Agents
Dissecting the SWE-Bench Leaderboards: Profiling Submitters and Architectures of LLM- and Agent-Based Repair Systems
Martinez, Matias, Franch, Xavier
The rapid progress in Automated Program Repair (APR) has been driven by advances in AI, particularly large language models (LLMs) and agent-based systems. SWE-Bench is a recent benchmark designed to evaluate LLM-based repair systems using real issues and pull requests mined from 12 popular open-source Python repositories. Its public leaderboards -- SWE-Bench Lite and SWE-Bench Verified -- have become central platforms for tracking progress and comparing solutions. However, because the submission process does not require detailed documentation, the architectural design and origin of many solutions remain unclear. In this paper, we present the first comprehensive study of all submissions to the SWE-Bench Lite (79 entries) and Verified (99 entries) leaderboards, analyzing 80 unique approaches across dimensions such as submitter type, product availability, LLM usage, and system architecture. Our findings reveal the dominance of proprietary LLMs (especially Claude 3.5), the presence of both agentic and non-agentic designs, and a contributor base spanning from individual developers to large tech companies.
Contemplative Artificial Intelligence
Laukkonen, Ruben, Inglis, Fionn, Chandaria, Shamil, Sandved-Smith, Lars, Lopez-Sola, Edmundo, Hohwy, Jakob, Gold, Jonathan, Elwood, Adam
As artificial intelligence (AI) improves, traditional alignment strategies may falter in the face of unpredictable self-improvement, hidden subgoals, and the sheer complexity of intelligent systems. Inspired by contemplative wisdom traditions, we show how four axiomatic principles can instil a resilient Wise World Model in AI systems. First, mindfulness enables self-monitoring and recalibration of emergent subgoals. Second, emptiness forestalls dogmatic goal fixation and relaxes rigid priors. Third, non-duality dissolves adversarial self-other boundaries. Fourth, boundless care motivates the universal reduction of suffering. We find that prompting AI to reflect on these principles improves performance on the AILuminate Benchmark (d=.96) and boosts cooperation and joint-reward on the Prisoner's Dilemma task (d=7+). We offer detailed implementation strategies at the level of architectures, constitutions, and reinforcement on chain-of-thought. For future systems, active inference may offer the self-organizing and dynamic coupling capabilities needed to enact Contemplative AI in embodied agents.
Feedback Linearization for Replicator Dynamics: A Control Framework for Evolutionary Game Convergence
This paper demonstrates the first application of feedback linearization to replicator dynamics, driving the evolution of non-convergent evolutionary games to systems with guaranteed global asymptotic stability. Replicator dynamics, while a cornerstone of evolutionary game theory, possess neutral stability at Nash equilibria [2], which causes the evolutionary process to oscillate without converging to an optimal strategy. We build a control-theoretic framework that cancels the nonlinear components in replica-tor dynamics, and then apply a linear feedback component to force a strategy change at the Nash equilibrium. Through Lyapunov analysis, we show global convergence from any initial conditions in the probability simplex. We illustrate this approach with a numerical example of a penalty shootout game, where we illustrate that our method guides strategies quickly to mixed Nash equilibria, while the uncontrolled dynamics oscillate. Our work serves as one of the first known connections between nonlinear control theory and evolutionary game dynamics with applications in multi-agent systems, algorithmic trading, and strategic optimization.
Systematic Analysis of MCP Security
Guo, Yongjian, Liu, Puzhuo, Ma, Wanlun, Deng, Zehang, Zhu, Xiaogang, Di, Peng, Xiao, Xi, Wen, Sheng
--The Model Context Protocol (MCP) has emerged as a universal standard that enables AI agents to seamlessly connect with external tools, significantly enhancing their functionality. However, while MCP brings notable benefits, it also introduces significant vulnerabilities, such as T ool Poisoning Attacks (TPA), where hidden malicious instructions exploit the sycophancy of large language models (LLMs) to manipulate agent behavior . Despite these risks, current academic research on MCP security remains limited, with most studies focusing on narrow or qualitative analyses that fail to capture the diversity of real-world threats. Our experiments reveal key insights into MCP vulnerabilities, including agents' blind reliance on tool descriptions, sensitivity to file-based attacks, chain attacks exploiting shared context, and difficulty distinguishing external data from executable commands. These insights, validated through attack experiments, underscore the urgency for robust defense strategies and informed MCP design. This work provides a foundational framework, supporting the secure evolution of MCP ecosystems. In the era of large language models (LLMs), AI agents are significantly enhancing their application [1], [2] and importance across various domains by incorporating tool invocation to interact with external systems [3]. To facilitate cross-platform development for agents, Anthropic introduced the Model Context Protocol (MCP), to standardize context exchange between models and applications [4]. As illustrated in Figure 1, MCP follows a client-server architecture composed of Host, Client, and Server. The Host 1, an AI application that utilizes data and tools, sends requests to single or multiple Servers via the Client 2 . The Server possesses three core capabilities: Tools 3 (enabling external operations), Resources 4 (exposing data to AI models), and Prompts 5 (reusable templates for workflow optimization).
Results of the NeurIPS 2023 Neural MMO Competition on Multi-task Reinforcement Learning
Suรกrez, Joseph, Choe, Kyoung Whan, Bloomin, David, Gao, Jianming, Li, Yunkun, Feng, Yao, Pola, Saidinesh, Zhang, Kun, Zhu, Yonghui, Pinnaparaju, Nikhil, Li, Hao Xiang, Kanna, Nishaanth, Scott, Daniel, Sullivan, Ryan, Shuman, Rose S., de Alcรขntara, Lucas, Bradley, Herbie, You, Kirsty, Wu, Bo, Jiang, Yuhao, Li, Qimai, Chen, Jiaxin, Castricato, Louis, Zhu, Xiaolong, Isola, Phillip
We present the results of the NeurIPS 2023 Neural MMO Competition, which attracted over 200 participants and submissions. Participants trained goal-conditional policies that generalize to tasks, maps, and opponents never seen during training. The top solution achieved a score 4x higher than our baseline within 8 hours of training on a single 4090 GPU. We open-source everything relating to Neural MMO and the competition under the MIT license, including the policy weights and training code for our baseline and for the top submissions.
The Yokai Learning Environment: Tracking Beliefs Over Space and Time
Ruhdorfer, Constantin, Bortoletto, Matteo, Bulling, Andreas
Developing collaborative AI hinges on Theory of Mind (ToM) - the ability to reason about the beliefs of others to build and maintain common ground. Existing ToM benchmarks, however, are restricted to passive observer settings or lack an assessment of how agents establish and maintain common ground over time. To address these gaps, we introduce the Yokai Learning Environment (YLE) - a multi-agent reinforcement learning (RL) environment based on the cooperative card game Yokai. In the YLE, agents take turns peeking at hidden cards and moving them to form clusters based on colour. Success requires tracking evolving beliefs, remembering past observations, using hints as grounded communication, and maintaining common ground with teammates. Our evaluation yields two key findings: First, current RL agents struggle to solve the YLE, even when given access to perfect memory. Second, while belief modelling improves performance, agents are still unable to effectively generalise to unseen partners or form accurate beliefs over longer games, exposing a reliance on brittle conventions rather than robust belief tracking. We use the YLE to investigate research questions in belief modelling, memory, partner generalisation, and scaling to higher-order ToM.
AgentCDM: Enhancing Multi-Agent Collaborative Decision-Making via ACH-Inspired Structured Reasoning
Zhao, Xuyang, Zhao, Shiwan, Yu, Hualong, Zhang, Liting, Li, Qicheng
Multi-agent systems (MAS) powered by large language models (LLMs) hold significant promise for solving complex decision-making tasks. However, the core process of collaborative decision-making (CDM) within these systems remains underexplored. Existing approaches often rely on either ``dictatorial" strategies that are vulnerable to the cognitive biases of a single agent, or ``voting-based" methods that fail to fully harness collective intelligence. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{AgentCDM}, a structured framework for enhancing collaborative decision-making in LLM-based multi-agent systems. Drawing inspiration from the Analysis of Competing Hypotheses (ACH) in cognitive science, AgentCDM introduces a structured reasoning paradigm that systematically mitigates cognitive biases and shifts decision-making from passive answer selection to active hypothesis evaluation and construction. To internalize this reasoning process, we develop a two-stage training paradigm: the first stage uses explicit ACH-inspired scaffolding to guide the model through structured reasoning, while the second stage progressively removes this scaffolding to encourage autonomous generalization. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that AgentCDM achieves state-of-the-art performance and exhibits strong generalization, validating its effectiveness in improving the quality and robustness of collaborative decisions in MAS.
A Comprehensive Review of AI Agents: Transforming Possibilities in Technology and Beyond
Qu, Xiaodong, Damoah, Andrews, Sherwood, Joshua, Liu, Peiyan, Jin, Christian Shun, Chen, Lulu, Shen, Minjie, Aleisa, Nawwaf, Hou, Zeyuan, Zhang, Chenyu, Gao, Lifu, Li, Yanshu, Yang, Qikai, Wang, Qun, De Souza, Cristabelle
The development of artificial intelligence (AI) agents--autonomous systems capable of perceiving their surroundings, reasoning about possible courses of action, and executing decisions--has evolved significantly in recent decades. Early AI agents, rooted in the symbolic reasoning systems of the 1950s and 1960s, relied on hand-crafted rules and logic-based methods, excelling in constrained domains but struggling with adaptability and uncertainty[1, 2]. The introduction of statistical learning and probabilistic reasoning in the 1980s and 1990s enhanced reliability, while the rise of reinforcement learning (RL) allowed agents to learn policies through trial-and-error interactions [3, 4, 5, 6]. The integration of deep neural networks with RL (DeepRL) led to breakthroughs such as superhuman performance in Atari games and Go [7, 8]. With growing computational power, recent advancements in statistical methods and machine learning, AI agents have incorporated advanced perception, natural language sequence modeling, and cognitive-inspired principles, enabling them to adapt, collaborate, and mirror aspects of human reasoning in dynamic environments [2, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14]. Contemporary AI agents are increasingly deployed in high-stakes, real-world contexts: self-driving cars navigating congested urban environments [15, 16], autonomous laboratories accelerating scientific discovery [17, 18], virtual assistants managing complex user queries [19], and automated trading agents operating in financial markets [20].
CAMF: Collaborative Adversarial Multi-agent Framework for Machine Generated Text Detection
Wang, Yue, Wei, Liesheng, Wang, Yuxiang
Detecting machine-generated text (MGT) from contemporary Large Language Models (LLMs) is increasingly crucial amid risks like disinformation and threats to academic integrity. Existing zero-shot detection paradigms, despite their practicality, often exhibit significant deficiencies. Key challenges include: (1) superficial analyses focused on limited textual attributes, and (2) a lack of investigation into consistency across linguistic dimensions such as style, semantics, and logic. To address these challenges, we introduce the \textbf{C}ollaborative \textbf{A}dversarial \textbf{M}ulti-agent \textbf{F}ramework (\textbf{CAMF}), a novel architecture using multiple LLM-based agents. CAMF employs specialized agents in a synergistic three-phase process: \emph{Multi-dimensional Linguistic Feature Extraction}, \emph{Adversarial Consistency Probing}, and \emph{Synthesized Judgment Aggregation}. This structured collaborative-adversarial process enables a deep analysis of subtle, cross-dimensional textual incongruities indicative of non-human origin. Empirical evaluations demonstrate CAMF's significant superiority over state-of-the-art zero-shot MGT detection techniques.
CORE: Measuring Multi-Agent LLM Interaction Quality under Game-Theoretic Pressures
Pandey, Punya Syon, Yang, Yongjin, Liu, Jiarui, Jin, Zhijing
Game-theoretic interactions between agents with Large Language Models (LLMs) have revealed many emergent capabilities, yet the linguistic diversity of these interactions has not been sufficiently quantified. In this paper, we present the Conversational Robustness Evaluation Score: CORE, a metric to quantify the effectiveness of language use within multi-agent systems across different game-theoretic interactions. CORE integrates measures of cluster entropy, lexical repetition, and semantic similarity, providing a direct lens of dialog quality. We apply CORE to pairwise LLM dialogs across competitive, cooperative, and neutral settings, further grounding our analysis in Zipf's and Heaps' Laws to characterize word frequency distributions and vocabulary growth. Our findings show that cooperative settings exhibit both steeper Zipf distributions and higher Heap exponents, indicating more repetition alongside greater vocabulary expansion. In contrast, competitive interactions display lower Zipf and Heaps exponents, reflecting less repetition and more constrained vocabularies. These results provide new insights into how social incentives influence language adaptation, and highlight CORE as a robust diagnostic for measuring linguistic robustness in multi-agent LLM systems. Our code is available at https://github.com/psyonp/core.