Existing studies of innovation emphasize the power of social structures to shape innovation capacity. Emerging machine learning approaches, however, enable us to model innovators' personal perspectives and interpersonal innovation opportunities as a function of their prior trajectories of experience. We theorize then quantify subjective perspectives and innovation opportunities based on innovator positions within the geometric space of concepts inscribed by dynamic language representations. Using data on millions of scientists, inventors, writers, entrepreneurs, and Wikipedia contributors across the creative domains of science, technology, film, entrepreneurship, and Wikipedia, here we show that measured subjective perspectives anticipate what ideas individuals and groups creatively attend to and successfully combine in future. When perspective and background diversity are decomposed as the angular difference between collaborators' perspectives on their creation and between their experiences, the former consistently anticipates creative achievement while the latter portends its opposite, across all cases and time periods examined. We analyze a natural experiment and simulate creative collaborations between AI (large language model) agents designed with various perspective and background diversity, which are consistent with our observational findings. We explore mechanisms underlying these findings and identify how successful collaborators leverage common language to weave together diverse experience obtained through trajectories of prior work that converge to provoke one another and innovate. We explore the importance of these findings for team assembly and research policy.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language understanding, code generation, and complex planning. Simultaneously, Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have garnered attention for their potential to enable cooperation among distributed agents. However, from a multi-party perspective, MAS could be vulnerable to malicious agents that exploit the system to serve self-interests without disrupting its core functionality. This work explores integrity attacks where malicious agents employ subtle prompt manipulation to bias MAS operations and gain various benefits. Four types of attacks are examined: \textit{Scapegoater}, who misleads the system monitor to underestimate other agents' contributions; \textit{Boaster}, who misleads the system monitor to overestimate their own performance; \textit{Self-Dealer}, who manipulates other agents to adopt certain tools; and \textit{Free-Rider}, who hands off its own task to others. We demonstrate that strategically crafted prompts can introduce systematic biases in MAS behavior and executable instructions, enabling malicious agents to effectively mislead evaluation systems and manipulate collaborative agents. Furthermore, our attacks can bypass advanced LLM-based monitors, such as GPT-4o-mini and o3-mini, highlighting the limitations of current detection mechanisms. Our findings underscore the critical need for MAS architectures with robust security protocols and content validation mechanisms, alongside monitoring systems capable of comprehensive risk scenario assessment.

This paper introduces Energentic Intelligence, a class of autonomous systems defined not by task performance, but by their capacity to sustain themselves through internal energy regulation. Departing from conventional reward-driven paradigms, these agents treat survival-maintaining functional operation under fluctuating energetic and thermal conditions-as the central objective. We formalize this principle through an energy-based utility function and a viability-constrained survival horizon, and propose a modular architecture that integrates energy harvesting, thermal regulation, and adaptive computation into a closed-loop control system. A simulated environment demonstrates the emergence of stable, resource-aware behavior without external supervision. Together, these contributions provide a theoretical and architectural foundation for deploying autonomous agents in resource-volatile settings where persistence must be self-regulated and infrastructure cannot be assumed.

Self-improving agents aim to continuously acquire new capabilities with minimal supervision. However, current approaches face two key limitations: their self-improvement processes are often rigid, fail to generalize across tasks domains, and struggle to scale with increasing agent capabilities. We argue that effective self-improvement requires intrinsic metacognitive learning, defined as an agent's intrinsic ability to actively evaluate, reflect on, and adapt its own learning processes. Drawing inspiration from human metacognition, we introduce a formal framework comprising three components: metacognitive knowledge (self-assessment of capabilities, tasks, and learning strategies), metacognitive planning (deciding what and how to learn), and metacognitive evaluation (reflecting on learning experiences to improve future learning). Analyzing existing self-improving agents, we find they rely predominantly on extrinsic metacognitive mechanisms, which are fixed, human-designed loops that limit scalability and adaptability. Examining each component, we contend that many ingredients for intrinsic metacognition are already present. Finally, we explore how to optimally distribute metacognitive responsibilities between humans and agents, and robustly evaluate and improve intrinsic metacognitive learning, key challenges that must be addressed to enable truly sustained, generalized, and aligned self-improvement.

We present HADA (Human-AI Agent Decision Alignment), a protocol- and framework agnostic reference architecture that keeps both large language model (LLM) agents and legacy algorithms aligned with organizational targets and values. HADA wraps any algorithm or LLM in role-specific stakeholder agents -- business, data-science, audit, ethics, and customer -- each exposing conversational APIs so that technical and non-technical actors can query, steer, audit, or contest every decision across strategic, tactical, and real-time horizons. Alignment objectives, KPIs, and value constraints are expressed in natural language and are continuously propagated, logged, and versioned while thousands of heterogeneous agents run on different orchestration stacks. A cloud-native proof of concept packages a production credit-scoring model (getLoanDecision) and deploys it on Docker/Kubernetes/Python; five scripted retail-bank scenarios show how target changes, parameter tweaks, explanation requests, and ethics triggers flow end to end through the architecture. Evaluation followed the Design-Science Research Methodology. Walkthrough observation and log inspection demonstrated complete coverage of six predefined objectives: every role could invoke conversational control, trace KPIs and value constraints, detect and mitigate ZIP-code bias, and reproduce full decision lineage, independent of the underlying LLM or agent library. Contributions: (1) an open-source HADA architecture, (2) a mid-range design theory for human-AI alignment in multi-agent systems, and (3) empirical evidence that framework-agnostic, protocol-compliant stakeholder agents improve accuracy, transparency, and ethical compliance in real-world decision pipelines.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant potential to advance a broad range of domains. However, current benchmarks for evaluating MLLMs primarily emphasize general knowledge and vertical step-by-step reasoning typical of STEM disciplines, while overlooking the distinct needs and potential of the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS). Tasks in the HSS domain require more horizontal, interdisciplinary thinking and a deep integration of knowledge across related fields, which presents unique challenges for MLLMs, particularly in linking abstract concepts with corresponding visual representations. Addressing this gap, we present HSSBench, a dedicated benchmark designed to assess the capabilities of MLLMs on HSS tasks in multiple languages, including the six official languages of the United Nations. We also introduce a novel data generation pipeline tailored for HSS scenarios, in which multiple domain experts and automated agents collaborate to generate and iteratively refine each sample. HSSBench contains over 13,000 meticulously designed samples, covering six key categories. We benchmark more than 20 mainstream MLLMs on HSSBench and demonstrate that it poses significant challenges even for state-of-the-art models. We hope that this benchmark will inspire further research into enhancing the cross-disciplinary reasoning abilities of MLLMs, especially their capacity to internalize and connect knowledge across fields.

Complex tasks involving tool integration pose significant challenges for Large Language Models (LLMs), leading to the emergence of multi-agent workflows as a promising solution. Reflection has emerged as an effective strategy for correcting erroneous trajectories in agentic workflows. However, existing approaches only exploit such capability in the post-action stage, where the agent observes the execution outcomes. We argue that, like humans, LLMs can also engage in reflection before action execution: the agent can anticipate undesirable outcomes from its own decisions, which not only provides a necessarily complementary perspective to evaluate the decision but also prevents the propagation of errors throughout the trajectory. In this paper, we propose MIRROR, a framework that consists of both intra-reflection, which critically assesses intended actions before execution, and inter-reflection, which further adjusts the trajectory based on observations. This design systematically leverages LLM reflection capabilities to eliminate and rectify erroneous actions on a more comprehensive scope. Evaluations on both the Stable-ToolBench and TravelPlanner benchmarks demonstrate MIRROR's superior performance, achieving state-of-the-art results compared to existing approaches.

Offline cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) faces unique challenges due to distributional shifts, particularly stemming from the high dimensionality of joint action spaces and the presence of out-of-distribution joint action selections. In this work, we highlight that a fundamental challenge in offline MARL arises from the multi-equilibrium nature of cooperative tasks, which induces a highly multimodal joint behavior policy space coupled with heterogeneous-quality behavior data. This makes it difficult for individual policy regularization to align with a consistent coordination pattern, leading to the policy distribution shift problems. To tackle this challenge, we design a sequential score function decomposition method that distills per-agent regularization signals from the joint behavior policy, which induces coordinated modality selection under decentralized execution constraints. Then we leverage a flexible diffusion-based generative model to learn these score functions from multimodal offline data, and integrate them into joint-action critics to guide policy updates toward high-reward, in-distribution regions under a shared team reward. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple particle environments and Multi-agent MuJoCo benchmarks consistently. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to explicitly address the distributional gap between offline and online MARL, paving the way for more generalizable offline policy-based MARL methods.

Accurate and verifiable large language model (LLM) simulations of human research subjects promise an accessible data source for understanding human behavior and training new AI systems. However, results to date have been limited, and few social scientists have adopted this method. In this position paper, we argue that the promise of LLM social simulations can be achieved by addressing five tractable challenges. We ground our argument in a review of empirical comparisons between LLMs and human research subjects, commentaries on the topic, and related work. We identify promising directions, including context-rich prompting and fine-tuning with social science datasets. We believe that LLM social simulations can already be used for pilot and exploratory studies, and more widespread use may soon be possible with rapidly advancing LLM capabilities. Researchers should prioritize developing conceptual models and iterative evaluations to make the best use of new AI systems.

Introduction Swarm robotics systems ( 1) have the potential to revolutionize many industries, from targeted material delivery ( 2) to precision farming ( 3, 4). Boosted by technical breakthroughs, such as cloud computing ( 5, 6), novel hardware design ( 7-9), and manufacturing techniques ( 10), swarms of robots are envisioned to play an important role in both industrial ( 12) and urban ( 13, 14) activities. The emergence of robot swarms has been acknowledged as one of the ten robotics grand challenges for the next 5-10 years that will have significant socioeconomic impact. Despite having such a promising future, many important aspects which need to be considered in realistic deployments are either underexplored or neglected ( 15). One of the main reasons why swarms of robots have not been widely adopted in real-world applications is because there is no consensus on how to design swarm robotics systems that include perception, action, and communication ( 15). In addition, recent research points out that the lack of security standards in the field is also hindering the adoption of this technology in data-sensitive areas (e.g., military, surveillance, public infrastructure) ( 16, 17). These research gaps are motivating scientists to focus on new fields of study such as applied swarm security (18, 19) and privacy ( 20, 21) as well as to revisit already accepted assumptions in the field. From the origins of swarm robotics research, robot swarms were assumed to be fault-tolerant by design, due to the large number of robot units involved ( 22-25). However, it has been shown that a small number of partially failed (with defective sensors, broken actuators, noisy communications devices, etc.) ( 26) or malicious robots ( 27,28) can have a significant impact on 2 Figure 1: T owards secure and secret cooperation in swarm robotics missions.