Agents
Collaborative Task Assignment, Sequencing and Multi-agent Path-finding
Bai, Yifan, Kotpalliwar, Shruti, Kanellakis, Christoforos, Nikolakopoulos, George
In this article, we address the problem of collaborative task assignment, sequencing, and multi-agent pathfinding (TSPF), where a team of agents must visit a set of task locations without collisions while minimizing flowtime. TSPF incorporates agent-task compatibility constraints and ensures that all tasks are completed. We propose a Conflict-Based Search with Task Sequencing (CBS-TS), an optimal and complete algorithm that alternates between finding new task sequences and resolving conflicts in the paths of current sequences. CBS-TS uses a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) to optimize task sequencing and employs Conflict-Based Search (CBS) with Multi-Label A* (MLA*) for collision-free path planning within a search forest. By invoking MILP for the next-best sequence only when needed, CBS-TS efficiently limits the search space, enhancing computational efficiency while maintaining optimality. We compare the performance of our CBS-TS against Conflict-based Steiner Search (CBSS), a baseline method that, with minor modifications, can address the TSPF problem. Experimental results demonstrate that CBS-TS outperforms CBSS in most testing scenarios, achieving higher success rates and consistently optimal solutions, whereas CBSS achieves near-optimal solutions in some cases. The supplementary video is available at https://youtu.be/QT8BYgvefmU.
AI-Enhanced Operator Assistance for UNICOS Applications
Tam, Bernard, Tournier, Jean-Charles, Rodriguez, Fernando Varela
This project explores the development of an AI-enhanced operator assistant for UNICOS, CERN's UNified Industrial Control System. While powerful, UNICOS presents a number of challenges, including the cognitive burden of decoding widgets, manual effort required for root cause analysis, and difficulties maintainers face in tracing datapoint elements (DPEs) across a complex codebase. In situations where timely responses are critical, these challenges can increase cognitive load and slow down diagnostics. To address these issues, a multi-agent system was designed and implemented. The solution is supported by a modular architecture comprising a UNICOS-side extension written in CTRL code, a Python-based multi-agent system deployed on a virtual machine, and a vector database storing both operator documentation and widget animation code. Preliminary evaluations suggest that the system is capable of decoding widgets, performing root cause analysis by leveraging live device data and documentation, and tracing DPEs across a complex codebase. Together, these capabilities reduce the manual workload of operators and maintainers, enhance situational awareness in operations, and accelerate responses to alarms and anomalies. Beyond these immediate gains, this work highlights the potential of introducing multi-modal reasoning and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) into the domain of industrial control. Ultimately, this work represents more than a proof of concept: it provides a basis for advancing intelligent operator interfaces at CERN. By combining modular design, extensibility, and practical AI integration, this project not only alleviates current operator pain points but also points toward broader opportunities for assistive AI in accelerator operations.
DAO-AI: Evaluating Collective Decision-Making through Agentic AI in Decentralized Governance
Capponi, Agostino, Gliozzo, Alfio, Han, Chunghyun, Lee, Junkyu
This paper presents a first empirical study of agentic AI as autonomous decision-makers in decentralized governance. Using more than 3K proposals from major protocols, we build an agentic AI voter that interprets proposal contexts, retrieves historical deliberation data, and independently determines its voting position. The agent operates within a realistic financial simulation environment grounded in verifiable blockchain data, implemented through a modular composable program (MCP) workflow that defines data flow and tool usage via Agentics framework. We evaluate how closely the agent's decisions align with the human and token-weighted outcomes, uncovering strong alignments measured by carefully designed evaluation metrics. Our findings demonstrate that agentic AI can augment collective decision-making by producing interpretable, auditable, and empirically grounded signals in realistic DAO governance settings. The study contributes to the design of explainable and economically rigorous AI agents for decentralized financial systems.
Which LLM Multi-Agent Protocol to Choose?
Du, Hongyi, Su, Jiaqi, Li, Jisen, Ding, Lijie, Yang, Yingxuan, Han, Peixuan, Tang, Xiangru, Zhu, Kunlun, You, Jiaxuan
As large-scale multi-agent systems evolve, the communication protocol layer has become a critical yet under-evaluated factor shaping performance and reliability. Despite the existence of diverse protocols (A2A, ACP, ANP, Agora, etc.), the selection of them is often intuition-driven and lacks standardized guidance. We introduce ProtocolBench, a benchmark that systematically compares agent protocols along four measurable axes: task success, end-to-end latency, message or byte overhead, and robustness under failures. On ProtocolBench, the choice of protocol significantly influences system behavior. In the Streaming Queue scenario, overall completion time varies by up to 36.5% across protocols, and mean end-to-end latency differs by 3.48 s. Under Fail-Storm Recovery, resilience also differs consistently across protocols. Beyond evaluation, we present ProtocolRouter, a learnable protocol router that selects per-scenario (or per-module) protocols from requirement and runtime signals. ProtocolRouter reduces Fail-Storm recovery time by up to 18.1% versus the best single-protocol baseline, and achieves scenario-specific gains such as higher success in GAIA. We also release ProtocolRouterBench to standardize protocol evaluation and improve reliability at scale.
Beyond Pipelines: A Survey of the Paradigm Shift toward Model-Native Agentic AI
Sang, Jitao, Xiao, Jinlin, Han, Jiarun, Chen, Jilin, Chen, Xiaoyi, Wei, Shuyu, Sun, Yongjie, Wang, Yuhang
The rapid evolution of agentic AI marks a new phase in artificial intelligence, where Large Language Models (LLMs) no longer merely respond but act, reason, and adapt. This survey traces the paradigm shift in building agentic AI: from Pipeline-based systems, where planning, tool use, and memory are orchestrated by external logic, to the emerging Model-native paradigm, where these capabilities are internalized within the model's parameters. We first position Reinforcement Learning (RL) as the algorithmic engine enabling this paradigm shift. By reframing learning from imitating static data to outcome-driven exploration, RL underpins a unified solution of LLM + RL + Task across language, vision and embodied domains. Building on this, the survey systematically reviews how each capability -- Planning, Tool use, and Memory -- has evolved from externally scripted modules to end-to-end learned behaviors. Furthermore, it examines how this paradigm shift has reshaped major agent applications, specifically the Deep Research agent emphasizing long-horizon reasoning and the GUI agent emphasizing embodied interaction. We conclude by discussing the continued internalization of agentic capabilities like Multi-agent collaboration and Reflection, alongside the evolving roles of the system and model layers in future agentic AI. Together, these developments outline a coherent trajectory toward model-native agentic AI as an integrated learning and interaction framework, marking the transition from constructing systems that apply intelligence to developing models that grow intelligence through experience.
Operationalising Extended Cognition: Formal Metrics for Corporate Knowledge and Legal Accountability
Corporate responsibility turns on notions of corporate \textit{mens rea}, traditionally imputed from human agents. Yet these assumptions are under challenge as generative AI increasingly mediates enterprise decision-making. Building on the theory of extended cognition, we argue that in response corporate knowledge may be redefined as a dynamic capability, measurable by the efficiency of its information-access procedures and the validated reliability of their outputs. We develop a formal model that captures epistemic states of corporations deploying sophisticated AI or information systems, introducing a continuous organisational knowledge metric $S_S(ฯ)$ which integrates a pipeline's computational cost and its statistically validated error rate. We derive a thresholded knowledge predicate $\mathsf{K}_S$ to impute knowledge and a firm-wide epistemic capacity index $\mathcal{K}_{S,t}$ to measure overall capability. We then operationally map these quantitative metrics onto the legal standards of actual knowledge, constructive knowledge, wilful blindness, and recklessness. Our work provides a pathway towards creating measurable and justiciable audit artefacts, that render the corporate mind tractable and accountable in the algorithmic age.
Expandable Decision-Making States for Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning in Soccer Tactical Analysis
Ide, Kenjiro, Someya, Taiga, Kawaguchi, Kohei, Fujii, Keisuke
Invasion team sports such as soccer produce a high-dimensional, strongly coupled state space as many players continuously interact on a shared field, challenging quantitative tactical analysis. Traditional rule-based analyses are intuitive, while modern predictive machine learning models often perform pattern-matching without explicit agent representations. The problem we address is how to build player-level agent models from data, whose learned values and policies are both tactically interpretable and robust across heterogeneous data sources. Here, we propose Expandable Decision-Making States (EDMS), a semantically enriched state representation that augments raw positions and velocities with relational variables (e.g., scoring of space, pass, and score), combined with an action-masking scheme that gives on-ball and off-ball agents distinct decision sets. Compared to prior work, EDMS maps learned value functions and action policies to human-interpretable tactical concepts (e.g., marking pressure, passing lanes, ball accessibility) instead of raw coordinate features, and aligns agent choices with the rules of play. In the experiments, EDMS with action masking consistently reduced both action-prediction loss and temporal-difference (TD) error compared to the baseline. Qualitative case studies and Q-value visualizations further indicate that EDMS highlights high-risk, high-reward tactical patterns (e.g., fast counterattacks and defensive breakthroughs). We also integrated our approach into an open-source library and demonstrated compatibility with multiple commercial and open datasets, enabling cross-provider evaluation and reproducible experiments.
SceneWeaver: All-in-One 3D Scene Synthesis with an Extensible and Self-Reflective Agent
Yang, Yandan, Jia, Baoxiong, Zhang, Shujie, Huang, Siyuan
Indoor scene synthesis has become increasingly important with the rise of Embodied AI, which requires 3D environments that are not only visually realistic but also physically plausible and functionally diverse. While recent approaches have advanced visual fidelity, they often remain constrained to fixed scene categories, lack sufficient object-level detail and physical consistency, and struggle to align with complex user instructions. In this work, we present SceneWeaver, a reflective agentic framework that unifies diverse scene synthesis paradigms through tool-based iterative refinement. At its core, SceneWeaver employs a language model-based planner to select from a suite of extensible scene generation tools, ranging from data-driven generative models to visual- and LLM-based methods, guided by self-evaluation of physical plausibility, visual realism, and semantic alignment with user input. This closed-loop reason-act-reflect design enables the agent to identify semantic inconsistencies, invoke targeted tools, and update the environment over successive iterations. Extensive experiments on both common and open-vocabulary room types demonstrate that SceneWeaver not only outperforms prior methods on physical, visual, and semantic metrics, but also generalizes effectively to complex scenes with diverse instructions, marking a step toward general-purpose 3D environment generation. Project website: https://scene-weaver.github.io/.
Hierarchical AI Multi-Agent Fundamental Investing: Evidence from China's A-Share Market
He, Chujun, Huang, Zhonghao, Li, Xiangguo, Luo, Ye, Ma, Kewei, Xiong, Yuxuan, Zhang, Xiaowei, Zhao, Mingyang
We present a multi-agent, AI-driven framework for fundamental investing that integrates macro indicators, industry-level and firm-specific information to construct optimized equity portfolios. The architecture comprises: (i) a Macro agent that dynamically screens and weights sectors based on evolving economic indicators and industry performance; (ii) four firm-level agents -- Fundamental, Technical, Report, and News -- that conduct in-depth analyses of individual firms to ensure both breadth and depth of coverage; (iii) a Portfolio agent that uses reinforcement learning to combine the agent outputs into a unified policy to generate the trading strategy; and (iv) a Risk Control agent that adjusts portfolio positions in response to market volatility. We evaluate the system on the constituents by the CSI 300 Index of China's A-share market and find that it consistently outperforms standard benchmarks and a state-of-the-art multi-agent trading system on risk-adjusted returns and drawdown control. Our core contribution is a hierarchical multi-agent design that links top-down macro screening with bottom-up fundamental analysis, offering a robust and extensible approach to factor-based portfolio construction.
Mixture-of-Minds: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Table Understanding
Zhou, Yuhang, Zhang, Mingrui, Li, Ke, Wang, Mingyi, Liu, Qiao, Wang, Qifei, Liu, Jiayi, Liu, Fei, Li, Serena, Li, Weiwei, Gao, Mingze, Kumar, Abhishek, Fan, Xiangjun, Zhao, Zhuokai, Zhang, Lizhu
Understanding and reasoning over tables is a critical capability for many real-world applications. Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise on this task, but current approaches remain limited. Fine-tuning based methods strengthen language reasoning; yet they are prone to arithmetic errors and hallucination. In contrast, tool-based methods enable precise table manipulation but rely on rigid schemas and lack semantic understanding. These complementary drawbacks highlight the need for approaches that integrate robust reasoning with reliable table processing. In this work, we propose Mixture-of-Minds, a multi-agent framework that decomposes table reasoning into three specialized roles: planning, coding, and answering. This design enables each agent to focus on a specific aspect of the task while leveraging code execution for precise table manipulation. Building on this workflow, we introduce a self-improvement training framework that employs Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) rollouts to generate pseudo-gold trajectories and optimize agents with reinforcement learning (RL). Extensive experiments show that Mixture-of-Minds delivers substantial gains, reaching 62.13% on TableBench and surpassing OpenAI-o4-mini-high. These results demonstrate the promise of combining structured multi-agent workflows with RL to advance table understanding.