Agents
CORRECT: COndensed eRror RECognition via knowledge Transfer in multi-agent systems
Yu, Yifan, Li, Moyan, Xu, Shaoyuan, Fu, Jinmiao, Hou, Xinhai, Lai, Fan, Wang, Bryan
Multi-agent systems (MAS) are increasingly capable of tackling complex real-world tasks, yet their reliance on inter-agent coordination, tool use, and long-horizon reasoning makes error recognition particularly challenging. Minor errors can propagate across agents, escalating into task failures while producing long, intertwined execution trajectories that impose significant costs for both human developers and automated systems to debug and analyze. Our key insight is that, despite surface differences in failure trajectories (e.g., logs), MAS errors often recur with similar structural patterns. This paper presents CORRECT, the first lightweight, training-free framework that leverages an online cache of distilled error schemata to recognize and transfer knowledge of failure structures across new requests. This cache-based reuse allows LLMs to perform targeted error localization at inference time, avoiding the need for expensive retraining while adapting to dynamic MAS deployments in subseconds. To support rigorous study in this domain, we also introduce CORRECT-Error, a large-scale dataset of over 2,000 annotated trajectories collected through a novel error-injection pipeline guided by real-world distributions, and further validated through human evaluation to ensure alignment with natural failure patterns. Experiments across seven diverse MAS applications show that CORRECT improves step-level error localization up to 19.8% over existing advances while at near-zero overhead, substantially narrowing the gap between automated and human-level error recognition.
TeraAgent: A Distributed Agent-Based Simulation Engine for Simulating Half a Trillion Agents
Breitwieser, Lukas, Hesam, Ahmad, Yaฤlฤฑkรงฤฑ, Abdullah Giray, Sadrosadati, Mohammad, Rademakers, Fons, Mutlu, Onur
Agent-based simulation is an indispensable paradigm for studying complex systems. These systems can comprise billions of agents, requiring the computing resources of multiple servers to simulate. Unfortunately, the state-of-the-art platform, BioDynaMo, does not scale out across servers due to its shared-memory-based implementation. To overcome this key limitation, we introduce TeraAgent, a distributed agent-based simulation engine. A critical challenge in distributed execution is the exchange of agent information across servers, which we identify as a major performance bottleneck. We propose two solutions: 1) a tailored serialization mechanism that allows agents to be accessed and mutated directly from the receive buffer, and 2) leveraging the iterative nature of agent-based simulations to reduce data transfer with delta encoding. Built on our solutions, TeraAgent enables extreme-scale simulations with half a trillion agents (an 84x improvement), reduces time-to-result with additional compute nodes, improves interoperability with third-party tools, and provides users with more hardware flexibility.
Advancing Multi-agent Traffic Simulation via R1-Style Reinforcement Fine-Tuning
Pei, Muleilan, Shi, Shaoshuai, Shen, Shaojie
Scalable and realistic simulation of multi-agent traffic behavior is critical for advancing autonomous driving technologies. Although existing data-driven simulators have made significant strides in this domain, they predominantly rely on supervised learning to align simulated distributions with real-world driving scenarios. A persistent challenge, however, lies in the distributional shift that arises between training and testing, which often undermines model generalization in unseen environments. To address this limitation, we propose SMART -R1, a novel R1-style reinforcement fine-tuning paradigm tailored for next-token prediction models to better align agent behavior with human preferences and evaluation metrics. Our approach introduces a metric-oriented policy optimization algorithm to improve distribution alignment and an iterative "SFT -RFT -SFT" training strategy that alternates between Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) to maximize performance gains. The results on the Waymo Open Sim Agents Challenge (WOSAC) showcase that SMART -R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance with an overall realism meta score of 0.7858, ranking first on the leaderboard at the time of submission. Simulating multi-agent traffic behaviors plays a pivotal role in ensuring the safety and reliability of autonomous driving systems. However, modeling realistic and scalable traffic behaviors remains highly challenging due to the inherent uncertainty and multi-modality of human driving. Traditional simulators that simply replay logged data lack reactive capability, while rule-based methods, such as the Intelligent Driver Model (IDM) (Treiber et al., 2000), depend on handcrafted heuristics and fail to capture the diversity and realism of human behavior.
Integrated Communication and Control for Energy-Efficient UAV Swarms: A Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Approach
Sun, Tianjiao, Guo, Ningyan, Gu, Haozhe, Peng, Yanyan, Feng, Zhiyong
The deployment of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm-assisted communication networks has become an increasingly vital approach for remediating coverage limitations in infrastructure-deficient environments, with especially pressing applications in temporary scenarios, such as emergency rescue, military and security operations, and remote area coverage. However, complex geographic environments lead to unpredictable and highly dynamic wireless channel conditions, resulting in frequent interruptions of air-to-ground (A2G) links that severely constrain the reliability and quality of service in UAV swarm-assisted mobile communications. To improve the quality of UAV swarm-assisted communications in complex geographic environments, we propose an integrated communication and control co-design mechanism. Given the stringent energy constraints inherent in UAV swarms, our proposed mechanism is designed to optimize energy efficiency while maintaining an equilibrium between equitable communication rates for mobile ground users (GUs) and UAV energy expenditure. We formulate the joint resource allocation and 3D trajectory control problem as a Markov decision process (MDP), and develop a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) framework to enable real-time coordinated actions across the UAV swarm. To optimize the action policy of UAV swarms, we propose a novel multi-agent hybrid proximal policy optimization with action masking (MAHPPO-AM) algorithm, specifically designed to handle complex hybrid action spaces. The algorithm incorporates action masking to enforce hard constraints in high-dimensional action spaces. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves a fairness index of 0.99 while reducing energy consumption by up to 25% compared to baseline methods.
AgentGuard: Runtime Verification of AI Agents
The rapid evolution to autonomous, agentic AI systems introduces significant risks due to their inherent unpredictability and emergent behaviors; this also renders traditional verification methods inadequate and necessitates a shift towards probabilistic guarantees where the question is no longer if a system will fail, but the probability of its failure within given constraints. This paper presents AgentGuard, a framework for runtime verification of Agentic AI systems that provides continuous, quantitative assurance through a new paradigm called Dynamic Probabilistic Assurance. AgentGuard operates as an inspection layer that observes an agent's raw I/O and abstracts it into formal events corresponding to transitions in a state model. It then uses online learning to dynamically build and update a Markov Decision Process (MDP) that formally models the agent's emergent behavior. Using probabilistic model checking, the framework then verifies quantitative properties in real-time.
Mix-Ecom: Towards Mixed-Type E-Commerce Dialogues with Complex Domain Rules
Zhou, Chenyu, Shi, Xiaoming, Qiu, Hui, Zheng, Xiawu, Leng, Haitao, Jiang, Yankai, Liu, Shaoguo, Gao, Tingting, Ji, Rongrong
E-commerce agents contribute greatly to helping users complete their e-commerce needs. To promote further research and application of e-commerce agents, benchmarking frameworks are introduced for evaluating LLM agents in the e-commerce domain. Despite the progress, current benchmarks lack evaluating agents' capability to handle mixed-type e-commerce dialogue and complex domain rules. To address the issue, this work first introduces a novel corpus, termed Mix-ECom, which is constructed based on real-world customer-service dialogues with post-processing to remove user privacy and add CoT process. Specifically, Mix-ECom contains 4,799 samples with multiply dialogue types in each e-commerce dialogue, covering four dialogue types (QA, recommendation, task-oriented dialogue, and chit-chat), three e-commerce task types (pre-sales, logistics, after-sales), and 82 e-commerce rules. Furthermore, this work build baselines on Mix-Ecom and propose a dynamic framework to further improve the performance. Results show that current e-commerce agents lack sufficient capabilities to handle e-commerce dialogues, due to the hallucination cased by complex domain rules. The dataset will be publicly available.
FedAgentBench: Towards Automating Real-world Federated Medical Image Analysis with Server-Client LLM Agents
Saha, Pramit, Strong, Joshua, Mishra, Divyanshu, Ouyang, Cheng, Noble, J. Alison
Federated learning (FL) allows collaborative model training across healthcare sites without sharing sensitive patient data. However, real-world FL deployment is often hindered by complex operational challenges that demand substantial human efforts. This includes: (a) selecting appropriate clients (hospitals), (b) coordinating between the central server and clients, (c) client-level data pre-processing, (d) harmonizing non-standardized data and labels across clients, and (e) selecting FL algorithms based on user instructions and cross-client data characteristics. However, the existing FL works overlook these practical orchestration challenges. These operational bottlenecks motivate the need for autonomous, agent-driven FL systems, where intelligent agents at each hospital client and the central server agent collaboratively manage FL setup and model training with minimal human intervention. To this end, we first introduce an agent-driven FL framework that captures key phases of real-world FL workflows from client selection to training completion and a benchmark dubbed FedAgentBench that evaluates the ability of LLM agents to autonomously coordinate healthcare FL. Our framework incorporates 40 FL algorithms, each tailored to address diverse task-specific requirements and cross-client characteristics. Furthermore, we introduce a diverse set of complex tasks across 201 carefully curated datasets, simulating 6 modality-specific real-world healthcare environments, viz., Dermatoscopy, Ultrasound, Fundus, Histopathology, MRI, and X-Ray. We assess the agentic performance of 14 open-source and 10 proprietary LLMs spanning small, medium, and large model scales. While some agent cores such as GPT-4.1 and DeepSeek V3 can automate various stages of the FL pipeline, our results reveal that more complex, interdependent tasks based on implicit goals remain challenging for even the strongest models.
STAIR: Addressing Stage Misalignment through Temporal-Aligned Preference Reinforcement Learning
Luan, Yao, Mu, Ni, Yang, Yiqin, Xu, Bo, Jia, Qing-Shan
Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) bypasses complex reward engineering by learning rewards directly from human preferences, enabling better alignment with human intentions. However, its effectiveness in multi-stage tasks, where agents sequentially perform sub-tasks (e.g., navigation, grasping), is limited by stage misalignment: Comparing segments from mismatched stages, such as movement versus manipulation, results in uninformative feedback, thus hindering policy learning. In this paper, we validate the stage misalignment issue through theoretical analysis and empirical experiments. To address this issue, we propose STage-AlIgned Reward learning (STAIR), which first learns a stage approximation based on temporal distance, then prioritizes comparisons within the same stage. Temporal distance is learned via contrastive learning, which groups temporally close states into coherent stages, without predefined task knowledge, and adapts dynamically to policy changes. Extensive experiments demonstrate STAIR's superiority in multi-stage tasks and competitive performance in single-stage tasks. Furthermore, human studies show that stages approximated by STAIR are consistent with human cognition, confirming its effectiveness in mitigating stage misalignment.
From What to Why: A Multi-Agent System for Evidence-based Chemical Reaction Condition Reasoning
Yang, Cheng, Lu, Jiaxuan, Wan, Haiyuan, Yu, Junchi, Qin, Feiwei
The chemical reaction recommendation is to select proper reaction condition parameters for chemical reactions, which is pivotal to accelerating chemical science. With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), there is growing interest in leveraging their reasoning and planning capabilities for reaction condition recommendation. Despite their success, existing methods rarely explain the rationale behind the recommended reaction conditions, limiting their utility in high-stakes scientific workflows. In this work, we propose ChemMAS, a multi-agent system that reframes condition prediction as an evidence-based reasoning task. ChemMAS decomposes the task into mechanistic grounding, multi-channel recall, constraint-aware agentic debate, and rationale aggregation. Each decision is backed by interpretable justifications grounded in chemical knowledge and retrieved precedents. Experiments show that ChemMAS achieves 20-35% gains over domain-specific baselines and outperforms general-purpose LLMs by 10-15% in Top-1 accuracy, while offering falsifiable, human-trustable rationales, which establishes a new paradigm for explainable AI in scientific discovery.
Transparent Visual Reasoning via Object-Centric Agent Collaboration
Teoh, Benjamin, Glocker, Ben, Toni, Francesca, Kori, Avinash
A central challenge in explainable AI, particularly in the visual domain, is producing explanations grounded in human-understandable concepts. To tackle this, we introduce OCEAN (Object-Centric Explananda via Agent Negotiation), a novel, inherently interpretable framework built on object-centric representations and a transparent multi-agent reasoning process. The game-theoretic reasoning process drives agents to agree on coherent and discriminative evidence, resulting in a faithful and interpretable decision-making process. We train OCEAN end-to-end and benchmark it against standard visual classifiers and popular posthoc explanation tools like GradCAM and LIME across two diagnostic multi-object datasets. Our results demonstrate competitive performance with respect to state-of-the-art black-box models with a faithful reasoning process, which was reflected by our user study, where participants consistently rated OCEAN's explanations as more intuitive and trustworthy.