Feature transformation enhances downstream task performance by generating informative features through mathematical feature crossing. Despite the advancements in deep learning, feature transformation remains essential for structured data, where deep models often struggle to capture complex feature interactions. Prior literature on automated feature transformation has achieved success but often relies on heuristics or exhaustive searches, leading to inefficient and time-consuming processes. Recent works employ reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance traditional approaches through a more effective trial-and-error way. However, two limitations remain: 1) Dynamic feature expansion during the transformation process, which causes instability and increases the learning complexity for RL agents; 2) Insufficient cooperation and communication between agents, which results in suboptimal feature crossing operations and degraded model performance. To address them, we propose a novel heterogeneous multi-agent RL framework to enable cooperative and scalable feature transformation. The framework comprises three heterogeneous agents, grouped into two types, each designed to select essential features and operations for feature crossing. To enhance communication among these agents, we implement a shared critic mechanism that facilitates information exchange during feature transformation. To handle the dynamically expanding feature space, we tailor multi-head attention-based feature agents to select suitable features for feature crossing. Additionally, we introduce a state encoding technique during the optimization process to stabilize and enhance the learning dynamics of the RL agents, resulting in more robust and reliable transformation policies. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness, efficiency, robustness, and interpretability of our model.

Emotion-aware customer service needs in-domain conversational data, rich annotations, and predictive capabilities, but existing resources for emotion recognition are often out-of-domain, narrowly labeled, and focused on post-hoc detection. To address this, we conducted a controlled Wizard of Oz (WOZ) experiment to elicit interactions with targeted affective trajectories. The resulting corpus, EmoWOZ-CS, contains 2,148 bilingual (Dutch-English) written dialogues from 179 participants across commercial aviation, e-commerce, online travel agencies, and telecommunication scenarios. Our contributions are threefold: (1) Evaluate WOZ-based operator-steered valence trajectories as a design for emotion research; (2) Quantify human annotation performance and variation, including divergences between self-reports and third-party judgments; (3) Benchmark detection and forward-looking emotion inference in real-time support. Findings show neutral dominates participant messages; desire and gratitude are the most frequent non-neutral emotions. Agreement is moderate for multilabel emotions and valence, lower for arousal and dominance; self-reports diverge notably from third-party labels, aligning most for neutral, gratitude, and anger. Objective strategies often elicit neutrality or gratitude, while suboptimal strategies increase anger, annoyance, disappointment, desire, and confusion. Some affective strategies (cheerfulness, gratitude) foster positive reciprocity, whereas others (apology, empathy) can also leave desire, anger, or annoyance. Temporal analysis confirms successful conversation-level steering toward prescribed trajectories, most distinctly for negative targets; positive and neutral targets yield similar final valence distributions. Benchmarks highlight the difficulty of forward-looking emotion inference from prior turns, underscoring the complexity of proactive emotion-aware support.

Abstract--The Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) problem aims to find collision-free paths for multiple agents while optimizing objectives such as the sum of costs or makespan. MAPF has wide applications in domains like automated warehouses, manufacturing systems, and airport logistics. However, most MAPF formulations assume a simplified robot model for planning, which overlooks execution-time factors such as kinodynamic constraints, communication latency, and controller variability. This gap between planning and execution is problematic for time-sensitive applications. T o bridge this gap, we propose REMAP, an execution-informed MAPF planning framework that can be combined with leading search-based MAPF planners with minor changes. Our framework integrates the proposed ExecTimeNet to accurately estimate execution time based on planned paths. We demonstrate our method for solving MAPF with Real-world Deadlines (MAPF-RD) problem, where agents must reach their goals before a predefined wall-clock time. We integrate our framework with two popular MAPF methods, MAPF-LNS and CBS. Experiments show that REMAP achieves up to 20% improvement in solution quality over baseline methods (e.g., constant execution speed estimators) on benchmark maps with up to 300 agents. The Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) problem seeks to find collision-free paths for multiple agents in a shared environment while optimizing objectives such as the sum of costs or makespan. This problem is a fundamental challenge in settings such as automated warehouses [1], traffic intersections [2], and airport logistics [3]. State-of-the-art MAPF methods can efficiently coordinate hundreds of agents, making MAPF a promising solution for these domains.

We study whether large language models acting as autonomous bidders can tacitly collude by coordinating when to accept platform posted payouts in repeated Dutch auctions, without any communication. We present a minimal repeated auction model that yields a simple incentive compatibility condition and a closed form threshold for sustainable collusion for subgame-perfect Nash equilibria. In controlled simulations with multiple language models, we observe systematic supra-competitive prices in small auction settings and a return to competitive behavior as the number of bidders in the market increases, consistent with the theoretical model. We also find LLMs use various mechanisms to facilitate tacit coordination, such as focal point acceptance timing versus patient strategies that track the theoretical incentives. The results provide, to our knowledge, the first evidence of bidder side tacit collusion by LLMs and show that market structure levers can be more effective than capability limits for mitigation.

The risk of indoor airborne transmission among co-located individuals is generally non-uniform, which remains a critical challenge for public health modelling. Thus, we present CompARE, an integrated risk assessment framework for indoor airborne disease transmission that reveals a striking bimodal distribution of infection risk driven by airflow dynamics and human behavior. Combining computational fluid dynamics (CFD), machine learning (ML), and agent-based modeling (ABM), our model captures the complex interplay between aerosol transport, human mobility, and environmental context. Based on a prototypical childcare center, our approach quantifies how incorporation of ABM can unveil significantly different infection risk profiles across agents, with more than two-fold change in risk of infection between the individuals with the lowest and highest risks in more than 90% of cases, despite all individuals being in the same overall environment. We found that infection risk distributions can exhibit not only a striking bimodal pattern in certain activities but also exponential decay and fat-tailed behavior in others. Specifically, we identify low-risk modes arising from source containment, as well as high-risk tails from prolonged close contact. Our approach enables near-real-time scenario analysis and provides policy-relevant quantitative insights into how ventilation design, spatial layout, and social distancing policies can mitigate transmission risk. These findings challenge simple distance-based heuristics and support the design of targeted, evidence-based interventions in high-occupancy indoor settings.

Current AI agents excel in familiar settings, but fail sharply when faced with novel tasks with unseen vocabularies -- a core limitation of procedural memory systems. We present the first benchmark that isolates procedural memory retrieval from task execution, evaluating whether agents can recognize functionally equivalent procedures that span different object instantiations. Using ALFWorld, we construct dual corpora of expert and LLM-generated trajectories and evaluate six retrieval methods using systematically stratified queries. Our results expose a clear generalization cliff: embedding-based methods perform strongly on familiar contexts, yet degrade considerably on novel ones, while LLM-generated procedural abstractions demonstrate reliable cross-context transfer. Controlled ablations show that although embeddings capture some lexical-level abstraction, they fundamentally treat procedures as unordered bags of words, discarding temporal structure necessary for cross-context transfer. Corpus scale delivers far larger gains than representation enrichment, revealing an architectural ceiling in current encoders. Our benchmark offers the first diagnostic framework separating genuine procedural understanding from surface-level memorization and gives tools for developing retrieval systems capable of dependable generalization. Resources available at our GitHub repository (https://github.com/qpiai/Proced_mem_bench).

The Multi-Traveling Salesman Problem (MTSP) is a commonly used mathematical model for multi-agent task allocation. However, as the number of agents and task targets increases, existing optimization-based methods often incur prohibitive computational costs, posing significant challenges to large-scale coordination in unmanned systems. To address this issue, this paper proposes a K-means-inspired task allocation framework that reformulates the MTSP as a spatially constrained classification process. By leveraging spatial coherence, the proposed method enables fast estimation of path costs and efficient task grouping, thereby fundamentally reducing overall computational complexity. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the framework can maintain high solution quality even in extremely large-scale scenarios-for instance, in tasks involving 1000 agents and 5000 targets. The findings indicate that this "cluster-then-route" decomposition strategy offers an efficient and reliable solution for large-scale multi-agent task allocation.

Document Visual Question Answering (VQA) requires models to not only extract accurate textual answers but also precisely localize them within document images, a capability critical for interpretability in high-stakes applications. However, existing systems achieve strong textual accuracy while producing unreliable spatial grounding, or sacrifice performance for interpretability. We present ARIAL (Agentic Reasoning for Interpretable Answer Localization), a modular framework that orchestrates specialized tools through an LLM-based planning agent to achieve both precise answer extraction and reliable spatial grounding. ARIAL decomposes Document VQA into structured subtasks: OCR-based text extraction with TrOCR, retrieval-augmented context selection using semantic search, answer generation via a fine-tuned Gemma 3-27B model, and explicit bounding-box localization through text-to-region alignment. This modular architecture produces transparent reasoning traces, enabling tool-level auditability and independent component optimization. We evaluate ARIAL on four benchmarks (DocVQA, FUNSD, CORD, and SROIE) using both textual accuracy (ANLS) and spatial precision (mAP at IoU 0.50 to 0.95). ARIAL achieves state-of-the-art results across all datasets: 88.7 ANLS and 50.1 mAP on DocVQA, 90.0 ANLS and 50.3 mAP on FUNSD, 85.5 ANLS and 60.2 mAP on CORD, and 93.1 ANLS on SROIE, surpassing the previous best method (DLaVA) by +2.8 ANLS and +3.9 mAP on DocVQA. Our work demonstrates how agentic orchestration of specialized tools can simultaneously improve performance and interpretability, providing a pathway toward trustworthy, explainable document AI systems.

With the remarkable success of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in perception tasks, enhancing their complex reasoning capabilities has emerged as a critical research focus. Existing models still suffer from challenges such as opaque reasoning paths and insufficient generalization ability. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, which has demonstrated significant efficacy in language models by enhancing reasoning transparency and output interpretability, holds promise for improving model reasoning capabilities when extended to the multimodal domain. This paper provides a systematic review centered on "Multimodal Chain-of-Thought" (MCoT). First, it analyzes the background and theoretical motivations for its inception from the perspectives of technical evolution and task demands. Then, it introduces mainstream MCoT methods from three aspects: CoT paradigms, the post-training stage, and the inference stage, while also analyzing their underlying mechanisms. Furthermore, the paper summarizes existing evaluation benchmarks and metrics, and discusses the application scenarios of MCoT. Finally, it analyzes the challenges currently facing MCoT and provides an outlook on its future research directions.

Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate SQL queries from natural language questions but struggle with database-specific schemas and tacit domain knowledge. We introduce a framework for continual learning from human feedback in text-to-SQL, where a learning agent receives natural language feedback to refine queries and distills the revealed knowledge for reuse on future tasks. This distilled knowledge is stored in a structured memory, enabling the agent to improve execution accuracy over time. We design and evaluate multiple variations of a learning agent architecture that vary in how they capture and retrieve past experiences. Experiments on the BIRD benchmark Dev set show that memory-augmented agents, particularly the Procedural Agent, achieve significant accuracy gains and error reduction by leveraging human-in-the-loop feedback. Our results highlight the importance of transforming tacit human expertise into reusable knowledge, paving the way for more adaptive, domain-aware text-to-SQL systems that continually learn from a human-in-the-loop.