Agents
COMPASS: Cooperative Multi-Agent Persistent Monitoring using Spatio-Temporal Attention Network
Zhang, Xingjian, Wang, Yizhuo, Sartoretti, Guillaume
Persistent monitoring of dynamic targets is essential in real-world applications such as disaster response, environmental sensing, and wildlife conservation, where mobile agents must continuously gather information under uncertainty. We propose COMPASS, a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) framework that enables decentralized agents to persistently monitor multiple moving targets efficiently. We model the environment as a graph, where nodes represent spatial locations and edges capture topological proximity, allowing agents to reason over structured layouts and revisit informative regions as needed. Each agent independently selects actions based on a shared spatio-temporal attention network that we design to integrate historical observations and spatial context. We model target dynamics using Gaussian Processes (GPs), which support principled belief updates and enable uncertainty-aware planning. We train COMPASS using centralized value estimation and decentralized policy execution under an adaptive reward setting. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that COMPASS consistently outperforms strong baselines in uncertainty reduction, target coverage, and coordination efficiency across dynamic multi-target scenarios.
FinResearchBench: A Logic Tree based Agent-as-a-Judge Evaluation Framework for Financial Research Agents
Sun, Rui, Bai, Zuo, Zhang, Wentao, Zhang, Yuxiang, Zhao, Li, Sun, Shan, Qiu, Zhengwen
Recently, AI agents are rapidly evolving in intelligence and widely used in professional research applications, such as STEM, software development, and finance. Among these AI agents, deep research agent is a key category as it can perform long-horizon tasks and solve problems of greater complexity. However, there are few evaluation frameworks and benchmarks that systematically and automatically investigate the capabilities of these research agents. In addition, financial research problems have distinct complexity and subtlety. To fill in the gap, we propose FinResearchBench, which is a logic tree-based Agent-as-a-Judge and targets specifically for the financial research agents. It provides a comprehensive and automatic assessment of the research agents across 7 key types of tasks in the financial research domain. The contributions of this work are two-folded: (1) the first and innovative Agent-as-a-Judge system that extracts the logic tree of the research outcome and uses it as the intermediate information to present a comprehensive, reliable, and robust evaluation; (2) finance-oriented that it covers 70 typical financial research questions, spreading across 7 frequently encountered types of task in the domain.
LANGTRAJ: Diffusion Model and Dataset for Language-Conditioned Trajectory Simulation
Chang, Wei-Jer, Zhan, Wei, Tomizuka, Masayoshi, Chandraker, Manmohan, Pittaluga, Francesco
Evaluating autonomous vehicles with controllability enables scalable testing in counterfactual or structured settings, enhancing both efficiency and safety. We introduce LangTraj, a language-conditioned scene-diffusion model that simulates the joint behavior of all agents in traffic scenarios. By conditioning on natural language inputs, LangTraj provides flexible and intuitive control over interactive behaviors, generating nuanced and realistic scenarios. Unlike prior approaches that depend on domain-specific guidance functions, LangTraj incorporates language conditioning during training, facilitating more intuitive traffic simulation control. We propose a novel closed-loop training strategy for diffusion models, explicitly tailored to enhance stability and realism during closed-loop simulation. To support language-conditioned simulation, we develop Inter-Drive, a large-scale dataset with diverse and interactive labels for training language-conditioned diffusion models. Our dataset is built upon a scalable pipeline for annotating agent-agent interactions and single-agent behaviors, ensuring rich and varied supervision. Validated on the Waymo Open Motion Dataset, LangTraj demonstrates strong performance in realism, language controllability, and language-conditioned safety-critical simulation, establishing a new paradigm for flexible and scalable autonomous vehicle testing. Project Website: https://langtraj.github.io/
STARK: Strategic Team of Agents for Refining Kernels
Dong, Juncheng, Yang, Yang, Liu, Tao, Wang, Yang, Qi, Feng, Tarokh, Vahid, Rangadurai, Kaushik, Yang, Shuang
The efficiency of GPU kernels is central to the progress of modern AI, yet optimizing them remains a difficult and labor-intensive task due to complex interactions between memory hierarchies, thread scheduling, and hardware-specific characteristics. While recent advances in large language models (LLMs) provide new opportunities for automated code generation, existing approaches largely treat LLMs as single-shot generators or naive refinement tools, limiting their effectiveness in navigating the irregular kernel optimization landscape. We introduce an LLM agentic framework for GPU kernel optimization that systematically explores the design space through multi-agent collaboration, grounded instruction, dynamic context management, and strategic search. This framework mimics the workflow of expert engineers, enabling LLMs to reason about hardware trade-offs, incorporate profiling feedback, and refine kernels iteratively. We evaluate our approach on KernelBench, a benchmark for LLM-based kernel optimization, and demonstrate substantial improvements over baseline agents: our system produces correct solutions where baselines often fail, and achieves kernels with up to 16x faster runtime performance. These results highlight the potential of agentic LLM frameworks to advance fully automated, scalable GPU kernel optimization.
Towards Interpretable and Trustworthy Time Series Reasoning: A BlueSky Vision
Ning, Kanghui, Pan, Zijie, Jiang, Yushan, Schneider, Anderson, Nevmyvaka, Yuriy, Song, Dongjin
Time series reasoning is emerging as the next frontier in temporal analysis, aiming to move beyond pattern recognition towards explicit, interpretable, and trustworthy inference. This paper presents a BlueSky vision built on two complementary directions. One builds robust foundations for time series reasoning, centered on comprehensive temporal understanding, structured multi-step reasoning, and faithful evaluation frameworks. The other advances system-level reasoning, moving beyond language-only explanations by incorporating multi-agent collaboration, multi-modal context, and retrieval-augmented approaches. Together, these directions outline a flexible and extensible framework for advancing time series reasoning, aiming to deliver interpretable and trustworthy temporal intelligence across diverse domains.
A Comparative User Evaluation of XRL Explanations using Goal Identification
Towers, Mark, Du, Yali, Freeman, Christopher, Norman, Timothy J.
Debugging is a core application of explainable reinforcement learning (XRL) algorithms; however, limited comparative evaluations have been conducted to understand their relative performance. We propose a novel evaluation methodology to test whether users can identify an agent's goal from an explanation of its decision-making. Utilising the Atari's Ms. Pacman environment and four XRL algorithms, we find that only one achieved greater than random accuracy for the tested goals and that users were generally overconfident in their selections. Further, we find that users' self-reported ease of identification and understanding for every explanation did not correlate with their accuracy.
DiRAC - Distributed Robot Awareness and Consensus
Gopan, Uday, Kulkarni, Manjari, S, Lakshasri, Mittal, Kashish, Radhakrishna, Sriram, Naskar, Aditya, DL, Rameshwar
Abstract--DiRAC is a scalable, distributed framework designed to enable efficient task assignment and path planning in very large robotic swarms. It introduces a novel zone-partitioned architecture with dynamically elected leaders and a tick-synchronized consensus protocol that yields strong consistency and deterministic outcomes. For path planning, DiRAC uses a novel algorithm, a force-based decentralized planner for real-time collision resolution. V alidated within ROS 2 middleware through preliminary simulation, DiRAC demonstrates architectural scalability and modular efficiency in simulated warehouse environments, laying the groundwork for real-world deployment in large-scale industrial and logistics domains. Index T erms--Swarm Robotics, Multi-Agent Systems, Distributed Consensus, T ask Assignment, Path Planning, Distributed Algorithms, Robot Coordination, Scalable Systems, Leader Election, Fault T olerance, Cooperative Control, Decentralized Control, ROS 2 Middleware.
FinSight: Towards Real-World Financial Deep Research
Jin, Jiajie, Zhang, Yuyao, Xu, Yimeng, Qian, Hongjin, Zhu, Yutao, Dou, Zhicheng
Generating professional financial reports is a labor-intensive and intellectually demanding process that current AI systems struggle to fully automate. To address this challenge, we introduce FinSight (Financial InSight), a novel multi agent framework for producing high-quality, multimodal financial reports. The foundation of FinSight is the Code Agent with Variable Memory (CAVM) architecture, which unifies external data, designed tools, and agents into a programmable variable space, enabling flexible data collection, analysis and report generation through executable code. To ensure professional-grade visualization, we propose an Iterative Vision-Enhanced Mechanism that progressively refines raw visual outputs into polished financial charts. Furthermore, a two stage Writing Framework expands concise Chain-of-Analysis segments into coherent, citation-aware, and multimodal reports, ensuring both analytical depth and structural consistency. Experiments on various company and industry-level tasks demonstrate that FinSight significantly outperforms all baselines, including leading deep research systems in terms of factual accuracy, analytical depth, and presentation quality, demonstrating a clear path toward generating reports that approach human-expert quality.
Enhancing Language Agent Strategic Reasoning through Self-Play in Adversarial Games
Zhang, Yikai, Rong, Ye, Yuan, Siyu, Chen, Jiangjie, Xie, Jian, Xiao, Yanghua
Existing language agents often encounter difficulties in dynamic adversarial games due to poor strategic reasoning. To mitigate this limitation, a promising approach is to allow agents to learn from game interactions automatically, without relying on costly expert-labeled data. Unlike static environments where agents receive fixed feedback or rewards, selecting appropriate opponents in dynamic adversarial games can significantly impact learning performance. However, the discussion of opponents in adversarial environments remains an area under exploration. In this paper, we propose a Step-level poliCy Optimization method through Play-And-Learn, SCO-PAL. Leveraging SCO-PAL, we conduct a detailed analysis of opponent selection by setting opponents at different levels and find that self-play is the most effective way to improve strategic reasoning in such adversarial environments. Utilizing SCO-PAL with self-play, we increase the average win rate against four opponents by approximately 30% compared to baselines and achieve a 54.76% win rate against GPT-4 in six adversarial games.
Prompt Optimization via Retrieved Reasoning Assets and Multi-Agent Analysis
Seo, Wonduk, Lee, Juhyeon, Koh, Junseo, An, Hyunjin, Park, Jian, Lee, Seunghyun, Chen, Haihua, Bu, Yi
Prompt optimization has emerged as an effective alternative to retraining for improving the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, most existing approaches treat evaluation as a black box, relying solely on numerical scores while offering limited insight into why a prompt succeeds or fails. They also depend heavily on trial-and-error refinements, which are difficult to interpret and control. In this paper, we introduce MA-SAPO, a Multi-Agent framework for Score-Aware Prompt Optimization. Compared to prior methods, MA-SAPO explicitly couples evaluation outcomes with structured reasoning to guide systematic edits. The framework specifically consists of two stages: during the Reasoning Phase, agents collaboratively explain metric scores, diagnose weaknesses, and synthesize targeted refinements that are stored as reusable reasoning assets; during the Test Phase, agents retrieve these assets to analyze optimized prompts and apply only evidence-grounded edits. By turning evaluation signals into interpretable reasoning chains, MA-SAPO produces prompt refinements that are more transparent, auditable, and controllable. Experiments on the HelpSteer1/2 benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over single-pass prompting, retrieval-augmented baselines, and prior multi-agent strategies, validating the effectiveness of our approach.