Machine Learning (ML) is profoundly reshaping the way researchers create, implement, and operate data-intensive software. Its adoption, however, introduces notable challenges for computing infrastructures, particularly when it comes to coordinating access to hardware accelerators across development, testing, and production environments. The INFN initiative AI_INFN (Artificial Intelligence at INFN) seeks to promote the use of ML methods across various INFN research scenarios by offering comprehensive technical support, including access to AI-focused computational resources. Leveraging the INFN Cloud ecosystem and cloud-native technologies, the project emphasizes efficient sharing of accelerator hardware while maintaining the breadth of the Institute's research activities. This contribution describes the deployment and commissioning of a Kubernetes-based platform designed to simplify GPU-powered data analysis workflows and enable their scalable execution on heterogeneous distributed resources. By integrating offload-ing mechanisms through Virtual Kubelet and the InterLink API, the platform allows workflows to span multiple resource providers, from Worldwide LHC Computing Grid sites to high-performance computing centers like CINECA Leonardo. We will present preliminary benchmarks, functional tests, and case studies, demonstrating both performance and integration outcomes.

Humans write code in a fundamentally interactive manner and rely on constant execution feedback to correct errors, resolve ambiguities, and decompose tasks.

Large Language Models (LLMs) agents augmented with domain tools promise to autonomously execute complex tasks requiring human-level intelligence, such as customer service and digital assistance. However, their practical deployment is often limited by their low success rates under complex real-world environments. To tackle this, prior research has primarily focused on improving the agents themselves, such as developing strong agentic LLMs, while overlooking the role of the system environment in which the agent operates. In this paper, we study a complementary direction: improving agent success rates by optimizing the system environment in which the agent operates. We collect 142 agent traces (3,656 turns of agent-environment interactions) across 5 state-of-the-art agentic benchmarks. By analyzing these agent failures, we propose a taxonomy for agent-environment interaction failures that includes 6 failure modes. Guided by these findings, we design Aegis, a set of targeted environment optimizations: 1) environment observability enhancement, 2) common computation offloading, and 3) speculative agentic actions. These techniques improve agent success rates on average by 6.7-12.5%, without any modifications to the agent and underlying LLM.

Machine Learning (ML) is driving a revolution in the way scientists design, develop, and deploy data-intensive software. However, the adoption of ML presents new challenges for the computing infrastructure, particularly in terms of provisioning and orchestrating access to hardware accelerators for development, testing, and production. The INFN-funded project AI_INFN ("Artificial Intelligence at INFN") aims at fostering the adoption of ML techniques within INFN use cases by providing support on multiple aspects, including the provision of AI-tailored computing resources. It leverages cloud-native solutions in the context of INFN Cloud, to share hardware accelerators as e ffec-tively as possible, ensuring the diversity of the Institute's research activities is not compromised. In this contribution, we provide an update on the commissioning of a Kubernetes platform designed to ease the development of GPU-powered data analysis workflows and their scalability on heterogeneous, distributed computing resources, possibly federated as Virtual Kubelets with the interLink provider.

Tag-based browsing is a popular interaction model for navigating digital libraries. According to this model, users select descriptive tags to filter resources in the collections. Typical implementations of the model are based on inverted indexes. However, these implementations can require a considerable amount of set operations to update the browsing state. To palliate this inconven-ience, it is possible to adopt suitable cache strategies. In this paper we describe and compare two of these strategies: (i) a query-based strategy, according to which previously computed browsing states are indexed by sets of selected tags; and (ii) a resource-based strategy, according to which browsing states are in-dexed by sets of filtered resources. Our comparison focused on runtime perfor-mance, and was carried out empirically, using a real-world web-based collec-tion in the field of digital humanities. The results obtained show that the re-source-based strategy clearly outperforms the query-based one.