In the critical 72 hours after an earthquake or explosion, a race against the clock begins to find survivors. When a powerful earthquake hit central Italy on 24 August 2016, killing 299 people, over 5 000 emergency workers were mobilised in search and rescue efforts that saved dozens from the rubble in the immediate aftermath. The pressure to move fast can create risks for first responders, who often face unstable environments with little information about the dangers ahead. But this type of rescue work could soon become safer and more efficient thanks to a joint effort by EU and Japanese researchers. Rescue organisations, research institutes and companies from both Europe and Japan worked together from 2019 to 2023 to develop a new generation of tools blending robotics, drone technology and chemical sensing to transform how emergency teams operate in disaster zones.

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has opened up unprecedented possibilities for automating complex tasks that are often comparable to human performance. Despite their capabilities, LLMs still encounter difficulties in completing tasks that require high levels of accuracy and complexity due to their inherent limitations in handling multifaceted problems single-handedly. This paper introduces `Smurfs', a cutting-edge multi-agent framework designed to revolutionize the application of LLMs. By seamlessly transforming a conventional LLM into a synergistic multi-agent ensemble, Smurfs can enhance the model's ability to solve complex tasks at no additional cost. This is achieved through innovative prompting strategies that allocate distinct roles within the model, thereby facilitating collaboration among specialized agents and forming an intelligent multi-agent system. Our empirical investigation on both open-ended task of StableToolBench and closed-ended task on HotpotQA showcases Smurfs' superior capability in intricate tool utilization scenarios. Notably, Smurfs outmatches all the baseline methods in both experiments, setting new state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, through comprehensive ablation studies, we dissect the contribution of the core components of the multi-agent framework to its overall efficacy. This not only verifies the effectiveness of the framework, but also sets a route for future exploration of multi-agent LLM systems.

Nonlinearities are crucial for capturing complex input-output relationships especially in deep neural networks. However, nonlinear functions often incur various hardware and compute overheads. Meanwhile, stochastic computing (SC) has emerged as a promising approach to tackle this challenge by trading output precision for hardware simplicity. To this end, this paper proposes a first-of-its-kind stochastic multivariate universal-radix finite-state machine (SMURF) that harnesses SC for hardware-simplistic multivariate nonlinear function generation at high accuracy. We present the finite-state machine (FSM) architecture for SMURF, as well as analytical derivations of sampling gate coefficients for accurately approximating generic nonlinear functions. Experiments demonstrate the superiority of SMURF, requiring only 16.07% area and 14.45% power consumption of Taylor-series approximation, and merely 2.22% area of look-up table (LUT) schemes.