Agents
Multitask Learning with Learned Task Relationships
Classical consensus-based strategies for federated and decentralized learning are statistically suboptimal in the presence of heterogeneous local data or task distributions. As a result, in recent years, there has been growing interest in multitask or personalized strategies, which allow individual agents to benefit from one another in pursuing locally optimal models without enforcing consensus. Existing strategies require either precise prior knowledge of the underlying task relationships or are fully non-parametric and instead rely on meta-learning or proximal constructions. In this work, we introduce an algorithmic framework that strikes a balance between these extremes. By modeling task relationships through a Gaussian Markov Random Field with an unknown precision matrix, we develop a strategy that jointly learns both the task relationships and the local models, allowing agents to self-organize in a way consistent with their individual data distributions. Our theoretical analysis quantifies the quality of the learned relationship, and our numerical experiments demonstrate its practical effectiveness.
MedCoAct: Confidence-Aware Multi-Agent Collaboration for Complete Clinical Decision
Zheng, Hongjie, Shi, Zesheng, Yi, Ping
Abstract--Autonomous agents utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in isolated medical tasks like diagnosis and image analysis, but struggle with integrated clinical workflows that connect diagnostic reasoning and medication decisions. We identify a core limitation: existing medical AI systems process tasks in isolation without the cross-validation and knowledge integration found in clinical teams, reducing their effectiveness in real-world healthcare scenarios. T o transform the isolation paradigm into a collaborative approach, we propose MedCoAct, a confidence-aware multi-agent framework that simulates clinical collaboration by integrating specialized doctor and pharmacist agents, and present a benchmark, DrugCareQA, to evaluate medical AI capabilities in integrated diagnosis and treatment workflows. Our results demonstrate that MedCoAct achieves 67.58% diagnostic accuracy and 67.58% medication recommendation accuracy, outperforming single agent framework by 7.04% and 7.08% respectively. In healthcare, LLMs have demonstrated capabilities across diverse applications. Medical question-answering systems provide rapid access to comprehensive clinical knowledge and evidence-based recommendations [1]-[3]. LLMs assist also with medical imaging report generation, significantly reducing physician workload [4]. Moreover, LLMs help drug discovery research by accelerating molecular design and optimization processes [5].
Traj-CoA: Patient Trajectory Modeling via Chain-of-Agents for Lung Cancer Risk Prediction
Zeng, Sihang, Fu, Yujuan, Zhou, Sitong, Yu, Zixuan, Liu, Lucas Jing, Wen, Jun, Thompson, Matthew, Etzioni, Ruth, Yetisgen, Meliha
Large language models (LLMs) offer a generalizable approach for modeling patient trajectories, but suffer from the long and noisy nature of electronic health records (EHR) data in temporal reasoning. To address these challenges, we introduce Traj-CoA, a multi-agent system involving chain-of-agents for patient trajectory modeling. Traj-CoA employs a chain of worker agents to process EHR data in manageable chunks sequentially, distilling critical events into a shared long-term memory module, EHRMem, to reduce noise and preserve a comprehensive timeline. A final manager agent synthesizes the worker agents' summary and the extracted timeline in EHRMem to make predictions. In a zero-shot one-year lung cancer risk prediction task based on five-year EHR data, Traj-CoA outperforms baselines of four categories. Analysis reveals that Traj-CoA exhibits clinically aligned temporal reasoning, establishing it as a promisingly robust and generalizable approach for modeling complex patient trajectories.
Rise of the Robochemist
Zhu, Jihong, Huang, Kefeng, Pipe, Jonathon, Horbaczewsky, Chris, Tyrrell, Andy, Fairlamb, Ian J. S.
Abstract--Chemistry, a long-standing discipline, has historically relied on manual and often time-consuming processes. While some automation exists, the field is now on the cusp of a significant evolution driven by the integration of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), giving rise to the concept of the robochemist: a new paradigm where autonomous systems assist in designing, executing, and analyzing experiments. Robo-chemists integrate mobile manipulators, advanced perception, teleoperation, and data-driven protocols to execute experiments with greater adaptability, reproducibility, and safety. Rather than a fully automated replacement for human chemists, we envisioned the robochemist as a complementary partner that works collaboratively to enhance discovery, enabling a more efficient exploration of chemical space and accelerating innovation in pharmaceuticals, materials science, and sustainable manufacturing. This article traces the technologies, applications, and challenges that define this transformation, highlighting both the opportunities and the responsibilities that accompany the emergence of the robochemist. Ultimately, the future of chemistry is argued to lie in a symbiotic partnership where human intuition and expertise is amplified by robotic precision and AI-driven insight. The field of chemistry, a cornerstone of modern science and industry, has long been characterized by a blend of theoretical insight and practical, hands-on experimentation.
KG-MAS: Knowledge Graph-Enhanced Multi-Agent Infrastructure for coupling physical and digital robotic environments
The seamless integration of physical and digital environments in Cyber-Physical Systems(CPS), particularly within Industry 4.0, presents significant challenges stemming from system heterogeneity and complexity. Traditional approaches often rely on rigid, data-centric solutions like co-simulation frameworks or brittle point-to-point middleware bridges, which lack the semantic richness and flexibility required for intelligent, autonomous coordination. This report introduces the Knowledge Graph-Enhanced Multi-Agent Infrastructure(KG-MAS), as resolution in addressing such limitations. KG-MAS leverages a centralized Knowledge Graph (KG) as a dynamic, shared world model, providing a common semantic foundation for a Multi-Agent System(MAS). Autonomous agents, representing both physical and digital components, query this KG for decision-making and update it with real-time state information. The infrastructure features a model-driven architecture which facilitates the automatic generation of agents from semantic descriptions, thereby simplifying system extension and maintenance. By abstracting away underlying communication protocols and providing a unified, intelligent coordination mechanism, KG-MAS offers a robust, scalable, and flexible solution for coupling heterogeneous physical and digital robotic environments.
It Takes Two: Learning Interactive Whole-Body Control Between Humanoid Robots
Liu, Zuhong, Ge, Junhao, Xiong, Minhao, Gu, Jiahao, Tang, Bowei, Jing, Wei, Chen, Siheng
The true promise of humanoid robotics lies beyond single-agent autonomy: two or more humanoids must engage in physically grounded, socially meaningful whole-body interactions that echo the richness of human social interaction. However, single-humanoid methods suffer from the isolation issue, ignoring inter-agent dynamics and causing misaligned contacts, interpenetrations, and unrealistic motions. To address this, we present Harmanoid , a dual-humanoid motion imitation framework that transfers interacting human motions to two robots while preserving both kinematic fidelity and physical realism. Harmanoid comprises two key components: (i) contact-aware motion retargeting, which restores inter-body coordination by aligning SMPL contacts with robot vertices, and (ii) interaction-driven motion controller, which leverages interaction-specific rewards to enforce coordinated keypoints and physically plausible contacts. By explicitly modeling inter-agent contacts and interaction-aware dynamics, Harmanoid captures the coupled behaviors between humanoids that single-humanoid frameworks inherently overlook. Experiments demonstrate that Harmanoid significantly improves interactive motion imitation, surpassing existing single-humanoid frameworks that largely fail in such scenarios.
MedAgentAudit: Diagnosing and Quantifying Collaborative Failure Modes in Medical Multi-Agent Systems
Gu, Lei, Zhu, Yinghao, Sang, Haoran, Wang, Zixiang, Sui, Dehao, Tang, Wen, Harrison, Ewen, Gao, Junyi, Yu, Lequan, Ma, Liantao
While large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems show promise in simulating medical consultations, their evaluation is often confined to final-answer accuracy. This practice treats their internal collaborative processes as opaque "black boxes" and overlooks a critical question: is a diagnostic conclusion reached through a sound and verifiable reasoning pathway? The inscrutable nature of these systems poses a significant risk in high-stakes medical applications, potentially leading to flawed or untrustworthy conclusions. To address this, we conduct a large-scale empirical study of 3,600 cases from six medical datasets and six representative multi-agent frameworks. Through a rigorous, mixed-methods approach combining qualitative analysis with quantitative auditing, we develop a comprehensive taxonomy of collaborative failure modes. Our quantitative audit reveals four dominant failure patterns: flawed consensus driven by shared model deficiencies, suppression of correct minority opinions, ineffective discussion dynamics, and critical information loss during synthesis. This study demonstrates that high accuracy alone is an insufficient measure of clinical or public trust. It highlights the urgent need for transparent and auditable reasoning processes, a cornerstone for the responsible development and deployment of medical AI.
DixitWorld: Evaluating Multimodal Abductive Reasoning in Vision-Language Models with Multi-Agent Dixit Gameplay
Mo, Yunxiang, Zheng, Tianshi, Zong, Qing, Liu, Jiayu, Xu, Baixuan, Yim, Yauwai, Chan, Chunkit, Bai, Jiaxin, Song, Yangqiu
Multimodal abductive reasoning--the generation and selection of explanatory hypotheses from partial observations--is a cornerstone of intelligence. Current evaluations of this ability in vision-language models (VLMs) are largely confined to static, single-agent tasks. Inspired by Dixit, we introduce DixitWorld, a comprehensive evaluation suite designed to deconstruct this challenge. DIXITWORLD features two core components: DixitArena, a dynamic, multi-agent environment that evaluates both hypothesis generation (a "storyteller" crafting cryptic clues) and hypothesis selection ("listeners" choosing the target image from decoys) under imperfect information; and DixitBench, a static QA benchmark that isolates the listener's task for efficient, controlled evaluation. Results from DixitArena reveal distinct, role-dependent behaviors: smaller open-source models often excel as creative storytellers, producing imaginative yet less discriminative clues, whereas larger proprietary models demonstrate superior overall performance, particularly as listeners. Performance on DixitBench strongly correlates with listener results in DixitArena, validating it as a reliable proxy for hypothesis selection. Our findings reveal a key trade-off between generative creativity and discriminative understanding in multimodal abductive reasoning, a central challenge for developing more balanced and capable vision-language agents.
Beyond ADE and FDE: A Comprehensive Evaluation Framework for Safety-Critical Prediction in Multi-Agent Autonomous Driving Scenarios
Liu, Feifei, Wang, Haozhe, Wei, Zejun, Lu, Qirong, Wen, Yiyang, Tang, Xiaoyu, Jiang, Jingyan, He, Zhijian
Current evaluation methods for autonomous driving prediction models rely heavily on simplistic metrics such as Average Displacement Error (ADE) and Final Displacement Error (FDE). While these metrics offer basic performance assessments, they fail to capture the nuanced behavior of prediction modules under complex, interactive, and safety-critical driving scenarios. For instance, existing benchmarks do not distinguish the influence of nearby versus distant agents, nor systematically test model robustness across varying multi-agent interactions. This paper addresses this critical gap by proposing a novel testing framework that evaluates prediction performance under diverse scene structures, saying, map context, agent density and spatial distribution. Through extensive empirical analysis, we quantify the differential impact of agent proximity on target trajectory prediction and identify scenario-specific failure cases that are not exposed by traditional metrics. Our findings highlight key vulnerabilities in current state-of-the-art prediction models and demonstrate the importance of scenario-aware evaluation. The proposed framework lays the groundwork for rigorous, safety-driven prediction validation, contributing significantly to the identification of failure-prone corner cases and the development of robust, certifiable prediction systems for autonomous vehicles.
Agentic Troubleshooting Guide Automation for Incident Management
Mao, Jiayi, Li, Liqun, Gao, Yanjie, Peng, Zegang, He, Shilin, Zhang, Chaoyun, Qin, Si, Khalid, Samia, Lin, Qingwei, Rajmohan, Saravan, Lanka, Sitaram, Zhang, Dongmei
Effective incident management in large-scale IT systems relies on troubleshooting guides (TSGs), but their manual execution is slow and error-prone. While recent advances in LLMs offer promise for automating incident management tasks, existing LLM-based solutions lack specialized support for several key challenges, including managing TSG quality issues, interpreting complex control flow, handling data-intensive queries, and exploiting execution parallelism. We first conducted an empirical study on 92 real-world TSGs, and, guided by our findings, we present StepFly, a novel end-to-end agentic framework for troubleshooting guide automation. Our approach features a three-stage workflow: the first stage provides a comprehensive guide together with a tool, TSG Mentor, to assist SREs in improving TSG quality; the second stage performs offline preprocessing using LLMs to extract structured execution DAGs from unstructured TSGs and to create dedicated Query Preparation Plugins (QPPs); and the third stage executes online using a DAG-guided scheduler-executor framework with a memory system to guarantee correct workflow and support parallel execution of independent steps. Our empirical evaluation on a collection of real-world TSGs and incidents demonstrates that StepFly achieves a ~94% success rate on GPT-4.1, outperforming baselines with less time and token consumption. Furthermore, it achieves a remarkable execution time reduction of 32.9% to 70.4% for parallelizable TSGs.