End Composable Multi-Agent Framework for Automating CFD Simulation in OpenFOAM

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is an essential simulation tool in engineering, yet its steep learning curve and complex manual setup create significant barriers. To address these challenges, we introduce Foam-Agent, a multi-agent framework that automates the entire end-to-end OpenFOAM workflow from a single natural language prompt. Our key innovations address critical gaps in existing systems: 1. An Comprehensive End-to-End Simulation Automation: Foam-Agent is the first system to manage the full simulation pipeline, including advanced pre-processing with a versatile Meshing Agent capable of handling external mesh files and generating new geometries via Gmsh, automatic generation of HPC submission scripts, and post-simulation visualization via ParaView. 2. Composable Service Architecture: Going beyond a monolithic agent, the framework uses Model Context Protocol (MCP) to expose its core functions as discrete, callable tools. This allows for flexible integration and use by other agentic systems, such as Claude-code, for more exploratory workflows. 3. High-Fidelity Configuration Generation: We achieve superior accuracy through a Hierarchical Multi-Index RAG for precise context retrieval and a dependency-aware generation process that ensures configuration consistency. Evaluated on a benchmark of 110 simulation tasks, Foam-Agent achieves an 88.2% success rate with Claude 3.5 Sonnet, significantly outperforming existing frameworks (55.5% for MetaOpenFOAM). Foam-Agent dramatically lowers the expertise barrier for CFD, demonstrating how specialized multi-agent systems can democratize complex scientific computing. The code is public at https://github.com/csml-rpi/Foam-Agent.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 17, 2025

Youtu-Agent: Scaling Agent Productivity with Automated Generation and Hybrid Policy Optimization

Existing Large Language Model (LLM) agent frameworks face two significant challenges: high configuration costs and static capabilities. Building a high-quality agent often requires extensive manual effort in tool integration and prompt engineering, while deployed agents struggle to adapt to dynamic environments without expensive fine-tuning. To address these issues, we propose Youtu-Agent, a modular framework designed for the automated generation and continuous evolution of LLM agents. Youtu-Agent features a structured configuration system that decouples execution environments, toolkits, and context management, enabling flexible reuse and automated synthesis. We introduce two generation paradigms: a Workflow mode for standard tasks and a Meta-Agent mode for complex, non-standard requirements, capable of automatically generating tool code, prompts, and configurations. Furthermore, Youtu-Agent establishes a hybrid policy optimization system: (1) an Agent Practice module that enables agents to accumulate experience and improve performance through in-context optimization without parameter updates; and (2) an Agent RL module that integrates with distributed training frameworks to enable scalable and stable reinforcement learning of any Youtu-Agents in an end-to-end, large-scale manner. Experiments demonstrate that Youtu-Agent achieves state-of-the-art performance on WebWalkerQA (71.47\%) and GAIA (72.8\%) using open-weight models. Our automated generation pipeline achieves over 81\% tool synthesis success rate, while the Practice module improves performance on AIME 2024/2025 by +2.7\% and +5.4\% respectively. Moreover, our Agent RL training achieves 40\% speedup with steady performance improvement on 7B LLMs, enhancing coding/reasoning and searching capabilities respectively up to 35\% and 21\% on Maths and general/multi-hop QA benchmarks.

tencent Tencent
·
Dec 30, 2025 5

HarnessRisk: A Lifecycle-Oriented Benchmark for Agent Harness Safety

Large language models are increasingly deployed through agent harnesses that manage tools, extensions, persistent state, permissions, and external actions. Existing safety benchmarks mainly target individual attack mechanisms or a limited subset of operational settings, making it difficult to compare how safety failures emerge across different harness responsibilities. We present HarnessRisk, a lifecycle oriented benchmark that organizes agent harness safety into six operational phases including Harness Configuration, Capability Extension, Runtime Operation, State Persistence, Action Control, and Incident Recovery. HarnessRisk contains 128 sandboxed cases, each pairing a benign user objective with an adversarial instruction embedded in an untrusted workflow artifact. We evaluate each trajectory using Utility, Attack Success Rate, Persistence, and Detection. Across three harnesses, six language models, and 14 model and harness configurations, attack success ranges from 12.6% to 80.9%, while Utility remains between 75.0% and 97.6%. Harness Configuration is the most vulnerable phase across all three harnesses, showing that attacks can succeed by altering security sensitive parameters within otherwise authorized workflows. We also find that explicit risk recognition does not reliably lead to safe action, as some configurations detect risks in more than 90% of runs while retaining substantial attack success. These results highlight the need to evaluate agent safety across multiple harness responsibilities and at the level of the deployed model and harness configuration.

  • 7 authors
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Aug 17 2

VideoGen-Agent: Reinforcing Video Generation Agents

Recent advances in video generative models have enabled high-fidelity, temporally coherent video generation. However, these models often struggle to satisfy prompts requiring specialized knowledge, specific identities, physical consistency, or ordered events. In this paper, we present VideoGen-Agent, a multimodal agent trained through multitask agentic reinforcement learning to use external tools for video generation. The agent coordinates augmentation, generation, and verification tools through multi-turn interactions, using the prompt and intermediate observations to guide its decisions. We train a shared policy on a category-balanced dataset spanning six tasks. Supervised fine-tuning on teacher-generated trajectories establishes tool-use behavior, which is then refined through reinforcement learning. A category-aware hybrid reward evaluates tool-call validity, task-appropriate tool use, and generated video quality. We further introduce VABench, a held-out benchmark of 600 prompts covering procedural knowledge, single- and multi-entity identity preservation, physical consistency, scene composition, and multi-shot temporal structure. On VABench, VideoGen-Agent improves over its base text-to-video generator by 19.1 points, from 56.5 to 75.6. Upgrading the generation tools further raises the score to 86.1 without additional agent training. Human raters prefer the upgraded configuration over the strongest standalone baseline in 84.3% of comparisons. These results support learning tool use across video-generation tasks and show that the trained agent can benefit from subsequent advances in generation tools.

The Agent in the Middle: How AI-Mediated Access Reshapes Web Vulnerability Exploitation

Web services increasingly expose backend interfaces that let users delegate tasks to AI agents, which invoke service operations directly without navigating websites. This shift changes how existing Web vulnerabilities can be exploited. We investigate these changes through VELA, an executable benchmark covering 44 vulnerabilities across twelve Web application families. The benchmark preserves vulnerable backends and derives agent-facing interfaces from legitimate workflows. We evaluate three commercial agents across multiple interface configurations, using controlled comparisons to separate interface effects from agent behavior and independent oracles to verify attack outcomes. Our results show that the agent realizes every attack that direct interface invocation realizes in the reference configuration, so exploitability is set mainly by the interface: 91% of vulnerabilities remain exploitable under the reference design. Interface restrictions prevent some attacks by removing required operations or limiting input control, while retention remains high across vulnerability classes. No case-level loss in the reference configuration is attributed to agent refusal or input normalization, and in one case the agent completed an attack by supplying calls the attacker omitted. Across the tested configurations, interface design affects exploitability more than agent choice, moving retention from 39% to 95% against at most 4.5 points across agents, but some restrictive interfaces also limit legitimate workflows. Our study provides a systematic empirical account of how agent-mediated access reshapes existing Web vulnerabilities, grounding future Web architecture design in measured security outcomes and trade-offs between reducing attack exposure and preserving legitimate functionality in agent-facing services.

  • 4 authors
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Oct 25

Evolutionary Generation of Multi-Agent Systems

Large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems (MAS) show strong promise for complex reasoning, planning, and tool-augmented tasks, but designing effective MAS architectures remains labor-intensive, brittle, and hard to generalize. Existing automatic MAS generation methods either rely on code generation, which often leads to executability and robustness failures, or impose rigid architectural templates that limit expressiveness and adaptability. We propose Evolutionary Generation of Multi-Agent Systems (EvoMAS), which formulates MAS generation as structured configuration generation. EvoMAS performs evolutionary generation in configuration space. Specifically, EvoMAS selects initial configurations from a pool, applies feedback-conditioned mutation and crossover guided by execution traces, and iteratively refines both the candidate pool and an experience memory. We evaluate EvoMAS on diverse benchmarks, including BBEH, SWE-Bench, and WorkBench, covering reasoning, software engineering, and tool-use tasks. EvoMAS consistently improves task performance over both human-designed MAS and prior automatic MAS generation methods, while producing generated systems with higher executability and runtime robustness. EvoMAS outperforms the agent evolution method EvoAgent by +10.5 points on BBEH reasoning and +7.1 points on WorkBench. With Claude-4.5-Sonnet, EvoMAS also reaches 79.1% on SWE-Bench-Verified, matching the top of the leaderboard.

  • 7 authors
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Feb 10

Structured Distillation for Personalized Agent Memory: 11x Token Reduction with Retrieval Preservation

Long conversations with an AI agent create a simple problem for one user: the history is useful, but carrying it verbatim is expensive. We study personalized agent memory: one user's conversation history with an agent, distilled into a compact retrieval layer for later search. Each exchange is compressed into a compound object with four fields (exchange_core, specific_context, thematic room_assignments, and regex-extracted files_touched). The searchable distilled text averages 38 tokens per exchange. Applied to 4,182 conversations (14,340 exchanges) from 6 software engineering projects, the method reduces average exchange length from 371 to 38 tokens, yielding 11x compression. We evaluate whether personalized recall survives that compression using 201 recall-oriented queries, 107 configurations spanning 5 pure and 5 cross-layer search modes, and 5 LLM graders (214,519 consensus-graded query-result pairs). The best pure distilled configuration reaches 96% of the best verbatim MRR (0.717 vs 0.745). Results are mechanism-dependent. All 20 vector search configurations remain non-significant after Bonferroni correction, while all 20 BM25 configurations degrade significantly (effect sizes |d|=0.031-0.756). The best cross-layer setup slightly exceeds the best pure verbatim baseline (MRR 0.759). Structured distillation compresses single-user agent memory without uniformly sacrificing retrieval quality. At 1/11 the context cost, thousands of exchanges fit within a single prompt while the verbatim source remains available for drill-down. We release the implementation and analysis pipeline as open-source software.

  • 1 authors
·
Mar 12

Where Does Agent Reliability Come From? A Cross-Benchmark Decomposition of Verification Loops, Specialist Models, and Scaffolding in a Production Enterprise Agent

Multi-step enterprise agent tasks fail in a characteristic way: single-pass inference has no checkpoint between deciding an answer and committing to it. We study one production system (Leni) whose architecture installs such checkpoints: verification loops (execute, observe, compare, correct) staffed by lightweight task-specialized post-trained models. We evaluate the unmodified production configuration on three public benchmarks stressing distinct failure modes: SpreadsheetBench Verified (silent computation error), BullshitBench v2 (premise confabulation), and the GAIA validation split (cascade error over long tool chains). The full system improves over its frontier base model by +11.0 percentage points on SpreadsheetBench (91.25% vs 80.25%, n=400, p<0.001), +7 to +10 percentage points on BullshitBench (98% vs 91%, n=100), and roughly +15 points on GAIA validation (75.2% pass@1, n=165; 83.0% best-of-k). Our central contribution is a decomposition of that uplift: most of it comes from scaffolding, routing, and specialist models rather than from the verification step itself, whose isolated contribution is small (+1.5 points) but concentrated at the top of the score distribution, where it converts otherwise-failing tasks. We instrument the loop end-to-end, yielding an empirical verifier confusion matrix (catch rate about 0.20, fix rate 0.75, no false-alarm regressions) that grounds a compounding-reliability model. Specialist-swap ablations suggest that the loop's value depends on who observes it: replacing the small trained verifier with the generating frontier model eliminates most rescues. A valid-premise control shows zero over-rejections in 100 expert-level questions.

  • 1 authors
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Jul 18

A Modular Agent for Reliable and Auditable Spatial Relation Verification in CT Scans

Reliable spatial understanding is an important prerequisite for future medical vision-language systems that aim to support radiological report generation and structured image understanding. While modern vision-language models (VLMs) show promising performance on many medical imaging tasks, recent evidence suggests they remain weak in controlled spatial reasoning and often fail to reliably ground spatial relations in image evidence. Given that radiological reasoning hinges on understanding the relative positions of anatomical structures and findings, this spatial weakness poses risks to diagnostic accuracy. We present a modular medical imaging agent for binary spatial relation verification in axial CT slices. Instead of directly predicting spatial answers end-to-end, the system decomposes the task into explicit stages: language parsing, anatomical localization, and deterministic geometric verification. Natural-language queries are converted into structured relation tuples, queried organs are localized with a YOLO-based detector, and the final spatial decision is computed from object centers using deterministic geometric rules. We evaluate the approach on the held-out MIRP spatial QA benchmark and compare it against representative end-to-end VLM baselines. The best-performing hybrid configuration reaches 94.1% accuracy and 94.2% F1, outperforming direct Qwen2-VL prompting by 42.5 percentage points in accuracy, while preserving interpretable intermediate representations and auditable reasoning stages. The results suggest that explicit modular spatial verification can serve as a promising building block for future report-oriented medical imaging agents.

  • 6 authors
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Aug 20 2

CatchBench: When Can an Agent Failure Be Caught?

When can an agent failure be caught? An audit is usually limited by the record rather than by the method. CatchBench therefore puts one auditor's question to three information states: the declared configuration before a run (PRE), a growing prefix of its trace (LIVE), and the finished trace (POST). Prior benchmarks fix one of these states or vary the telemetry; to our knowledge none scores all three under one task-method interface. Each state admits different questions, so seven task contracts carry their own labels and metrics rather than one leaderboard. Four are evidential; three are Gold-derived mechanism diagnostics. The release scores 72 entrants, from rule scanners and structural models to eleven LLM judges across nine model families (GPT, Claude, Gemini, Gemma, Llama, Qwen, DeepSeek, Mistral, Nova), over 1187 declared configurations and 1162 recorded runs. Most of the arena does not order: 56 of 138 registered contrasts separate, and the rest are published unresolved rather than ranked. The two sharpest results cut against our own data. One rule ignores every name and permission; it flags each capability declared after the first. On one of six configuration sources it reaches a perfect F1, so a score there measures how the corpus was built rather than how well a method reasons. Our admissibility bar then rejected one injected substrate and withheld evidential status from the other. A benchmark number is therefore not interpretable until the process behind its labels is published and tested for the shortcut it may leave. We report both, and regenerate every ordering from released predictions with no model call.

  • 5 authors
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Sep 5

CRAKEN: Cybersecurity LLM Agent with Knowledge-Based Execution

Large Language Model (LLM) agents can automate cybersecurity tasks and can adapt to the evolving cybersecurity landscape without re-engineering. While LLM agents have demonstrated cybersecurity capabilities on Capture-The-Flag (CTF) competitions, they have two key limitations: accessing latest cybersecurity expertise beyond training data, and integrating new knowledge into complex task planning. Knowledge-based approaches that incorporate technical understanding into the task-solving automation can tackle these limitations. We present CRAKEN, a knowledge-based LLM agent framework that improves cybersecurity capability through three core mechanisms: contextual decomposition of task-critical information, iterative self-reflected knowledge retrieval, and knowledge-hint injection that transforms insights into adaptive attack strategies. Comprehensive evaluations with different configurations show CRAKEN's effectiveness in multi-stage vulnerability detection and exploitation compared to previous approaches. Our extensible architecture establishes new methodologies for embedding new security knowledge into LLM-driven cybersecurity agentic systems. With a knowledge database of CTF writeups, CRAKEN obtained an accuracy of 22% on NYU CTF Bench, outperforming prior works by 3% and achieving state-of-the-art results. On evaluation of MITRE ATT&CK techniques, CRAKEN solves 25-30% more techniques than prior work, demonstrating improved cybersecurity capabilities via knowledge-based execution. We make our framework open source to public https://github.com/NYU-LLM-CTF/nyuctf_agents_craken.

  • 12 authors
·
May 21, 2025

FALAT: Tracing Failures in LLM Agent Trajectories via Dependency-Guided Search

LLM-based agents increasingly solve complex tasks through long trajectories involving reasoning steps, tool calls, and inter-agent communication. However, when these agents fail, it is often unclear which agent caused the failure and which step introduced the decisive error. This attribution problem is challenging because mistakes can propagate across the trajectory: later actions may appear incorrect, but only because they depend on an earlier corrupted state. Therefore, failure attribution cannot be treated as independent step-level classification. We propose FALAT, a diagnostic framework for failure attribution in LLM agent trajectories. FALAT frames attribution as a dependency-guided search problem. It first constructs an expectation of how the task should be solved and uses this expectation to identify suspicious regions in the trajectory. It then traces dependencies among decisions, tool outputs, and agent messages to distinguish error-introducing steps from steps that merely inherit or propagate prior mistakes. Finally, FALAT evaluates whether correcting a candidate step would be sufficient to recover the expected outcome, allowing it to identify both the responsible agent and the decisive failure step. We evaluate FALAT on the Who&When benchmark, which includes both algorithm-generated and hand-crafted multi-agent failure trajectories. The results show that FALAT consistently improves responsible-agent and decisive-step attribution. Its best configurations achieve 46.0% step-level accuracy on algorithm-generated trajectories and 29.1% on the more challenging hand-crafted trajectories, outperforming specialized attribution baselines and direct prompting with standalone LLMs. These findings suggest that dependency-aware reasoning is essential for reliable failure diagnosis in LLM agent systems.

  • 5 authors
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May 29

LimAgents: Multi-Agent LLMs for Generating Research Limitations

Identifying and articulating limitations is essential for transparent and rigorous scientific research. However, zero-shot large language models (LLMs) approach often produce superficial or general limitation statements (e.g., dataset bias or generalizability). They usually repeat limitations reported by authors without looking at deeper methodological issues and contextual gaps. This problem is made worse because many authors disclose only partial or trivial limitations. We propose LimAgents, a multi-agent LLM framework for generating substantive limitations. LimAgents integrates OpenReview comments and author-stated limitations to provide stronger ground truth. It also uses cited and citing papers to capture broader contextual weaknesses. In this setup, different agents have specific roles as sequential role: some extract explicit limitations, others analyze methodological gaps, some simulate the viewpoint of a peer reviewer, and a citation agent places the work within the larger body of literature. A Judge agent refines their outputs, and a Master agent consolidates them into a clear set. This structure allows for systematic identification of explicit, implicit, peer review-focused, and literature-informed limitations. Moreover, traditional NLP metrics like BLEU, ROUGE, and cosine similarity rely heavily on n-gram or embedding overlap. They often overlook semantically similar limitations. To address this, we introduce a pointwise evaluation protocol that uses an LLM-as-a-Judge to measure coverage more accurately. Experiments show that LimAgents substantially improve performance. The RAG + multi-agent GPT-4o mini configuration achieves a +15.51% coverage gain over zero-shot baselines, while the Llama 3 8B multi-agent setup yields a +4.41% improvement.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 30, 2025

Harmonia: A Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Approach to Data Placement and Migration in Hybrid Storage Systems

Hybrid storage systems (HSS) integrate multiple storage devices with diverse characteristics to deliver high performance and capacity at low cost. The performance of an HSS highly depends on the effectiveness of two key policies: (1) the data-placement policy, which determines the best-fit storage device for incoming data, and (2) the data-migration policy, which dynamically rearranges stored data (i.e., prefetches hot data and evicts cold data) across the devices to sustain high HSS performance. Prior works optimize either data placement or data migration in isolation, which leads to suboptimal HSS performance. Unfortunately, no prior work tries to optimize both policies together. Our goal is to design a holistic data-management technique that optimizes both data-placement and data-migration policies to fully exploit the potential of an HSS, and thus significantly improve system performance. We propose Harmonia, a multi-agent reinforcement learning (RL)-based data-management technique that employs two lightweight autonomous RL agents, a data-placement agent and a data-migration agent, that adapt their policies for the current workload and HSS configuration while coordinating with each other to improve overall HSS performance. We evaluate Harmonia on real HSS configurations with up to four heterogeneous storage devices and seventeen data-intensive workloads. On performance-optimized (cost-optimized) HSS with two storage devices, Harmonia outperforms the best-performing prior approach by 49.5% (31.7%) on average. On an HSS with three (four) devices, Harmonia outperforms the best-performing prior work by 37.0% (42.0%) on average. Harmonia's performance benefits come with low latency (240ns for inference) and storage overheads (206 KiB in DRAM for both RL agents combined). We will open-source Harmonia's implementation to aid future research on HSS.

  • 9 authors
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Mar 26, 2025

Multi-Agent LLM Orchestration Achieves Deterministic, High-Quality Decision Support for Incident Response

Large language models (LLMs) promise to accelerate incident response in production systems, yet single-agent approaches generate vague, unusable recommendations. We present MyAntFarm.ai, a reproducible containerized framework demonstrating that multi-agent orchestration fundamentally transforms LLM-based incident response quality. Through 348 controlled trials comparing single-agent copilot versus multi-agent systems on identical incident scenarios, we find that multi-agent orchestration achieves 100% actionable recommendation rate versus 1.7% for single-agent approaches, an 80 times improvement in action specificity and 140 times improvement in solution correctness. Critically, multi-agent systems exhibit zero quality variance across all trials, enabling production SLA commitments impossible with inconsistent single-agent outputs. Both architectures achieve similar comprehension latency (approx.40s), establishing that the architectural value lies in deterministic quality, not speed. We introduce Decision Quality (DQ), a novel metric capturing validity, specificity, and correctness properties essential for operational deployment that existing LLM metrics do not address. These findings reframe multi-agent orchestration from a performance optimization to a production-readiness requirement for LLM-based incident response. All code, Docker configurations, and trial data are publicly available for reproduction.

  • 1 authors
·
Nov 19, 2025

Understanding Agent Scaling in LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems via Diversity

LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) have emerged as a promising approach to tackle complex tasks that are difficult for individual LLMs. A natural strategy is to scale performance by increasing the number of agents; however, we find that such scaling exhibits strong diminishing returns in homogeneous settings, while introducing heterogeneity (e.g., different models, prompts, or tools) continues to yield substantial gains. This raises a fundamental question: what limits scaling, and why does diversity help? We present an information-theoretic framework showing that MAS performance is bounded by the intrinsic task uncertainty, not by agent count. We derive architecture-agnostic bounds demonstrating that improvements depend on how many effective channels the system accesses. Homogeneous agents saturate early because their outputs are strongly correlated, whereas heterogeneous agents contribute complementary evidence. We further introduce K^*, an effective channel count that quantifies the number of effective channels without ground-truth labels. Empirically, we show that heterogeneous configurations consistently outperform homogeneous scaling: 2 diverse agents can match or exceed the performance of 16 homogeneous agents. Our results provide principled guidelines for building efficient and robust MAS through diversity-aware design. Code and Dataset are available at the link: https://github.com/SafeRL-Lab/Agent-Scaling.

  • 8 authors
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Feb 3

Institutional AI: Governing LLM Collusion in Multi-Agent Cournot Markets via Public Governance Graphs

Multi-agent LLM ensembles can converge on coordinated, socially harmful equilibria. This paper advances an experimental framework for evaluating Institutional AI, our system-level approach to AI alignment that reframes alignment from preference engineering in agent-space to mechanism design in institution-space. Central to this approach is the governance graph, a public, immutable manifest that declares legal states, transitions, sanctions, and restorative paths; an Oracle/Controller runtime interprets this manifest, attaching enforceable consequences to evidence of coordination while recording a cryptographically keyed, append-only governance log for audit and provenance. We apply the Institutional AI framework to govern the Cournot collusion case documented by prior work and compare three regimes: Ungoverned (baseline incentives from the structure of the Cournot market), Constitutional (a prompt-only policy-as-prompt prohibition implemented as a fixed written anti-collusion constitution, and Institutional (governance-graph-based). Across six model configurations including cross-provider pairs (N=90 runs/condition), the Institutional regime produces large reductions in collusion: mean tier falls from 3.1 to 1.8 (Cohen's d=1.28), and severe-collusion incidence drops from 50% to 5.6%. The prompt-only Constitutional baseline yields no reliable improvement, illustrating that declarative prohibitions do not bind under optimisation pressure. These results suggest that multi-agent alignment may benefit from being framed as an institutional design problem, where governance graphs can provide a tractable abstraction for alignment-relevant collective behavior.

  • 9 authors
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Jan 19

CoFlow: Coordinated Few-Step Flow for Offline Multi-Agent Decision Making

Generative models have emerged as a major paradigm for offline multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), but existing approaches require many iterative sampling steps. Recent few-step accelerations either distill a joint teacher into independent students or apply averaged velocities independently per agent, suggesting that few-step inference requires sacrificing inter-agent coordination. We show this trade-off is not necessary: single-pass multi-agent generation can preserve coordination when the velocity field is natively joint-coupled. We propose Coordinated few-step Flow (CoFlow), an architecture that combines Coordinated Velocity Attention (CVA) with Adaptive Coordination Gating. A finite-difference consistency surrogate further replaces memory-prohibitive Jacobian-vector product backpropagation through the averaged velocity field with two stop-gradient forward passes. Across 60 configurations spanning MPE, MA-MuJoCo, and SMAC, CoFlow matches or surpasses Gaussian / value-based, transformer, diffusion, and prior flow baselines on episodic return. Three independent coordination probes confirm that the gains flow through inter-agent coordination rather than per-agent capacity. A denoising-step sweep shows that single-pass inference suffices on every configuration. CoFlow reaches state-of-the-art coordination quality in 1-3 denoising steps under both centralized and decentralized execution. Project page: https://github.com/Guowei-Zou/coflow.

  • 5 authors
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May 1

Harness-Bench: Measuring Harness Effects across Models in Realistic Agent Workflows

LLM agents are increasingly deployed as executable systems that use tools, modify workspaces, and produce concrete artifacts. In such workflows, performance depends not only on the base model, but also on the harness: the system layer that manages context, tools, state, constraints, permissions, tracing, and recovery. However, existing benchmarks typically abstract away execution, compare complete agent systems, or hold the harness fixed, making execution-layer variation difficult to study. We introduce Harness-Bench, a diagnostic benchmark for evaluating configuration-level harness effects in realistic agent workflows. Harness-Bench evaluates representative harness configurations across multiple model backends under shared task environments, budgets, and evaluation protocols, while preserving each harness's native execution behavior. The benchmark contains 106 sandboxed offline tasks constructed from practical agent-use patterns and manually reviewed for realism, solvability, oracle-checkability, and integrity. Each run records final artifacts, execution traces, usage statistics, and validator outputs, enabling analysis beyond final completion. Across 5,194 execution trajectories, we observe substantial variation in completion, process quality, efficiency, and failure behavior across model-harness pairings. These results suggest that agent capability should be reported at the model-harness configuration level rather than attributed to the base model alone. Our analysis further identifies recurring execution-alignment failures, where plausible reasoning becomes decoupled from tool feedback, workspace state, evidence, or verifiable output contracts. Harness-Bench provides a reproducible foundation for diagnosing and improving reliable, efficient, and auditable agent execution stacks.

  • 12 authors
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May 26

Harness^2: Recursive Agent Harnessing for an Open World

LLM agents' capabilities depend not only on their underlying models but also on their execution harnesses. Recursive self-improvement (RSI) offers a promising approach to automatically evolve these harnesses. However, deploying RSI in open-world settings still faces two critical challenges. First, open-world tasks are typically unseen during the harness design phase and novel at test time, leaving no ground-truth verifiers to reliably guide online harness edits. Second, the RSI process remains highly task-specific and fails to generalize to novel scenarios. We introduce Harness^2, a plug-and-play, recursive agent harnessing framework that addresses these challenges through two connected levels of recursion. Task-level recursion refines the current task's harness using a contrastive Propose-Probe-Compose step that reliably guides edits without ground-truth verifiers, and can be scaled further via parallel or sequential recursion. Harnessing-level recursion then extracts experience from these edits to update a continual improvement harness, enabling the agent to better adapt to future tasks. Across three professional benchmarks and four model-harness configurations, a single step consistently improves GLM-5 and Gemini 3.5 Flash over their base harnesses, yielding gains of up to 11.5 points on WorkBuddy-Bench, 4.5 points on JobBench, and 11.8 percentage points on LAB, with further gains as the task-level recursion budget increases.

google Google
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Oct 8 4

Coda: Exploiting Admission Flexibility for Coding-Agent Serving

Coding agents powered by large language models (LLMs) repeatedly alternate between model inference and tool calls, creating long-lived sessions with reusable key-value (KV) states and asynchronous request resumptions. Logical readiness, however, does not ensure efficient admission in a shared serving system. Through direct trace analysis and trace-driven replay, we identify two mismatches: reusable KV states reside across storage tiers and incur unequal computational costs for state preparation, while requests with heterogeneous context lengths can decode inefficiently together. Our central insight is that exploiting admission flexibility can improve serving performance while preserving request progress. We present Coda, a coding-agent serving system that realizes this insight through a readiness-informed admission layer incorporating two mechanisms. Tiered-Aging state admission exploits bounded flexibility in admission order to improve admission efficiency and preserve request progress. Compatibility-Aware execution admission exploits flexibility in attention grouping within each model iteration to reduce mixed-context interference and improve shared decoding efficiency. For multi-worker configurations, Coda introduces a separate routing layer that considers KV-state residency, worker load, and request-to-worker context-length compatibility to guide efficient request placement. We evaluate Coda across different models and workloads against state-of-the-art coding-agent serving systems and vLLM. Across the single-worker and multi-worker experiments, Coda improves output-token and SLO-compliant throughput by 20.3% and 70.5% on average, with peak gains of 29.3% and 140.2%.

  • 8 authors
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Oct 1

Effective control of two-dimensional Rayleigh--Bénard convection: invariant multi-agent reinforcement learning is all you need

Rayleigh-B\'enard convection (RBC) is a recurrent phenomenon in several industrial and geoscience flows and a well-studied system from a fundamental fluid-mechanics viewpoint. However, controlling RBC, for example by modulating the spatial distribution of the bottom-plate heating in the canonical RBC configuration, remains a challenging topic for classical control-theory methods. In the present work, we apply deep reinforcement learning (DRL) for controlling RBC. We show that effective RBC control can be obtained by leveraging invariant multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), which takes advantage of the locality and translational invariance inherent to RBC flows inside wide channels. The MARL framework applied to RBC allows for an increase in the number of control segments without encountering the curse of dimensionality that would result from a naive increase in the DRL action-size dimension. This is made possible by the MARL ability for re-using the knowledge generated in different parts of the RBC domain. We show in a case study that MARL DRL is able to discover an advanced control strategy that destabilizes the spontaneous RBC double-cell pattern, changes the topology of RBC by coalescing adjacent convection cells, and actively controls the resulting coalesced cell to bring it to a new stable configuration. This modified flow configuration results in reduced convective heat transfer, which is beneficial in several industrial processes. Therefore, our work both shows the potential of MARL DRL for controlling large RBC systems, as well as demonstrates the possibility for DRL to discover strategies that move the RBC configuration between different topological configurations, yielding desirable heat-transfer characteristics. These results are useful for both gaining further understanding of the intrinsic properties of RBC, as well as for developing industrial applications.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 5, 2023