As language models evolve into autonomous agents that act and communicate on behalf of users, ensuring safety in multi-agent ecosystems becomes a central challenge. Interactions between personal assistants and external service providers expose a core tension between utility and protection: effective collaboration requires information sharing, yet every exchange creates new attack surfaces. We introduce ConVerse, a dynamic benchmark for evaluating privacy and security risks in agent-agent interactions. ConVerse spans three practical domains (travel, real estate, insurance) with 12 user personas and over 864 contextually grounded attacks (611 privacy, 253 security). Unlike prior single-agent settings, it models autonomous, multi-turn agent-to-agent conversations where malicious requests are embedded within plausible discourse. Privacy is tested through a three-tier taxonomy assessing abstraction quality, while security attacks target tool use and preference manipulation. Evaluating seven state-of-the-art models reveals persistent vulnerabilities; privacy attacks succeed in up to 88% of cases and security breaches in up to 60%, with stronger models leaking more. By unifying privacy and security within interactive multi-agent contexts, ConVerse reframes safety as an emergent property of communication.

Soft robot manipulators have the potential for deployment in delicate environments to perform complex manipulation tasks. However, existing obstacle detection and avoidance methods do not consider limits on the forces that manipulators may exert upon contact with delicate obstacles. This work introduces a framework that maps force safety criteria from task space (i.e. positions along the robot's body) to configuration space (i.e. the robot's joint angles) and enables real-time force safety detection. We incorporate limits on allowable environmental contact forces for given task-space obstacles, and map them into configuration space (C-space) through the manipulator's forward kinematics. This formulation ensures that configurations classified as safe are provably below the maximum force thresholds, thereby allowing us to determine force-safe configurations of the soft robot manipulator in real-time. We validate our approach in simulation and hardware experiments on a two-segment pneumatic soft robot manipulator. Results demonstrate that the proposed method accurately detects force safety during interactions with deformable obstacles, thereby laying the foundation for real-time safe planning of soft manipulators in delicate, cluttered environments.

In this paper, we study cooperation in distributed games under network-constrained communication. Building on the framework of Monderer and Tennenholtz (1999), we derive a sufficient condition for cooperative equilibrium in settings where communication between agents is delayed by the underlying network topology. Each player deploys an agent at every location, and local interactions follow a Prisoner's Dilemma structure. We derive a sufficient condition that depends on the network diameter and the number of locations, and analyze extreme cases of instantaneous, delayed, and proportionally delayed communication. We also discuss the asymptotic case of scale-free communication networks, in which the network diameter grows sub-linearly in the number of locations. These insights clarify how communication latency and network design jointly determine the emergence of distributed cooperation.

Today's autonomous agents can understand free-form natural language instructions and execute long-horizon tasks in a manner akin to human-level reasoning. These capabilities are mostly driven by large-scale pre-trained foundation models (FMs). However, the approaches with which these models are grounded for human-robot interaction (HRI) perpetuate a master-apprentice model, where the apprentice (embodied agent) passively receives and executes the master's (human's) commands without reciprocal learning. This reactive interaction approach does not capture the co-adaptive dynamics inherent in everyday multi-turn human-human interactions. To address this, we propose a Symbiotic Interactive Learning (SIL) approach that enables both the master and the apprentice to co-adapt through mutual, bidirectional interactions. We formalised SIL as a co-adaptation process within a shared latent task space, where the agent and human maintain joint belief states that evolve based on interaction history. This enables the agent to move beyond reactive execution to proactive clarification, adaptive suggestions, and shared plan refinement. To realise these novel behaviours, we leveraged pre-trained FMs for spatial perception and reasoning, alongside a lightweight latent encoder that grounds the models' outputs into task-specific representations. Furthermore, to ensure stability as the tasks evolve, we augment SIL with a memory architecture that prevents the forgetting of learned task-space representations. We validate SIL on both simulated and real-world embodied tasks, including instruction following, information retrieval, query-oriented reasoning, and interactive dialogues. Demos and resources are public at:~\href{https://linusnep.github.io/SIL/}{https://linusnep.github.io/SIL/}.

Progress in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) requires challenging benchmarks that assess the limits of current methods. However, existing benchmarks often target narrow short-horizon challenges that do not adequately stress the long-term dependencies and generalization capabilities inherent in many multi-agent systems. To address this, we first present \textit{Craftax-MA}: an extension of the popular open-ended RL environment, Craftax, that supports multiple agents and evaluates a wide range of general abilities within a single environment. Written in JAX, \textit{Craftax-MA} is exceptionally fast with a training run using 250 million environment interactions completing in under an hour. To provide a more compelling challenge for MARL, we also present \textit{Craftax-Coop}, an extension introducing heterogeneous agents, trading and more mechanics that require complex cooperation among agents for success. We provide analysis demonstrating that existing algorithms struggle with key challenges in this benchmark, including long-horizon credit assignment, exploration and cooperation, and argue for its potential to drive long-term research in MARL.

Agents in the real world must make not only logical but also timely judgments. This requires continuous awareness of the dynamic environment: hazards emerge, opportunities arise, and other agents act, while the agent's reasoning is still unfolding. Despite advances in language model reasoning, existing approaches fail to account for this dynamic nature. We introduce real-time reasoning as a new problem formulation for agents in evolving environments and build Real-Time Reasoning Gym to demonstrate it. We study two paradigms for deploying language models in agents: (1) reactive agents, which employ language models with bounded reasoning computation for rapid responses, and (2) planning agents, which allow extended reasoning computation for complex problems. Our experiments show that even state-of-the-art models struggle with making logical and timely judgments in either paradigm. To address this limitation, we propose AgileThinker, which simultaneously engages both reasoning paradigms. AgileThinker consistently outperforms agents engaging only one reasoning paradigm as the task difficulty and time pressure rise, effectively balancing reasoning depth and response latency. Our work establishes real-time reasoning as a critical testbed for developing practical agents and provides a foundation for research in temporally constrained AI systems, highlighting a path toward real-time capable agents.

In bipartite matching problems, agents on two sides of a graph want to be paired according to their preferences. The stability of a matching depends on these preferences, which in uncertain environments also reflect agents' beliefs about the underlying state of the world. We investigate how a principal -- who observes the true state of the world -- can strategically shape these beliefs through Bayesian persuasion to induce stable matching that maximizes a desired utility. Due to the general intractability of the underlying matching optimization problem as well as the multi-receiver persuasion problem, our main considerations are two important special cases: (1) when agents can be categorized into a small number of types based on their value functions, and (2) when the number of possible world states is small. For each case, we study both public and private signaling settings. Our results draw a complete complexity landscape: we show that private persuasion remains intractable even when the number of worlds is small, while all other settings admit polynomial-time algorithms. We present efficient algorithms for each tractable case and prove NP-hardness for the intractable ones. These results illuminate the algorithmic frontier of stable matching under information design and clarify when optimal persuasion is computationally feasible.

Rare diseases represent the long tail of medical imaging, where AI models often fail due to the scarcity of representative training data. In clinical workflows, radiologists frequently consult case reports and literature when confronted with unfamiliar findings. Following this line of reasoning, we introduce RADAR, Retrieval Augmented Diagnostic Reasoning Agents, an agentic system for rare disease detection in brain MRI. Our approach uses AI agents with access to external medical knowledge by embedding both case reports and literature using sentence transformers and indexing them with FAISS to enable efficient similarity search. The agent retrieves clinically relevant evidence to guide diagnostic decision making on unseen diseases, without the need of additional training. Designed as a model-agnostic reasoning module, RADAR can be seamlessly integrated with diverse large language models, consistently improving their rare pathology recognition and interpretability. On the NOVA dataset comprising 280 distinct rare diseases, RADAR achieves up to a 10.2% performance gain, with the strongest improvements observed for open source models such as DeepSeek. Beyond accuracy, the retrieved examples provide interpretable, literature grounded explanations, highlighting retrieval-augmented reasoning as a powerful paradigm for low-prevalence conditions in medical imaging.

Abstract--We consider the problem of communication-constrained collaborative personalized mean estimation under a privacy constraint in an environment of several agents continuously receiving data according to arbitrary unknown agent-specific distributions. A consensus-based algorithm is studied under the framework of differential privacy in order to protect each agent's data. We give a theoretical convergence analysis of the proposed consensus-based algorithm for any bounded unknown distributions on the agents' data, showing that collaboration provides faster convergence than a fully local approach where agents do not share data, under an oracle decision rule and under some restrictions on the privacy level and the agents' connectivity, which illustrates the benefit of private collaboration in an online setting under a communication restriction on the agents. The theoretical faster-than-local convergence guarantee is backed up by several numerical results. The interest in collaborative learning has grown considerably recently, fueled by prominent frameworks such as federated learning (FL) [1]-[3], which offers a partially decentralized approach, and fully decentralized methods like swarm learning [4].

School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, P A, USA ABSTRACT Disinformation campaigns can distort public perception and destabilize institutions. Understanding how different populations respond to information is crucial for designing effective interventions, yet real-world experimentation is impractical and ethically challenging. To address this, we develop an agent-based simulation using Large Language Models (LLMs) to model responses to misinformation. We construct agent personas spanning five professions and three mental schemas, and evaluate their reactions to news headlines. Our findings show that LLM-generated agents align closely with ground-truth labels and human predictions, supporting their use as proxies for studying information responses. We also find that mental schemas, more than professional background, influence how agents interpret misinformation. This work provides a validation of LLMs to be used as agents in an agent-based model of an information network for analyzing trust, polarization, and susceptibility to deceptive content in complex social systems. 1 INTRODUCTION Protection against foreign information campaigns and the ability to conduct effective information operations are critical to modern national security. In an era where the information domain can be leveraged as a battlefield, there is a need to maintain information advantage, defined as "the use, protection, and exploitation of information to achieve objectives more effectively than enemies and adversaries do" (U.S. Achieving and sustaining information advantage requires not only the ability to disseminate compelling narratives but also to detect, counter, and mitigate adversarial information operations.