Dynamic pricing in retail requires policies that adapt to shifting demand while coordinating decisions across related products. We present a systematic empirical study of multi-agent reinforcement learning for retail price optimization, comparing a strong MAPPO baseline with a graph-attention-augmented variant (MAPPO+GAT) that leverages learned interactions among products. Using a simulated pricing environment derived from real transaction data, we evaluate profit, stability across random seeds, fairness across products, and training efficiency under a standardized evaluation protocol. The results indicate that MAPPO provides a robust and reproducible foundation for portfolio-level price control, and that MAPPO+GAT further enhances performance by sharing information over the product graph without inducing excessive price volatility. These results indicate that graph-integrated MARL provides a more scalable and stable solution than independent learners for dynamic retail pricing, offering practical advantages in multi-product decision-making.

The Zero-shot Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE) task requires agents to navigate previously unseen 3D environments using natural language instructions, without any scene-specific training. A critical challenge in this setting lies in ensuring agents' actions align with both spatial structure and task intent over long-horizon execution. Existing methods often fail to achieve robust navigation due to a lack of structured decision-making and insufficient integration of feedback from previous actions. To address these challenges, we propose STRIDER (Instruction-Aligned Structural Decision Space Optimization), a novel framework that systematically optimizes the agent's decision space by integrating spatial layout priors and dynamic task feedback. Our approach introduces two key innovations: 1) a Structured Waypoint Generator that constrains the action space through spatial structure, and 2) a Task-Alignment Regulator that adjusts behavior based on task progress, ensuring semantic alignment throughout navigation. Extensive experiments on the R2R-CE and RxR-CE benchmarks demonstrate that STRIDER significantly outperforms strong SOT A across key metrics; in particular, it improves Success Rate (SR) from 29% to 35%, a relative gain of 20.7%. Such results highlight the importance of spatially constrained decision-making and feedback-guided execution in improving navigation fidelity for zero-shot VLN-CE.

Graph Chain-of-Thought (Graph-CoT) enables large language models (LLMs) to perform step-by-step reasoning over graph-structured knowledge, but existing pipelines suffer from low accuracy, excessive token usage, high latency, and low throughput due to single-agent monolithic prompts, repeated context re-encoding, and inefficient serving execution. We present GLM, the first multi-agent Graph-CoT system co-designed with an optimized LLM serving architecture. GLM decomposes reasoning into specialized agents for classification, reasoning, action generation, and graph retrieval, enabling branching and selective context sharing to reduce prompt length and reasoning iterations while preserving reasoning quality, thereby improving accuracy and reducing overall token consumption. To scale inference, we introduce a Graph-CoT-aware LLM inference mechanism with graph-specific KV-cache management, priority-based eviction, and pipelined execution to improve serving efficiency. Experiments demonstrate that GLM improves answer accuracy by up to 38%, reduces token cost by up to 95.7%, lowers inference latency by 90.3%, and achieves up to 15.1x higher throughput compared to state-of-the-art Graph-CoT baselines, enabling efficient adoption for complex real-world reasoning at scale.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in cross-modal understanding and reasoning, offering new opportunities for intelligent assistive systems, yet existing systems still struggle with risk-aware planning, user personalization, and grounding language plans into executable skills in cluttered homes. We introduce MARS - a Multi-Agent Robotic System powered by MLLMs for assistive intelligence and designed for smart home robots supporting people with disabilities. The system integrates four agents: a visual perception agent for extracting semantic and spatial features from environment images, a risk assessment agent for identifying and prioritizing hazards, a planning agent for generating executable action sequences, and an evaluation agent for iterative optimization. By combining multimodal perception with hierarchical multi-agent decision-making, the framework enables adaptive, risk-aware, and personalized assistance in dynamic indoor environments. Experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate the superior overall performance of the proposed system in risk-aware planning and coordinated multi-agent execution compared with state-of-the-art multimodal models. The proposed approach also highlights the potential of collaborative AI for practical assistive scenarios and provides a generalizable methodology for deploying MLLM-enabled multi-agent systems in real-world environments.

Effective communication in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is critical for success but constrained by bandwidth, yet past approaches have been limited to complex gating mechanisms that only decide \textit{whether} to communicate, not \textit{how precisely}. Learning to optimize message precision at the bit-level is fundamentally harder, as the required discretization step breaks gradient flow. We address this by generalizing Differentiable Discrete Communication Learning (DDCL), a framework for end-to-end optimization of discrete messages. Our primary contribution is an extension of DDCL to support unbounded signals, transforming it into a universal, plug-and-play layer for any MARL architecture. We verify our approach with three key results. First, through a qualitative analysis in a controlled environment, we demonstrate \textit{how} agents learn to dynamically modulate message precision according to the informational needs of the task. Second, we integrate our variant of DDCL into four state-of-the-art MARL algorithms, showing it reduces bandwidth by over an order of magnitude while matching or exceeding task performance. Finally, we provide direct evidence for the \enquote{Bitter Lesson} in MARL communication: a simple Transformer-based policy leveraging DDCL matches the performance of complex, specialized architectures, questioning the necessity of bespoke communication designs.

This work presents a requirement analysis for collaborative dialogues among medical experts and an inquiry dialogue game based on this analysis for incorporating explainability into multiagent system design. The game allows experts with different knowledge bases to collaboratively make recommendations while generating rich traces of the reasoning process through combining explanation-based illocutionary forces in an inquiry dialogue. The dialogue game was implemented as a prototype web-application and evaluated against the specification through a formative user study. The user study confirms that the dialogue game meets the needs for collaboration among medical experts. It also provides insights on the real-life value of dialogue-based communication tools for the medical community.

Global healthcare systems face critical challenges from increasing patient volumes and limited consultation times, with primary care visits averaging under 5 minutes in many countries. While pre-consultation processes encompassing triage and structured history-taking offer potential solutions, they remain limited by passive interaction paradigms and context management challenges in existing AI systems. This study introduces a hierarchical multi-agent framework that transforms passive medical AI systems into proactive inquiry agents through autonomous task orchestration. We developed an eight-agent architecture with centralized control mechanisms that decomposes pre-consultation into four primary tasks: Triage ($T_1$), History of Present Illness collection ($T_2$), Past History collection ($T_3$), and Chief Complaint generation ($T_4$), with $T_1$--$T_3$ further divided into 13 domain-specific subtasks. Evaluated on 1,372 validated electronic health records from a Chinese medical platform across multiple foundation models (GPT-OSS 20B, Qwen3-8B, Phi4-14B), the framework achieved 87.0% accuracy for primary department triage and 80.5% for secondary department classification, with task completion rates reaching 98.2% using agent-driven scheduling versus 93.1% with sequential processing. Clinical quality scores from 18 physicians averaged 4.56 for Chief Complaints, 4.48 for History of Present Illness, and 4.69 for Past History on a 5-point scale, with consultations completed within 12.7 rounds for $T_2$ and 16.9 rounds for $T_3$. The model-agnostic architecture maintained high performance across different foundation models while preserving data privacy through local deployment, demonstrating the potential for autonomous AI systems to enhance pre-consultation efficiency and quality in clinical settings.

Large Language Models (LLMs) integrated with agent-based reasoning frameworks have recently shown strong potential for autonomous decision-making and system-level operations. One promising yet underexplored direction is microservice remediation, where the goal is to automatically recover faulty microservice systems. Existing approaches, however, still rely on human-crafted prompts from Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), with LLMs merely converting textual instructions into executable code. To advance research in this area, we introduce MicroRemed, the first benchmark for evaluating LLMs in end-to-end microservice remediation, where models must directly generate executable Ansible playbooks from diagnosis reports to restore system functionality. We further propose ThinkRemed, a multi-agent framework that emulates the reflective and perceptive reasoning of SREs. Experimental results show that MicroRemed presents substantial challenges to current LLMs, while ThinkRemed improves end-to-end remediation performance through iterative reasoning and system reflection. The benchmark is available at https://github.com/LLM4AIOps/MicroRemed.

This paper addresses the limitations of a single agent in task decomposition and collaboration during complex task execution, and proposes a multi-agent architecture for modular task decomposition and dynamic collaboration based on large language models. The method first converts natural language task descriptions into unified semantic representations through a large language model. On this basis, a modular decomposition mechanism is introduced to break down the overall goal into multiple hierarchical sub-tasks. Then, dynamic scheduling and routing mechanisms enable reasonable division of labor and realtime collaboration among agents, allowing the system to adjust strategies continuously according to environmental feedback, thus maintaining efficiency and stability in complex tasks. Furthermore, a constraint parsing and global consistency mechanism is designed to ensure coherent connections between sub-tasks and balanced workload, preventing performance degradation caused by redundant communication or uneven resource allocation. The experiments validate the architecture across multiple dimensions, including task success rate, decomposition efficiency, sub-task coverage, and collaboration balance. The results show that the proposed method outperforms existing approaches in both overall performance and robustness, achieving a better balance between task complexity and communication overhead. In conclusion, this study demonstrates the effectiveness and feasibility of language-driven task decomposition and dynamic collaboration in multi-agent systems, providing a systematic solution for task execution in complex environments.

Continual Learning (CL) methods have traditionally focused on mitigating catastrophic forgetting through gradient-based retraining, an approach ill-suited for deployed agents that must adapt in real time. We introduce our Adaptive Teaching and Learning System (ATLAS), a dual-agent architecture that decouples reasoning (Teacher) from execution (Student) and incorporates a persistent learning memory that stores distilled guidance from experience. This informs the orchestration layer, enabling the system to dynamically adjust its operational strategies, such as supervision level or initial plan selection, at inference time. In doing so, ATLAS achieves gradient-free continual learning, shifting the locus of adaptation from model parameters to system-level orchestration. We formulate this as a system-centric paradigm for continual learning, where the objective is adaptive efficiency: maximizing task success while minimizing computational cost through inference-time orchestration rather than parameter updates. Evaluated on Microsoft's ExCyTIn-Bench, an open-source benchmark simulating complex cyberthreat investigation, ATLAS achieves 54.1% success with GPT-5-mini as its Student, outperforming the larger GPT-5 (High) by 13% while reducing cost by 86%. Cross-incident validation demonstrates generalization: frozen pamphlets from Incident #5 improve accuracy from 28% to 41% with zero retraining, while shifting output composition from verbose exploration to structured reasoning. Together, these findings establish gradient-free continual learning as a viable path toward adaptive, deployable AI systems and provide causally annotated traces valuable for training explicit world models.