Agents
GATE: Graph-based Adaptive Tool Evolution Across Diverse Tasks
Luo, Jianwen, Huang, Yiming, Meng, Jinxiang, Lei, Fangyu, He, Shizhu, Liu, Xiao, Jiang, Shanshan, Dong, Bin, Zhao, Jun, Liu, Kang
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great promise in tool-making, yet existing frameworks often struggle to efficiently construct reliable toolsets and are limited to single-task settings. To address these challenges, we propose GATE (Graph-based Adaptive Tool Evolution), an adaptive framework that dynamically constructs and evolves a hierarchical graph of reusable tools across multiple scenarios. We evaluate GATE on open-ended tasks (Minecraft), agent-based tasks (TextCraft, DABench), and code generation tasks (MATH, Date, TabMWP). Our results show that GATE achieves up to 4.3x faster milestone completion in Minecraft compared to the previous SOTA, and provides an average improvement of 9.23% over existing tool-making methods in code generation tasks and 10.03% in agent tasks. GATE demonstrates the power of adaptive evolution, balancing tool quantity, complexity, and functionality while maintaining high efficiency. Code and data are available at \url{https://github.com/ayanami2003/GATE}.
Planning, scheduling, and execution on the Moon: the CADRE technology demonstration mission
Rabideau, Gregg, Russino, Joseph, Branch, Andrew, Dhamani, Nihal, Vaquero, Tiago Stegun, Chien, Steve, de la Croix, Jean-Pierre, Rossi, Federico
NASA's Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration (CADRE) mission, slated for flight to the Moon's Reiner Gamma region in 2025/2026, is designed to demonstrate multi-agent autonomous exploration of the Lunar surface and sub-surface. A team of three robots and a base station will autonomously explore a region near the lander, collecting the data required for 3D reconstruction of the surface with no human input; and then autonomously perform distributed sensing with multi-static ground penetrating radars (GPR), driving in formation while performing coordinated radar soundings to create a map of the subsurface. At the core of CADRE's software architecture is a novel autonomous, distributed planning, scheduling, and execution (PS&E) system. The system coordinates the robots' activities, planning and executing tasks that require multiple robots' participation while ensuring that each individual robot's thermal and power resources stay within prescribed bounds, and respecting ground-prescribed sleep-wake cycles. The system uses a centralized-planning, distributed-execution paradigm, and a leader election mechanism ensures robustness to failures of individual agents. In this paper, we describe the architecture of CADRE's PS&E system; discuss its design rationale; and report on verification and validation (V&V) testing of the system on CADRE's hardware in preparation for deployment on the Moon.
Making Universal Policies Universal
Hรถpner, Niklas, Kuric, David, van Hoof, Herke
The development of a generalist agent capable of solving a wide range of sequential decision-making tasks remains a significant challenge. We address this problem in a cross-agent setup where agents share the same observation space but differ in their action spaces. Our approach builds on the universal policy framework, which decouples policy learning into two stages: a diffusion-based planner that generates observation sequences and an inverse dynamics model that assigns actions to these plans. We propose a method for training the planner on a joint dataset composed of trajectories from all agents. This method offers the benefit of positive transfer by pooling data from different agents, while the primary challenge lies in adapting shared plans to each agent's unique constraints. We evaluate our approach on the BabyAI environment, covering tasks of varying complexity, and demonstrate positive transfer across agents. Additionally, we examine the planner's generalisation ability to unseen agents and compare our method to traditional imitation learning approaches. By training on a pooled dataset from multiple agents, our universal policy achieves an improvement of up to $42.20\%$ in task completion accuracy compared to a policy trained on a dataset from a single agent.
Multi-Agent Coordination across Diverse Applications: A Survey
Sun, Lijun, Yang, Yijun, Duan, Qiqi, Shi, Yuhui, Lyu, Chao, Chang, Yu-Cheng, Lin, Chin-Teng, Shen, Yang
Multi-agent coordination studies the underlying mechanism enabling the trending spread of diverse multi-agent systems (MAS) and has received increasing attention, driven by the expansion of emerging applications and rapid AI advances. This survey outlines the current state of coordination research across applications through a unified understanding that answers four fundamental coordination questions: (1) what is coordination; (2) why coordination; (3) who to coordinate with; and (4) how to coordinate. Our purpose is to explore existing ideas and expertise in coordination and their connections across diverse applications, while identifying and highlighting emerging and promising research directions. First, general coordination problems that are essential to varied applications are identified and analyzed. Second, a number of MAS applications are surveyed, ranging from widely studied domains, e.g., search and rescue, warehouse automation and logistics, and transportation systems, to emerging fields including humanoid and anthropomorphic robots, satellite systems, and large language models (LLMs). Finally, open challenges about the scalability, heterogeneity, and learning mechanisms of MAS are analyzed and discussed. In particular, we identify the hybridization of hierarchical and decentralized coordination, human-MAS coordination, and LLM-based MAS as promising future directions.
Ranking Joint Policies in Dynamic Games using Evolutionary Dynamics
Koliou, Natalia, Vouros, George
Game-theoretic solution concepts, such as the Nash equilibrium, have been key to finding stable joint actions in multi-player games. However, it has been shown that the dynamics of agents' interactions, even in simple two-player games with few strategies, are incapable of reaching Nash equilibria, exhibiting complex and unpredictable behavior. Instead, evolutionary approaches can describe the long-term persistence of strategies and filter out transient ones, accounting for the long-term dynamics of agents' interactions. Our goal is to identify agents' joint strategies that result in stable behavior, being resistant to changes, while also accounting for agents' payoffs, in dynamic games. Towards this goal, and building on previous results, this paper proposes transforming dynamic games into their empirical forms by considering agents' strategies instead of agents' actions, and applying the evolutionary methodology $\alpha$-Rank to evaluate and rank strategy profiles according to their long-term dynamics. This methodology not only allows us to identify joint strategies that are strong through agents' long-term interactions, but also provides a descriptive, transparent framework regarding the high ranking of these strategies. Experiments report on agents that aim to collaboratively solve a stochastic version of the graph coloring problem. We consider different styles of play as strategies to define the empirical game, and train policies realizing these strategies, using the DQN algorithm. Then we run simulations to generate the payoff matrix required by $\alpha$-Rank to rank joint strategies.
CORBA: Contagious Recursive Blocking Attacks on Multi-Agent Systems Based on Large Language Models
Zhou, Zhenhong, Li, Zherui, Zhang, Jie, Zhang, Yuanhe, Wang, Kun, Liu, Yang, Guo, Qing
Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Systems (LLM-MASs) have demonstrated remarkable real-world capabilities, effectively collaborating to complete complex tasks. While these systems are designed with safety mechanisms, such as rejecting harmful instructions through alignment, their security remains largely unexplored. This gap leaves LLM-MASs vulnerable to targeted disruptions. In this paper, we introduce Contagious Recursive Blocking Attacks (Corba), a novel and simple yet highly effective attack that disrupts interactions between agents within an LLM-MAS. Corba leverages two key properties: its contagious nature allows it to propagate across arbitrary network topologies, while its recursive property enables sustained depletion of computational resources. Notably, these blocking attacks often involve seemingly benign instructions, making them particularly challenging to mitigate using conventional alignment methods. We evaluate Corba on two widely-used LLM-MASs, namely, AutoGen and Camel across various topologies and commercial models. Additionally, we conduct more extensive experiments in open-ended interactive LLM-MASs, demonstrating the effectiveness of Corba in complex topology structures and open-source models. Our code is available at: https://github.com/zhrli324/Corba.
Enhancing Language Multi-Agent Learning with Multi-Agent Credit Re-Assignment for Interactive Environment Generalization
He, Zhitao, Liu, Zijun, Li, Peng, Fung, May, Yan, Ming, Zhang, Ji, Huang, Fei, Liu, Yang
LLM-based agents have made significant advancements in interactive environments, such as mobile operations and web browsing, and other domains beyond computer using. Current multi-agent systems universally excel in performance, compared to single agents, but struggle with generalization across environments due to predefined roles and inadequate strategies for generalizing language agents. The challenge of achieving both strong performance and good generalization has hindered the progress of multi-agent systems for interactive environments. To address these issues, we propose CollabUIAgents, a multi-agent reinforcement learning framework with a novel multi-agent credit re-assignment (CR) strategy, assigning process rewards with LLMs rather than environment-specific rewards and learning with synthesized preference data, in order to foster generalizable, collaborative behaviors among the role-free agents' policies. Empirical results show that our framework improves both performance and cross-environment generalizability of multi-agent systems. Moreover, our 7B-parameter system achieves results on par with or exceed strong closed-source models, and the LLM that guides the CR. We also provide insights in using granular CR rewards effectively for environment generalization, and accommodating trained LLMs in multi-agent systems.
An Efficient Ground-aerial Transportation System for Pest Control Enabled by AI-based Autonomous Nano-UAVs
Crupi, Luca, Butera, Luca, Ferrante, Alberto, Giusti, Alessandro, Palossi, Daniele
Efficient crop production requires early detection of pest outbreaks and timely treatments; we consider a solution based on a fleet of multiple autonomous miniaturized unmanned aerial vehicles (nano-UAVs) to visually detect pests and a single slower heavy vehicle that visits the detected outbreaks to deliver treatments. To cope with the extreme limitations aboard nano-UAVs, e.g., low-resolution sensors and sub-100 mW computational power budget, we design, fine-tune, and optimize a tiny image-based convolutional neural network (CNN) for pest detection. Despite the small size of our CNN (i.e., 0.58 GOps/inference), on our dataset, it scores a mean average precision (mAP) of 0.79 in detecting harmful bugs, i.e., 14% lower mAP but 32x fewer operations than the best-performing CNN in the literature. Our CNN runs in real-time at 6.8 frame/s, requiring 33 mW on a GWT GAP9 System-on-Chip aboard a Crazyflie nano-UAV. Then, to cope with in-field unexpected obstacles, we leverage a global+local path planner based on the A* algorithm. The global path planner determines the best route for the nano-UAV to sweep the entire area, while the local one runs up to 50 Hz aboard our nano-UAV and prevents collision by adjusting the short-distance path. Finally, we demonstrate with in-simulator experiments that once a 25 nano-UAVs fleet has combed a 200x200 m vineyard, collected information can be used to plan the best path for the tractor, visiting all and only required hotspots. In this scenario, our efficient transportation system, compared to a traditional single-ground vehicle performing both inspection and treatment, can save up to 20 h working time.
Beyond Self-Talk: A Communication-Centric Survey of LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems
Yan, Bingyu, Zhang, Xiaoming, Zhang, Litian, Zhang, Lian, Zhou, Ziyi, Miao, Dezhuang, Li, Chaozhuo
Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable capabilities in reasoning, planning, and decision-making. Building upon these strengths, researchers have begun incorporating LLMs into multi-agent systems (MAS), where agents collaborate or compete through natural language interactions to tackle tasks beyond the scope of single-agent setups. In this survey, we present a communication-centric perspective on LLM-based multi-agent systems, examining key system-level features such as architecture design and communication goals, as well as internal mechanisms like communication strategies, paradigms, objects and content. We illustrate how these communication elements interplay to enable collective intelligence and flexible collaboration. Furthermore, we discuss prominent challenges, including scalability, security, and multimodal integration, and propose directions for future work to advance research in this emerging domain. Ultimately, this survey serves as a catalyst for further innovation, fostering more robust, scalable, and intelligent multi-agent systems across diverse application domains.
{\mu}RL: Discovering Transient Execution Vulnerabilities Using Reinforcement Learning
Tol, M. Caner, Derya, Kemal, Sunar, Berk
We propose using reinforcement learning to address the challenges of discovering microarchitectural vulnerabilities, such as Spectre and Meltdown, which exploit subtle interactions in modern processors. Traditional methods like random fuzzing fail to efficiently explore the vast instruction space and often miss vulnerabilities that manifest under specific conditions. To overcome this, we introduce an intelligent, feedback-driven approach using RL. Our RL agents interact with the processor, learning from real-time feedback to prioritize instruction sequences more likely to reveal vulnerabilities, significantly improving the efficiency of the discovery process. We also demonstrate that RL systems adapt effectively to various microarchitectures, providing a scalable solution across processor generations. By automating the exploration process, we reduce the need for human intervention, enabling continuous learning that uncovers hidden vulnerabilities. Additionally, our approach detects subtle signals, such as timing anomalies or unusual cache behavior, that may indicate microarchitectural weaknesses. This proposal advances hardware security testing by introducing a more efficient, adaptive, and systematic framework for protecting modern processors. When unleashed on Intel Skylake-X and Raptor Lake microarchitectures, our RL agent was indeed able to generate instruction sequences that cause significant observable byte leakages through transient execution without generating any $\mu$code assists, faults or interrupts. The newly identified leaky sequences stem from a variety of Intel instructions, e.g. including SERIALIZE, VERR/VERW, CLMUL, MMX-x87 transitions, LSL+RDSCP and LAR. These initial results give credence to the proposed approach.