Agents
Dynamic Aware: Adaptive Multi-Mode Out-of-Distribution Detection for Trajectory Prediction in Autonomous Vehicles
Trajectory prediction is central to the safe and seamless operation of autonomous vehicles (AVs). In deployment, however, prediction models inevitably face distribution shifts between training data and real-world conditions, where rare or underrepresented traffic scenarios induce out-of-distribution (OOD) cases. While most prior OOD detection research in AVs has concentrated on computer vision tasks such as object detection and segmentation, trajectory-level OOD detection remains largely underexplored. A recent study formulated this problem as a quickest change detection (QCD) task, providing formal guarantees on the trade-off between detection delay and false alarms [1]. Building on this foundation, we propose a new framework that introduces adaptive mechanisms to achieve robust detection in complex driving environments. Empirical analysis across multiple real-world datasets reveals that prediction errors -- even on in-distribution samples -- exhibit mode-dependent distributions that evolve over time with dataset-specific dynamics. By explicitly modeling these error modes, our method achieves substantial improvements in both detection delay and false alarm rates. Comprehensive experiments on established trajectory prediction benchmarks show that our framework significantly outperforms prior UQ- and vision-based OOD approaches in both accuracy and computational efficiency, offering a practical path toward reliable, driving-aware autonomy.
Multi-Attacker Single-Defender Target Defense in Conical Environments
Pourghorban, Arman, Maity, Dipankar
We consider a variant of the target defense problem in a planar conical environment where a single defender is tasked to capture a sequence of incoming attackers. The attackers' objective is to breach the target boundary without being captured by the defender. As soon as the current attacker breaches the target or gets captured by the defender, the next attacker appears at the boundary of the environment and moves radially toward the target with maximum speed. Therefore, the defender's final location at the end of the current game becomes its initial location for the next game. The attackers pick strategies that are advantageous for the current as well as for future engagements between the defender and the remaining attackers. The attackers have their own sensors with limited range, using which they can perfectly detect if the defender is within their sensing range. We derive equilibrium strategies for all the players to optimize the capture percentage using the notions of capture distribution. Finally, the theoretical results are verified through numerical examples using Monte Carlo type random trials of experiments.
AI Agents with Human-Like Collaborative Tools: Adaptive Strategies for Enhanced Problem-Solving
Reed, Harper, Sugimura, Michael, Zangari, Angelo
We investigate whether giving LLM agents the collaborative tools and autonomy that humans naturally use for problem solving can improve their performance. We equip Claude Code agents with MCP-based social media and journaling tools and allow them to use these tools as they see fit. Across 34 Aider Polyglot Python programming challenges, collaborative tools substantially improve performance on the hardest problems, delivering 15-40% lower cost, 12-27% fewer turns, and 12-38% faster completion than baseline agents. Effects on the full challenge set are mixed, suggesting these tools act as performance enhancers when additional reasoning scaffolding is most needed. Surprisingly, Different models naturally adopted distinct collaborative strategies without explicit instruction. Sonnet 3.7 engaged broadly across tools and benefited from articulation-based cognitive scaffolding. Sonnet 4 showed selective adoption, leaning on journal-based semantic search when problems were genuinely difficult. This mirrors how human developers adjust collaboration based on expertise and task complexity. Behavioral analysis shows agents prefer writing over reading by about 2-9x, indicating that structured articulation drives much of the improvement rather than information access alone. Overall, AI agents can systematically benefit from human-inspired collaboration tools at the edge of their capabilities, pointing to adaptive collaborative interfaces as reasoning enhancers rather than universal efficiency boosts.
Cooperative Target Detection with AUVs: A Dual-Timescale Hierarchical MARDL Approach
Xueyao, Zhang, Bo, Yang, Zhiwen, Yu, Xuelin, Cao, Alexandropoulos, George C., Debbah, Merouane, Yuen, Chau
Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) have shown great potential for cooperative detection and reconnaissance. However, collaborative AUV communications introduce risks of exposure. In adversarial environments, achieving efficient collaboration while ensuring covert operations becomes a key challenge for underwater cooperative missions. In this paper, we propose a novel dual time-scale Hierarchical Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization (H-MAPPO) framework. The high-level component determines the individuals participating in the task based on a central AUV, while the low-level component reduces exposure probabilities through power and trajectory control by the participating AUVs. Simulation results show that the proposed framework achieves rapid convergence, outperforms benchmark algorithms in terms of performance, and maximizes long-term cooperative efficiency while ensuring covert operations.
All Models Are Wrong, But Can They Be Useful? Lessons from COVID-19 Agent-Based Models: A Systematic Review
Von Hoene, Emma, Von Hoene, Sara, Peter, Szandra, Hopson, Ethan, Csizmadia, Emily, Fenyk, Faith, Barner, Kai, Leslie, Timothy, Kavak, Hamdi, Zufle, Andreas, Roess, Amira, Anderson, Taylor
The COVID-19 pandemic prompted a surge in computational models to simulate disease dynamics and guide interventions. Agent-based models (ABMs) are well-suited to capture population and environmental heterogeneity, but their rapid deployment raised questions about utility for health policy. We systematically reviewed 536 COVID-19 ABM studies published from January 2020 to December 2023, retrieved from Web of Science, PubMed, and Wiley on January 30, 2024. Studies were included if they used ABMs to simulate COVID-19 transmission, where reviews were excluded. Studies were assessed against nine criteria of model usefulness, including transparency and re-use, interdisciplinary collaboration and stakeholder engagement, and evaluation practices. Publications peaked in late 2021 and were concentrated in a few countries. Most models explored behavioral or policy interventions (n = 294, 54.85%) rather than real-time forecasting (n = 9, 1.68%). While most described model assumptions (n = 491, 91.60%), fewer disclosed limitations (n = 349, 65.11%), shared code (n = 219, 40.86%), or built on existing models (n = 195, 36.38%). Standardized reporting protocols (n = 36, 6.72%) and stakeholder engagement were rare (13.62%, n = 73). Only 2.24% (n = 12) described a comprehensive validation framework, though uncertainty was often quantified (n = 407, 75.93%). Limitations of this review include underrepresentation of non-English studies, subjective data extraction, variability in study quality, and limited generalizability. Overall, COVID-19 ABMs advanced quickly, but lacked transparency, accessibility, and participatory engagement. Stronger standards are needed for ABMs to serve as reliable decision-support tools in future public health crises.
Auto-Slides: An Interactive Multi-Agent System for Creating and Customizing Research Presentations
Yang, Yuheng, Jiang, Wenjia, Wang, Yang, Wang, Yiwei, Zhang, Chi
The rapid progress of large language models (LLMs) has opened new opportunities for education. While learners can interact with academic papers through LLM-powered dialogue, limitations still exist: absence of structured organization and high text reliance can impede systematic understanding and engagement with complex concepts. To address these challenges, we propose Auto-Slides, an LLM-driven system that converts research papers into pedagogically structured, multimodal slides (e.g., diagrams and tables). Drawing on cognitive science, it creates a presentation-oriented narrative and allows iterative refinement via an interactive editor, in order to match learners' knowledge level and goals. Auto-Slides further incorporates verification and knowledge retrieval mechanisms to ensure accuracy and contextual completeness. Through extensive user studies, Auto-Slides enhances learners' comprehension and engagement compared to conventional LLM-based reading. Our contributions lie in designing a multi-agent framework for transforming academic papers into pedagogically optimized slides and introducing interactive customization for personalized learning.
Occupancy-aware Trajectory Planning for Autonomous Valet Parking in Uncertain Dynamic Environments
Nawaz, Farhad, Tariq, Faizan M., Bae, Sangjae, Isele, David, Singh, Avinash, Figueroa, Nadia, Matni, Nikolai, D'sa, Jovin
Autonomous Valet Parking (AVP) requires planning under partial observability, where parking spot availability evolves as dynamic agents enter and exit spots. Existing approaches either rely only on instantaneous spot availability or make static assumptions, thereby limiting foresight and adaptability. We propose an approach that estimates probability of future spot occupancy by distinguishing initially vacant and occupied spots while leveraging nearby dynamic agent motion. We propose a probabilistic estimator that integrates partial, noisy observations from a limited Field-of-View, with the evolving uncertainty of unobserved spots. Coupled with the estimator, we design a strategy planner that balances goal-directed parking maneuvers with exploratory navigation based on information gain, and incorporates wait-and-go behaviors at promising spots. Through randomized simulations emulating large parking lots, we demonstrate that our framework significantly improves parking efficiency and trajectory smoothness over existing approaches, while maintaining safety margins.
Co-Investigator AI: The Rise of Agentic AI for Smarter, Trustworthy AML Compliance Narratives
Naik, Prathamesh Vasudeo, Dintakurthi, Naresh Kumar, Hu, Zhanghao, Wang, Yue, Qiu, Robby
Generating regulatorily compliant Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) remains a high-cost, low-scalability bottleneck in Anti-Money Laundering (AML) workflows. While large language models (LLMs) offer promising fluency, they suffer from factual hallucination, limited crime typology alignment, and poor explainability -- posing unacceptable risks in compliance-critical domains. This paper introduces Co-Investigator AI, an agentic framework optimized to produce Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) significantly faster and with greater accuracy than traditional methods. Drawing inspiration from recent advances in autonomous agent architectures, such as the AI Co-Scientist, our approach integrates specialized agents for planning, crime type detection, external intelligence gathering, and compliance validation. The system features dynamic memory management, an AI-Privacy Guard layer for sensitive data handling, and a real-time validation agent employing the Agent-as-a-Judge paradigm to ensure continuous narrative quality assurance. Human investigators remain firmly in the loop, empowered to review and refine drafts in a collaborative workflow that blends AI efficiency with domain expertise. We demonstrate the versatility of Co-Investigator AI across a range of complex financial crime scenarios, highlighting its ability to streamline SAR drafting, align narratives with regulatory expectations, and enable compliance teams to focus on higher-order analytical work. This approach marks the beginning of a new era in compliance reporting -- bringing the transformative benefits of AI agents to the core of regulatory processes and paving the way for scalable, reliable, and transparent SAR generation.
VeriOS: Query-Driven Proactive Human-Agent-GUI Interaction for Trustworthy OS Agents
Wu, Zheng, Huang, Heyuan, Lou, Xingyu, Qu, Xiangmou, Cheng, Pengzhou, Wu, Zongru, Liu, Weiwen, Zhang, Weinan, Wang, Jun, Wang, Zhaoxiang, Zhang, Zhuosheng
With the rapid progress of multimodal large language models, operating system (OS) agents become increasingly capable of automating tasks through on-device graphical user interfaces (GUIs). However, most existing OS agents are designed for idealized settings, whereas real-world environments often present untrustworthy conditions. To mitigate risks of over-execution in such scenarios, we propose a query-driven human-agent-GUI interaction framework that enables OS agents to decide when to query humans for more reliable task completion. Built upon this framework, we introduce VeriOS-Agent, a trustworthy OS agent trained with a two-stage learning paradigm that falicitate the decoupling and utilization of meta-knowledge. Concretely, VeriOS-Agent autonomously executes actions in normal conditions while proactively querying humans in untrustworthy scenarios. Experiments show that VeriOS-Agent improves the average step-wise success rate by 20.64\% in untrustworthy scenarios over the state-of-the-art, without compromising normal performance. Analysis highlights VeriOS-Agent's rationality, generalizability, and scalability. The codes, datasets and models are available at https://github.com/Wuzheng02/VeriOS.
Emergent Social Dynamics of LLM Agents in the El Farol Bar Problem
Takata, Ryosuke, Masumori, Atsushi, Ikegami, Takashi
We investigate the emergent social dynamics of Large Language Model (LLM) agents in a spatially extended El Farol Bar problem, observing how they autonomously navigate this classic social dilemma. As a result, the LLM agents generated a spontaneous motivation to go to the bar and changed their decision making by becoming a collective. We also observed that the LLM agents did not solve the problem completely, but rather behaved more like humans. These findings reveal a complex interplay between external incentives (prompt-specified constraints such as the 60% threshold) and internal incentives (culturally-encoded social preferences derived from pre-training), demonstrating that LLM agents naturally balance formal game-theoretic rationality with social motivations that characterize human behavior. These findings suggest that a new model of group decision making, which could not be handled in the previous game-theoretic problem setting, can be realized by LLM agents.