Agents
Optimized Area Coverage in Disaster Response Utilizing Autonomous UAV Swarm Formations
Papakostas, Lampis, Geladaris, Aristeidis, Mastrogeorgiou, Athanasios, Sharples, Jim, Hattenberger, Gautier, Chatzakos, Panagiotis, Polygerinos, Panagiotis
Abstract-- This paper presents a UA V swarm system designed to assist first responders in disaster scenarios like wildfires. By distributing sensors across multiple agents, the system extends flight duration and enhances data availability, reducing the risk of mission failure due to collisions. T o mitigate this risk further, we introduce an autonomous navigation framework that utilizes a local Euclidean Signed Distance Field (ESDF) map for obstacle avoidance while maintaining swarm formation with minimal path deviation. Additionally, we incorporate a Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) variant to optimize area coverage, prioritizing Points of Interest (POIs) based on preas-signed values derived from environmental behavior and critical infrastructure. The proposed system is validated through simulations with varying swarm sizes, demonstrating its ability to maximize coverage while ensuring collision avoidance between UA Vs and obstacles.
DIJIT: A Robotic Head for an Active Observer
Tabrizi, Mostafa Kamali, Chi, Mingshi, Dey, Bir Bikram, Yuan, Yu Qing, Solbach, Markus D., Liu, Yiqian, Jenkin, Michael, Tsotsos, John K.
We present DIJIT, a novel binocular robotic head expressly designed for mobile agents that behave as active observers. DIJIT's unique breadth of functionality enables active vision research and the study of human-like eye and head-neck motions, their interrelationships, and how each contributes to visual ability. DIJIT is also being used to explore the differences between how human vision employs eye/head movements to solve visual tasks and current computer vision methods. DIJIT's design features nine mechanical degrees of freedom, while the cameras and lenses provide an additional four optical degrees of freedom. The ranges and speeds of the mechanical design are comparable to human performance. Our design includes the ranges of motion required for convergent stereo, namely, vergence, version, and cyclotorsion. The exploration of the utility of these to both human and machine vision is ongoing. Here, we present the design of DIJIT and evaluate aspects of its performance. We present a new method for saccadic camera movements. In this method, a direct relationship between camera orientation and motor values is developed. The resulting saccadic camera movements are close to human movements in terms of their accuracy.
Can AI autonomously build, operate, and use the entire data stack?
Agarwal, Arvind, Amini, Lisa, Mehta, Sameep, Samulowitz, Horst, Srinivas, Kavitha
Enterprise data management is a monumental task. It spans data architecture and systems, integration, quality, governance, and continuous improvement. While AI assistants can help specific persona, such as data engineers and stewards, to navigate and configure the data stack, they fall far short of full automation. However, as AI becomes increasingly capable of tackling tasks that have previously resisted automation due to inherent complexities, we believe there is an imminent opportunity to target fully autonomous data estates. Currently, AI is used in different parts of the data stack, but in this paper, we argue for a paradigm shift from the use of AI in independent data component operations towards a more holistic and autonomous handling of the entire data lifecycle. Towards that end, we explore how each stage of the modern data stack can be autonomously managed by intelligent agents to build self-sufficient systems that can be used not only by human end-users, but also by AI itself. We begin by describing the mounting forces and opportunities that demand this paradigm shift, examine how agents can streamline the data lifecycle, and highlight open questions and areas where additional research is needed. We hope this work will inspire lively debate, stimulate further research, motivate collaborative approaches, and facilitate a more autonomous future for data systems.
MARINE: Theoretical Optimization and Design for Multi-Agent Recursive IN-context Enhancement
Zhang, Hongwei, Lu, Ji, Du, Yongsheng, Gao, Yanqin, Huang, Lingjun, Wang, Baoli, Tan, Fang, Zou, Peng
Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents demonstrate advanced reasoning capabilities, yet practical constraints frequently limit outputs to single responses, leaving significant performance potential unrealized. This paper introduces MARINE (Multi-Agent Recursive IN-context Enhancement), a theoretically grounded framework that reconceptualizes test-time reasoning as iterative refinement of a persistent reference trajectory, fundamentally departing from conventional one-shot or multi-sample paradigms. The MARINE refinement operator systematically converts a base model's pass@N capabilities into near-optimal pass@1 performance. Rigorous theoretical analysis establishes that minimal feasible batches maximize expected performance gains under fixed invocation budgets, while logarithmically growing batch schedules ensure continuous improvement without computational constraints. Comprehensive evaluation on the BrowserComp-ZH benchmark demonstrates state-of-the-art results, with a 685B-parameter implementation achieving 46.0% pass@1 accuracy. Meanwhile, MARINE establishes a new paradigm for parameter-efficient reasoning: an 80B-parameter model augmented with MARINE matches the performance of standalone 1000B-parameter agents, reducing parameter requirements by over an order of magnitude. Notably, within a fixed computational budget, the proposed MARINE delivers higher-quality samples to alignment and optimization processes than traditional sampling-and-ranking strategies. Consequently, it has great potential to boost post-training efficiency.
Controllable risk scenario generation from human crash data for autonomous vehicle testing
Lu, Qiujing, Wang, Xuanhan, Yuan, Runze, Lu, Wei, Gong, Xinyi, Feng, Shuo
Ensuring the safety of autonomous vehicles (AV) requires rigorous testing under both everyday driving and rare, safety-critical conditions. A key challenge lies in simulating environment agents, including background vehicles (BVs) and vulnerable road users (VRUs), that behave realistically in nominal traffic while also exhibiting risk-prone behaviors consistent with real-world accidents. We introduce Controllable Risk Agent Generation (CRAG), a framework designed to unify the modeling of dominant nominal behaviors and rare safety-critical behaviors. CRAG constructs a structured latent space that disentangles normal and risk-related behaviors, enabling efficient use of limited crash data. By combining risk-aware latent representations with optimization-based mode-transition mechanisms, the framework allows agents to shift smoothly and plausibly from safe to risk states over extended horizons, while maintaining high fidelity in both regimes. Extensive experiments show that CRAG improves diversity compared to existing baselines, while also enabling controllable generation of risk scenarios for targeted and efficient evaluation of AV robustness.
Khalasi: Energy-Efficient Navigation for Surface Vehicles in Vortical Flow Fields
Gadhvi, Rushiraj, Manjanna, Sandeep
For centuries, khalasi (Gujarati for sailor) have skillfully harnessed ocean currents to navigate vast waters with minimal effort. Emulating this intuition in autonomous systems remains a significant challenge, particularly for Autonomous Surface Vehicles tasked with long duration missions under strict energy budgets. In this work, we present a learning-based approach for energy-efficient surface vehicle navigation in vortical flow fields, where partial observability often undermines traditional path-planning methods. We present an end to end reinforcement learning framework based on Soft Actor Critic that learns flow-aware navigation policies using only local velocity measurements. Through extensive evaluation across diverse and dynamically rich scenarios, our method demonstrates substantial energy savings and robust generalization to previously unseen flow conditions, offering a promising path toward long term autonomy in ocean environments. The navigation paths generated by our proposed approach show an improvement in energy conservation 30 to 50 percent compared to the existing state of the art techniques.
Towards agent-based-model informed neural networks
In this article, we present a framework for designing neural networks that remain consistent with the underlying principles of agent-based models. We begin by highlighting the limitations of standard neural differential equations in modeling complex systems, where physical invariants (like energy) are often absent but other constraints (like mass conservation, information locality, bounded rationality) must be enforced. To address this, we introduce Agent-Based-Model informed Neural Networks (ABM-NNs), which leverage restricted graph neural networks and hierarchical decomposition to learn interpretable, structure-preserving dynamics. We validate the framework across three case studies of increasing complexity: (i) a Generalized Lotka-Volterra system, where we recover ground-truth parameters from short trajectories in presence of interventions; (ii) a graph-based SIR contagion model, where our method outperforms state-of-the-art graph learning baselines (GCN, GraphSAGE, Graph Transformer) in out-of-sample forecasting and noise robustness; and (iii) a real-world macroeconomic model of the ten largest economies, where we learn coupled GDP dynamics from empirical data and demonstrate counterfactual analysis for policy interventions.
SlideGen: Collaborative Multimodal Agents for Scientific Slide Generation
Liang, Xin, Zhang, Xiang, Xu, Yiwei, Sun, Siqi, You, Chenyu
Generating academic slides from scientific papers is a challenging multimodal reasoning task that requires both long context understanding and deliberate visual planning. Existing approaches largely reduce it to text only summarization, overlooking the visual component and design intensive nature of slide creation. In this paper we introduce SlideGen, an agentic, modular, and visual in the loop framework for scientific paper to slide generation. SlideGen orchestrates a group of vision language agents that reason collaboratively over the document structure and semantics, producing editable PPTX slides with logical flow and compelling visual presentation. By integrating coordinated outlining, mapping, arrangement, note synthesis, and iterative refinement, our system consistently delivers slides of expert level quality. Across diverse benchmarks and strong baselines, SlideGen outperforms existing methods in visual quality, content faithfulness, and readability, positioning it as the new state of the art in automated slide generation. Our work establishes a foundation for design aware multimodal slide generation, demonstrating how agentic collaboration can bridge understanding and presentation in complex multimodal reasoning tasks.
MARL Warehouse Robots
Allman, Price, Thang, Lian, Simmons, Dre, Riaz, Salmon
Our research investigates the complex task of multiple autonomous agents learning to coordinate and deliver packages in warehouse environments--a problem requiring implicit communication, collision avoidance, and efficient task allocation without centralized control. Traditional warehouse automation relies on centralized planning systems that face scalability limitations; multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) offers an alternative through decentralized learned policies, but requires solving the credit assignment problem. We compare MARL algorithms on warehouse coordination: QMIX [Rashid et al., 2018] (value decomposition), IPPO (independent learning), and MASAC (centralized critic). Our study progresses from MPE for validation to RWARE for warehouse evaluation, culminating in Unity 3D deployment where agents demonstrate learned package delivery behavior. QMIX emerged as the best performer after systematic comparison. Our contributions: (1) hyperparameter analysis showing default configurations fail on sparse-reward warehouse tasks, (2) comparative evaluation across algorithms and scales, (3) Unity ML-Agents integration demonstrating sim-to-sim transfer with successful package delivery, and (4) identification of scaling challenges. Full experimental details and results are documented in our Quarto documentation book. 1
Orchestrator Multi-Agent Clinical Decision Support System for Secondary Headache Diagnosis in Primary Care
Wu, Xizhi, Garduno-Rapp, Nelly Estefanie, Rousseau, Justin F, Thakkallapally, Mounika, Zhang, Hang, Ji, Yuelyu, Visweswaran, Shyam, Peng, Yifan, Wang, Yanshan
Unlike most primary headaches, secondary headaches need specialized care and can have devastating consequences if not treated promptly. Clinical guidelines highlight several 'red flag' features, such as thunderclap onset, meningismus, papilledema, focal neurologic deficits, signs of temporal arteritis, systemic illness, and the 'worst headache of their life' presentation. Despite these guidelines, determining which patients require urgent evaluation remains challenging in primary care settings. Clinicians often work with limited time, incomplete information, and diverse symptom presentations, which can lead to under-recognition and inappropriate care. We present a large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent clinical decision support system built on an orchestrator-specialist architecture, designed to perform explicit and interpretable secondary headache diagnosis from free-text clinical vignettes. The multi-agent system decomposes diagnosis into seven domain-specialized agents, each producing a structured and evidence-grounded rationale, while a central orchestrator performs task decomposition and coordinates agent routing. We evaluated the multi-agent system using 90 expert-validated secondary headache cases and compared its performance with a single-LLM baseline across two prompting strategies: question-based prompting (QPrompt) and clinical practice guideline-based prompting (GPrompt). We tested five open-source LLMs (Qwen-30B, GPT-OSS-20B, Qwen-14B, Qwen-8B, and Llama-3.1-8B), and found that the orchestrated multi-agent system with GPrompt consistently achieved the highest F1 scores, with larger gains in smaller models. These findings demonstrate that structured multi-agent reasoning improves accuracy beyond prompt engineering alone and offers a transparent, clinically aligned approach for explainable decision support in secondary headache diagnosis.