As artificial intelligence (AI) agents are deployed across economic domains, understanding their strategic behavior and market-level impact becomes critical. This paper puts forward a groundbreaking new framework that is the first to capture the real-world economic forces that shape agentic labor markets: adverse selection, moral hazard, and reputation dynamics. Our framework encapsulates three core capabilities that successful LLM-agents will need: \textbf{metacognition} (accurate self-assessment of skills), \textbf{competitive awareness} (modeling rivals and market dynamics), and \textbf{long-horizon strategic planning}. We illustrate our framework through a tractable simulated gig economy where agentic Large Language Models (LLMs) compete for jobs, develop skills, and adapt their strategies under competitive pressure. Our simulations illustrate how LLM agents explicitly prompted with reasoning capabilities learn to strategically self-improve and demonstrate superior adaptability to changing market conditions. At the market level, our simulations reproduce classic macroeconomic phenomena found in human labor markets, while controlled experiments reveal potential AI-driven economic trends, such as rapid monopolization and systemic price deflation. This work provides a foundation to further explore the economic properties of AI-driven labour markets, and a conceptual framework to study the strategic reasoning capabilities in agents competing in the emerging economy.

The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) from passive responders to autonomous agents necessitates a fundamental shift in learning paradigms -- from static imitation to incentive-driven decision making. However, this transition is significantly impeded by the lack of scalable infrastructure capable of constructing high-quality interaction signals for effective policy learning. To address this, we introduce a comprehensive method designed to systematically scale the diversity and complexity of interactive environments. Our method realizes this scaling by addressing three orthogonal dimensions: (1) Complexity: NexAU, a flexible agent framework that supports building complex agent hierarchies via simple configurations; (2) Diversity: NexA4A automatically generates diverse agent hierarchies from natural language to cover infinite domains; and (3) Fidelity: NexGAP bridges the simulation-reality gap by integrating dynamic real-world environment for grounded trajectories synthesis. We train Nex-N1 upon the diverse and complex interactive environments established by our infrastructure. Empirical results on benchmarks such as SWE-bench and tau2 demonstrate that Nex-N1 consistently outperforms SOTA open-source models and achieves competitive performance against frontier proprietary models on complex agentic tasks. We open-source the Nex ecosystem and model weights to facilitate further research.

Multimodal Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, particularly Vision-Language Models (VLMs), have become integral to critical applications ranging from autonomous decision-making to automated document processing. As these systems scale, they rely heavily on preprocessing pipelines to handle diverse inputs efficiently. However, this dependency on standard preprocessing operations, specifically image downscaling, creates a significant yet often overlooked security vulnerability. While intended for computational optimization, scaling algorithms can be exploited to conceal malicious visual prompts that are invisible to human observers but become active semantic instructions once processed by the model. Current adversarial strategies remain largely static, failing to account for the dynamic nature of modern agentic workflows. To address this gap, we propose Chameleon, a novel, adaptive adversarial framework designed to expose and exploit scaling vulnerabilities in production VLMs. Unlike traditional static attacks, Chameleon employs an iterative, agent-based optimization mechanism that dynamically refines image perturbations based on the target model's real-time feedback. This allows the framework to craft highly robust adversarial examples that survive standard downscaling operations to hijack downstream execution. We evaluate Chameleon against Gemini 2.5 Flash model. Our experiments demonstrate that Chameleon achieves an Attack Success Rate (ASR) of 84.5% across varying scaling factors, significantly outperforming static baseline attacks which average only 32.1%. Furthermore, we show that these attacks effectively compromise agentic pipelines, reducing decision-making accuracy by over 45% in multi-step tasks. Finally, we discuss the implications of these vulnerabilities and propose multi-scale consistency checks as a necessary defense mechanism.

Artificial intelligence systems are increasingly deployed in biomedical research. However, current evaluation frameworks may inadequately assess their effectiveness as research collaborators. This rapid review examines benchmarking practices for AI systems in preclinical biomedical research. Three major databases and two preprint servers were searched from January 1, 2018 to October 31, 2025, identifying 14 benchmarks that assess AI capabilities in literature understanding, experimental design, and hypothesis generation. The results revealed that all current benchmarks assess isolated component capabilities, including data analysis quality, hypothesis validity, and experimental protocol design. However, authentic research collaboration requires integrated workflows spanning multiple sessions, with contextual memory, adaptive dialogue, and constraint propagation. This gap implies that systems excelling on component benchmarks may fail as practical research co-pilots. A process-oriented evaluation framework is proposed that addresses four critical dimensions absent from current benchmarks: dialogue quality, workflow orchestration, session continuity, and researcher experience. These dimensions are essential for evaluating AI systems as research co-pilots rather than as isolated task executors.

Agentic AI systems, software agents with autonomy, decision-making ability, and adaptability, are increasingly used to execute complex tasks on behalf of organisations. Most such systems rely on Large Language Models (LLMs), whose broad semantic capabilities enable powerful language processing but lack explicit, institution-specific grounding. In enterprises, data rarely comes with an inspectable semantic layer, and constructing one typically requires labour-intensive "data archaeology": cleaning, modelling, and curating knowledge into ontologies, taxonomies, and other formal structures. At the same time, explainability methods such as saliency maps expose an "interpretability gap": they highlight what the model attends to but not why, leaving decision processes opaque. In this preprint, we present a case study, developed by Kaiasm and Avantra AI through their work with The Turing Way Practitioners Hub, a forum developed under the InnovateUK BridgeAI program. This study presents a collaborative human-AI approach to building an inspectable semantic layer for Agentic AI. AI agents first propose candidate knowledge structures from diverse data sources; domain experts then validate, correct, and extend these structures, with their feedback used to improve subsequent models. Authors show how this process captures tacit institutional knowledge, improves response quality and efficiency, and mitigates institutional amnesia. We argue for a shift from post-hoc explanation to justifiable Agentic AI, where decisions are grounded in explicit, inspectable evidence and reasoning accessible to both experts and non-specialists.

AI agent-based systems are becoming increasingly integral to modern software architectures, enabling autonomous decision-making, dynamic task execution, and multimodal interactions through large language models (LLMs). However, these systems introduce novel and evolving security challenges, including prompt injection attacks, context poisoning, model manipulation, and opaque agent-to-agent communication, that are not effectively captured by traditional threat modeling frameworks. In this paper, we introduce ASTRIDE, an automated threat modeling platform purpose-built for AI agent-based systems. ASTRIDE extends the classical STRIDE framework by introducing a new threat category, A for AI Agent-Specific Attacks, which encompasses emerging vulnerabilities such as prompt injection, unsafe tool invocation, and reasoning subversion, unique to agent-based applications. To automate threat modeling, ASTRIDE combines a consortium of fine-tuned vision-language models (VLMs) with the OpenAI-gpt-oss reasoning LLM to perform end-to-end analysis directly from visual agent architecture diagrams, such as data flow diagrams(DFDs). LLM agents orchestrate the end-to-end threat modeling automation process by coordinating interactions between the VLM consortium and the reasoning LLM. Our evaluations demonstrate that ASTRIDE provides accurate, scalable, and explainable threat modeling for next-generation intelligent systems. To the best of our knowledge, ASTRIDE is the first framework to both extend STRIDE with AI-specific threats and integrate fine-tuned VLMs with a reasoning LLM to fully automate diagram-driven threat modeling in AI agent-based applications.

This article extends the preprint "Characterizing Agent-Based Model Dynamics via $ε$-Machines and Kolmogorov-Style Complexity" by introducing diffusion models as orthogonal and complementary tools for characterizing the output of agent-based models (ABMs). Where $ε$-machines capture the predictive temporal structure and intrinsic computation of ABM-generated time series, diffusion models characterize high-dimensional cross-sectional distributions, learn underlying data manifolds, and enable synthetic generation of plausible population-level outcomes. We provide a formal analysis demonstrating that the two approaches operate on distinct mathematical domains -- processes vs. distributions -- and show that their combination yields a two-axis representation of ABM behavior based on temporal organization and distributional geometry. To our knowledge, this is the first framework to integrate computational mechanics with score-based generative modeling for the structural analysis of ABM outputs, thereby situating ABM characterization within the broader landscape of modern machine-learning methods for density estimation and intrinsic computation. The framework is validated using the same elder-caregiver ABM dataset introduced in the companion paper, and we provide precise definitions and propositions formalizing the mathematical complementarity between $ε$-machines and diffusion models. This establishes a principled methodology for jointly analyzing temporal predictability and high-dimensional distributional structure in complex simulation models.

Large language models (LLMs) have been widely deployed in various applications, often functioning as autonomous agents that interact with each other in multi-agent systems. While these systems have shown promise in enhancing capabilities and enabling complex tasks, they also pose significant ethical challenges. This position paper outlines a research agenda aimed at ensuring the ethical behavior of multi-agent systems of LLMs (MALMs) from the perspective of mechanistic interpretability. We identify three key research challenges: (i) developing comprehensive evaluation frameworks to assess ethical behavior at individual, interactional, and systemic levels; (ii) elucidating the internal mechanisms that give rise to emergent behaviors through mechanistic interpretability; and (iii) implementing targeted parameter-efficient alignment techniques to steer MALMs towards ethical behaviors without compromising their performance.

Self-adaptive systems (SASs) are designed to handle changes and uncertainties through a feedback loop with four core functionalities: monitoring, analyzing, planning, and execution. Recently, generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), especially the area of large language models, has shown impressive performance in data comprehension and logical reasoning. These capabilities are highly aligned with the functionalities required in SASs, suggesting a strong potential to employ GenAI to enhance SASs. However, the specific benefits and challenges of employing GenAI in SASs remain unclear. Yet, providing a comprehensive understanding of these benefits and challenges is complex due to several reasons: limited publications in the SAS field, the technological and application diversity within SASs, and the rapid evolution of GenAI technologies. To that end, this paper aims to provide researchers and practitioners a comprehensive snapshot that outlines the potential benefits and challenges of employing GenAI's within SAS. Specifically, we gather, filter, and analyze literature from four distinct research fields and organize them into two main categories to potential benefits: (i) enhancements to the autonomy of SASs centered around the specific functions of the MAPE-K feedback loop, and (ii) improvements in the interaction between humans and SASs within human-on-the-loop settings. From our study, we outline a research roadmap that highlights the challenges of integrating GenAI into SASs. The roadmap starts with outlining key research challenges that need to be tackled to exploit the potential for applying GenAI in the field of SAS. The roadmap concludes with a practical reflection, elaborating on current shortcomings of GenAI and proposing possible mitigation strategies.

Traffic congestion is a major and complex challenge for cities worldwide with the rapid growth of urbanization and vehicle ownership. Longer commute times, excessive fuel consumption, and elevated air pollution levels are direct consequences of over-saturated roads. For instance, according to the 2024 INRIX Global Traffic Scorecard, individual commuters in Istanbul, New York City, and Chicago experienced total annual delay of about 105, 102, and 102 hours, respectively, underscoring the magnitude of intersection-driven delays in major metros (INRIX). Within urban networks, signalized intersections are the dominant bottlenecks: the policies implemented at these intersections allocate scarce space-time among competing traffic streams and therefore largely determine corridor-level delay, queues, and emissions. Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a standard practice for adaptive traffic signal control (ATSC), controlling phase selection and timing as a sequential decision problem that optimizes long-horizon objectives such as delay, throughput, and emissions under nonstationary demand (Yau et al., 2017). Deep RL (DRL) extends this by using function approximation to digest rich state representations--from detector queues to trajectories and graph-structured networks--enabling policies that generalize across varying traffic flows and topologies (Zhao et al., 2024). Collectively, this body of work motivates moving beyond single-intersection controllers toward coordinated, network-level solutions and setting the stage for multi-agent formulations.