Agents
Dark Patterns Meet GUI Agents: LLM Agent Susceptibility to Manipulative Interfaces and the Role of Human Oversight
Tang, Jingyu, Chen, Chaoran, Li, Jiawen, Zhang, Zhiping, Guo, Bingcan, Khalilov, Ibrahim, Gebreegziabher, Simret Araya, Yao, Bingsheng, Wang, Dakuo, Ye, Yanfang, Li, Tianshi, Xiao, Ziang, Yao, Yaxing, Li, Toby Jia-Jun
The dark patterns, deceptive interface designs manipulating user behaviors, have been extensively studied for their effects on human decision-making and autonomy. Yet, with the rising prominence of LLM-powered GUI agents that automate tasks from high-level intents, understanding how dark patterns affect agents is increasingly important. We present a two-phase empirical study examining how agents, human participants, and human-AI teams respond to 16 types of dark patterns across diverse scenarios. Phase 1 highlights that agents often fail to recognize dark patterns, and even when aware, prioritize task completion over protective action. Phase 2 revealed divergent failure modes: humans succumb due to cognitive shortcuts and habitual compliance, while agents falter from procedural blind spots. Human oversight improved avoidance but introduced costs such as attentional tunneling and cognitive load. Our findings show neither humans nor agents are uniformly resilient, and collaboration introduces new vulnerabilities, suggesting design needs for transparency, adjustable autonomy, and oversight.
ZapGPT: Free-form Language Prompting for Simulated Cellular Control
Le, Nam H., Erickson, Patrick, Zhang, Yanbo, Levin, Michael, Bongard, Josh
Human language is one of the most expressive tools for conveying intent, yet most artificial or biological systems lack mechanisms to interpret or respond meaningfully to it. Bridging this gap could enable more natural forms of control over complex, decentralized systems. In AI and artificial life, recent work explores how language can specify high-level goals, but most systems still depend on engineered rewards, task-specific supervision, or rigid command sets, limiting generalization to novel instructions. Similar constraints apply in synthetic biology and bioengineering, where the locus of control is often genomic rather than environmental perturbation. A key open question is whether artificial or biological collectives can be guided by free-form natural language alone, without task-specific tuning or carefully designed evaluation metrics. We provide one possible answer here by showing, for the first time, that simple agents' collective behavior can be guided by free-form language prompts: one AI model transforms an imperative prompt into an intervention that is applied to simulated cells; a second AI model scores how well the prompt describes the resulting cellular dynamics; and the former AI model is evolved to improve the scores generated by the latter. Unlike previous work, our method does not require engineered fitness functions or domain-specific prompt design. We show that the evolved system generalizes to unseen prompts without retraining. By treating natural language as a control layer, the system suggests a future in which spoken or written prompts could direct computational, robotic, or biological systems to desired behaviors. This work provides a concrete step toward this vision of AI-biology partnerships, in which language replaces mathematical objective functions, fixed rules, and domain-specific programming.
Self-Supervised Goal-Reaching Results in Multi-Agent Cooperation and Exploration
Nimonkar, Chirayu, Shah, Shlok, Ji, Catherine, Eysenbach, Benjamin
For groups of autonomous agents to achieve a particular goal, they must engage in coordination and long-horizon reasoning. However, designing reward functions to elicit such behavior is challenging. In this paper, we study how self-supervised goal-reaching techniques can be leveraged to enable agents to cooperate. The key idea is that, rather than have agents maximize some scalar reward, agents aim to maximize the likelihood of visiting a certain goal. This problem setting enables human users to specify tasks via a single goal state rather than implementing a complex reward function. While the feedback signal is quite sparse, we will demonstrate that self-supervised goal-reaching techniques enable agents to learn from such feedback. On MARL benchmarks, our proposed method outperforms alternative approaches that have access to the same sparse reward signal as our method. While our method has no explicit mechanism for exploration, we observe that self-supervised multi-agent goal-reaching leads to emergent cooperation and exploration in settings where alternative approaches never witness a single successful trial.
Synergetic Empowerment: Wireless Communications Meets Embodied Intelligence
Liang, Hongtao, Diao, Yihe, Wu, YuHang, Zhou, Fuhui, Wu, Qihui
--Wireless communication is evolving into an agent era, where large-scale agents with inherent embodied intelligence are not just users but active participants. The perfect combination of wireless communication and embodied intelligence can achieve a synergetic empowerment and greatly facilitate the development of agent communication. An overview of this synergetic empowerment is presented, framing it as a co-evolutionary process that transforms wireless communication from a simple utility into the digital nervous system of a collective intelligence, while simultaneously elevating isolated agents into a unified superorganism with emergent capabilities far exceeding individual contributions. Furthermore, critical open issues and future research directions are identified. IRELESS communication is evolving into the agent era, marking a fundamental shift from connecting passive information endpoints to enabling massive-scale agent collaboration. Unlike traditional devices, these agents such as autonomous vehicles, industrial robots, and advanced environmental sensors possess inherent embodied intelligence, empowering them to actively perceive, reason, and physically interact with their surroundings [1]. The scale of this transformation is unprecedented. The projections for 2030 estimate that the number of connected IoT devices will reach 125 billion, while monthly global mobile traffic is expected to increase to over 5000 exabytes, representing an 80-fold increase from 2020 [2]. More critically, a growing portion of these devices is the embodied agents that require real-time coordination for complex collective tasks, marking a qualitative shift from isolated sensors to collaborative swarms. Diao and Q. Wu are with the College of Electronic and Information Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, 210000, P .
Adaptive Monitoring and Real-World Evaluation of Agentic AI Systems
Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) -- multi-agent systems that combine large language models with external tools and autonomous planning -- are rapidly transitioning from research laboratories into high-stakes domains. Our earlier "Basic" paper introduced a five-axis framework and proposed preliminary metrics such as goal drift and harm reduction but did not provide an algorithmic instantiation or empirical evidence. This "Advanced" sequel fills that gap. First, we revisit recent benchmarks and industrial deployments to show that technical metrics still dominate evaluations: a systematic review of 84 papers from 2023--2025 found that 83% report capability metrics while only 30% consider human-centred or economic axes [2]. Second, we formalise an Adaptive Multi-Dimensional Monitoring (AMDM) algorithm that normalises heterogeneous metrics, applies per-axis exponentially weighted moving-average thresholds and performs joint anomaly detection via the Mahalanobis distance [7]. Third, we conduct simulations and real-world experiments. AMDM cuts anomaly-detection latency from 12.3 s to 5.6 s on simulated goal drift and reduces false-positive rates from 4.5% to 0.9% compared with static thresholds. We present a comparison table and ROC/PR curves, and we reanalyse case studies to surface missing metrics. Code, data and a reproducibility checklist accompany this paper to facilitate replication. The code supporting this work is available at https://github.com/Manishms18/Adaptive-Multi-Dimensional-Monitoring.
GitTaskBench: A Benchmark for Code Agents Solving Real-World Tasks Through Code Repository Leveraging
Ni, Ziyi, Wang, Huacan, Zhang, Shuo, Lu, Shuo, He, Ziyang, You, Wang, Tang, Zhenheng, Du, Yuntao, Sun, Bill, Liu, Hongzhang, Hu, Sen, Chen, Ronghao, Li, Bo, Li, Xin, Hu, Chen, Jiao, Binxing, Jiang, Daxin, Lyu, Pin
Beyond scratch coding, exploiting large-scale code repositories (e.g., GitHub) for practical tasks is vital in real-world software development, yet current benchmarks rarely evaluate code agents in such authentic, workflow-driven scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce GitTaskBench, a benchmark designed to systematically assess this capability via 54 realistic tasks across 7 modalities and 7 domains. Each task pairs a relevant repository with an automated, human-curated evaluation harness specifying practical success criteria. Beyond measuring execution and task success, we also propose the alpha-value metric to quantify the economic benefit of agent performance, which integrates task success rates, token cost, and average developer salaries. Experiments across three state-of-the-art agent frameworks with multiple advanced LLMs show that leveraging code repositories for complex task solving remains challenging: even the best-performing system, OpenHands+Claude 3.7, solves only 48.15% of tasks (recent progress has pushed the frontier further, with RepoMaster+Claude 3.5 achieving a new record of 62.96%). Error analysis attributes over half of failures to seemingly mundane yet critical steps like environment setup and dependency resolution, highlighting the need for more robust workflow management and increased timeout preparedness. By releasing GitTaskBench, we aim to drive progress and attention toward repository-aware code reasoning, execution, and deployment -- moving agents closer to solving complex, end-to-end real-world tasks. The benchmark and code are open-sourced at https://github.com/QuantaAlpha/GitTaskBench.
Multi-Agent Retrieval-Augmented Framework for Evidence-Based Counterspeech Against Health Misinformation
Anik, Anirban Saha, Song, Xiaoying, Wang, Elliott, Wang, Bryan, Yarimbas, Bengisu, Hong, Lingzi
Large language models (LLMs) incorporated with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) have demonstrated powerful capabilities in generating counterspeech against misinformation. However, current studies rely on limited evidence and offer less control over final outputs. To address these challenges, we propose a Multi-agent Retrieval-Augmented Framework to generate counterspeech against health misinformation, incorporating multiple LLMs to optimize knowledge retrieval, evidence enhancement, and response refinement. Our approach integrates both static and dynamic evidence, ensuring that the generated counterspeech is relevant, well-grounded, and up-to-date. Our method outperforms baseline approaches in politeness, relevance, informativeness, and factual accuracy, demonstrating its effectiveness in generating high-quality counterspeech. To further validate our approach, we conduct ablation studies to verify the necessity of each component in our framework. Furthermore, cross evaluations show that our system generalizes well across diverse health misinformation topics and datasets. And human evaluations reveal that refinement significantly enhances counterspeech quality and obtains human preference.
RoboBrain 2.0 Technical Report
BAAI RoboBrain Team, null, Cao, Mingyu, Tan, Huajie, Ji, Yuheng, Chen, Xiansheng, Lin, Minglan, Li, Zhiyu, Cao, Zhou, Wang, Pengwei, Zhou, Enshen, Han, Yi, Tang, Yingbo, Xu, Xiangqi, Guo, Wei, Lyu, Yaoxu, Xu, Yijie, Shi, Jiayu, Du, Mengfei, Chi, Cheng, Zhao, Mengdi, Hao, Xiaoshuai, Zhao, Junkai, Zhang, Xiaojie, Rong, Shanyu, Lyu, Huaihai, Cai, Zhengliang, Fu, Yankai, Chen, Ning, Zhang, Bolun, Zhang, Lingfeng, Zhang, Shuyi, Liu, Dong, Feng, Xi, Wang, Songjing, Liu, Xiaodan, Jiao, Yance, Lyu, Mengsi, Chen, Zhuo, He, Chenrui, Ao, Yulong, Sun, Xue, He, Zheqi, Zheng, Jingshu, Yang, Xi, Shi, Donghai, Xie, Kunchang, Zhang, Bochao, Nie, Shaokai, Men, Chunlei, Lin, Yonghua, Wang, Zhongyuan, Huang, Tiejun, Zhang, Shanghang
We introduce RoboBrain 2.0, our latest generation of embodied vision-language foundation models, designed to unify perception, reasoning, and planning for complex embodied tasks in physical environments. It comes in two variants: a lightweight 7B model and a full-scale 32B model, featuring a heterogeneous architecture with a vision encoder and a language model. Despite its compact size, RoboBrain 2.0 achieves strong performance across a wide spectrum of embodied reasoning tasks. On both spatial and temporal benchmarks, the 32B variant achieves leading results, surpassing prior open-source and proprietary models. In particular, it supports key real-world embodied AI capabilities, including spatial understanding (e.g., affordance prediction, spatial referring, trajectory forecasting) and temporal decision-making (e.g., closed-loop interaction, multi-agent long-horizon planning, and scene graph updating). This report details the model architecture, data construction, multi-stage training strategies, infrastructure and practical applications. We hope RoboBrain 2.0 advances embodied AI research and serves as a practical step toward building generalist embodied agents. The code, checkpoint and benchmark are available at https://superrobobrain.github.io.
MultiMind: Enhancing Werewolf Agents with Multimodal Reasoning and Theory of Mind
Zhang, Zheng, Xiao, Nuoqian, Chai, Qi, Ye, Deheng, Wang, Hao
Large Language Model (LLM) agents have demonstrated impressive capabilities in social deduction games (SDGs) like Werewolf, where strategic reasoning and social deception are essential. However, current approaches remain limited to textual information, ignoring crucial multimodal cues such as facial expressions and tone of voice that humans naturally use to communicate. Moreover, existing SDG agents primarily focus on inferring other players' identities without modeling how others perceive themselves or fellow players. To address these limitations, we use One Night Ultimate Werewolf (ONUW) as a testbed and present MultiMind, the first framework integrating multimodal information into SDG agents. MultiMind processes facial expressions and vocal tones alongside verbal content, while employing a Theory of Mind (ToM) model to represent each player's suspicion levels toward others. By combining this ToM model with Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), our agent identifies communication strategies that minimize suspicion directed at itself. Through comprehensive evaluation in both agent-versus-agent simulations and studies with human players, we demonstrate MultiMind's superior performance in gameplay. Our work presents a significant advancement toward LLM agents capable of human-like social reasoning across multimodal domains.
AgentDynEx: Nudging the Mechanics and Dynamics of Multi-Agent Simulations
Ma, Jenny, Sahni, Riya, Sreedhar, Karthik, Chilton, Lydia B.
Multi-agent large language model simulations have the potential to model complex human behaviors and interactions. If the mechanics are set up properly, unanticipated and valuable social dynamics can surface. However, it is challenging to consistently enforce simulation mechanics while still allowing for notable and emergent dynamics. We present AgentDynEx, an AI system that helps set up simulations from user-specified mechanics and dynamics. AgentDynEx uses LLMs to guide users through a Configuration Matrix to identify core mechanics and define milestones to track dynamics. It also introduces a method called \textit{nudging}, where the system dynamically reflects on simulation progress and gently intervenes if it begins to deviate from intended outcomes. A technical evaluation found that nudging enables simulations to have more complex mechanics and maintain its notable dynamics compared to simulations without nudging. We discuss the importance of nudging as a technique for balancing mechanics and dynamics of multi-agent simulations.