Agents
VICoT-Agent: A Vision-Interleaved Chain-of-Thought Framework for Interpretable Multimodal Reasoning and Scalable Remote Sensing Analysis
Wang, Chujie, Luo, Zhiyuan, Liu, Ruiqi, Ran, Can, Fan, Shenghua, Chen, Xi, He, Chu
The current remote sensing image analysis task is increasingly evolving from traditional object recognition to complex intelligence reasoning, which places higher requirements on the model's reasoning ability and the flexibility of tool invocation. T o this end, we propose a new multimodal agent framework, Vision-Interleaved Chain-of-Thought Framework (VICoT), which implements explicit multi-round reasoning by dynamically incorporating visual tools into the chain of thought. Through a stack-based reasoning structure and a modular MCP-compatible tool suite, VICoT enables LLMs to efficiently perform multi-round, interleaved vision-language reasoning tasks with strong generalization and flexibility.W e also propose the Reasoning Stack distillation method to migrate complex Agent behaviors to small, lightweight models, which ensures the reasoning capability while significantly reducing complexity. Experiments on multiple remote sensing benchmarks demonstrate that VICoT significantly outperforms existing SOTA frameworks in reasoning transparency, execution efficiency, and generation quality.
AutoEnv: Automated Environments for Measuring Cross-Environment Agent Learning
Zhang, Jiayi, Peng, Yiran, Kong, Fanqi, Yang, Cheng, Wu, Yifan, Yu, Zhaoyang, Xiang, Jinyu, Ruan, Jianhao, Wang, Jinlin, Song, Maojia, Liu, HongZhang, Tang, Xiangru, Liu, Bang, Wu, Chenglin, Luo, Yuyu
Humans naturally adapt to diverse environments by learning underlying rules across worlds with different dynamics, observations, and reward structures. In contrast, existing agents typically demonstrate improvements via self-evolving within a single domain, implicitly assuming a fixed environment distribution. Cross-environment learning has remained largely unmeasured: there is no standard collection of controllable, heterogeneous environments, nor a unified way to represent how agents learn. We address these gaps in two steps. First, we propose AutoEnv, an automated framework that treats environments as factorizable distributions over transitions, observations, and rewards, enabling low-cost (4.12 USD on average) generation of heterogeneous worlds. Using AutoEnv, we construct AutoEnv-36, a dataset of 36 environments with 358 validated levels, on which seven language models achieve 12-49% normalized reward, demonstrating the challenge of AutoEnv-36. Second, we formalize agent learning as a component-centric process driven by three stages of Selection, Optimization, and Evaluation applied to an improvable agent component. Using this formulation, we design eight learning methods and evaluate them on AutoEnv-36. Empirically, the gain of any single learning method quickly decrease as the number of environments increases, revealing that fixed learning methods do not scale across heterogeneous environments. Environment-adaptive selection of learning methods substantially improves performance but exhibits diminishing returns as the method space expands. These results highlight both the necessity and the current limitations of agent learning for scalable cross-environment generalization, and position AutoEnv and AutoEnv-36 as a testbed for studying cross-environment agent learning. The code is avaiable at https://github.com/FoundationAgents/AutoEnv.
Mobile-Agent-RAG: Driving Smart Multi-Agent Coordination with Contextual Knowledge Empowerment for Long-Horizon Mobile Automation
Zhou, Yuxiang, Li, Jichang, Zhang, Yanhao, Lu, Haonan, Li, Guanbin
Mobile agents show immense potential, yet current state-of-the-art (SoTA) agents exhibit inadequate success rates on real-world, long-horizon, cross-application tasks. We attribute this bottleneck to the agents' excessive reliance on static, internal knowledge within MLLMs, which leads to two critical failure points: 1) strategic hallucinations in high-level planning and 2) operational errors during low-level execution on user interfaces (UI). The core insight of this paper is that high-level planning and low-level UI operations require fundamentally distinct types of knowledge. Planning demands high-level, strategy-oriented experiences, whereas operations necessitate low-level, precise instructions closely tied to specific app UIs. Motivated by these insights, we propose Mobile-Agent-RAG, a novel hierarchical multi-agent framework that innovatively integrates dual-level retrieval augmentation. At the planning stage, we introduce Manager-RAG to reduce strategic hallucinations by retrieving human-validated comprehensive task plans that provide high-level guidance. At the execution stage, we develop Operator-RAG to improve execution accuracy by retrieving the most precise low-level guidance for accurate atomic actions, aligned with the current app and subtask. To accurately deliver these knowledge types, we construct two specialized retrieval-oriented knowledge bases. Furthermore, we introduce Mobile-Eval-RAG, a challenging benchmark for evaluating such agents on realistic multi-app, long-horizon tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Mobile-Agent-RAG significantly outperforms SoTA baselines, improving task completion rate by 11.0% and step efficiency by 10.2%, establishing a robust paradigm for context-aware, reliable multi-agent mobile automation.
PerfBench: Can Agents Resolve Real-World Performance Bugs?
Garg, Spandan, Moghaddam, Roshanak Zilouchian, Sundaresan, Neel
Performance bugs are inefficiencies in software that waste computational resources without causing functional failures, making them particularly challenging to detect and fix. While recent advances in Software Engineering agents have shown promise in automated bug fixing, existing benchmarks primarily focus on functional correctness and fail to evaluate agents' abilities to identify and resolve non-functional issues like performance bugs. We introduce PerfBench, a benchmark comprising 81 real-world performance bug-fixing tasks from popular .NET repositories on GitHub. Unlike existing benchmarks that rely on pre-existing test suites, PerfBench features a novel evaluation harness that allows agents to generate their own performance benchmarks and validates fixes by comparing execution metrics collected for developer fix and agent fix. Each task in PerfBench is derived from actual developer fixes linked to performance-related issues, which are then verified by human experts, ensuring real-world relevance. Our evaluation reveals that current state-of-the-art coding agents struggle with performance optimization tasks, with baseline OpenHands agent achieving only a ~3% success rate on our benchmark. We develop OpenHands-Perf-Agent, which incorporates performance-aware tooling and instructions and achieves a ~20% success rate on the benchmark. We show that by ensuring the agent has proper instructions to benchmark its changes and tooling for benchmark output processing, we can improve the agent performance significantly, but room for improvement still remains. PerfBench provides a challenging test set for furthering the capabilities of agents in fixing performance issues.
Structuring Collective Action with LLM-Guided Evolution: From Ill-Structured Problems to Executable Heuristics
Dsouza, Kevin Bradley, Watt, Graham Alexander, Leonenko, Yuri, Moreno-Cruz, Juan
Collective action problems, which require aligning individual incentives with collective goals, are classic examples of Ill-Structured Problems (ISPs). For an individual agent, the causal links between local actions and global outcomes are unclear, stakeholder objectives often conflict, and no single, clear algorithm can bridge micro-level choices with macro-level welfare. We present ECHO-MIMIC, a general computational framework that converts this global complexity into a tractable, Well-Structured Problem (WSP) for each agent by discovering executable heuristics and persuasive rationales. The framework operates in two stages: ECHO (Evolutionary Crafting of Heuristics from Outcomes) evolves snippets of Python code that encode candidate behavioral policies, while MIMIC (Mechanism Inference \& Messaging for Individual-to-Collective Alignment) evolves companion natural language messages that motivate agents to adopt those policies. Both phases employ a large-language-model-driven evolutionary search: the LLM proposes diverse and context-aware code or text variants, while population-level selection retains those that maximize collective performance in a simulated environment. We demonstrate this framework on two distinct ISPs: a canonical agricultural landscape management problem and a carbon-aware EV charging time slot usage problem. Results show that ECHO-MIMIC discovers high-performing heuristics compared to baselines and crafts tailored messages that successfully align simulated agent behavior with system-level goals. By coupling algorithmic rule discovery with tailored communication, ECHO-MIMIC transforms the cognitive burden of collective action into a implementable set of agent-level instructions, making previously ill-structured problems solvable in practice and opening a new path toward scalable, adaptive policy design.
3D and 4D World Modeling: A Survey
Kong, Lingdong, Yang, Wesley, Mei, Jianbiao, Liu, Youquan, Liang, Ao, Zhu, Dekai, Lu, Dongyue, Yin, Wei, Hu, Xiaotao, Jia, Mingkai, Deng, Junyuan, Zhang, Kaiwen, Wu, Yang, Yan, Tianyi, Gao, Shenyuan, Wang, Song, Li, Linfeng, Pan, Liang, Liu, Yong, Zhu, Jianke, Ooi, Wei Tsang, Hoi, Steven C. H., Liu, Ziwei
World modeling has become a cornerstone in AI research, enabling agents to understand, represent, and predict the dynamic environments they inhabit. While prior work largely emphasizes generative methods for 2D image and video data, they overlook the rapidly growing body of work that leverages native 3D and 4D representations such as RGB-D imagery, occupancy grids, and LiDAR point clouds for large-scale scene modeling. At the same time, the absence of a standardized definition and taxonomy for ``world models'' has led to fragmented and sometimes inconsistent claims in the literature. This survey addresses these gaps by presenting the first comprehensive review explicitly dedicated to 3D and 4D world modeling and generation. We establish precise definitions, introduce a structured taxonomy spanning video-based (VideoGen), occupancy-based (OccGen), and LiDAR-based (LiDARGen) approaches, and systematically summarize datasets and evaluation metrics tailored to 3D/4D settings. We further discuss practical applications, identify open challenges, and highlight promising research directions, aiming to provide a coherent and foundational reference for advancing the field. A systematic summary of existing literature is available at https://github.com/worldbench/awesome-3d-4d-world-models
Astra: A Multi-Agent System for GPU Kernel Performance Optimization
Wei, Anjiang, Sun, Tianran, Seenichamy, Yogesh, Song, Hang, Ouyang, Anne, Mirhoseini, Azalia, Wang, Ke, Aiken, Alex
GPU kernel optimization has long been a central challenge at the intersection of high-performance computing and machine learning. Efficient kernels are crucial for accelerating large language model (LLM) training and serving, yet attaining high performance typically requires extensive manual tuning. Compiler-based systems reduce some of this burden, but still demand substantial manual design and engineering effort. Recently, researchers have explored using LLMs for GPU kernel generation, though prior work has largely focused on translating high-level PyTorch modules into CUDA code. In this work, we introduce Astra, the first LLM-based multi-agent system for GPU kernel optimization. Unlike previous approaches, Astra starts from existing CUDA implementations extracted from SGLang, a widely deployed framework for serving LLMs, rather than treating PyTorch modules as the specification. Within Astra, specialized LLM agents collaborate through iterative code generation, testing, profiling, and planning to produce kernels that are both correct and high-performance. On kernels from SGLang, Astra achieves an average speedup of 1.32x using zero-shot prompting with OpenAI o4-mini. A detailed case study further demonstrates that LLMs can autonomously apply loop transformations, optimize memory access patterns, exploit CUDA intrinsics, and leverage fast math operations to yield substantial performance gains. Our work highlights multi-agent LLM systems as a promising new paradigm for GPU kernel optimization. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Anjiang-Wei/Astra.
TeamMedAgents: Enhancing Medical Decision-Making of LLMs Through Structured Teamwork
Mishra, Pranav Pushkar, Arvan, Mohammad, Zalake, Mohan
Building upon Salas et al.'s "Big Five" teamwork model, we operationalize five core components as independently configurable mechanisms: shared mental models, team leadership, team orientation, trust networks, and mutual monitoring. Our architecture dynamically recruits 2-4 specialist agents and employs structured four-phase deliberation with adaptive component selection. Evaluation across eight medical benchmarks encompassing 11,545 questions demonstrates TeamMedAgents achieves 77.63% overall accuracy (text-based: 81.30%, vision-language: 66.60%). Systematic ablation studies comparing three single-agent baselines (Zero-Shot, Few-Shot, CoT) against individual teamwork components reveal task-specific optimization patterns: shared mental models excel on knowledge tasks, trust mechanisms improve differential diagnosis, while comprehensive integration degrades performance. Adaptive component selection yields 2-10 percentage point improvements over strongest baselines, with 96.2% agent convergence validating structured coordination effectiveness. TeamMedAgents establishes principled methodology for translating human teamwork theory into multi-agent systems, demonstrating that evidence-based collaboration patterns enhance AI performance in safety-critical domains through modular component design and selective activation strategies.
MARS: A Meta-Adaptive Reinforcement Learning Framework for Risk-Aware Multi-Agent Portfolio Management
Chen, Jiayi, Li, Jing, Wang, Guiling
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown significant promise in automated portfolio management; however, effectively balancing risk and return remains a central challenge, as many models fail to adapt to dynamically changing market conditions. We propose Meta-controlled Agents for a Risk-aware System (MARS), a novel framework addressing this through a multi-agent, risk-aware approach. MARS replaces monolithic models with a Heterogeneous Agent Ensemble, where each agent's unique risk profile is enforced by a Safety-Critic network to span behaviors from capital preservation to aggressive growth. A high-level Meta-Adaptive Controller (MAC) dynamically orchestrates this ensemble, shifting reliance between conservative and aggressive agents to minimize drawdown during downturns while seizing opportunities in bull markets. This two-tiered structure leverages behavioral diversity rather than explicit feature engineering to ensure a disciplined portfolio robust across market regimes. Experiments on major international indexes confirm that our framework significantly reduces maximum drawdown and volatility while maintaining competitive returns.
The Download: AI and coding, and Waymo's aggressive driverless cars
Plus: the FDA's newly-appointed head drug regulator is out AI has already transformed how code is written, but a new wave of autonomous systems promise to make the process even smoother and less prone to making mistakes. Amazon Web Services has just revealed three new "frontier" AI agents, its term for a more sophisticated class of autonomous agents capable of working for days at a time without human intervention. One of them, called Kiro, is designed to work independently without the need for a human to constantly point it in the right direction. Another, AWS Security Agent, scans a project for common vulnerabilities: an interesting development given that many AI-enabled coding assistants can end up introducing errors. To learn more about the exciting direction AI-enhanced coding is heading in, check out our team's reporting: Are we ready for what could happen next? They remember previous sessions and continuously learn from a company's codebase.