Agents
Disproving the Feasibility of Learned Confidence Calibration Under Binary Supervision: An Information-Theoretic Impossibility
Nair, Arjun S., Sinaga, Kristina P.
We prove a fundamental impossibility theorem: neural networks cannot simultaneously learn well-calibrated confidence estimates with meaningful diversity when trained using binary correct/incorrect supervision. Through rigorous mathematical analysis and comprehensive empirical evaluation spanning negative reward training, symmetric loss functions, and post-hoc calibration methods, we demonstrate this is an information-theoretic constraint, not a methodological failure. Our experiments reveal universal failure patterns: negative rewards produce extreme underconfidence (ECE greater than 0.8) while destroying confidence diversity (std less than 0.05), symmetric losses fail to escape binary signal averaging, and post-hoc methods achieve calibration (ECE less than 0.02) only by compressing the confidence distribution. We formalize this as an underspecified mapping problem where binary signals cannot distinguish between different confidence levels for correct predictions: a 60 percent confident correct answer receives identical supervision to a 90 percent confident one. Crucially, our real-world validation shows 100 percent failure rate for all training methods across MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and CIFAR-10, while post-hoc calibration's 33 percent success rate paradoxically confirms our theorem by achieving calibration through transformation rather than learning. This impossibility directly explains neural network hallucinations and establishes why post-hoc calibration is mathematically necessary, not merely convenient. We propose novel supervision paradigms using ensemble disagreement and adaptive multi-agent learning that could overcome these fundamental limitations without requiring human confidence annotations.
The Sum Leaks More Than Its Parts: Compositional Privacy Risks and Mitigations in Multi-Agent Collaboration
Patil, Vaidehi, Stengel-Eskin, Elias, Bansal, Mohit
As large language models (LLMs) become integral to multi-agent systems, new privacy risks emerge that extend beyond memorization, direct inference, or single-turn evaluations. In particular, seemingly innocuous responses, when composed across interactions, can cumulatively enable adversaries to recover sensitive information, a phenomenon we term compositional privacy leakage. We present the first systematic study of such compositional privacy leaks and possible mitigation methods in multi-agent LLM systems. First, we develop a framework that models how auxiliary knowledge and agent interactions jointly amplify privacy risks, even when each response is benign in isolation. Next, to mitigate this, we propose and evaluate two defense strategies: (1) Theory-of-Mind defense (ToM), where defender agents infer a questioner's intent by anticipating how their outputs may be exploited by adversaries, and (2) Collaborative Consensus Defense (CoDef), where responder agents collaborate with peers who vote based on a shared aggregated state to restrict sensitive information spread. Crucially, we balance our evaluation across compositions that expose sensitive information and compositions that yield benign inferences. Our experiments quantify how these defense strategies differ in balancing the privacy-utility trade-off. We find that while chain-of-thought alone offers limited protection to leakage (~39% sensitive blocking rate), our ToM defense substantially improves sensitive query blocking (up to 97%) but can reduce benign task success. CoDef achieves the best balance, yielding the highest Balanced Outcome (79.8%), highlighting the benefit of combining explicit reasoning with defender collaboration. Together, our results expose a new class of risks in collaborative LLM deployments and provide actionable insights for designing safeguards against compositional, context-driven privacy leakage.
Continuous-Time Value Iteration for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Wang, Xuefeng, Zhang, Lei, Pu, Henglin, Qureshi, Ahmed H., Li, Husheng
Existing reinforcement learning (RL) methods struggle with complex dynamical systems that demand interactions at high frequencies or irregular time intervals. Continuous-time RL (CTRL) has emerged as a promising alternative by replacing discrete-time Bellman recursion with differential value functions defined as viscosity solutions of the Hamilton--Jacobi--Bellman (HJB) equation. While CTRL has shown promise, its applications have been largely limited to the single-agent domain. This limitation stems from two key challenges: (i) conventional solution methods for HJB equations suffer from the curse of dimensionality (CoD), making them intractable in high-dimensional systems; and (ii) even with HJB-based learning approaches, accurately approximating centralized value functions in multi-agent settings remains difficult, which in turn destabilizes policy training. In this paper, we propose a CT-MARL framework that uses physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) to approximate HJB-based value functions at scale. To ensure the value is consistent with its differential structure, we align value learning with value-gradient learning by introducing a Value Gradient Iteration (VGI) module that iteratively refines value gradients along trajectories. This improves gradient fidelity, in turn yielding more accurate values and stronger policy learning. We evaluate our method using continuous-time variants of standard benchmarks, including multi-agent particle environment (MPE) and multi-agent MuJoCo. Our results demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing continuous-time RL baselines and scales to complex multi-agent dynamics.
Judging with Many Minds: Do More Perspectives Mean Less Prejudice? On Bias Amplifications and Resistance in Multi-Agent Based LLM-as-Judge
Ma, Chiyu, Zhang, Enpei, Zhao, Yilun, Liu, Wenjun, Jia, Yaning, Qing, Peijun, Shi, Lin, Cohan, Arman, Yan, Yujun, Vosoughi, Soroush
LLM-as-Judge has emerged as a scalable alternative to human evaluation, enabling large language models (LLMs) to provide reward signals in trainings. While recent work has explored multi-agent extensions such as multi-agent debate and meta-judging to enhance evaluation quality, the question of how intrinsic biases manifest in these settings remains underexplored. In this study, we conduct a systematic analysis of four diverse bias types: position bias, verbosity bias, chain-of-thought bias, and bandwagon bias. We evaluate these biases across two widely adopted multi-agent LLM-as-Judge frameworks: Multi-Agent-Debate and LLM-as-Meta-Judge. Our results show that debate framework amplifies biases sharply after the initial debate, and this increased bias is sustained in subsequent rounds, while meta-judge approaches exhibit greater resistance. We further investigate the incorporation of PINE, a leading single-agent debiasing method, as a bias-free agent within these systems. The results reveal that this bias-free agent effectively reduces biases in debate settings but provides less benefit in meta-judge scenarios. Our work provides a comprehensive study of bias behavior in multi-agent LLM-as-Judge systems and highlights the need for targeted bias mitigation strategies in collaborative evaluation settings.
Trustless Autonomy: Understanding Motivations, Benefits, and Governance Dilemmas in Self-Sovereign Decentralized AI Agents
Hu, Botao Amber, Liu, Yuhan, Rong, Helena
The recent trend of self-sovereign Decentralized AI Agents (DeAgents) combines Large Language Model (LLM)-based AI agents with decentralization technologies such as blockchain smart contracts and trusted execution environments (TEEs). These tamper-resistant trustless substrates allow agents to achieve self-sovereignty through ownership of cryptowallet private keys and control of digital assets and social media accounts. DeAgents eliminate centralized control and reduce human intervention, addressing key trust concerns inherent in centralized AI systems. This contributes to social computing by enabling new human cooperative paradigm "intelligence as commons." However, given ongoing challenges in LLM reliability such as hallucinations, this creates paradoxical tension between trustlessness and unreliable autonomy. This study addresses this empirical research gap through interviews with DeAgents stakeholders-experts, founders, and developers-to examine their motivations, benefits, and governance dilemmas. The findings will guide future DeAgents system and protocol design and inform discussions about governance in sociotechnical AI systems in the future agentic web.
Out-of-Sight Trajectories: Tracking, Fusion, and Prediction
Zhang, Haichao, Xu, Yi, Fu, Yun
Trajectory prediction is a critical task in computer vision and autonomous systems, playing a key role in autonomous driving, robotics, surveillance, and virtual reality. Existing methods often rely on complete and noise-free observational data, overlooking the challenges associated with out-of-sight objects and the inherent noise in sensor data caused by limited camera coverage, obstructions, and the absence of ground truth for denoised trajectories. These limitations pose safety risks and hinder reliable prediction in real-world scenarios. In this extended work, we present advancements in Out-of-Sight Trajectory (OST), a novel task that predicts the noise-free visual trajectories of out-of-sight objects using noisy sensor data. Building on our previous research, we broaden the scope of Out-of-Sight Trajectory Prediction (OOSTraj) to include pedestrians and vehicles, extending its applicability to autonomous driving, robotics, surveillance, and virtual reality. Our enhanced Vision-Positioning Denoising Module leverages camera calibration to establish a vision-positioning mapping, addressing the lack of visual references, while effectively denoising noisy sensor data in an unsupervised manner. Through extensive evaluations on the Vi-Fi and JRDB datasets, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in both trajectory denoising and prediction, significantly surpassing previous baselines. Additionally, we introduce comparisons with traditional denoising methods, such as Kalman filtering, and adapt recent trajectory prediction models to our task, providing a comprehensive benchmark. This work represents the first initiative to integrate vision-positioning projection for denoising noisy sensor trajectories of out-of-sight agents, paving the way for future advances. The code and preprocessed datasets are available at github.com/Hai-chao-Zhang/OST
An Evaluation-Centric Paradigm for Scientific Visualization Agents
Ai, Kuangshi, Miao, Haichao, Li, Zhimin, Wang, Chaoli, Liu, Shusen
Recent advances in multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have enabled increasingly sophisticated autonomous visualization agents capable of translating user intentions into data visualizations. However, measuring progress and comparing different agents remains challenging, particularly in scientific visualization (SciVis), due to the absence of comprehensive, large-scale benchmarks for evaluating real-world capabilities. This position paper examines the various types of evaluation required for SciVis agents, outlines the associated challenges, provides a simple proof-of-concept evaluation example, and discusses how evaluation benchmarks can facilitate agent self-improvement. We advocate for a broader collaboration to develop a SciVis agentic evaluation benchmark that would not only assess existing capabilities but also drive innovation and stimulate future development in the field.
Nonlinear Cooperative Salvo Guidance with Seeker-Limited Interceptors
Gopikannan, Lohitvel, Kumar, Shashi Ranjan, Sinha, Abhinav
Abstract--This paper presents a cooperative guidance strategy for the simultaneous interception of a constant-velocity, non-maneuvering target, addressing the realistic scenario where only a subset of interceptors are equipped with onboard seekers. T o overcome the resulting heterogeneity in target observability, a fixed-time distributed observer is employed, enabling seeker-less interceptors to estimate the target state using information from seeker-equipped agents and local neighbors over a directed communication topology. Departing from conventional strategies that approximate time-to-go via linearization or small-angle assumptions, the proposed approach leverages deviated pursuit guidance where the time-to-go expression is exact for such a target. Moreover, a higher-order sliding mode consensus protocol is utilized to establish time-to-go consensus within a finite time. The effectiveness of the proposed guidance and estimation architecture is demonstrated through simulations.
Emergent Alignment via Competition
Collina, Natalie, Goel, Surbhi, Roth, Aaron, Ryu, Emily, Shi, Mirah
Aligning AI systems with human values remains a fundamental challenge, but does our inability to create perfectly aligned models preclude obtaining the benefits of alignment? We study a strategic setting where a human user interacts with multiple differently misaligned AI agents, none of which are individually well-aligned. Our key insight is that when the users utility lies approximately within the convex hull of the agents utilities, a condition that becomes easier to satisfy as model diversity increases, strategic competition can yield outcomes comparable to interacting with a perfectly aligned model. We model this as a multi-leader Stackelberg game, extending Bayesian persuasion to multi-round conversations between differently informed parties, and prove three results: (1) when perfect alignment would allow the user to learn her Bayes-optimal action, she can also do so in all equilibria under the convex hull condition (2) under weaker assumptions requiring only approximate utility learning, a non-strategic user employing quantal response achieves near-optimal utility in all equilibria and (3) when the user selects the best single AI after an evaluation period, equilibrium guarantees remain near-optimal without further distributional assumptions. We complement the theory with two sets of experiments.
Forecasting and Visualizing Air Quality from Sky Images with Vision-Language Models
Vahdatpour, Mohammad Saleh, Eyvazi, Maryam, Zhang, Yanqing
Air pollution remains a critical threat to public health and environmental sustainability, yet conventional monitoring systems are often constrained by limited spatial coverage and accessibility. This paper proposes an AI-driven agent that predicts ambient air pollution levels from sky images and synthesizes realistic visualizations of pollution scenarios using generative modeling. Our approach combines statistical texture analysis with supervised learning for pollution classification, and leverages vision-language model (VLM)-guided image generation to produce interpretable representations of air quality conditions. The generated visuals simulate varying degrees of pollution, offering a foundation for user-facing interfaces that improve transparency and support informed environmental decision-making. These outputs can be seamlessly integrated into intelligent applications aimed at enhancing sit-uational awareness and encouraging behavioral responses based on real-time forecasts. W e validate our method using a dataset of urban sky images and demonstrate its effectiveness in both pollution level estimation and semantically consistent visual synthesis. The system design further incorporates human-centered user experience principles to ensure accessibility, clarity, and public engagement in air quality forecasting. T o support scalable and energy-efficient deployment, future iterations will incorporate a green CNN architecture enhanced with FPGA-based incremental learning, enabling real-time inference on edge platforms.