Inference-time computation is a critical yet challenging paradigm for enhancing the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs). While existing strategies improve reasoning stability and consistency, they suffer from notable limitations: self-correction often reinforces the model's initial biases, and Multi-Agent Collaboration (MAC) often fails due to the lack of efficient coordination mechanisms, leading to collective errors. Although high-performing verifiers can detect reasoning errors, making them reliable requires substantial training. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel inference-time framework, Adaptive Coopetition (AdCo), in which LLM agents utilize an adaptive, UCB-based "coopetition" mechanism. At each round, agents leverage coarse verifier signals to determine whether to collaborate or compete, and iteratively refine their reasoning based on peer feedback. Without relying on high-performance verifiers, our adaptive strategy achieves significant performance gains on mathematical reasoning benchmarks, yielding a 20% relative improvement over baselines on the more challenging dataset. Our approach remains robust and consistent in terms of accuracy under different sample sizes and configurations. This adaptive, signal-guided "coopetition" framework enhances reasoning robustness by leveraging both model knowledge diversity and reasoning trace measures, while also promoting uncertainty-driven exploration, especially when participants have comparable capabilities. From this perspective, our work offers a fresh lens on inference-time computation and paves the way for more resilient multi-agent LLM systems. Our code is available at: https://github.com/AdCo-Research/adaptive-coopetition.

Inertial fusion energy promises nearly unlimited, clean power if it can be achieved. However, the design and engineering of fusion systems requires controlling and manipulating matter at extreme energies and timescales; the shock physics and radiation transport governing the physical behavior under these conditions are complex requiring the development, calibration, and use of predictive multiphysics codes to navigate the highly nonlinear and multi-faceted design landscape. We hypothesize that artificial intelligence reasoning models can be combined with physics codes and emulators to autonomously design fusion fuel capsules. In this article, we construct a multi-agent system where natural language is utilized to explore the complex physics regimes around fusion energy. The agentic system is capable of executing a high-order multiphysics inertial fusion computational code. We demonstrate the capacity of the multi-agent design assistant to both collaboratively and autonomously manipulate, navigate, and optimize capsule geometry while accounting for high fidelity physics that ultimately achieve simulated ignition via inverse design.

We focus explicitly on multi-agent RL methods in 3D air combat environments, while the survey [4] also includes single-agent RL and 2D dynamics. Several existing works employ techniques that are relevant to multi-agent air combat, such as tactical reward shaping [5], heterogeneous agents [6], attention-based neural networks for situational awareness [7], or communication mechanisms [8] to improve mission strategies. Curriculum Learning (CL) with gradually increasing task difficulty is applied in [9], while enhanced coordination among agents is achieved by adapted training algorithms [10]. The application of HMARL in defense contexts is comparatively limited. An HMARL approach that employs attention mechanisms and self-play is introduced in [11]. Frameworks more closely related to ours appear in [12], [13], with the former integrating CL and the latter employing heterogeneous leader-follower agents together with JSBSim. In this work, we introduce a complex 3D air combat environment and a training framework to learn hierarchical policies using reward shaping and cascaded league-play that gradually increases mission complexity under realistic and heterogeneous conditions. In contrast to prior efforts that are built on established RL algorithms such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) [14], we additionally adapt the recently presented SPO algorithm [3] to the hierarchical multi-agent domain. To the best of our knowledge, this adapted setup has not yet been studied in this context and represents a significant step toward enhancing the realism of such applications.

AI scientists are emerging computational systems that serve as collaborative partners in discovery. These systems remain difficult to build because they are bespoke, tied to rigid workflows, and lack shared environments that unify tools, data, and analyses into a common ecosystem. In genomics, unified ecosystems have transformed research by enabling interoperability, reuse, and community-driven development; AI scientists require comparable infrastructure. We present ToolUniverse, an ecosystem for building AI scientists from any language or reasoning model across open- and closed-weight models. ToolUniverse standardizes how AI scientists identify and call tools by providing more than 600 machine learning models, datasets, APIs, and scientific packages for data analysis, knowledge retrieval, and experimental design. It automatically refines tool interfaces for correct use by AI scientists, generates new tools from natural language descriptions, iteratively optimizes tool specifications, and composes tools into agentic workflows. In a case study of hypercholesterolemia, ToolUniverse was used to create an AI scientist to identify a potent analog of a drug with favorable predicted properties. The open-source ToolUniverse is available at https://aiscientist.tools.

Embodied agents face persistent challenges in real-world environments, including partial observability, limited spatial reasoning, and high-latency multi-memory integration. We present RoboMemory, a brain-inspired framework that unifies Spatial, Temporal, Episodic, and Semantic memory under a parallelized architecture for efficient long-horizon planning and interactive environmental learning. A dynamic spatial knowledge graph (KG) ensures scalable and consistent memory updates, while a closed-loop planner with a critic module supports adaptive decision-making in dynamic settings. Experiments on EmbodiedBench show that RoboMemory, built on Qwen2.5-VL-72B-Ins, improves average success rates by 25% over its baseline and exceeds the closed-source state-of-the-art (SOTA) Gemini-1.5-Pro by 3%. Real-world trials further confirm its capacity for cumulative learning, with performance improving across repeated tasks. These results highlight RoboMemory as a scalable foundation for memory-augmented embodied intelligence, bridging the gap between cognitive neuroscience and robotic autonomy.

The injection molding industry faces critical challenges in preserving and transferring field knowledge, particularly as experienced workers retire and multilingual barriers hinder effective communication. This study introduces IM-Chat, a multi-agent framework based on large language models (LLMs), designed to facilitate knowledge transfer in injection molding. IM-Chat integrates both limited documented knowledge (e.g., troubleshooting tables, manuals) and extensive field data modeled through a data-driven process condition generator that infers optimal manufacturing settings from environmental inputs such as temperature and humidity, enabling robust and context-aware task resolution. By adopting a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) strategy and tool-calling agents within a modular architecture, IM-Chat ensures adaptability without the need for fine-tuning. Performance was assessed across 100 single-tool and 60 hybrid tasks for GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini, and GPT-3.5-turbo by domain experts using a 10-point rubric focused on relevance and correctness, and was further supplemented by automated evaluation using GPT-4o guided by a domain-adapted instruction prompt. The evaluation results indicate that more capable models tend to achieve higher accuracy, particularly in complex, tool-integrated scenarios. In addition, compared with the fine-tuned single-agent LLM, IM-Chat demonstrated superior accuracy, particularly in quantitative reasoning, and greater scalability in handling multiple information sources. Overall, these findings demonstrate the viability of multi-agent LLM systems for industrial knowledge workflows and establish IM-Chat as a scalable and generalizable approach to AI-assisted decision support in manufacturing.

Web-use agents are rapidly being deployed to automate complex web tasks with extensive browser capabilities. However, these capabilities create a critical and previously unexplored attack surface. This paper demonstrates how attackers can exploit web-use agents by embedding malicious content in web pages, such as comments, reviews, or advertisements, that agents encounter during legitimate browsing tasks. We introduce the task-aligned injection technique that frames malicious commands as helpful task guidance rather than obvious attacks, exploiting fundamental limitations in LLMs' contextual reasoning. Agents struggle to maintain coherent contextual awareness and fail to detect when seemingly helpful web content contains steering attempts that deviate them from their original task goal. To scale this attack, we developed an automated three-stage pipeline that generates effective injections without manual annotation or costly online agent interactions during training, remaining efficient even with limited training data. This pipeline produces a generator model that we evaluate on five popular agents using payloads organized by the Confidentiality-Integrity-Availability (CIA) security triad, including unauthorized camera activation, file exfiltration, user impersonation, phishing, and denial-of-service. This generator achieves over 80% attack success rate (ASR) with strong transferability across unseen payloads, diverse web environments, and different underlying LLMs. This attack succeed even against agents with built-in safety mechanisms, requiring only the ability to post content on public websites. To address this risk, we propose comprehensive mitigation strategies including oversight mechanisms, execution constraints, and task-aware reasoning techniques.

Malicious agents pose significant threats to the reliability and decision-making capabilities of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) powered by Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing defenses often fall short due to reactive designs or centralized architectures which may introduce single points of failure. To address these challenges, we propose SentinelNet, the first decentralized framework for proactively detecting and mitigating malicious behaviors in multi-agent collaboration. SentinelNet equips each agent with a credit-based detector trained via contrastive learning on augmented adversarial debate trajectories, enabling autonomous evaluation of message credibility and dynamic neighbor ranking via bottom-k elimination to suppress malicious communications. To overcome the scarcity of attack data, it generates adversarial trajectories simulating diverse threats, ensuring robust training. Experiments on MAS benchmarks show SentinelNet achieves near-perfect detection of malicious agents, close to 100% within two debate rounds, and recovers 95% of system accuracy from compromised baselines. By exhibiting strong generalizability across domains and attack patterns, SentinelNet establishes a novel paradigm for safeguarding collaborative MAS.

This paper investigates underwater cooperative target detection using autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), with a focus on the critical trade-off between cooperation efficiency and communication covertness. To tackle this challenge, we first formulate a joint trajectory and power control optimization problem, and then present an innovative hierarchical action management framework to solve it. According to the hierarchical formulation, at the macro level, the master AUV models the agent selection process as a Markov decision process and deploys the proximal policy optimization algorithm for strategic task allocation. At the micro level, each selected agent's decentralized decision-making is modeled as a partially observable Markov decision process, and a multi-agent proximal policy optimization algorithm is used to dynamically adjust its trajectory and transmission power based on its local observations. Under the centralized training and decentralized execution paradigm, our target detection framework enables adaptive covert cooperation while satisfying both energy and mobility constraints. By comprehensively modeling the considered system, the involved signals and tasks, as well as energy consumption, theoretical insights and practical solutions for the efficient and secure operation of multiple AUVs are provided, offering significant implications for the execution of underwater covert communication tasks.

Autonomous exploration in complex multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) with sparse rewards critically depends on providing agents with effective intrinsic motivation. While artificial curiosity offers a powerful self-supervised signal, it often confuses environmental stochasticity with meaningful novelty. Moreover, existing curiosity mechanisms exhibit a uniform novelty bias, treating all unexpected observations equally. However, peer behavior novelty, which encode latent task dynamics, are often overlooked, resulting in suboptimal exploration in decentralized, communication-free MARL settings. To this end, inspired by how human children adaptively calibrate their own exploratory behaviors via observing peers, we propose a novel approach to enhance multi-agent exploration. We introduce CERMIC, a principled framework that empowers agents to robustly filter noisy surprise signals and guide exploration by dynamically calibrating their intrinsic curiosity with inferred multi-agent context. Additionally, CERMIC generates theoretically-grounded intrinsic rewards, encouraging agents to explore state transitions with high information gain. We evaluate CERMIC on benchmark suites including VMAS, Meltingpot, and SMACv2. Empirical results demonstrate that exploration with CERMIC significantly outperforms SoTA algorithms in sparse-reward environments.