--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).

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.

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.

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.

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].

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.

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.

Modern software delivery has accelerated from quarterly releases to multiple deployments per day. While CI/CD tooling has matured, human decision points interpreting flaky tests, choosing rollback strategies, tuning feature flags, and deciding when to promote a canary remain major sources of latency and operational toil. We propose AI-Augmented CI/CD Pipelines, where large language models (LLMs) and autonomous agents act as policy-bounded co-pilots and progressively as decision makers. We contribute: (1) a reference architecture for embedding agentic decision points into CI/CD, (2) a decision taxonomy and policy-as-code guardrail pattern, (3) a trust-tier framework for staged autonomy, (4) an evaluation methodology using DevOps Research and Assessment ( DORA) metrics and AI-specific indicators, and (5) a detailed industrial-style case study migrating a React 19 microservice to an AI-augmented pipeline. We discuss ethics, verification, auditability, and threats to validity, and chart a roadmap for verifiable autonomy in production delivery systems.

In several applications in distributed systems, an important design criterion is ensuring that the network is sparse, i.e., does not contain too many edges, while achieving reliable connectivity. Sparsity ensures communication overhead remains low, while reliable connectivity is tied to reliable communication and inference on decentralized data reservoirs and computational resources. A class of network models called random K-out graphs appear widely as a heuristic to balance connectivity and sparsity, especially in settings with limited trust, e.g., privacy-preserving aggregation of networked data in which networks are deployed. However, several questions remain regarding how to choose network parameters in response to different operational requirements, including the need to go beyond asymptotic results and the ability to model the stochastic and adversarial environments. To address this gap, we present theorems to inform the choice of network parameters that guarantee reliable connectivity in regimes where nodes can be finite or unreliable. We first derive upper and lower bounds for probability of connectivity in random K-out graphs when the number of nodes is finite. Next, we analyze the property of r-robustness, a stronger notion than connectivity that enables resilient consensus in the presence of malicious nodes. Finally, motivated by aggregation mechanisms based on pairwise masking, we model and analyze the impact of a subset of adversarial nodes, modeled as deletions, on connectivity and giant component size - metrics that are closely tied to privacy guarantees. Together, our results pave the way for end-to-end performance guarantees for a suite of algorithms for reliable inference on networks.

The Centralized Training with Decentralized Execution (CTDE) paradigm has gained significant attention in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) and is the foundation of many recent algorithms. However, decentralized policies operate under partial observability and often yield suboptimal performance compared to centralized policies, while fully centralized approaches typically face scalability challenges as the number of agents increases. We propose Centralized Permutation Equivariant (CPE) learning, a centralized training and execution framework that employs a fully centralized policy to overcome these limitations. Our approach leverages a novel permutation equivariant architecture, Global-Local Permutation Equivariant (GLPE) networks, that is lightweight, scalable, and easy to implement. Experiments show that CPE integrates seamlessly with both value decomposition and actor-critic methods, substantially improving the performance of standard CTDE algorithms across cooperative benchmarks including MPE, SMAC, and RWARE, and matching the performance of state-of-the-art RWARE implementations.