Agents
De-risking investment in AI agents
AI agents thrive when trust is designed in from the start, says vice president of product management at NICE, Neeraj Verma. Automation has become a defining force in the customer experience. Between the chatbots that answer our questions and the recommendation systems that shape our choices, AI-driven tools are now embedded in nearly every interaction. But the latest wave of so-called "agentic AI"--systems that can plan, act, and adapt toward a defined goal--promises to push automation even further. Every single person that I've spoken to has at least spoken to some sort of GenAI bot on their phones. They expect experiences to be not scripted.
SelectMix: Enhancing Label Noise Robustness through Targeted Sample Mixing
Liu, Qiuhao, Li, Ling, Lu, Yao, Xuan, Qi, Zhu, Zhaowei, Wei, Jiaheng
Deep neural networks tend to memorize noisy labels, severely degrading their generalization performance. Although Mixup has demonstrated effectiveness in improving generalization and robustness, existing Mixup-based methods typically perform indiscriminate mixing without principled guidance on sample selection and mixing strategy, inadvertently propagating noisy supervision. To overcome these limitations, we propose SelectMix, a confidence-guided mixing framework explicitly tailored for noisy labels. SelectMix first identifies potentially noisy or ambiguous samples through confidence based mismatch analysis using K-fold cross-validation, then selectively blends identified uncertain samples with confidently predicted peers from their potential classes. Furthermore, SelectMix employs soft labels derived from all classes involved in the mixing process, ensuring the labels accurately represent the composition of the mixed samples, thus aligning supervision signals closely with the actual mixed inputs. Through extensive theoretical analysis and empirical evaluations on multiple synthetic (MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100) and real-world benchmark datasets (CIFAR-N, MNIST and Clothing1M), we demonstrate that SelectMix consistently outperforms strong baseline methods, validating its effectiveness and robustness in learning with noisy labels.
$K$-Level Policy Gradients for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Reddi, Aryaman, Tiboni, Gabriele, Peters, Jan, D'Eramo, Carlo
Actor-critic algorithms for deep multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) typically employ a policy update that responds to the current strategies of other agents. While being straightforward, this approach does not account for the updates of other agents at the same update step, resulting in miscoordination. In this paper, we introduce the $K$-Level Policy Gradient (KPG), a method that recursively updates each agent against the updated policies of other agents, speeding up the discovery of effective coordinated policies. We theoretically prove that KPG with finite iterates achieves monotonic convergence to a local Nash equilibrium under certain conditions. We provide principled implementations of KPG by applying it to the deep MARL algorithms MAPPO, MADDPG, and FACMAC. Empirically, we demonstrate superior performance over existing deep MARL algorithms in StarCraft II and multi-agent MuJoCo.
Hi-DARTS: Hierarchical Dynamically Adapting Reinforcement Trading System
Sagong, Hoon, Kim, Heesu, Hong, Hanbeen
Personal use of this material is permitted. Abstract--Conventional autonomous trading systems struggle to balance computational efficiency and market responsiveness due to their fixed operating frequency. We propose Hi-DARTS, a hierarchical multi-agent reinforcement learning framework that addresses this trade-off. Hi-DARTS utilizes a meta-agent to analyze market volatility and dynamically activate specialized Time Frame Agents for high-frequency or low-frequency trading as needed. During back-testing on AAPL stock from January 2024 to May 2025, Hi-DARTS yielded a cumulative return of 25.17% with a Sharpe Ratio of 0.75. Our work demonstrates that dynamic, hierarchical agents can achieve superior risk-adjusted returns while maintaining high computational efficiency.
Human-AI Use Patterns for Decision-Making in Disaster Scenarios: A Systematic Review
Domfeh, Emmanuel Adjei, Dancy, Christopher L.
In high-stakes disaster scenarios, timely and informed decision-making is critical yet often challenged by uncertainty, dynamic environments, and limited resources. This paper presents a systematic review of Human-AI collaboration patterns that support decision-making across all disaster management phases. Drawing from 51 peer-reviewed studies, we identify four major categories: Human-AI Decision Support Systems, Task and Resource Coordination, Trust and Transparency, and Simulation and Training. Within these, we analyze sub-patterns such as cognitive-augmented intelligence, multi-agent coordination, explainable AI, and virtual training environments. Our review highlights how AI systems may enhance situational awareness, improves response efficiency, and support complex decision-making, while also surfacing critical limitations in scalability, interpretability, and system interoperability. We conclude by outlining key challenges and future research directions, emphasizing the need for adaptive, trustworthy, and context-aware Human-AI systems to improve disaster resilience and equitable recovery outcomes.
MusicSwarm: Biologically Inspired Intelligence for Music Composition
We show that coherent, long-form musical composition can emerge from a decentralized swarm of identical, frozen foundation models that coordinate via stigmergic, peer-to-peer signals, without any weight updates. We compare a centralized multi-agent system with a global critic to a fully decentralized swarm in which bar-wise agents sense and deposit harmonic, rhythmic, and structural cues, adapt short-term memory, and reach consensus. Across symbolic, audio, and graph-theoretic analyses, the swarm yields superior quality while delivering greater diversity and structural variety and leads across creativity metrics. The dynamics contract toward a stable configuration of complementary roles, and self-similarity networks reveal a small-world architecture with efficient long-range connectivity and specialized bridging motifs, clarifying how local novelties consolidate into global musical form. By shifting specialization from parameter updates to interaction rules, shared memory, and dynamic consensus, MusicSwarm provides a compute- and data-efficient route to long-horizon creative structure that is immediately transferable beyond music to collaborative writing, design, and scientific discovery.
Time-Constrained Intelligent Adversaries for Automation Vulnerability Testing: A Multi-Robot Patrol Case Study
Ward, James C., Bott, Alex, York, Connor, Hunt, Edmund R.
Abstract-- Simulating hostile attacks of physical autonomous systems can be a useful tool to examine their robustness to attack and inform vulnerability-aware design. In this work, we examine this through the lens of multi-robot patrol, by presenting a machine learning-based adversary model that observes robot patrol behavior in order to attempt to gain undetected access to a secure environment within a limited time duration. Such a model allows for evaluation of a patrol system against a realistic potential adversary, offering insight into future patrol strategy design. We show that our new model outperforms existing baselines, thus providing a more stringent test, and examine its performance against multiple leading decentralized multi-robot patrol strategies. Security in automated and robotic systems is of increasing importance as these systems becomes more pervasive and integrated throughout society. Beyond the obvious considerations of cybersecurity and communication security, an important facet of this is physical security -- the robustness of these systems to interference in the real world from a hostile actor.
Agentic Temporal Graph of Reasoning with Multimodal Language Models: A Potential AI Aid to Healthcare
Healthcare and medicine are multimodal disciplines that deal with multimodal data for reasoning and diagnosing multiple diseases. Although some multimodal reasoning models have emerged for reasoning complex tasks in scientific domains, their applications in the healthcare domain remain limited and fall short in correct reasoning for diagnosis. To address the challenges of multimodal medical reasoning for correct diagnosis and assist the healthcare professionals, a novel temporal graph-based reasoning process modelled through a directed graph has been proposed in the current work. It helps in accommodating dynamic changes in reasons through backtracking, refining the reasoning content, and creating new or deleting existing reasons to reach the best recommendation or answer. Again, consideration of multimodal data at different time points can enable tracking and analysis of patient health and disease progression. Moreover, the proposed multi-agent temporal reasoning framework provides task distributions and a cross-validation mechanism to further enhance the accuracy of reasoning outputs. A few basic experiments and analysis results justify the novelty and practical utility of the proposed preliminary approach.
VisDocSketcher: Towards Scalable Visual Documentation with Agentic Systems
Gomes, Luรญs F., Zhou, Xin, Lo, David, Abreu, Rui
Visual documentation is an effective tool for reducing the cognitive barrier developers face when understanding unfamiliar code, enabling more intuitive comprehension. Compared to textual documentation, it provides a higher-level understanding of the system structure and data flow. Developers usually prefer visual representations over lengthy textual descriptions for large software systems. Visual documentation is both difficult to produce and challenging to evaluate. Manually creating it is time-consuming, and currently, no existing approach can automatically generate high-level visual documentation directly from code. Its evaluation is often subjective, making it difficult to standardize and automate. To address these challenges, this paper presents the first exploration of using agentic LLM systems to automatically generate visual documentation. We introduce VisDocSketcher, the first agent-based approach that combines static analysis with LLM agents to identify key elements in the code and produce corresponding visual representations. We propose a novel evaluation framework, AutoSketchEval, for assessing the quality of generated visual documentation using code-level metrics. The experimental results show that our approach can valid visual documentation for 74.4% of the samples. It shows an improvement of 26.7-39.8% over a simple template-based baseline. Our evaluation framework can reliably distinguish high-quality (code-aligned) visual documentation from low-quality (non-aligned) ones, achieving an AUC exceeding 0.87. Our work lays the foundation for future research on automated visual documentation by introducing practical tools that not only generate valid visual representations but also reliably assess their quality.
Collaborative Document Editing with Multiple Users and AI Agents
Lehmann, Florian, Shauchenka, Krystsina, Buschek, Daniel
Current AI writing support tools are largely designed for individuals, complicating collaboration when co-writers must leave the shared workspace to use AI and then communicate and reintegrate results. We propose integrating AI agents directly into collaborative writing environments. Our prototype makes AI use transparent and customisable through two new shared objects: agent profiles and tasks. Agent responses appear in the familiar comment feature. In a user study (N=30), 14 teams worked on writing projects during one week. Interaction logs and interviews show that teams incorporated agents into existing norms of authorship, control, and coordination, rather than treating them as team members. Agent profiles were viewed as personal territory, while created agents and outputs became shared resources. We discuss implications for team-based AI interaction, highlighting opportunities and boundaries for treating AI as a shared resource in collaborative work.