Agents
Look Before You Leap: A GUI-Critic-R1 Model for Pre-Operative Error Diagnosis in GUI Automation
Wanyan, Yuyang, Zhang, Xi, Xu, Haiyang, Liu, Haowei, Wang, Junyang, Ye, Jiabo, Kou, Yutong, Yan, Ming, Huang, Fei, Yang, Xiaoshan, Dong, Weiming, Xu, Changsheng
In recent years, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have been extensively utilized for multimodal reasoning tasks, including Graphical User Interface (GUI) automation. Unlike general offline multimodal tasks, GUI automation is executed in online interactive environments, necessitating step-by-step decision-making based on real-time status of the environment. This task has a lower tolerance for decision-making errors at each step, as any mistakes may cumulatively disrupt the process and potentially lead to irreversible outcomes like deletions or payments. To address these issues, we introduce a pre-operative critic mechanism that provides effective feedback prior to the actual execution, by reasoning about the potential outcome and correctness of actions. Specifically, we propose a Suggestion-aware Gradient Relative Policy Optimization (S-GRPO) strategy to construct our pre-operative critic model GUI-Critic-R1, incorporating a novel suggestion reward to enhance the reliability of the model's feedback. Furthermore, we develop a reasoning-bootstrapping based data collection pipeline to create a GUI-Critic-Train and a GUI-Critic-Test, filling existing gaps in GUI critic data. Static experiments on the GUI-Critic-Test across both mobile and web domains reveal that our GUI-Critic-R1 offers significant advantages in critic accuracy compared to current MLLMs. Dynamic evaluation on GUI automation benchmark further highlights the effectiveness and superiority of our model, as evidenced by improved success rates and operational efficiency.
Properties of zero-determinant strategies in multichannel games
Controlling payoffs in repeated games is one of the important topics in control theory of multi-agent systems. Recently proposed zero-determinant strategies enable players to unilaterally enforce linear relations between payoffs. Furthermore, based on the mathematics of zero-determinant strategies, regional payoff control, in which payoffs are enforced into some feasible regions, has been discovered in social dilemma situations. More recently, theory of payoff control was extended to multichannel games, where players parallelly interact with each other in multiple channels. However, the existence of payoff-controlling strategies in multichannel games seems to require the existence of payoff-controlling strategies in some channels, and properties of zero-determinant strategies specific to multichannel games are still not clear. In this paper, we elucidate properties of zero-determinant strategies in multichannel games. First, we relate the existence condition of zero-determinant strategies in multichannel games to that of zero-determinant strategies in each channel. We then show that the existence of zero-determinant strategies in multichannel games requires the existence of zero-determinant strategies in some channels. This result implies that the existence of zero-determinant strategies in multichannel games is tightly restricted by structure of games played in each channel.
EcoAgent: An Efficient Device-Cloud Collaborative Multi-Agent Framework for Mobile Automation
Yi, Biao, Hu, Xavier, Chen, Yurun, Zhang, Shengyu, Yang, Hongxia, Wu, Fan
To tackle increasingly complex tasks, recent research on mobile agents has shifted towards multi-agent collaboration. Current mobile multi-agent systems are primarily deployed in the cloud, leading to high latency and operational costs. A straightforward idea is to deploy a device-cloud collaborative multi-agent system, which is nontrivial, as directly extending existing systems introduces new challenges: (1) reliance on cloud-side verification requires uploading mobile screenshots, compromising user privacy; and (2) open-loop cooperation lacking device-to-cloud feedback, under-utilizing device resources and increasing latency. To overcome these limitations, we propose EcoAgent, a closed-loop device-cloud collaborative multi-agent framework designed for privacy-aware, efficient, and responsive mobile automation. EcoAgent integrates a novel reasoning approach, Dual-ReACT, into the cloud-based Planning Agent, fully exploiting cloud reasoning to compensate for limited on-device capacity, thereby enabling device-side verification and lightweight feedback. Furthermore, the device-based Observation Agent leverages a Pre-understanding Module to summarize screen content into concise textual descriptions, significantly reducing token usage and device-cloud communication overhead while preserving privacy. Experiments on Android-World demonstrate that EcoAgent matches the task success rates of fully cloud-based agents, while reducing resource consumption and response latency.
Human-Centered AI and Autonomy in Robotics: Insights from a Bibliometric Study
Casini, Simona, Ducange, Pietro, Marcelloni, Francesco, Pollini, Lorenzo
The development of autonomous robotic systems offers significant potential for performing complex tasks with precision and consistency. Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have enabled more capable intelligent automation systems, addressing increasingly complex challenges. However, this progress raises questions about human roles in such systems. Human-Centered AI (HCAI) aims to balance human control and automation, ensuring performance enhancement while maintaining creativity, mastery, and responsibility. For real-world applications, autonomous robots must balance task performance with reliability, safety, and trustworthiness. Integrating HCAI principles enhances human-robot collaboration and ensures responsible operation. This paper presents a bibliometric analysis of intelligent autonomous robotic systems, utilizing SciMA T and VOSViewer to examine data from the Scopus database. These insights are then projected onto the IBM MAPE-K architecture, with the goal of identifying how these research results map into actual robotic autonomous systems development efforts for real-world scenarios. In recent decades, robotics has made significant advancements across various sectors, including aviation, transportation, marine, and agriculture. According to the European strategy proposed by euRobotics in December 2024 [1], robotics is a complex integration of technologies that offers functional, economic, and societal benefits.
EduAgentQG: A Multi-Agent Workflow Framework for Personalized Question Generation
Jia, Rui, Zhang, Min, Liu, Fengrui, Jiang, Bo, Kuang, Kun, Dai, Zhongxiang
Abstract--High-quality personalized question banks are crucial for supporting adaptive learning and individualized assessment. Manually designing questions is time-consuming and often fails to meet diverse learning needs, making automated question generation a crucial approach to reduce teachers' workload and improve the scalability of educational resources. However, most existing question generation methods rely on single-agent or rule-based pipelines, which still produce questions with unstable quality, limited diversity, and insufficient alignment with educational goals. T o address these challenges, we propose EduAgentQG, a multi-agent collaborative framework for generating high-quality and diverse personalized questions. The framework consists of five specialized agents and operates through an iterative feedback loop: the Planner generates structured design plans and multiple question directions to enhance diversity; the Writer produces candidate questions based on the plan and optimizes their quality and diversity using feedback from the Solver and Educator; the Solver and Educator perform binary scoring across multiple evaluation dimensions and feed the evaluation results back to the Writer; the Checker conducts final verification, including answer correctness and clarity, ensuring alignment with educational goals. Through this multi-agent collaboration and iterative feedback loop, EduAgentQG generates questions that are both high-quality and diverse, while maintaining consistency with educational objectives. Experiments on two mathematics question datasets demonstrate that EduAgentQG outperforms existing single-agent and multi-agent methods in terms of question diversity, goal consistency, and overall quality. High-quality personalized question banks are crucial for supporting adaptive learning and individualized assessment [1], [2], [3]. In practical teaching, experienced educators can often determine the specific educational goals a student needs to achieve based on observation and prior knowledge [4], [5], [6]. Teachers typically engage in iterative cycles of planning, drafting, validation, and optimization to design questions that are both diagnostically effective and pedagogically meaningful, balancing knowledge coverage, cognitive skill development, and difficulty levels [7], [8]. Existing question banks may not always contain suitable questions, and even when relevant questions are available, they may have been previously attempted by students [9], [10], [11].
DIAP: A Decentralized Agent Identity Protocol with Zero-Knowledge Proofs and a Hybrid P2P Stack
Liu, Yuanjie, Xing, Wenpeng, Zhou, Ye, Chang, Gaowei, Lin, Changting, Han, Meng
The absence of a fully decentralized, verifiable, and privacy-preserving communication protocol for autonomous agents remains a core challenge in decentralized computing. Existing systems often rely on centralized intermediaries, which reintroduce trust bottlenecks, or lack decentralized identity-resolution mechanisms, limiting persistence and cross-network interoperability. We propose the Decentralized Interstellar Agent Protocol (DIAP), a novel framework for agent identity and communication that enables persistent, verifiable, and trustless interoperability in fully decentralized environments. DIAP binds an agent's identity to an immutable IPFS or IPNS content identifier and uses zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) to dynamically and statelessly prove ownership, removing the need for record updates. We present a Rust SDK that integrates Noir (for zero-knowledge proofs), DID-Key, IPFS, and a hybrid peer-to-peer stack combining Libp2p GossipSub for discovery and Iroh for high-performance, QUIC based data exchange. DIAP introduces a zero-dependency ZKP deployment model through a universal proof manager and compile-time build script that embeds a precompiled Noir circuit, eliminating the need for external ZKP toolchains. This enables instant, verifiable, and privacy-preserving identity proofs. This work establishes a practical, high-performance foundation for next-generation autonomous agent ecosystems and agent-to-agent (A to A) economies.
Machine learning-based cloud resource allocation algorithms: a comprehensive comparative review
Cloud resource allocation has emerged as a major challenge in modern computing environments, with organizations struggling to manage complex, dynamic workloads while optimizing performance and cost efficiency. Traditional heuristic approaches prove inadequate for handling the multi-objective optimization demands of existing cloud infrastructures. This paper presents a comparative analysis of state-of-the-art artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms for resource allocation. We systematically evaluate 10 algorithms across four categories: Deep Reinforcement Learning approaches, Neural Network architectures, Traditional Machine Learning enhanced methods, and Multi-Agent systems. Analysis of published results demonstrates significant performance improvements across multiple metrics including makespan reduction, cost optimization, and energy efficiency gains compared to traditional methods. The findings reveal that hybrid architectures combining multiple artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques consistently outperform single-method approaches, with edge computing environments showing the highest deployment readiness. Our analysis provides critical insights for both academic researchers and industry practitioners seeking to implement next-generation cloud resource allocation strategies in increasingly complex and dynamic computing environments.
DAOpt: Modeling and Evaluation of Data-Driven Optimization under Uncertainty with LLMs
Zhu, WenZhuo, Cui, Zheng, Lu, Wenhan, Liu, Sheng, Zhao, Yue
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have accelerated research on automated optimization modeling. While real-world decision-making is inherently uncertain, most existing work has focused on deterministic optimization with known parameters, leaving the application of LLMs in uncertain settings largely unexplored. To that end, we propose the DAOpt framework including a new dataset OptU, a multi-agent decision-making module, and a simulation environment for evaluating LLMs with a focus on out-of-sample feasibility and robustness. Additionally, we enhance LLMs' modeling capabilities by incorporating few-shot learning with domain knowledge from stochastic and robust optimization.
DIGing--SGLD: Decentralized and Scalable Langevin Sampling over Time--Varying Networks
Bajwa, Waheed U., Gurbuzbalaban, Mert, Kutbay, Mustafa Ali, Zhu, Lingjiong, Zulqarnain, Muhammad
Sampling from a target distribution induced by training data is central to Bayesian learning, with Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) serving as a key tool for scalable posterior sampling and decentralized variants enabling learning when data are distributed across a network of agents. This paper introduces DIGing-SGLD, a decentralized SGLD algorithm designed for scalable Bayesian learning in multi-agent systems operating over time-varying networks. Existing decentralized SGLD methods are restricted to static network topologies, and many exhibit steady-state sampling bias caused by network effects, even when full batches are used. DIGing-SGLD overcomes these limitations by integrating Langevin-based sampling with the gradient-tracking mechanism of the DIGing algorithm, originally developed for decentralized optimization over time-varying networks, thereby enabling efficient and bias-free sampling without a central coordinator. To our knowledge, we provide the first finite-time non-asymptotic Wasserstein convergence guarantees for decentralized SGLD-based sampling over time-varying networks, with explicit constants. Under standard strong convexity and smoothness assumptions, DIGing-SGLD achieves geometric convergence to an $O(\sqrtฮท)$ neighborhood of the target distribution, where $ฮท$ is the stepsize, with dependence on the target accuracy matching the best-known rates for centralized and static-network SGLD algorithms using constant stepsize. Numerical experiments on Bayesian linear and logistic regression validate the theoretical results and demonstrate the strong empirical performance of DIGing-SGLD under dynamically evolving network conditions.
Review of "Exploring metaphors of AI: visualisations, narratives and perception"
From 10th to 12th September 2025, Barcelona hosted an academic gathering at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya: the first Hype Studies Conference, titled "(Don't) Believe the Hype!?" Organised by a transnational, collective research group of scholars and practitioners, the conference drew together researchers, activists, artists, journalists, and technology professionals to examine hype as a significant force shaping contemporary society. Hype Studies is an emerging academic field that analyses how and why excessive expectations form around technologies, ideas, or phenomena, and what effects those expectations have on society, culture, economics, and policy. As the playful brackets around "Don't" in the conference title suggest - both a warning and an invitation to question that warning - the aim of the conference wasn't to simply reject hype, but to understand it. The conference approached hype critically by examining it as a phenomenon with real power and consequences that needs to be understood and questioned. The purpose here was to build collective knowledge about hype, develop better and more concrete theories, share empirical findings, and create an interdisciplinary community whilst advancing the field's scholarship and knowledge.