Agents
Comparing AI Agents to Cybersecurity Professionals in Real-World Penetration Testing
Lin, Justin W., Jones, Eliot Krzysztof, Jasper, Donovan Julian, Ho, Ethan Jun-shen, Wu, Anna, Yang, Arnold Tianyi, Perry, Neil, Zou, Andy, Fredrikson, Matt, Kolter, J. Zico, Liang, Percy, Boneh, Dan, Ho, Daniel E.
We present the first comprehensive evaluation of AI agents against human cybersecurity professionals in a live enterprise environment. We evaluate ten cybersecurity professionals alongside six existing AI agents and ARTEMIS, our new agent scaffold, on a large university network consisting of ~8,000 hosts across 12 subnets. ARTEMIS is a multi-agent framework featuring dynamic prompt generation, arbitrary sub-agents, and automatic vulnerability triaging. In our comparative study, ARTEMIS placed second overall, discovering 9 valid vulnerabilities with an 82% valid submission rate and outperforming 9 of 10 human participants. While existing scaffolds such as Codex and CyAgent underperformed relative to most human participants, ARTEMIS demonstrated technical sophistication and submission quality comparable to the strongest participants. We observe that AI agents offer advantages in systematic enumeration, parallel exploitation, and cost -- certain ARTEMIS variants cost $18/hour versus $60/hour for professional penetration testers. We also identify key capability gaps: AI agents exhibit higher false-positive rates and struggle with GUI-based tasks.
Interpretation as Linear Transformation: A Cognitive-Geometric Model of Belief and Meaning
This paper develops a geometric framework for modeling belief, motivation, and influence across cognitively heterogeneous agents. Each agent is represented by a personalized value space, a vector space encoding the internal dimensions through which the agent interprets and evaluates meaning. Beliefs are formalized as structured vectors-abstract beings-whose transmission is mediated by linear interpretation maps. A belief survives communication only if it avoids the null spaces of these maps, yielding a structural criterion for intelligibility, miscommunication, and belief death. Within this framework, I show how belief distortion, motivational drift, counterfactual evaluation, and the limits of mutual understanding arise from purely algebraic constraints. A central result-"the No-Null-Space Leadership Condition"-characterizes leadership as a property of representational reachability rather than persuasion or authority. More broadly, the model explains how abstract beings can propagate, mutate, or disappear as they traverse diverse cognitive geometries. The account unifies insights from conceptual spaces, social epistemology, and AI value alignment by grounding meaning preservation in structural compatibility rather than shared information or rationality. I argue that this cognitive-geometric perspective clarifies the epistemic boundaries of influence in both human and artificial systems, and offers a general foundation for analyzing belief dynamics across heterogeneous agents.
Dynamic one-time delivery of critical data by small and sparse UAV swarms: a model problem for MARL scaling studies
Persson, Mika, Lidman, Jonas, Ljungberg, Jacob, Sandelius, Samuel, Andersson, Adam
This work presents a conceptual study on the application of Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) for decentralized control of unmanned aerial vehicles to relay a critical data package to a known position. For this purpose, a family of deterministic games is introduced, designed for scaling studies for MARL. A robust baseline policy is proposed, which is based on restricting agent motion envelopes and applying Dijkstra's algorithm. Experimental results show that two off-the-shelf MARL algorithms perform competitively with the baseline for a small number of agents, but scalability issues arise as the number of agents increase.
Auto-BenchmarkCard: Automated Synthesis of Benchmark Documentation
Hofmann, Aris, Vejsbjerg, Inge, Salwala, Dhaval, Daly, Elizabeth M.
We present Auto-BenchmarkCard, a workflow for generating validated descriptions of AI benchmarks. Benchmark documentation is often incomplete or inconsistent, making it difficult to interpret and compare benchmarks across tasks or domains. Auto-BenchmarkCard addresses this gap by combining multi-agent data extraction from heterogeneous sources (e.g., Hugging Face, Unitxt, academic papers) with LLM-driven synthesis. A validation phase evaluates factual accuracy through atomic entailment scoring using the FactReasoner tool. This workflow has the potential to promote transparency, comparability, and reusability in AI benchmark reporting, enabling researchers and practitioners to better navigate and evaluate benchmark choices.
Supporting Dynamic Agentic Workloads: How Data and Agents Interact
Giurgiu, Ioana, Nidd, Michael E.
The rise of multi-agent systems powered by large language models (LLMs) and specialized reasoning agents exposes fundamental limitations in today's data management architectures. Traditional databases and data fabrics were designed for static, well-defined workloads, whereas agentic systems exhibit dynamic, context-driven, and collaborative behaviors. Agents continuously decompose tasks, shift attention across modalities, and share intermediate results with peers - producing non-deterministic, multi-modal workloads that strain conventional query optimizers and caching mechanisms. We propose an Agent-Centric Data Fabric, a unified architecture that rethinks how data systems serve, optimize, coordinate, and learn from agentic workloads. To achieve this we exploit the concepts of attention-guided data retrieval, semantic micro-caching for context-driven agent federations, predictive data prefetching and quorum-based data serving. Together, these mechanisms enable agents to access representative data faster and more efficiently, while reducing redundant queries, data movement, and inference load across systems. By framing data systems as adaptive collaborators, instead of static executors, we outline new research directions toward behaviorally responsive data infrastructures, where caching, probing, and orchestration jointly enable efficient, context-rich data exchange among dynamic, reasoning-driven agents.
On Mobile Ad Hoc Networks for Coverage of Partially Observable Worlds
Meriaux, Edwin, Wen, Shuo, Langevin, Louis-Roy, Precup, Doina, Loría, Antonio, Dudek, Gregory
This paper addresses the movement and placement of mobile agents to establish a communication network in initially unknown environments. We cast the problem in a computational-geometric framework by relating the coverage problem and line-of-sight constraints to the Cooperative Guard Art Gallery Problem, and introduce its partially observable variant, the Partially Observable Cooperative Guard Art Gallery Problem (POCGAGP). We then present two algorithms that solve POCGAGP: CADENCE, a centralized planner that incrementally selects 270 degree corners at which to deploy agents, and DADENCE, a decentralized scheme that coordinates agents using local information and lightweight messaging. Both approaches operate under partial observability and target simultaneous coverage and connectivity. We evaluate the methods in simulation across 1,500 test cases of varied size and structure, demonstrating consistent success in forming connected networks while covering and exploring unknown space. These results highlight the value of geometric abstractions for communication-driven exploration and show that decentralized policies are competitive with centralized performance while retaining scalability.
Advancing LLM-Based Security Automation with Customized Group Relative Policy Optimization for Zero-Touch Networks
Cao, Xinye, Lin, Yihan, Nan, Guoshun, Zhou, Qinchuan, Luo, Yuhang, Gao, Yurui, Zhang, Zeliang, Lu, Haolang, Cui, Qimei, Hou, Yanzhao, Tao, Xiaofeng, Quek, Tony Q. S.
Zero-Touch Networks (ZTNs) represent a transformative paradigm toward fully automated and intelligent network management, providing the scalability and adaptability required for the complexity of sixth-generation (6G) networks. However, the distributed architecture, high openness, and deep heterogeneity of 6G networks expand the attack surface and pose unprecedented security challenges. To address this, security automation aims to enable intelligent security management across dynamic and complex environments, serving as a key capability for securing 6G ZTNs. Despite its promise, implementing security automation in 6G ZTNs presents two primary challenges: 1) automating the lifecycle from security strategy generation to validation and update under real-world, parallel, and adversarial conditions, and 2) adapting security strategies to evolving threats and dynamic environments. This motivates us to propose SecLoop and SA-GRPO. SecLoop constitutes the first fully automated framework that integrates large language models (LLMs) across the entire lifecycle of security strategy generation, orchestration, response, and feedback, enabling intelligent and adaptive defenses in dynamic network environments, thus tackling the first challenge. Furthermore, we propose SA-GRPO, a novel security-aware group relative policy optimization algorithm that iteratively refines security strategies by contrasting group feedback collected from parallel SecLoop executions, thereby addressing the second challenge. Extensive real-world experiments on five benchmarks, including 11 MITRE ATT&CK processes and over 20 types of attacks, demonstrate the superiority of the proposed SecLoop and SA-GRPO. We will release our platform to the community, facilitating the advancement of security automation towards next generation communications.
Architectures for Building Agentic AI
This chapter argues that the reliability of agentic and generative AI is chiefly an architectural property. We define agentic systems as goal-directed, tool-using decision makers operating in closed loops, and show how reliability emerges from principled componentisation (goal manager, planner, tool-router, executor, memory, verifiers, safety monitor, telemetry), disciplined interfaces (schema-constrained, validated, least-privilege tool calls), and explicit control and assurance loops. Building on classical foundations, we propose a practical taxonomy-tool-using agents, memory-augmented agents, planning and self-improvement agents, multi-agent systems, and embodied or web agents - and analyse how each pattern reshapes the reliability envelope and failure modes. We distil design guidance on typed schemas, idempotency, permissioning, transactional semantics, memory provenance and hygiene, runtime governance (budgets, termination conditions), and simulate-before-actuate safeguards.
GAIR: GUI Automation via Information-Joint Reasoning and Group Reflection
Wei, Zishu, Ma, Qixiang, Hu, Xavier, Liu, Yuhang, Zang, Hui, Zhao, Yudong, Wang, Tao, Zhang, Shengyu, Wu, Fei
Building AI systems for GUI automation task has attracted remarkable research efforts, where MLLMs are leveraged for processing user requirements and give operations. However, GUI automation includes a wide range of tasks, from document processing to online shopping, from CAD to video editing. Diversity between particular tasks requires MLLMs for GUI automation to have heterogeneous capabilities and master multidimensional expertise, raising problems on constructing such a model. To address such challenge, we propose GAIR: GUI Automation via Information-Joint Reasoning and Group Reflection, a novel MLLM-based GUI automation agent framework designed for integrating knowledge and combining capabilities from heterogeneous models to build GUI automation agent systems with higher performance. Since different GUI-specific MLLMs are trained on different dataset and thus have different strengths, GAIR introduced a general-purpose MLLM for jointly processing the information from multiple GUI-specific models, further enhancing performance of the agent framework. The general-purpose MLLM also serves as decision maker, trying to execute a reasonable operation based on previously gathered information. When the general-purpose model thinks that there isn't sufficient information for a reasonable decision, GAIR would transit into group reflection status, where the general-purpose model would provide GUI-specific models with different instructions and hints based on their strengths and weaknesses, driving them to gather information with more significance and accuracy that can support deeper reasoning and decision. We evaluated the effectiveness and reliability of GAIR through extensive experiments on GUI benchmarks.
WOLF: Werewolf-based Observations for LLM Deception and Falsehoods
Agarwal, Mrinal, Rana, Saad, Sundoro, Theo, Berhe, Hermela, Kim, Spencer, Sharma, Vasu, O'Brien, Sean, Zhu, Kevin
Deception is a fundamental challenge for multi-agent reasoning: effective systems must strategically conceal information while detecting misleading behavior in others. Yet most evaluations reduce deception to static classification, ignoring the interactive, adversarial, and longitudinal nature of real deceptive dynamics. Large language models (LLMs) can deceive convincingly but remain weak at detecting deception in peers. We present WOLF, a multi-agent social deduction benchmark based on Werewolf that enables separable measurement of deception production and detection. WOLF embeds role-grounded agents (Villager, Werewolf, Seer, Doctor) in a programmable LangGraph state machine with strict night-day cycles, debate turns, and majority voting. Every statement is a distinct analysis unit, with self-assessed honesty from speakers and peer-rated deceptiveness from others. Deception is categorized via a standardized taxonomy (omission, distortion, fabrication, misdirection), while suspicion scores are longitudinally smoothed to capture both immediate judgments and evolving trust dynamics. Structured logs preserve prompts, outputs, and state transitions for full reproducibility. Across 7,320 statements and 100 runs, Werewolves produce deceptive statements in 31% of turns, while peer detection achieves 71-73% precision with ~52% overall accuracy. Precision is higher for identifying Werewolves, though false positives occur against Villagers. Suspicion toward Werewolves rises from ~52% to over 60% across rounds, while suspicion toward Villagers and the Doctor stabilizes near 44-46%. This divergence shows that extended interaction improves recall against liars without compounding errors against truthful roles. WOLF moves deception evaluation beyond static datasets, offering a dynamic, controlled testbed for measuring deceptive and detective capacity in adversarial multi-agent interaction.