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On Robust Popular Matchings with Tie-Bounded Preferences and Stable Matchings with Two-Sided Ties

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We are given a bipartite graph $G = \left( A \cup B, E \right)$. In the one-sided model, every $a \in A$ (often called agents) ranks its neighbours $z \in N_{a}$ strictly, and no $b \in B$ has any preference order over its neighbours $y \in N_{b}$, and vertices in $B$ abstain from casting their votes to matchings. In the two-sided model with one-sided ties, every $a \in A$ ranks its neighbours $z \in N_{a}$ strictly, and every $b \in B$ puts all of its neighbours into a single large tie, i.e., $b \in B$ prefers every $y \in N_{b}$ equally. In this two-sided model with one-sided ties, when two matchings compete in a majority election, $b \in B$ abstains from casting its vote for a matching when both the matchings saturate $b$ or both leave $b$ unsaturated; else $b$ prefers the matching where it is saturated. A popular matching $M$ is \emph{robust} if it remains popular among multiple instances. We have analysed the cases when a robust popular matching exists in the one-sided model where only one agent alters her preference order among the instances, and we have proposed a polynomial-time algorithm to decide if there exists a robust popular matching when instances differ only with respect to the preference orders of a single agent. We give a simple characterisation of popular matchings in the two-sided model with one-sided ties. We show that in the two-sided model with one-sided ties, if the input instances differ only with respect to the preference orders of a single agent, there is a polynomial-time algorithm to decide whether there exists a robust popular matching. We have been able to decide the stable matching problem in bipartite graphs $G = (A \cup B, E)$ where \textit{both} sides have weak preferences (ties allowed), with the restriction that every tie has length at most $k$.


Agentic Moderation: Multi-Agent Design for Safer Vision-Language Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Abstract--Agentic methods have emerged as a powerful and autonomous paradigm that enhances reasoning, collaboration, and adaptive control, enabling systems to coordinate and independently solve complex tasks. We extend this paradigm to safety alignment by introducing Agentic Moderation, a model-agnostic framework that leverages specialized agents to defend multimodal systems against jailbreak attacks. Unlike prior approaches that apply as a static layer over inputs or outputs and provide only binary classifications(safe or unsafe), our method integrates dynamic, cooperative agents,including Shield, Responder, Evaluator, and Reflector,to achieve context-aware and interpretable moderation. Extensive experiments across five datasets and four representative large vision-language models (L VLMs) demonstrate that our approach reduces the Attack Success Rate (ASR) by 7-19%, maintains a stable Non-Following Rate (NF), and improves the Refusal Rate (RR) by 4-20%, achieving robust, interpretable, and well-balanced safety performance. By harnessing the flexibility and reasoning capacity of agentic architectures, Agentic Moderation provides modular, scalable, and fine-grained safety enforcement, highlighting the broader potential of agentic systems as a foundation for automated safety governance. Large vision-language models (L VLMs) integrate visual and textual modalities, enabling richer multimodal reasoning and expanding their application scope. Malicious users can exploit cross-modal interactions and the continuous nature of visual embedding spaces, which makes adversarial defenses especially challenging. Cross-modality adversarial attacks exploit visual vulnerabilities and modality shifts in semantic meaning. Examples include pixel-level perturbations that embed harmful intent within images [1]-[3], malicious content rendered via typography or flowcharts [4], harmful behaviors that emerge only from the combination of benign-looking text and visual inputs, implicit cross-modal interactions that obscure adversarial intent [5], and hybrid or ensemble strategies that combine these mechanisms [6].


Emergent Coordinated Behaviors in Networked LLM Agents: Modeling the Strategic Dynamics of Information Operations

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Generative agents are rapidly advancing in sophistication, raising urgent questions about how they might coordinate when deployed in online ecosystems. This is particularly consequential in information operations (IOs), influence campaigns that aim to manipulate public opinion on social media. While traditional IOs have been orchestrated by human operators and relied on manually crafted tactics, agentic AI promises to make campaigns more automated, adaptive, and difficult to detect. This work presents the first systematic study of emergent coordination among generative agents in simulated IO campaigns. Using generative agent-based modeling, we instantiate IO and organic agents in a simulated environment and evaluate coordination across operational regimes, from simple goal alignment to team knowledge and collective decision-making. As operational regimes become more structured, IO networks become denser and more clustered, interactions more reciprocal and positive, narratives more homogeneous, amplification more synchronized, and hashtag adoption faster and more sustained. Remarkably, simply revealing to agents which other agents share their goals can produce coordination levels nearly equivalent to those achieved through explicit deliberation and collective voting. Overall, we show that generative agents, even without human guidance, can reproduce coordination strategies characteristic of real-world IOs, underscoring the societal risks posed by increasingly automated, self-organizing IOs.


SCOUT: A Lightweight Framework for Scenario Coverage Assessment in Autonomous Driving

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Assessing scenario coverage is crucial for evaluating the robustness of autonomous agents, yet existing methods rely on expensive human annotations or computationally intensive Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). These approaches are impractical for large-scale deployment due to cost and efficiency constraints. To address these shortcomings, we propose SCOUT (Scenario Coverage Oversight and Understanding Tool), a lightweight surrogate model designed to predict scenario coverage labels directly from an agent's latent sensor representations. SCOUT is trained through a distillation process, learning to approximate LVLM-generated coverage labels while eliminating the need for continuous LVLM inference or human annotation. By leveraging precomputed perception features, SCOUT avoids redundant computations and enables fast, scalable scenario coverage estimation. We evaluate our method across a large dataset of real-life autonomous navigation scenarios, demonstrating that it maintains high accuracy while significantly reducing computational cost. Our results show that SCOUT provides an effective and practical alternative for large-scale coverage analysis. While its performance depends on the quality of LVLM-generated training labels, SCOUT represents a major step toward efficient scenario coverage oversight in autonomous systems.


MASPRM: Multi-Agent System Process Reward Model

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Practical deployment of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) demands strong test-time performance, motivating methods that guide inference-time search and selectively spend compute to improve quality. We present the Multi-Agent System Process Reward Model (MASPRM). It assigns per-action, per-agent values to partial inter-agent transcripts and acts as an inference-time controller. MASPRM is trained from multi-agent Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) rollouts without requiring step-level human annotations, by propagating returns to local targets. At inference, MASPRM guides step-level beam search and MCTS, focusing computation on promising branches and pruning early. On GSM8K and MATH, MASPRM-guided decoding with an outcome reward model (ORM) applied to the final answer, improves exact match (EM) over a single straight-through MAS pass by $+30.7$ and $+22.9$ points, respectively. A MASPRM trained on GSM8K transfers zero-shot to MATH without retraining, adding $8.4$ EM points at the same budget. MASPRM is a plug-in value model that estimates per-agent progress and complements verifier-style decoders, enabling more reliable, compute-aware multi-agent reasoning. Code: https://github.com/milad1378yz/MASPRM



A Digital Twin Framework for Decision-Support and Optimization of EV Charging Infrastructure in Localized Urban Systems

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

As Electric Vehicle (EV) adoption accelerates in urban environments, optimizing charging infrastructure is vital for balancing user satisfaction, energy efficiency, and financial viability. This study advances beyond static models by proposing a digital twin framework that integrates agent-based decision support with embedded optimization to dynamically simulate EV charging behaviors, infrastructure layouts, and policy responses across scenarios. Applied to a localized urban site (a university campus) in Hanoi, Vietnam, the model evaluates operational policies, EV station configurations, and renewable energy sources. The interactive dashboard enables seasonal analysis, revealing a 20% drop in solar efficiency from October to March, with wind power contributing under 5% of demand, highlighting the need for adaptive energy management. Simulations show that real-time notifications of newly available charging slots improve user satisfaction, while gasoline bans and idle fees enhance slot turnover with minimal added complexity. Embedded metaheuristic optimization identifies near-optimal mixes of fast (30kW) and standard (11kW) solar-powered chargers, balancing energy performance, profitability, and demand with high computational efficiency. This digital twin provides a flexible, computation-driven platform for EV infrastructure planning, with a transferable, modular design that enables seamless scaling from localized to city-wide urban contexts.


VDSAgents: A PCS-Guided Multi-Agent System for Veridical Data Science Automation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large language models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into data science workflows for automated system design. However, these LLM-driven data science systems rely solely on the internal reasoning of LLMs, lacking guidance from scientific and theoretical principles. This limits their trustworthiness and robustness, especially when dealing with noisy and complex real-world datasets. This paper provides VDSAgents, a multi-agent system grounded in the Predictability-Computability-Stability (PCS) principles proposed in the Veridical Data Science (VDS) framework. Guided by PCS principles, the system implements a modular workflow for data cleaning, feature engineering, modeling, and evaluation. Each phase is handled by an elegant agent, incorporating perturbation analysis, unit testing, and model validation to ensure both functionality and scientific auditability. We evaluate VDSAgents on nine datasets with diverse characteristics, comparing it with state-of-the-art end-to-end data science systems, such as AutoKaggle and DataInterpreter, using DeepSeek-V3 and GPT-4o as backends. VDSAgents consistently outperforms the results of AutoKaggle and DataInterpreter, which validates the feasibility of embedding PCS principles into LLM-driven data science automation.


MAD-Fact: A Multi-Agent Debate Framework for Long-Form Factuality Evaluation in LLMs

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) raises critical concerns about the factual accuracy of their outputs, especially in high-risk domains such as biomedicine, law, and education. Existing evaluation methods for short texts often fail on long-form content due to complex reasoning chains, intertwined perspectives, and cumulative information. To address this, we propose a systematic approach integrating large-scale long-form datasets, multi-agent verification mechanisms, and weighted evaluation metrics. We construct LongHalluQA, a Chinese long-form factuality dataset; and develop MAD-Fact, a debate-based multi-agent verification system. We introduce a fact importance hierarchy to capture the varying significance of claims in long-form texts. Experiments on two benchmarks show that larger LLMs generally maintain higher factual consistency, while domestic models excel on Chinese content. Our work provides a structured framework for evaluating and enhancing factual reliability in long-form LLM outputs, guiding their safe deployment in sensitive domains.


Huxley-Gödel Machine: Human-Level Coding Agent Development by an Approximation of the Optimal Self-Improving Machine

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recent studies operationalize self-improvement through coding agents that edit their own codebases. They grow a tree of self-modifications through expansion strategies that favor higher software engineering benchmark performance, assuming that this implies more promising subsequent self-modifications. However, we identify a mismatch between the agent's self-improvement potential (metaproductivity) and its coding benchmark performance, namely the Metaproductivity-Performance Mismatch. Inspired by Huxley's concept of clade, we propose a metric ($\mathrm{CMP}$) that aggregates the benchmark performances of the descendants of an agent as an indicator of its potential for self-improvement. We show that, in our self-improving coding agent development setting, access to the true $\mathrm{CMP}$ is sufficient to simulate how the Gödel Machine would behave under certain assumptions. We introduce the Huxley-Gödel Machine (HGM), which, by estimating $\mathrm{CMP}$ and using it as guidance, searches the tree of self-modifications. On SWE-bench Verified and Polyglot, HGM outperforms prior self-improving coding agent development methods while using fewer allocated CPU hours. Last but not least, HGM demonstrates strong transfer to other coding datasets and large language models. The agent optimized by HGM on SWE-bench Verified with GPT-5-mini and evaluated on SWE-bench Lite with GPT-5 achieves human-level performance, matching the best officially checked results of human-engineered coding agents. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/metauto-ai/HGM.