Agents
MICA: Multi-Agent Industrial Coordination Assistant
Wen, Di, Peng, Kunyu, Zheng, Junwei, Chen, Yufan, Shi, Yitain, Wei, Jiale, Liu, Ruiping, Yang, Kailun, Stiefelhagen, Rainer
Industrial workflows demand adaptive and trustworthy assistance that can operate under limited computing, connectivity, and strict privacy constraints. In this work, we present MICA (Multi-Agent Industrial Coordination Assistant), a perception-grounded and speech-interactive system that delivers real-time guidance for assembly, troubleshooting, part queries, and maintenance. MICA coordinates five role-specialized language agents, audited by a safety checker, to ensure accurate and compliant support. To achieve robust step understanding, we introduce Adaptive Step Fusion (ASF), which dynamically blends expert reasoning with online adaptation from natural speech feedback. Furthermore, we establish a new multi-agent coordination benchmark across representative task categories and propose evaluation metrics tailored to industrial assistance, enabling systematic comparison of different coordination topologies. Our experiments demonstrate that MICA consistently improves task success, reliability, and responsiveness over baseline structures, while remaining deployable on practical offline hardware. Together, these contributions highlight MICA as a step toward deployable, privacy-preserving multi-agent assistants for dynamic factory environments. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/Kratos-Wen/MICA.
AgentA/B: Automated and Scalable Web A/BTesting with Interactive LLM Agents
Wang, Dakuo, Hsu, Ting-Yao, Lu, Yuxuan, Gu, Hansu, Cui, Limeng, Xie, Yaochen, Headean, William, Yao, Bingsheng, Veeragouni, Akash, Liu, Jiapeng, Nag, Sreyashi, Wang, Jessie
A/B testing experiment is a widely adopted method for evaluating UI/UX design decisions in modern web applications. Yet, traditional A/B testing remains constrained by its dependence on the large-scale and live traffic of human participants, and the long time of waiting for the testing result. Through formative interviews with six experienced industry practitioners, we identified critical bottlenecks in current A/B testing workflows. In response, we present AgentA/B, a novel system that leverages Large Language Model-based autonomous agents (LLM Agents) to automatically simulate user interaction behaviors with real webpages. AgentA/B enables scalable deployment of LLM agents with diverse personas, each capable of navigating the dynamic webpage and interactively executing multi-step interactions like search, clicking, filtering, and purchasing. In a demonstrative controlled experiment, we employ AgentA/B to simulate a between-subject A/B testing with 1,000 LLM agents Amazon.com, and compare agent behaviors with real human shopping behaviors at a scale. Our findings suggest AgentA/B can emulate human-like behavior patterns.
Agentic Aerial Cinematography: From Dialogue Cues to Cinematic Trajectories
Lin, Yifan, Liu, Sophie Ziyu, Qi, Ran, Xue, George Z., Song, Xinping, Qin, Chao, Liu, Hugh H. -T.
We present Agentic Aerial Cinematography: From Dialogue Cues to Cinematic Trajectories (ACDC), an autonomous drone cinematography system driven by natural language communication between human directors and drones. The main limitation of previous drone cinematography workflows is that they require manual selection of waypoints and view angles based on predefined human intent, which is labor-intensive and yields inconsistent performance. In this paper, we propose employing large language models (LLMs) and vision foundation models (VFMs) to convert free-form natural language prompts directly into executable indoor UAV video tours. Specifically, our method comprises a vision-language retrieval pipeline for initial waypoint selection, a preference-based Bayesian optimization framework that refines poses using aesthetic feedback, and a motion planner that generates safe quadrotor trajectories. We validate ACDC through both simulation and hardware-in-the-loop experiments, demonstrating that it robustly produces professional-quality footage across diverse indoor scenes without requiring expertise in robotics or cinematography. These results highlight the potential of embodied AI agents to close the loop from open-vocabulary dialogue to real-world autonomous aerial cinematography.
Inverse Optimization Latent Variable Models for Learning Costs Applied to Route Problems
Lahoud, Alan A., Schaffernicht, Erik, Stork, Johannes A.
Learning representations for solutions of constrained optimization problems (COPs) with unknown cost functions is challenging, as models like (Variational) Autoencoders struggle to enforce constraints when decoding structured outputs. We propose an Inverse Optimization Latent Variable Model (IO-LVM) that learns a latent space of COP cost functions from observed solutions and reconstructs feasible outputs by solving a COP with a solver in the loop. Our approach leverages estimated gradients of a Fenchel-Young loss through a non-differentiable deterministic solver to shape the latent space. Unlike standard Inverse Optimization or Inverse Reinforcement Learning methods, which typically recover a single or context-specific cost function, IO-LVM captures a distribution over cost functions, enabling the identification of diverse solution behaviors arising from different agents or conditions not available during the training process. We validate our method on real-world datasets of ship and taxi routes, as well as paths in synthetic graphs, demonstrating its ability to reconstruct paths and cycles, predict their distributions, and yield interpretable latent representations.
CoPAD : Multi-source Trajectory Fusion and Cooperative Trajectory Prediction with Anchor-oriented Decoder in V2X Scenarios
Wu, Kangyu, Qiao, Jiaqi, Zhang, Ya
Recently, data-driven trajectory prediction methods have achieved remarkable results, significantly advancing the development of autonomous driving. However, the instability of single-vehicle perception introduces certain limitations to trajectory prediction. In this paper, a novel lightweight framework for cooperative trajectory prediction, CoPAD, is proposed. This framework incorporates a fusion module based on the Hungarian algorithm and Kalman filtering, along with the Past Time Attention (PTA) module, mode attention module and anchor-oriented decoder (AoD). It effectively performs early fusion on multi-source trajectory data from vehicles and road infrastructure, enabling the trajectories with high completeness and accuracy. The PTA module can efficiently capture potential interaction information among historical trajectories, and the mode attention module is proposed to enrich the diversity of predictions. Additionally, the decoder based on sparse anchors is designed to generate the final complete trajectories. Extensive experiments show that CoPAD achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the DAIR-V2X-Seq dataset, validating the effectiveness of the model in cooperative trajectory prediction in V2X scenarios.
Localmax dynamics for attention in transformers and its asymptotic behavior
Cimetiรจre, Henri, Chiri, Maria Teresa, Gharesifard, Bahman
We introduce a new discrete-time attention model, termed the localmax dynamics, which interpolates between the classic softmax dynamics and the hardmax dynamics, where only the tokens that maximize the influence toward a given token have a positive weight. As in hardmax, uniform weights are determined by a parameter controlling neighbor influence, but the key extension lies in relaxing neighborhood interactions through an alignment-sensitivity parameter, which allows controlled deviations from pure hardmax behavior. As we prove, while the convex hull of the token states still converges to a convex polytope, its structure can no longer be fully described by a maximal alignment set, prompting the introduction of quiescent sets to capture the invariant behavior of tokens near vertices. We show that these sets play a key role in understanding the asymptotic behavior of the system, even under time-varying alignment sensitivity parameters. We further show that localmax dynamics does not exhibit finite-time convergence and provide results for vanishing, nonzero, time-varying alignment-sensitivity parameters, recovering the limiting behavior of hardmax as a by-product. Finally, we adapt Lyapunov-based methods from classical opinion dynamics, highlighting their limitations in the asymmetric setting of localmax interactions and outlining directions for future research.
Swarm Oracle: Trustless Blockchain Agreements through Robot Swarms
Pacheco, Alexandre, Zhao, Hanqing, Strobel, Volker, Roukny, Tarik, Dudek, Gregory, Reina, Andreagiovanni, Dorigo, Marco
Blockchain consensus, rooted in the principle ``don't trust, verify'', limits access to real-world data, which may be ambiguous or inaccessible to some participants. Oracles address this limitation by supplying data to blockchains, but existing solutions may reduce autonomy, transparency, or reintroduce the need for trust. We propose Swarm Oracle: a decentralized network of autonomous robots -- that is, a robot swarm -- that use onboard sensors and peer-to-peer communication to collectively verify real-world data and provide it to smart contracts on public blockchains. Swarm Oracle leverages the built-in decentralization, fault tolerance and mobility of robot swarms, which can flexibly adapt to meet information requests on-demand, even in remote locations. Unlike typical cooperative robot swarms, Swarm Oracle integrates robots from multiple stakeholders, protecting the system from single-party biases but also introducing potential adversarial behavior. To ensure the secure, trustless and global consensus required by blockchains, we employ a Byzantine fault-tolerant protocol that enables robots from different stakeholders to operate together, reaching social agreements of higher quality than the estimates of individual robots. Through extensive experiments using both real and simulated robots, we showcase how consensus on uncertain environmental information can be achieved, despite several types of attacks orchestrated by large proportions of the robots, and how a reputation system based on blockchain tokens lets Swarm Oracle autonomously recover from faults and attacks, a requirement for long-term operation.
Building Data-Driven Occupation Taxonomies: A Bottom-Up Multi-Stage Approach via Semantic Clustering and Multi-Agent Collaboration
Li, Nan, Kang, Bo, De Bie, Tijl
Creating robust occupation taxonomies, vital for applications ranging from job recommendation to labor market intelligence, is challenging. Manual curation is slow, while existing automated methods are either not adaptive to dynamic regional markets (top-down) or struggle to build coherent hierarchies from noisy data (bottom-up). We introduce CLIMB (CLusterIng-based Multi-agent taxonomy Builder), a framework that fully automates the creation of high-quality, data-driven taxonomies from raw job postings. CLIMB uses global semantic clustering to distill core occupations, then employs a reflection-based multi-agent system to iteratively build a coherent hierarchy. On three diverse, real-world datasets, we show that CLIMB produces taxonomies that are more coherent and scalable than existing methods and successfully capture unique regional characteristics. We release our code and datasets at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CLIMB.
SMART: Scalable Multi-Agent Reasoning and Trajectory Planning in Dense Environments
Huang, Heye, Yang, Yibin, Chen, Wang, Chen, Tiantian, Li, Xiaopeng, Chen, Sikai
Multi-vehicle trajectory planning is a non-convex problem that becomes increasingly difficult in dense environments due to the rapid growth of collision constraints. Efficient exploration of feasible behaviors and resolution of tight interactions are essential for real-time, large-scale coordination. This paper introduces SMART, Scalable Multi-Agent Reasoning and Trajectory Planning, a hierarchical framework that combines priority-based search with distributed optimization to achieve efficient and feasible multi-vehicle planning. The upper layer explores diverse interaction modes using reinforcement learning-based priority estimation and large-step hybrid A* search, while the lower layer refines solutions via parallelizable convex optimization. By partitioning space among neighboring vehicles and constructing robust feasible corridors, the method decouples the joint non-convex problem into convex subproblems solved efficiently in parallel. This design alleviates the step-size trade-off while ensuring kinematic feasibility and collision avoidance. Experiments show that SMART consistently outperforms baselines. On 50 m x 50 m maps, it sustains over 90% success within 1 s up to 25 vehicles, while baselines often drop below 50%. On 100 m x 100 m maps, SMART achieves above 95% success up to 50 vehicles and remains feasible up to 90 vehicles, with runtimes more than an order of magnitude faster than optimization-only approaches. Built on vehicle-to-everything communication, SMART incorporates vehicle-infrastructure cooperation through roadside sensing and agent coordination, improving scalability and safety. Real-world experiments further validate this design, achieving planning times as low as 0.014 s while preserving cooperative behaviors.
Distributed Nash Equilibrium Seeking Algorithm in Aggregative Games for Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Systems
Dong, Yi, Li, Zhongguo, Ramchurn, Sarvapali D., Huang, Xiaowei
This paper develops a distributed Nash Equilibrium seeking algorithm for heterogeneous multi-robot systems. The algorithm utilises distributed optimisation and output control to achieve the Nash equilibrium by leveraging information shared among neighbouring robots. Specifically, we propose a distributed optimisation algorithm that calculates the Nash equilibrium as a tailored reference for each robot and designs output control laws for heterogeneous multi-robot systems to track it in an aggregative game. We prove that our algorithm is guaranteed to converge and result in efficient outcomes. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated through numerical simulations and empirical testing with physical robots.