Agents
Optimal Safety-Aware Scheduling for Multi-Agent Aerial 3D Printing with Utility Maximization under Dependency Constraints
Stamatopoulos, Marios-Nektarios, Velhal, Shridhar, Banerjee, Avijit, Nikolakopoulos, George
Abstract--This article presents a novel coordination and task-planning framework to enable the simultaneous conflict-free collaboration of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UA Vs) for aerial 3D printing. The proposed framework formulates an optimization problem that takes a construction mission divided into sub-tasks and a team of autonomous UA Vs, along with limited volume and battery. It generates an optimal mission plan comprising task assignments and scheduling, while accounting for task dependencies arising from the geometric and structural requirements of the 3D design, inter-UA V safety constraints, material usage and total flight time of each UA V. The potential conflicts occurring during the simultaneous operation of the UA Vs are addressed at a segment-level by dynamically selecting the starting time and location of each task to guarantee collision-free parallel execution. An importance prioritization is proposed to accelerate the computation by guiding the solution towards more important tasks. Additionally, a utility maximization formulation is proposed to dynamically determine the optimal number of UA Vs required for a given mission, balancing the trade-off between minimizing makespan and the deployment of excess agents. The proposed framework's effectiveness is evaluated through a Gazebo-based simulation setup, where agents are coordinated by a mission control module allocating the printing tasks based on the generated optimal scheduling plan while remaining within the material and battery constraints of each UA V. A video of the whole mission is available in the following link: https://youtu.be/b4jwhkNPT Note to Practitioners--This framework addresses the critical need for efficiency and safety in planning and scheduling multiple aerial robots for parallel aerial 3D printing. Existing approaches lack safety guarantees for UA Vs during parallel construction. This work tackles these challenges by ensuring safety during parallel operations and effectively managing task dependencies.
The Missing Layer of AGI: From Pattern Alchemy to Coordination Physics
Influential critiques argue that Large Language Models (LLMs) are a dead end for AGI: "mere pattern matchers" structurally incapable of reasoning or planning. We argue this conclusion misidentifies the bottleneck: it confuses the ocean with the net. Pattern repositories are the necessary System-1 substrate; the missing component is a System-2 coordination layer that selects, constrains, and binds these patterns. We formalize this layer via UCCT, a theory of semantic anchoring that models reasoning as a phase transition governed by effective support (rho_d), representational mismatch (d_r), and an adaptive anchoring budget (gamma log k). Under this lens, ungrounded generation is simply an unbaited retrieval of the substrate's maximum likelihood prior, while "reasoning" emerges when anchors shift the posterior toward goal-directed constraints. We translate UCCT into architecture with MACI, a coordination stack that implements baiting (behavior-modulated debate), filtering (Socratic judging), and persistence (transactional memory). By reframing common objections as testable coordination failures, we argue that the path to AGI runs through LLMs, not around them.
MedTutor-R1: Socratic Personalized Medical Teaching with Multi-Agent Simulation
He, Zhitao, Yang, Haolin, Qin, Zeyu, Fung, Yi R
The significant gap between rising demands for clinical training and the scarcity of expert instruction poses a major challenge to medical education. With powerful capabilities in personalized guidance, Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising solution to bridge this gap. However, current research focuses mainly on one-on-one knowledge instruction, overlooking collaborative reasoning, a key skill for students developed in teamwork like ward rounds. To this end, we develop ClinEdu, a multi-agent pedagogical simulator with personality-driven patients and diverse student cohorts, enabling controlled testing of complex pedagogical processes and scalable generation of teaching data. Based on ClinEdu, we construct ClinTeach, a large Socratic teaching dialogue dataset that captures the complexities of group instruction. We then train MedTutor-R1, the first multimodal Socratic tutor designed for one-to-many instruction in clinical medical education. MedTutor-R1 is first instruction-tuned on our ClinTeach dataset and then optimized with reinforcement learning, using rewards derived from a three-axis rubric, covering structural fidelity, analytical quality, and clinical safety, to refine its adaptive Socratic strategies. For authentic in-situ assessment, we use simulation-based interactive evaluation that redeploys the tutor back into ClinEdu. Experimental results demonstrate that our MedTutor-R1 outperforms the base model by over 20% in average pedagogical score and is comparable to o3, while also exhibiting high adaptability in handling a varying number of students. This promising performance underscores the effectiveness of our pedagogical simulator, ClinEdu.
CureAgent: A Training-Free Executor-Analyst Framework for Clinical Reasoning
Current clinical agent built on small LLMs, such as TxAgent suffer from a \textit{Context Utilization Failure}, where models successfully retrieve biomedical evidence due to supervised finetuning but fail to ground their diagnosis in that information. In this work, we propose the Executor-Analyst Framework, a modular architecture that decouples the syntactic precision of tool execution from the semantic robustness of clinical reasoning. By orchestrating specialized TxAgents (Executors) with long-context foundation models (Analysts), we mitigate the reasoning deficits observed in monolithic models. Beyond simple modularity, we demonstrate that a Stratified Ensemble strategy significantly outperforms global pooling by preserving evidentiary diversity, effectively addressing the information bottleneck. Furthermore, our stress tests reveal critical scaling insights: (1) a \textit{Context-Performance Paradox}, where extending reasoning contexts beyond 12k tokens introduces noise that degrades accuracy; and (2) the \textit{Curse of Dimensionality} in action spaces, where expanding toolsets necessitates hierarchical retrieval strategies. Crucially, our approach underscores the potential of training-free architectural engineering, achieving state-of-the-art performance on CURE-Bench without the need for expensive end-to-end finetuning. This provides a scalable, agile foundation for the next generation of trustworthy AI-driven therapeutics. Code has been released on https://github.com/June01/CureAgent.
GRASP: Graph Reasoning Agents for Systems Pharmacology with Human-in-the-Loop
Bazgir, Omid, Manthapuri, Vineeth, Rattsev, Ilia, Jafarnejad, Mohammad
Quantitative Systems Pharmacology (QSP) modeling is essential for drug development but it requires significant time investment that limits the throughput of domain experts. We present \textbf{GRASP} -- a multi-agent, graph-reasoning framework with a human-in-the-loop conversational interface -- that encodes QSP models as typed biological knowledge graphs and compiles them to executable MATLAB/SimBiology code while preserving units, mass balance, and physiological constraints. A two-phase workflow -- \textsc{Understanding} (graph reconstruction of legacy code) and \textsc{Action} (constraint-checked, language-driven modification) -- is orchestrated by a state machine with iterative validation. GRASP performs breadth-first parameter-alignment around new entities to surface dependent quantities and propose biologically plausible defaults, and it runs automatic execution/diagnostics until convergence. In head-to-head evaluations using LLM-as-judge, GRASP outperforms SME-guided CoT and ToT baselines across biological plausibility, mathematical correctness, structural fidelity, and code quality (\(\approx\)9--10/10 vs.\ 5--7/10). BFS alignment achieves F1 = 0.95 for dependency discovery, units, and range. These results demonstrate that graph-structured, agentic workflows can make QSP model development both accessible and rigorous, enabling domain experts to specify mechanisms in natural language without sacrificing biomedical fidelity.
The Seeds of Scheming: Weakness of Will in the Building Blocks of Agentic Systems
Large language models display a peculiar form of inconsistency: they "know" the correct answer but fail to act on it. In human philosophy, this tension between global judgment and local impulse is called akrasia, or weakness of will. We propose akrasia as a foundational concept for analyzing inconsistency and goal drift in agentic AI systems. To operationalize it, we introduce a preliminary version of the Akrasia Benchmark, currently a structured set of prompting conditions (Baseline [B], Synonym [S], Temporal [T], and Temptation [X]) that measures when a model's local response contradicts its own prior commitments. The benchmark enables quantitative comparison of "self-control" across model families, decoding strategies, and temptation types. Beyond single-model evaluation, we outline how micro-level akrasia may compound into macro-level instability in multi-agent systems that may be interpreted as "scheming" or deliberate misalignment. By reframing inconsistency as weakness of will, this work connects agentic behavior to classical theories of agency and provides an empirical bridge between philosophy, psychology, and the emerging science of agentic AI.
RevoNAD: Reflective Evolutionary Exploration for Neural Architecture Design
Chang, Gyusam, Yoon, Jeongyoon, yi, Shin han, Lee, JaeHyeok, Jang, Sujin, Kim, Sangpil
Recent progress in leveraging large language models (LLMs) has enabled Neural Architecture Design (NAD) systems to generate new architecture not limited from manually predefined search space. Nevertheless, LLM-driven generation remains challenging: the token-level design loop is discrete and non-differentiable, preventing feedback from smoothly guiding architectural improvement. These methods, in turn, commonly suffer from mode collapse into redundant structures or drift toward infeasible designs when constructive reasoning is not well grounded. We introduce RevoNAD, a reflective evolutionary orchestrator that effectively bridges LLM-based reasoning with feedback-aligned architectural search. First, RevoNAD presents a Multi-round Multi-expert Consensus to transfer isolated design rules into meaningful architectural clues. Then, Adaptive Reflective Exploration adjusts the degree of exploration leveraging reward variance; it explores when feedback is uncertain and refines when stability is reached. Finally, Pareto-guided Evolutionary Selection effectively promotes architectures that jointly optimize accuracy, efficiency, latency, confidence, and structural diversity. Across CIFAR10, CIFAR100, ImageNet16-120, COCO-5K, and Cityscape, RevoNAD achieves state-of-the-art performance. Ablation and transfer studies further validate the effectiveness of RevoNAD in allowing practically reliable, and deployable neural architecture design.
MCP-AI: Protocol-Driven Intelligence Framework for Autonomous Reasoning in Healthcare
ElSayed, Zag, Erickson, Craig, Pedapati, Ernest
Healthcare AI systems have historically faced challenges in merging contextual reasoning, long-term state management, and human-verifiable workflows into a cohesive framework. This paper introduces a completely innovative architecture and concept: combining the Model Context Protocol (MCP) with a specific clinical application, known as MCP-AI. This integration allows intelligent agents to reason over extended periods, collaborate securely, and adhere to authentic clinical logic, representing a significant shift away from traditional Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) and prompt-based Large Language Models (LLMs). As healthcare systems become more complex, the need for autonomous, context-aware clinical reasoning frameworks has become urgent. We present MCP-AI, a novel architecture for explainable medical decision-making built upon the Model Context Protocol (MCP) a modular, executable specification for orchestrating generative and descriptive AI agents in real-time workflows. Each MCP file captures clinical objectives, patient context, reasoning state, and task logic, forming a reusable and auditable memory object. Unlike conventional CDSS or stateless prompt-based AI systems, MCP-AI supports adaptive, longitudinal, and collaborative reasoning across care settings. MCP-AI is validated through two use cases: (1) diagnostic modeling of Fragile X Syndrome with comorbid depression, and (2) remote coordination for Type 2 Diabetes and hypertension. In either scenario, the protocol facilitates physician-in-the-loop validation, streamlines clinical processes, and guarantees secure transitions of AI responsibilities between healthcare providers. The system connects with HL7/FHIR interfaces and adheres to regulatory standards, such as HIPAA and FDA SaMD guidelines. MCP-AI provides a scalable basis for interpretable, composable, and safety-oriented AI within upcoming clinical environments.
Robust forecast aggregation via additional queries
Frongillo, Rafael, Monroe, Mary, Neyman, Eric, Waggoner, Bo
We study the problem of robust forecast aggregation: combining expert forecasts with provable accuracy guarantees compared to the best possible aggregation of the underlying information. Prior work shows strong impossibility results, e.g. that even under natural assumptions, no aggregation of the experts' individual forecasts can outperform simply following a random expert (Neyman and Roughgarden, 2022). In this paper, we introduce a more general framework that allows the principal to elicit richer information from experts through structured queries. Our framework ensures that experts will truthfully report their underlying beliefs, and also enables us to define notions of complexity over the difficulty of asking these queries. Under a general model of independent but overlapping expert signals, we show that optimal aggregation is achievable in the worst case with each complexity measure bounded above by the number of agents $n$. We further establish tight tradeoffs between accuracy and query complexity: aggregation error decreases linearly with the number of queries, and vanishes when the "order of reasoning" and number of agents relevant to a query is $ω(\sqrt{n})$. These results demonstrate that modest extensions to the space of expert queries dramatically strengthen the power of robust forecast aggregation. We therefore expect that our new query framework will open up a fruitful line of research in this area.
A Survey of Bugs in AI-Generated Code
Gao, Ruofan, Tahir, Amjed, Liang, Peng, Susnjak, Teo, Khomh, Foutse
Developers are widely using AI code-generation models, aiming to increase productivity and efficiency. However, there are also quality concerns regarding the AI-generated code. The generated code is produced by models trained on publicly available code, which are known to contain bugs and quality issues. Those issues can cause trust and maintenance challenges during the development process. Several quality issues associated with AI-generated code have been reported, including bugs and defects. However, these findings are often scattered and lack a systematic summary. A comprehensive review is currently lacking to reveal the types and distribution of these errors, possible remediation strategies, as well as their correlation with the specific models. In this paper, we systematically analyze the existing AI-generated code literature to establish an overall understanding of bugs and defects in generated code, providing a reference for future model improvement and quality assessment. We aim to understand the nature and extent of bugs in AI-generated code, and provide a classification of bug types and patterns present in code generated by different models. We also discuss possible fixes and mitigation strategies adopted to eliminate bugs from the generated code.