Agents
A Framework for Adversarial Analysis of Decision Support Systems Prior to Deployment
Bissey, Brett, Gatesman, Kyle, Dimon, Walker, Alam, Mohammad, Robaina, Luis, Weissman, Joseph
This paper introduces a comprehensive framework designed to analyze and secure decision-support systems trained with Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), prior to deployment, by providing insights into learned behavior patterns and vulnerabilities discovered through simulation. The introduced framework aids in the development of precisely timed and targeted observation perturbations, enabling researchers to assess adversarial attack outcomes within a strategic decision-making context. We validate our framework, visualize agent behavior, and evaluate adversarial outcomes within the context of a custom-built strategic game, CyberStrike. Utilizing the proposed framework, we introduce a method for systematically discovering and ranking the impact of attacks on various observation indices and time-steps, and we conduct experiments to evaluate the transferability of adversarial attacks across agent architectures and DRL training algorithms. The findings underscore the critical need for robust adversarial defense mechanisms to protect decision-making policies in high-stakes environments.
GGBond: Growing Graph-Based AI-Agent Society for Socially-Aware Recommender Simulation
Zhong, Hailin, Wang, Hanlin, Ye, Yujun, Zhang, Meiyi, Zhu, Shengxin
Current personalized recommender systems predominantly rely on static offline data for algorithm design and evaluation, significantly limiting their ability to capture long-term user preference evolution and social influence dynamics in real-world scenarios. To address this fundamental challenge, we propose a high-fidelity social simulation platform integrating human-like cognitive agents and dynamic social interactions to realistically simulate user behavior evolution under recommendation interventions. Specifically, the system comprises a population of Sim-User Agents, each equipped with a five-layer cognitive architecture that encapsulates key psychological mechanisms, including episodic memory, affective state transitions, adaptive preference learning, and dynamic trust-risk assessments. In particular, we innovatively introduce the Intimacy--Curiosity--Reciprocity--Risk (ICR2) motivational engine grounded in psychological and sociological theories, enabling more realistic user decision-making processes. Furthermore, we construct a multilayer heterogeneous social graph (GGBond Graph) supporting dynamic relational evolution, effectively modeling users' evolving social ties and trust dynamics based on interest similarity, personality alignment, and structural homophily. During system operation, agents autonomously respond to recommendations generated by typical recommender algorithms (e.g., Matrix Factorization, MultVAE, LightGCN), deciding whether to consume, rate, and share content while dynamically updating their internal states and social connections, thereby forming a stable, multi-round feedback loop. This innovative design transcends the limitations of traditional static datasets, providing a controlled, observable environment for evaluating long-term recommender effects.
Creativity in LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems: A Survey
Lin, Yi-Cheng, Chen, Kang-Chieh, Li, Zhe-Yan, Wu, Tzu-Heng, Wu, Tzu-Hsuan, Chen, Kuan-Yu, Lee, Hung-yi, Chen, Yun-Nung
Large language model (LLM)-driven multi-agent systems (MAS) are transforming how humans and AIs collaboratively generate ideas and artifacts. While existing surveys provide comprehensive overviews of MAS infrastructures, they largely overlook the dimension of \emph{creativity}, including how novel outputs are generated and evaluated, how creativity informs agent personas, and how creative workflows are coordinated. This is the first survey dedicated to creativity in MAS. We focus on text and image generation tasks, and present: (1) a taxonomy of agent proactivity and persona design; (2) an overview of generation techniques, including divergent exploration, iterative refinement, and collaborative synthesis, as well as relevant datasets and evaluation metrics; and (3) a discussion of key challenges, such as inconsistent evaluation standards, insufficient bias mitigation, coordination conflicts, and the lack of unified benchmarks. This survey offers a structured framework and roadmap for advancing the development, evaluation, and standardization of creative MAS.
Agent-Environment Alignment via Automated Interface Generation
Liu, Kaiming, Lei, Xuanyu, Wang, Ziyue, Li, Peng, Liu, Yang
Large language model (LLM) agents have shown impressive reasoning capabilities in interactive decision-making tasks. These agents interact with environment through intermediate interfaces, such as predefined action spaces and interaction rules, which mediate the perception and action. However, mismatches often happen between the internal expectations of the agent regarding the influence of its issued actions and the actual state transitions in the environment, a phenomenon referred to as \textbf{agent-environment misalignment}. While prior work has invested substantially in improving agent strategies and environment design, the critical role of the interface still remains underexplored. In this work, we empirically demonstrate that agent-environment misalignment poses a significant bottleneck to agent performance. To mitigate this issue, we propose \textbf{ALIGN}, an \underline{A}uto-A\underline{l}igned \underline{I}nterface \underline{G}e\underline{n}eration framework that alleviates the misalignment by enriching the interface. Specifically, the ALIGN-generated interface enhances both the static information of the environment and the step-wise observations returned to the agent. Implemented as a lightweight wrapper, this interface achieves the alignment without modifying either the agent logic or the environment code. Experiments across multiple domains including embodied tasks, web navigation and tool-use, show consistent performance improvements, with up to a 45.67\% success rate improvement observed in ALFWorld. Meanwhile, ALIGN-generated interface can generalize across different agent architectures and LLM backbones without interface regeneration. Code and experimental results are available at https://github.com/THUNLP-MT/ALIGN.
SCALOFT: An Initial Approach for Situation Coverage-Based Safety Analysis of an Autonomous Aerial Drone in a Mine Environment
Proma, Nawshin Mannan, Hodge, Victoria J, Alexander, Rob
The safety of autonomous systems in dynamic and hazardous environments poses significant challenges. This paper presents a testing approach named SCALOFT for systematically assessing the safety of an autonomous aerial drone in a mine. SCALOFT provides a framework for developing diverse test cases, real-time monitoring of system behaviour, and detection of safety violations. Detected violations are then logged with unique identifiers for detailed analysis and future improvement. SCALOFT helps build a safety argument by monitoring situation coverage and calculating a final coverage measure. We have evaluated the performance of this approach by deliberately introducing seeded faults into the system and assessing whether SCALOFT is able to detect those faults. For a small set of plausible faults, we show that SCALOFT is successful in this.
MedSentry: Understanding and Mitigating Safety Risks in Medical LLM Multi-Agent Systems
Chen, Kai, Zhen, Taihang, Wang, Hewei, Liu, Kailai, Li, Xinfeng, Huo, Jing, Yang, Tianpei, Xu, Jinfeng, Dong, Wei, Gao, Yang
As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in healthcare, ensuring their safety, particularly within collaborative multi-agent configurations, is paramount. In this paper we introduce MedSentry, a benchmark comprising 5 000 adversarial medical prompts spanning 25 threat categories with 100 subthemes. Coupled with this dataset, we develop an end-to-end attack-defense evaluation pipeline to systematically analyze how four representative multi-agent topologies (Layers, SharedPool, Centralized, and Decentralized) withstand attacks from 'dark-personality' agents. Our findings reveal critical differences in how these architectures handle information contamination and maintain robust decision-making, exposing their underlying vulnerability mechanisms. For instance, SharedPool's open information sharing makes it highly susceptible, whereas Decentralized architectures exhibit greater resilience thanks to inherent redundancy and isolation. To mitigate these risks, we propose a personality-scale detection and correction mechanism that identifies and rehabilitates malicious agents, restoring system safety to near-baseline levels. MedSentry thus furnishes both a rigorous evaluation framework and practical defense strategies that guide the design of safer LLM-based multi-agent systems in medical domains.
MT-Mol:Multi Agent System with Tool-based Reasoning for Molecular Optimization
Kim, Hyomin, Jang, Yunhui, Ahn, Sungsoo
Large language models (LLMs) have large potential for molecular optimization, as they can gather external chemistry tools and enable collaborative interactions to iteratively refine molecular candidates. However, this potential remains underexplored, particularly in the context of structured reasoning, interpretability, and comprehensive tool-grounded molecular optimization. To address this gap, we introduce MT-Mol, a multi-agent framework for molecular optimization that leverages tool-guided reasoning and role-specialized LLM agents. Our system incorporates comprehensive RDKit tools, categorized into five distinct domains: structural descriptors, electronic and topological features, fragment-based functional groups, molecular representations, and miscellaneous chemical properties. Each category is managed by an expert analyst agent, responsible for extracting task-relevant tools and enabling interpretable, chemically grounded feedback. MT-Mol produces molecules with tool-aligned and stepwise reasoning through the interaction between the analyst agents, a molecule-generating scientist, a reasoning-output verifier, and a reviewer agent. As a result, we show that our framework shows the state-of-the-art performance of the PMO-1K benchmark on 17 out of 23 tasks.
Rethinking Information Synthesis in Multimodal Question Answering A Multi-Agent Perspective
Rajput, Krishna Singh, Anvekar, Tejas, Baral, Chitta, Gupta, Vivek
Recent advances in multimodal question answering have primarily focused on combining heterogeneous modalities or fine-tuning multimodal large language models. While these approaches have shown strong performance, they often rely on a single, generalized reasoning strategy, overlooking the unique characteristics of each modality ultimately limiting both accuracy and interpretability. To address these limitations, we propose MAMMQA, a multi-agent QA framework for multimodal inputs spanning text, tables, and images. Our system includes two Visual Language Model (VLM) agents and one text-based Large Language Model (LLM) agent. The first VLM decomposes the user query into sub-questions and sequentially retrieves partial answers from each modality. The second VLM synthesizes and refines these results through cross-modal reasoning. Finally, the LLM integrates the insights into a cohesive answer. This modular design enhances interpretability by making the reasoning process transparent and allows each agent to operate within its domain of expertise. Experiments on diverse multimodal QA benchmarks demonstrate that our cooperative, multi-agent framework consistently outperforms existing baselines in both accuracy and robustness.
STITCH-OPE: Trajectory Stitching with Guided Diffusion for Off-Policy Evaluation
Goli, Hossein, Gimelfarb, Michael, de Lara, Nathan Samuel, Nishimura, Haruki, Itkina, Masha, Shkurti, Florian
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) estimates the performance of a target policy using offline data collected from a behavior policy, and is crucial in domains such as robotics or healthcare where direct interaction with the environment is costly or unsafe. Existing OPE methods are ineffective for high-dimensional, long-horizon problems, due to exponential blow-ups in variance from importance weighting or compounding errors from learned dynamics models. To address these challenges, we propose STITCH-OPE, a model-based generative framework that leverages denoising diffusion for long-horizon OPE in high-dimensional state and action spaces. Starting with a diffusion model pre-trained on the behavior data, STITCH-OPE generates synthetic trajectories from the target policy by guiding the denoising process using the score function of the target policy. STITCH-OPE proposes two technical innovations that make it advantageous for OPE: (1) prevents over-regularization by subtracting the score of the behavior policy during guidance, and (2) generates long-horizon trajectories by stitching partial trajectories together end-to-end. We provide a theoretical guarantee that under mild assumptions, these modifications result in an exponential reduction in variance versus long-horizon trajectory diffusion. Experiments on the D4RL and OpenAI Gym benchmarks show substantial improvement in mean squared error, correlation, and regret metrics compared to state-of-the-art OPE methods.
BacktrackAgent: Enhancing GUI Agent with Error Detection and Backtracking Mechanism
Wu, Qinzhuo, Gao, Pengzhi, Liu, Wei, Luan, Jian
Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents have gained substantial attention due to their impressive capabilities to complete tasks through multiple interactions within GUI environments. However, existing agents primarily focus on enhancing the accuracy of individual actions and often lack effective mechanisms for detecting and recovering from errors. To address these shortcomings, we propose the BacktrackAgent, a robust framework that incorporates a backtracking mechanism to improve task completion efficiency. BacktrackAgent includes verifier, judger, and reflector components as modules for error detection and recovery, while also applying judgment rewards to further enhance the agent's performance. Additionally, we develop a training dataset specifically designed for the backtracking mechanism, which considers the outcome pages after action executions. Experimental results show that BacktrackAgent has achieved performance improvements in both task success rate and step accuracy on Mobile3M and Auto-UI benchmarks. Our data and code will be released upon acceptance.