Financial markets pose fundamental challenges for asset return prediction due to their high dimensionality, non-stationarity, and persistent volatility. Despite advances in large language models and multi-agent systems, current quantitative research pipelines suffer from limited automation, weak interpretability, and fragmented coordination across key components such as factor mining and model innovation. In this paper, we propose R&D-Agent for Quantitative Finance, in short R&D-Agent(Q), the first data-centric multi-agent framework designed to automate the full-stack research and development of quantitative strategies via coordinated factor-model co-optimization. R&D-Agent(Q)decomposes the quant process into two iterative stages: a Research stage that dynamically sets goal-aligned prompts, formulates hypotheses based on domain priors, and maps them to concrete tasks, and a Development stage that employs a code-generation agent, Co-STEER, to implement task-specific code, which is then executed in real-market backtests. The two stages are connected through a feedback stage that thoroughly evaluates experimental outcomes and informs subsequent iterations, with a multi-armed bandit scheduler for adaptive direction selection. Empirically, R&D-Agent(Q) achieves up to 2 higher annualized returns than classical factor libraries using 70% fewer factors, and outperforms state-of-the-art deep time-series models on real markets. Its joint factor-model optimization delivers a strong balance between predictive accuracy and strategy robustness.

Howeverc,athesebinVLM-basedet above approaches remain limited in their support for diverse embodiment types.

Agents based on large language models (LLMs) for machine learning engineering (MLE) can automatically implement ML models via code generation. However, existing approaches to build such agents often rely heavily on inherent LLM knowledge and employ coarse exploration strategies that modify the entire code structure at once. This limits their ability to select effective task-specific models and perform deep exploration within specific components, such as experimenting extensively with feature engineering options. To overcome these, we propose MLESTAR, a novel approach to build MLE agents. MLE-STAR first leverages external knowledge by using a search engine to retrieve effective models from the web, forming an initial solution, then iteratively refines it by exploring various strategies targeting specific ML components. This exploration is guided by ablation studies analyzing the impact of individual code blocks. Furthermore, we introduce a novel ensembling method using an effective strategy suggested by MLE-STAR. Our experimental results show that MLE-STAR achieves medals in 64% of the Kaggle competitions on the MLE-bench, significantly outperforming the best alternative.1

A multi-agent system (MAS) enhances its capacity to solve complex natural language processing (NLP) tasks through collaboration among multiple agents, where consensus-seeking serves as a fundamental mechanism. However, existing consensus-seeking approaches typically rely on voting mechanisms to judge consensus, overlooking contradictions in system-internal beliefs that destabilize the consensus. Moreover, these methods often involve agents updating their results through indiscriminate collaboration with every other agent. Such uniform interaction fails to identify the optimal collaborators for each agent, hindering the emergence of a stable consensus. To address these challenges, we provide a theoretical framework for selecting optimal collaborators that maximize consensus stability. Based on the theorems, we propose the Belief-Calibrated Consensus Seeking (BCCS) framework to facilitate stable consensus via selecting optimal collaborators and calibrating the consensus judgment by system-internal beliefs. Experimental results on the MATH and MMLU benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed BCCS framework outperforms the best existing results by 2.23% and 3.95% of accuracy on challenging tasks, respectively.

In typical graph neural networks (GNNs), feature representation learning naturally evolves through iteratively updating node features and exchanging information based on graph topology. In this context, we conceptualize that the learning process in GNNs is a mean-field game (MFG), where each graph node is an agent, interacting with its topologically connected neighbors. However, current GNNs often employ the identical MFG strategy across different graph datasets, regardless of whether the graph exhibits homophilic or heterophilic characteristics. To address this challenge, we propose to formulate the learning mechanism into a variational framework of the MFG inverse problem, introducing an in-context selective message passing paradigm for each agent, which promotes the best overall outcome for the graph. Specifically, we seek for the application-adaptive transportation function (controlling information exchange throughout the graph) and reaction function (controlling feature representation learning on each agent), on the fly, which allows us to uncover the most suitable selective mechanism of message passing by solving an MFG variational problem through the lens of Hamiltonian flows. Taken together, our variational framework unifies existing GNN models into various mean-field games with distinct equilibrium states, each characterized by the learned in-context message passing operators. Furthermore, we present an agnostic end-to-end deep model, coined Game-of-GNN, to jointly identify the message passing mechanism and fine-tune the GNN hyper-parameters on top of the elucidated message passing operators. Game-of-GNN has achieved SOTA performance on diverse graph data, including popular benchmark datasets and human connectomes. More importantly, the mathematical insight of MFG framework provides a new window to understand the foundational principles of graph learning as an interactive dynamical system, which allows us to reshape the idea of designing next-generation GNN models.

In settings where ML models are used to inform the allocation of resources, agents affected by the allocation decisions might have an incentive to strategically change their features to secure better outcomes. While prior work has studied strategic responses broadly, disentangling misreporting from genuine adaptation remains a fundamental challenge. In this paper, we propose a causally-motivated approach to identify and quantify how much an agent misreports on average by distinguishing deceptive changes in their features from genuine adaptation. Our key insight is that, unlike genuine adaptation, misreported features do not causally affect downstream variables (i.e., causal descendants). We exploit this asymmetry by comparing the causal effect of misreported features on their causal descendants as derived from manipulated datasets against those from unmanipulated datasets. We formally prove identifiability of the misreporting rate and characterize the variance of our estimator. We empirically validate our theoretical results using a semi-synthetic and real Medicare dataset with misreported data, demonstrating that our approach can be employed to identify misreporting in real-world scenarios.

Adaptive cooperation in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) requires policies to express homogeneous, specialised, or mixed behaviours, yet achieving this adaptivity remains a critical challenge. While parameter sharing (PS) is standard for efficient learning, it notoriously suppresses the behavioural diversity required for specialisation. This failure is largely due to cross-agent gradient interference, a problem we find is surprisingly exacerbated by the common practice of coupling agent IDs with observations. Existing remedies typically add complexity through altered objectives, manual preset diversity levels, or sequential updates - raising a fundamental question: can shared policies adapt without these intricacies? We propose a solution built on a key insight: an agent-conditioned hypernetwork can generate agent-specific parameters and decouple observationand agent-conditioned gradients, directly countering the interference from coupling agent IDs with observations. Our resulting method, HyperMARL, avoids the complexities of prior work and empirically reduces policy gradient variance. Across diverse MARL benchmarks (22 scenarios, up to 30 agents), HyperMARL achieves performance competitive with six key baselines while preserving behavioural diversity comparable to non-parameter sharing methods, establishing it as a versatile and principled approach for adaptive MARL.

We propose HETEROGENEOUSSWARMS, an algorithm to design multi-LLM systems by jointly optimizing model roles and weights. We represent multi-LLM systems as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) of LLMs with topological message passing for collaborative generation.

Multi-agent Inverse Reinforcement Learning (MAIRL) aims to recover agent reward functions from expert demonstrations. We characterize the feasible reward set in Markov games, identifying all reward functions that rationalize a given equilibrium. However, equilibrium-based observations are often ambiguous: a single Nash equilibrium can correspond to many reward structures, potentially changing the game's nature in multi-agent systems. We address this by introducing entropyregularized Markov games, which yield a unique equilibrium while preserving strategic incentives. For this setting, we provide a sample complexity analysis detailing how errors affect learned policy performance. Our work establishes theoretical foundations and practical insights for MAIRL.

Large language models are quickly becoming the foundation for intelligent agents that are capable of using tools. However, training such agents is challenging because it requires human creation and annotation of a diverse set of tasks, tools, and evaluation criteria. In this paper, we propose the Self-Challenging framework for training an agent on high-quality tasks that are generated by itself. The agent first plays the role of challenger and generates a task after interacting with the given tools. The tasks take the form of a novel general class of problems termed Code-as-Task, which are defined by an instruction, a verification function and solution and failure cases which serve as tests, allowing to filter only for highquality tasks. The agent then takes an executor role and trains on those tasks with reinforcement learning using the evaluation feedback as a reward. Evaluation on two existing multi-turn tool-use agent benchmarks, M3ToolEval and TauBench, shows the Self-Challenging framework achieves over a two-fold improvement in Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct,