Agents
AI Agents as Universal Task Solvers
Achille, Alessandro, Soatto, Stefano
AI reasoning agents are already able to solve a variety of tasks by deploying tools, simulating outcomes of multiple hypotheses and reflecting on them. In doing so, they perform computation, although not in the classical sense -- there is no program being executed. Still, if they perform computation, can AI agents be universal? Can chain-of-thought reasoning solve any computable task? How does an AI Agent learn to reason? Is it a matter of model size? Or training dataset size? In this work, we reinterpret the role of learning in the context of AI Agents, viewing them as compute-capable stochastic dynamical systems, and highlight the role of time in a foundational principle for learning to reason. In doing so, we propose a shift from classical inductive learning to transductive learning -- where the objective is not to approximate the distribution of past data, but to capture their algorithmic structure to reduce the time needed to find solutions to new tasks. Transductive learning suggests that, counter to Shannon's theory, a key role of information in learning is about reduction of time rather than reconstruction error. In particular, we show that the optimal speed-up that a universal solver can achieve using past data is tightly related to their algorithmic information. Using this, we show a theoretical derivation for the observed power-law scaling of inference time versus training time. We then show that scaling model size can lead to behaviors that, while improving accuracy on benchmarks, fail any reasonable test of intelligence, let alone super-intelligence: In the limit of infinite space and time, large models can behave as savants, able to brute-force through any task without any insight. Instead, we argue that the key quantity to optimize when scaling reasoning models is time, whose critical role in learning has so far only been indirectly considered.
SAGE: A Top-Down Bottom-Up Knowledge-Grounded User Simulator for Multi-turn AGent Evaluation
Shea, Ryan, Lu, Yunan, Qiu, Liang, Yu, Zhou
Evaluating multi-turn interactive agents is challenging due to the need for human assessment. Evaluation with simulated users has been introduced as an alternative, however existing approaches typically model generic users and overlook the domain-specific principles required to capture realistic behavior. We propose SAGE, a novel user Simulation framework for multi-turn AGent Evaluation that integrates knowledge from business contexts. SAGE incorporates top-down knowledge rooted in business logic, such as ideal customer profiles, grounding user behavior in realistic customer personas. We further integrate bottom-up knowledge taken from business agent infrastructure (e.g., product catalogs, FAQs, and knowledge bases), allowing the simulator to generate interactions that reflect users' information needs and expectations in a company's target market. Through empirical evaluation, we find that this approach produces interactions that are more realistic and diverse, while also identifying up to 33% more agent errors, highlighting its effectiveness as an evaluation tool to support bug-finding and iterative agent improvement.
CGBench: Benchmarking Language Model Scientific Reasoning for Clinical Genetics Research
Queen, Owen, Zhang, Harrison G., Zou, James
Variant and gene interpretation are fundamental to personalized medicine and translational biomedicine. However, traditional approaches are manual and labor-intensive. Generative language models (LMs) can facilitate this process, accelerating the translation of fundamental research into clinically-actionable insights. While existing benchmarks have attempted to quantify the capabilities of LMs for interpreting scientific data, these studies focus on narrow tasks that do not translate to real-world research. To meet these challenges, we introduce CGBench, a robust benchmark that tests reasoning capabilities of LMs on scientific publications. CGBench is built from ClinGen, a resource of expert-curated literature interpretations in clinical genetics. CGBench measures the ability to 1) extract relevant experimental results following precise protocols and guidelines, 2) judge the strength of evidence, and 3) categorize and describe the relevant outcome of experiments. We test 8 different LMs and find that while models show promise, substantial gaps exist in literature interpretation, especially on fine-grained instructions. Reasoning models excel in fine-grained tasks but non-reasoning models are better at high-level interpretations. Finally, we measure LM explanations against human explanations with an LM judge approach, revealing that models often hallucinate or misinterpret results even when correctly classifying evidence. CGBench reveals strengths and weaknesses of LMs for precise interpretation of scientific publications, opening avenues for future research in AI for clinical genetics and science more broadly.
Holistic Agent Leaderboard: The Missing Infrastructure for AI Agent Evaluation
Kapoor, Sayash, Stroebl, Benedikt, Kirgis, Peter, Nadgir, Nitya, Siegel, Zachary S, Wei, Boyi, Xue, Tianci, Chen, Ziru, Chen, Felix, Utpala, Saiteja, Ndzomga, Franck, Oruganty, Dheeraj, Luskin, Sophie, Liu, Kangheng, Yu, Botao, Arora, Amit, Hahm, Dongyoon, Trivedi, Harsh, Sun, Huan, Lee, Juyong, Jin, Tengjun, Mai, Yifan, Zhou, Yifei, Zhu, Yuxuan, Bommasani, Rishi, Kang, Daniel, Song, Dawn, Henderson, Peter, Su, Yu, Liang, Percy, Narayanan, Arvind
AI agents have been developed for complex real-world tasks from coding to customer service. But AI agent evaluations suffer from many challenges that undermine our understanding of how well agents really work. We introduce the Holistic Agent Leaderboard (HAL) to address these challenges. We make three main contributions. First, we provide a standardized evaluation harness that orchestrates parallel evaluations across hundreds of VMs, reducing evaluation time from weeks to hours while eliminating common implementation bugs. Second, we conduct three-dimensional analysis spanning models, scaffolds, and benchmarks. We validate the harness by conducting 21,730 agent rollouts across 9 models and 9 benchmarks in coding, web navigation, science, and customer service with a total cost of about $40,000. Our analysis reveals surprising insights, such as higher reasoning effort reducing accuracy in the majority of runs. Third, we use LLM-aided log inspection to uncover previously unreported behaviors, such as searching for the benchmark on HuggingFace instead of solving a task, or misusing credit cards in flight booking tasks. We share all agent logs, comprising 2.5B tokens of language model calls, to incentivize further research into agent behavior. By standardizing how the field evaluates agents and addressing common pitfalls in agent evaluation, we hope to shift the focus from agents that ace benchmarks to agents that work reliably in the real world.
Mean-Field Games with Constraints
This paper introduces a framework of Constrained Mean-Field Games (CMFGs), where each agent solves a constrained Markov decision process (CMDP). This formulation captures scenarios in which agents' strategies are subject to feasibility, safety, or regulatory restrictions, thereby extending the scope of classical mean field game (MFG) models. We first establish the existence of CMFG equilibria under a strict feasibility assumption, and we further show uniqueness under a classical monotonicity condition. To compute equilibria, we develop Constrained Mean-Field Occupation Measure Optimization (CMFOMO), an optimization-based scheme that parameterizes occupation measures and shows that finding CMFG equilibria is equivalent to solving a single optimization problem with convex constraints and bounded variables. CMFOMO does not rely on uniqueness of the equilibria and can approximate all equilibria with arbitrary accuracy. We further prove that CMFG equilibria induce $O(1 / \sqrt{N})$-Nash equilibria in the associated constrained $N$-player games, thereby extending the classical justification of MFGs as approximations for large but finite systems. Numerical experiments on a modified Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible (SIS) epidemic model with various constraints illustrate the effectiveness and flexibility of the framework.
Modeling Hypergraph Using Large Language Models
Gu, Bingqiao, Zeng, Jiale, Qi, Xingqin, Li, Dong
Due to the advantages of hypergraphs in modeling high-order relationships in complex systems, they have been applied to higher-order clustering, hypergraph neural networks and computer vision. These applications rely heavily on access to high-quality, large-scale real-world hypergraph data. Yet, compared to traditional pairwise graphs, real hypergraph datasets remain scarce in both scale and diversity. This shortage significantly limits the development and evaluation of advanced hypergraph learning algorithms. Therefore, how to quickly generate large-scale hypergraphs that conform to the characteristics of real networks is a crucial task that has not received sufficient attention. Motivated by recent advances in large language models (LLMs), particularly their capabilities in semantic reasoning, structured generation, and simulating human behavior, we investigate whether LLMs can facilitate hypergraph generation from a fundamentally new perspective. We introduce HyperLLM, a novel LLM-driven hypergraph generator that simulates the formation and evolution of hypergraphs through a multi-agent collaboration. The framework integrates prompts and structural feedback mechanisms to ensure that the generated hypergraphs reflect key real-world patterns. Extensive experiments across diverse datasets demonstrate that HyperLLM achieves superior fidelity to structural and temporal hypergraph patterns, while requiring minimal statistical priors. Our findings suggest that LLM-based frameworks offer a promising new direction for hypergraph modeling.
ManiAgent: An Agentic Framework for General Robotic Manipulation
Yang, Yi, Gu, Kefan, Wen, Yuqing, Li, Hebei, Zhao, Yucheng, Wang, Tiancai, Liu, Xudong
While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in robotic manipulation, their performance in complex reasoning and long-horizon task planning is limited by data scarcity and model capacity. To address this, we introduce ManiAgent, an agentic architecture for general manipulation tasks that achieves end-to-end output from task descriptions and environmental inputs to robotic manipulation actions. In this framework, multiple agents involve inter-agent communication to perform environmental perception, sub-task decomposition and action generation, enabling efficient handling of complex manipulation scenarios. Evaluations show ManiAgent achieves an 86.8% success rate on the SimplerEnv benchmark and 95.8% on real-world pick-and-place tasks, enabling efficient data collection that yields VLA models with performance comparable to those trained on human-annotated datasets. The project webpage is available at https://yi-yang929.github.io/ManiAgent/.
Autonomous vehicles need social awareness to find optima in multi-agent reinforcement learning routing games
Psarou, Anastasia, Gorczyca, ลukasz, Gaweล, Dominik, Kucharski, Rafaล
Previous work has shown that when multiple selfish Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) are introduced to future cities and start learning optimal routing strategies using Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), they may destabilize traffic systems, as they would require a significant amount of time to converge to the optimal solution, equivalent to years of real-world commuting. We demonstrate that moving beyond the selfish component in the reward significantly relieves this issue. If each AV, apart from minimizing its own travel time, aims to reduce its impact on the system, this will be beneficial not only for the system-wide performance but also for each individual player in this routing game. By introducing an intrinsic reward signal based on the marginal cost matrix, we significantly reduce training time and achieve convergence more reliably. Marginal cost quantifies the impact of each individual action (route-choice) on the system (total travel time). Including it as one of the components of the reward can reduce the degree of non-stationarity by aligning agents' objectives. Notably, the proposed counterfactual formulation preserves the system's equilibria and avoids oscillations. Our experiments show that training MARL algorithms with our novel reward formulation enables the agents to converge to the optimal solution, whereas the baseline algorithms fail to do so. We show these effects in both a toy network and the real-world network of Saint-Arnoult. Our results optimistically indicate that social awareness (i.e., including marginal costs in routing decisions) improves both the system-wide and individual performance of future urban systems with AVs.
BrowserAgent: Building Web Agents with Human-Inspired Web Browsing Actions
Yu, Tao, Zhang, Zhengbo, Lyu, Zhiheng, Gong, Junhao, Yi, Hongzhu, Wang, Xinming, Zhou, Yuxuan, Yang, Jiabing, Nie, Ping, Huang, Yan, Chen, Wenhu
Efficiently solving real-world problems with LLMs increasingly hinges on their ability to interact with dynamic web environments and autonomously acquire external information. While recent research like Search-R1 and WebDancer demonstrates strong performance in solving web tasks, they heavily rely on additional tools to convert the interactive web environment into static text content. This is in contrast to human browsing behaviors, which involve diverse interactions with the browser, such as scrolling, clicking, and typing. In this paper, we propose BrowserAgent, a more interactive agent that solves complex tasks through human-inspired browser actions. BrowserAgent operates directly on raw web pages via Playwright through a set of predefined browser actions. We adopt a two-stage training (Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Rejection Fine-Tuning (RFT)) to improve the model's generalization abilities. Despite using significantly less training data than Search-R1, BrowserAgent achieves more competitive results across different Open-QA tasks. Additionally, we introduce an explicit memory mechanism to store key conclusions across steps, further enhancing the model's reasoning capabilities for long-horizon tasks. Notably, BrowserAgent-7B can achieve around 20\% improvement over Search-R1 on multi-hop QA tasks like HotpotQA, 2Wiki, and Bamboogle. These results indicate that BrowserAgent can serve as a more advanced framework for more interactive and scalable web agents.
DSPO: Stable and Efficient Policy Optimization for Agentic Search and Reasoning
Gu, Chenyang, Pu, Yewen, Yang, Bruce, Li, Xiaofan, Gao, Huan
Enhancing LLMs with the ability to actively search external knowledge is crucial for complex and real-world tasks. Current approaches either rely on prompting to elicit the model's innate agent capabilities, or suffer from performance ceilings and collapse when applying RL to complex interactive tasks, leaving their true agentic potential untapped. To address this, we introduce \textbf{D}ynamic-filter \textbf{S}equence-level \textbf{P}olicy \textbf{O}ptimization (DSPO), an improved RL algorithm designed for robust agent training through sequence-level optimization and dynamic sample filtering. We train our model purely through RL to interleave multi-turn search and reasoning, obviating the need for supervised demonstration data. Across multiple QA benchmarks, our 7B model improves over a comparable previous work by \textbf{34.1\%}, and even outperforms the 14B model from previous work in complex multihop QA such as HotpotQA by nearly \textbf{9\% relative}, maintaining exceptional training stability.