With the rise of fifth-generation (5G) networks in critical applications, it is urgent to move from detection of malicious activity to systems capable of providing a reliable verdict suitable for mitigation. In this regard, understanding and interpreting machine learning (ML) models' security alerts is crucial for enabling actionable incident response orchestration. Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques are expected to enhance trust by providing insights into why alerts are raised. A dominant approach statistically associates feature sets that can be correlated to a given alert. This paper starts by questioning whether such attribution is relevant for future generation communication systems, and investigates its merits in comparison with an approach based on logical explanations. We extensively study two methods, SHAP and VoTE-XAI, by analyzing their interpretations of alerts generated by an XGBoost model in three different use cases with several 5G communication attacks. We identify three metrics for assessing explanations: sparsity, how concise they are; stability, how consistent they are across samples from the same attack type; and efficiency, how fast an explanation is generated. As an example, in a 5G network with 92 features, 6 were deemed important by VoTE-XAI for a Denial of Service (DoS) variant, ICMPFlood, while SHAP identified over 20. More importantly, we found a significant divergence between features selected by SHAP and VoTE-XAI. However, none of the top-ranked features selected by SHAP were missed by VoTE-XAI. When it comes to efficiency of providing interpretations, we found that VoTE-XAI is significantly more responsive, e.g. it provides a single explanation in under 0.002 seconds, in a high-dimensional setting (478 features).

The rapid adoption of autonomous AI agents is giving rise to a new economic layer where agents transact and coordinate at scales and speeds beyond direct human oversight. We propose the "sandbox economy" as a framework for analyzing this emergent system, characterizing it along two key dimensions: its origins (emergent vs. intentional) and its degree of separateness from the established human economy (permeable vs. impermeable). Our current trajectory points toward a spontaneous emergence of a vast and highly permeable AI agent economy, presenting us with opportunities for an unprecedented degree of coordination as well as significant challenges, including systemic economic risk and exacerbated inequality. Here we discuss a number of possible design choices that may lead to safely steerable AI agent markets. In particular, we consider auction mechanisms for fair resource allocation and preference resolution, the design of AI "mission economies" to coordinate around achieving collective goals, and socio-technical infrastructure needed to ensure trust, safety, and accountability. By doing this, we argue for the proactive design of steerable agent markets to ensure the coming technological shift aligns with humanity's long-term collective flourishing.

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly enhanced the capabilities of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) in supporting humans with complex, real-world tasks. However, MAS still face challenges in effective task planning when handling highly complex tasks with uncertainty, often resulting in misleading or incorrect outputs that hinder task execution. To address this, we propose XAgents, a unified multi-agent cooperative framework built on a multipolar task processing graph and IF-THEN rules. XAgents uses the multipolar task processing graph to enable dynamic task planning and handle task uncertainty. During subtask processing, it integrates domain-specific IF-THEN rules to constrain agent behaviors, while global rules enhance inter-agent collaboration. We evaluate the performance of XAgents across three distinct datasets, demonstrating that it consistently surpasses state-of-the-art single-agent and multi-agent approaches in both knowledge-typed and logic-typed question-answering tasks. The codes for XAgents are available at: https://github.com/AGI-FHBC/XAgents.

Modern scientific discovery increasingly requires coordinating distributed facilities and heterogeneous resources, forcing researchers to act as manual workflow coordinators rather than scientists. Advances in AI leading to AI agents show exciting new opportunities that can accelerate scientific discovery by providing intelligence as a component in the ecosystem. However, it is unclear how this new capability would materialize and integrate in the real world. To address this, we propose a conceptual framework where workflows evolve along two dimensions which are intelligence (from static to intelligent) and composition (from single to swarm) to chart an evolutionary path from current workflow management systems to fully autonomous, distributed scientific laboratories. With these trajectories in mind, we present an architectural blueprint that can help the community take the next steps towards harnessing the opportunities in autonomous science with the potential for 100x discovery acceleration and transformational scientific workflows.

Tackling One Health Risks: How Large Language Models are leveraged for Risk Negotiation and Consensus - building. Study Centre for Land-use related Evaluation procedures, One-Health, German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, Berlin, Germany; Email: Maciej.Durkalec@bfr.bund.de Faculty of Bioscience Engineering, Department. of Food Technology, Safety and Health, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium, E - mail: Andreja.Rajkovic@UGent.be Abstract Key global challenges of our times are characterized by complex interdependencies and can only be effectively addressed through an integrated, participatory effort. Conventional risk analysis frameworks often reduce complexity to ensure manageability, crea ting silos that hinder comprehensive solutions. A fundamental shift towards holistic strategies is essential to enable effective negotiations between different sectors and to balance the competing interests of stakeholders. However, achieving this balance is often hindered by limited time, vast amounts of information, and the complexity of integrating diverse perspectives. This study presents an AI - assisted negotiation framework that incorporates large language models (LLMs) and AI - based autonomous agents i nto a negotiation - centered risk analysis workflow. The framework enables stakeholders to simulate negotiations, systematically model dynamics, anticipate compromises, and evaluate solution impacts. By leveraging LLMs' semantic analysis capabilities we coul d mitigate information overload and augment decision - making process under time constraints. Proof - of - concept implementations were conducted in two real - world scenarios: (i) prudent use of a biopesticide, and (ii) targeted wild animal population control. Ou r work demonstrates the potential of AI - assisted negotiation to address the current lack of tools for cross - sectoral engagement.

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is rapidly emerging as a pivotal open standard, designed to enhance agent-tool integration and interoperability, and is positioned to unlock a new era of powerful, interconnected, and genuinely utilitarian agentic AI. However, despite MCP's growing adoption, existing benchmarks often fail to capture real-world agent performance within this new paradigm, leading to a distorted perception of their true operational value and an inability to reliably differentiate proficiencies. To bridge this critical evaluation gap, we introduce MCP-AgentBench -- a comprehensive benchmark specifically engineered to rigorously assess language agent capabilities in MCP-mediated tool interactions. Core contributions of MCP-AgentBench include: the establishment of a robust MCP testbed comprising 33 operational servers with 188 distinct tools; the development of a benchmark featuring 600 systematically designed queries distributed across 6 distinct categories of varying interaction complexity; and the introduction of MCP-Eval, a novel outcome-oriented evaluation methodology prioritizing real-world task success. Through extensive empirical evaluation of leading language agents, we provide foundational insights. MCP-AgentBench aims to equip the research community with a standardized and reliable framework to build, validate, and advance agents capable of fully leveraging MCP's transformative benefits, thereby accelerating progress toward truly capable and interoperable AI systems.

Question answering (QA) plays a central role in financial education, yet existing large language model (LLM) approaches often fail to capture the nuanced and specialized reasoning required for financial problem-solving. The financial domain demands multistep quantitative reasoning, familiarity with domain-specific terminology, and comprehension of real-world scenarios. We present a multi-agent framework that leverages role-based prompting to enhance performance on domain-specific QA. Our framework comprises a Base Generator, an Evidence Retriever, and an Expert Reviewer agent that work in a single-pass iteration to produce a refined answer. We evaluated our framework on a set of 3,532 expert-designed finance education questions from Study.com, an online learning platform. We leverage retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for contextual evidence from 6 finance textbooks and prompting strategies for a domain-expert reviewer. Our experiments indicate that critique-based refinement improves answer accuracy by 6.6-8.3% over zero-shot Chain-of-Thought baselines, with the highest performance from Gemini-2.0-Flash. Furthermore, our method enables GPT-4o-mini to achieve performance comparable to the finance-tuned FinGPT-mt_Llama3-8B_LoRA. Our results show a cost-effective approach to enhancing financial QA and offer insights for further research in multi-agent financial LLM systems.

The advancement of large language models (LLMs) has enabled the construction of multi-agent systems to solve complex tasks by dividing responsibilities among specialized agents, such as a planning agent for subgoal generation and a grounding agent for executing tool-use actions. Most existing methods typically fine-tune these agents independently, leading to capability gaps among them with poor coordination. To address this, we propose MOAT, a Multi-Agent Joint Alignment Tuning framework that improves agents collaboration through iterative alignment. MOAT alternates between two key stages: (1) Planning Agent Alignment, which optimizes the planning agent to generate subgoal sequences that better guide the grounding agent; and (2) Grounding Agent Improving, which fine-tunes the grounding agent using diverse subgoal-action pairs generated by the agent itself to enhance its generalization capablity. Theoretical analysis proves that MOAT ensures a non-decreasing and progressively convergent training process. Experiments across six benchmarks demonstrate that MOAT outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving average improvements of 3.1% on held-in tasks and 4.4% on held-out tasks.

Embodied AI systems operate in dynamic environments, requiring seamless integration of perception and generation modules to process high-frequency input and output demands. Traditional sequential computation patterns, while effective in ensuring accuracy, face significant limitations in achieving the necessary "thinking" frequency for real-world applications. In this work, we present Auras, an algorithm-system co-designed inference framework to optimize the inference frequency of embodied AI agents. Auras disaggregates the perception and generation and provides controlled pipeline parallelism for them to achieve high and stable throughput. Faced with the data staleness problem that appears when the parallelism is increased, Auras establishes a public context for perception and generation to share, thereby promising the accuracy of embodied agents. Experimental results show that Auras improves throughput by 2.54x on average while achieving 102.7% of the original accuracy, demonstrating its efficacy in overcoming the constraints of sequential computation and providing high throughput.

Molecular Tumor Boards (MTBs) are multidisciplinary forums where oncology specialists collaboratively assess complex patient cases to determine optimal treatment strategies. A central element of this process is the patient summary, typically compiled by a medical oncologist, radiation oncologist, or surgeon, or their trained medical assistant, who distills heterogeneous medical records into a concise narrative to facilitate discussion. This manual approach is often labor-intensive, subjective, and prone to omissions of critical information. To address these limitations, we introduce the Healthcare Agent Orchestrator (HAO), a Large Language Model (LLM)-driven AI agent that coordinates a multi-agent clinical workflow to generate accurate and comprehensive patient summaries for MTBs. Evaluating predicted patient summaries against ground truth presents additional challenges due to stylistic variation, ordering, synonym usage, and phrasing differences, which complicate the measurement of both succinctness and completeness. To overcome these evaluation hurdles, we propose TBFact, a ``model-as-a-judge'' framework designed to assess the comprehensiveness and succinctness of generated summaries. Using a benchmark dataset derived from de-identified tumor board discussions, we applied TBFact to evaluate our Patient History agent. Results show that the agent captured 94% of high-importance information (including partial entailments) and achieved a TBFact recall of 0.84 under strict entailment criteria. We further demonstrate that TBFact enables a data-free evaluation framework that institutions can deploy locally without sharing sensitive clinical data. Together, HAO and TBFact establish a robust foundation for delivering reliable and scalable support to MTBs.