Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has emerged as a prominent paradigm for increasingly complex tasks. However, joint evolution across heterogeneous agents remains challenging due to cooperative inefficiency and training instability. In this paper, we propose the joint evolution dynamics for MARL called JoyAgents-R1, which first applies Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to the joint training of heterogeneous multi-agents. By iteratively refining agents' large language models (LLMs) and memories, the method achieves holistic equilibrium with optimal decision-making and memory capabilities. Specifically, JoyAgents-R1 first implements node-wise Monte Carlo sampling on the behavior of each agent across entire reasoning trajectories to enhance GRPO sampling efficiency while maintaining policy diversity. Then, our marginal benefit-driven selection strategy identifies top-$K$ sampling groups with maximal reward fluctuations, enabling targeted agent model updates that improve training stability and maximize joint benefits through cost-effective parameter adjustments. Meanwhile, JoyAgents-R1 introduces an adaptive memory evolution mechanism that repurposes GRPO rewards as cost-free supervisory signals to eliminate repetitive reasoning and accelerate convergence. Experiments across general and domain-specific scenarios demonstrate that JoyAgents-R1 achieves performance comparable to that of larger LLMs while built on smaller open-source models.
Recent advancements in medical Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased their powerful reasoning and diagnostic capabilities. Despite their success, current unified multimodal medical LLMs face limitations in knowledge update costs, comprehensiveness, and flexibility. To address these challenges, we introduce the Modular Multi-Agent Framework for Multi-Modal Medical Diagnosis (MAM). Inspired by our empirical findings highlighting the benefits of role assignment and diagnostic discernment in LLMs, MAM decomposes the medical diagnostic process into specialized roles: a General Practitioner, Specialist Team, Radiologist, Medical Assistant, and Director, each embodied by an LLM-based agent. This modular and collaborative framework enables efficient knowledge updates and leverages existing medical LLMs and knowledge bases. Extensive experimental evaluations conducted on a wide range of publicly accessible multimodal medical datasets, incorporating text, image, audio, and video modalities, demonstrate that MAM consistently surpasses the performance of modality-specific LLMs. Notably, MAM achieves significant performance improvements ranging from 18% to 365% compared to baseline models. Our code is released at https://github.com/yczhou001/MAM.
This position paper argues that large language model (LLM)-based social simulations should establish clear boundaries to meaningfully contribute to social science research. While LLMs offer promising capabilities for modeling human-like agents compared to traditional agent-based modeling, they face fundamental limitations that constrain their reliability for social pattern discovery. The core issue lies in LLMs' tendency towards an ``average persona'' that lacks sufficient behavioral heterogeneity, a critical requirement for simulating complex social dynamics. We examine three key boundary problems: alignment (simulated behaviors matching real-world patterns), consistency (maintaining coherent agent behavior over time), and robustness (reproducibility under varying conditions). We propose heuristic boundaries for determining when LLM-based simulations can reliably advance social science understanding. We believe that these simulations are more valuable when focusing on (1) collective patterns rather than individual trajectories, (2) agent behaviors aligning with real population averages despite limited variance, and (3) proper validation methods available for testing simulation robustness. We provide a practical checklist to guide researchers in determining the appropriate scope and claims for LLM-based social simulations.
Query rewriting is pivotal for enhancing dense retrieval, yet current methods demand large-scale supervised data or suffer from inefficient reinforcement learning (RL) exploration. In this work, we first establish that guiding Large Language Models (LLMs) with a concise set of expert-crafted strategies, such as semantic expansion and entity disambiguation, substantially improves retrieval effectiveness on challenging benchmarks, including HotpotQA, FEVER, NFCorpus, and SciFact. Building on this insight, we introduce the Strategy-Adaptive Generation Engine (SAGE), which operationalizes these strategies in an RL framework. SAGE introduces two novel reward shaping mechanisms-Strategic Credit Shaping (SCS) and Contrastive Reward Shaping (CRS)-to deliver more informative learning signals. This strategy-guided approach not only achieves new state-of-the-art NDCG@10 results, but also uncovers a compelling emergent behavior: the agent learns to select optimal strategies, reduces unnecessary exploration, and generates concise rewrites, lowering inference cost without sacrificing performance. Our findings demonstrate that strategy-guided RL, enhanced with nuanced reward shaping, offers a scalable, efficient, and more interpretable paradigm for developing the next generation of robust information retrieval systems.
Multi-sensor fusion perception (MSFP) is a key technology for embodied AI, which can serve a variety of downstream tasks (e.g., 3D object detection and semantic segmentation) and application scenarios (e.g., autonomous driving and swarm robotics). Recently, impressive achievements on AI-based MSFP methods have been reviewed in relevant surveys. However, we observe that the existing surveys have some limitations after a rigorous and detailed investigation. For one thing, most surveys are oriented to a single task or research field, such as 3D object detection or autonomous driving. Therefore, researchers in other related tasks often find it difficult to benefit directly. For another, most surveys only introduce MSFP from a single perspective of multi-modal fusion, while lacking consideration of the diversity of MSFP methods, such as multi-view fusion and time-series fusion. To this end, in this paper, we hope to organize MSFP research from a task-agnostic perspective, where methods are reported from various technical views. Specifically, we first introduce the background of MSFP. Next, we review multi-modal and multi-agent fusion methods. A step further, time-series fusion methods are analyzed. In the era of LLM, we also investigate multimodal LLM fusion methods. Finally, we discuss open challenges and future directions for MSFP. We hope this survey can help researchers understand the important progress in MSFP and provide possible insights for future research.
In recent years, Large-Language-Model-driven AI agents have exhibited unprecedented intelligence, flexibility, and adaptability, and are rapidly changing human production and lifestyle. Nowadays, agents are undergoing a new round of evolution. They no longer act as an isolated island like LLMs. Instead, they start to communicate with diverse external entities, such as other agents and tools, to collectively perform more complex tasks. Under this trend, agent communication is regarded as a foundational pillar of the future AI ecosystem, and many organizations intensively begin to design related communication protocols (e.g., Anthropic's MCP and Google's A2A) within the recent few months. However, this new field exposes significant security hazard, which can cause severe damage to real-world scenarios. To help researchers to quickly figure out this promising topic and benefit the future agent communication development, this paper presents a comprehensive survey of agent communication security. More precisely, we first present a clear definition of agent communication and categorize the entire lifecyle of agent communication into three stages: user-agent interaction, agent-agent communication, and agent-environment communication. Next, for each communication phase, we dissect related protocols and analyze its security risks according to the communication characteristics. Then, we summarize and outlook on the possible defense countermeasures for each risk. Finally, we discuss open issues and future directions in this promising research field.
We introduce TAPAS (Task-based Adaptation and Planning using AgentS), a multi-agent framework that integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) with symbolic planning to solve complex tasks without the need for manually defined environment models. TAPAS employs specialized LLM-based agents that collaboratively generate and adapt domain models, initial states, and goal specifications as needed using structured tool-calling mechanisms. Through this tool-based interaction, downstream agents can request modifications from upstream agents, enabling adaptation to novel attributes and constraints without manual domain redefinition. A ReAct (Reason+Act)-style execution agent, coupled with natural language plan translation, bridges the gap between dynamically generated plans and real-world robot capabilities. TAPAS demonstrates strong performance in benchmark planning domains and in the VirtualHome simulated real-world environment.
While Large Language Models (LLMs) possess significant capabilities in open-world agent tasks, they also face challenges in rapidly adapting to new, specialized tasks due to their reliance on static pre-trained knowledge. Traditional methods such as fine-tuning are often costly, data-intensive, and may lead to "catastrophic forgetting." Therefore, we present KnowMap, a novel approach that dynamically constructs a knowledge base from environmental and experiential data. KnowMap fine-tunes a small knowledge-embedding model to equip a larger LLM with valuable task-specific knowledge. Our experiments on the ScienceWorld benchmark demonstrate 17.71% improvement for the performance of gpt-4-turbo model. KnowMap not only provides an efficient and effective means for LLM task-adapting, but also highlights how integrating environmental and experiential knowledge can enhance LLMs' reasoning capabilities.
Accessibility remains a critical concern in today's society, as many technologies are not developed to support the full range of user needs. Existing multi-agent systems (MAS) often cannot provide comprehensive assistance for users in need due to the lack of customization stemming from closed-source designs. Consequently, individuals with disabilities frequently encounter significant barriers when attempting to interact with digital environments. We introduce MATE, a multimodal accessibility MAS, which performs the modality conversions based on the user's needs. The system is useful for assisting people with disabilities by ensuring that data will be converted to an understandable format. For instance, if the user cannot see well and receives an image, the system converts this image to its audio description. MATE can be applied to a wide range of domains, industries, and areas, such as healthcare, and can become a useful assistant for various groups of users. The system supports multiple types of models, ranging from LLM API calling to using custom machine learning (ML) classifiers. This flexibility ensures that the system can be adapted to various needs and is compatible with a wide variety of hardware. Since the system is expected to run locally, it ensures the privacy and security of sensitive information. In addition, the framework can be effectively integrated with institutional technologies (e.g., digital healthcare service) for real-time user assistance. Furthermore, we introduce ModCon-Task-Identifier, a model that is capable of extracting the precise modality conversion task from the user input. Numerous experiments show that ModCon-Task-Identifier consistently outperforms other LLMs and statistical models on our custom data. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/AlgazinovAleksandr/Multi-Agent-MATE.
LLMs' reliance on static knowledge and fragile tool invocation severely hinders the orchestration of complex, heterogeneous toolchains, particularly at large scales. Existing methods typically use rigid single-path execution, resulting in poor error recovery and exponentially growing search spaces. We introduce NaviAgent, a graph-navigated bilevel planning architecture for robust function calling, comprising a Multi-Path Decider and Graph-Encoded Navigator. As an LLM-powered agent, the Multi-Path Decider defines a four-dimensional decision space and continuously perceives environmental states, dynamically selecting the optimal action to fully cover all tool invocation scenarios. The Graph-Encoded Navigator constructs a Tool Dependency Heterogeneous Graph (TDHG), where node embeddings explicitly fuse API schema structure with historical invocation behavior. It also integrates a novel heuristic search strategy that guides the Decider toward efficient and highly successful toolchains, even for unseen tool combinations. Experiments show that NaviAgent consistently achieves the highest task success rate (TSR) across all foundation models and task complexities, outperforming the average baselines (ReAct, ToolLLM, {\alpha}-UMI) by 13.5%, 16.4%, and 19.0% on Qwen2.5-14B, Qwen2.5-32B, and Deepseek-V3, respectively. Its execution steps are typically within one step of the most efficient baseline, ensuring a strong balance between quality and efficiency. Notably, a fine-tuned Qwen2.5-14B model achieves a TSR of 49.5%, surpassing the much larger 32B model (44.9%) under our architecture. Incorporating the Graph-Encoded Navigator further boosts TSR by an average of 2.4 points, with gains up over 9 points on complex tasks for larger models (Deepseek-V3 and GPT-4o), highlighting its essential role in toolchain orchestration.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly transforming education by enabling rich conversational learning experiences. This article provides a comprehensive review of how LLM-based conversational agents are being used in higher education, with extensions to secondary and lifelong learning contexts. We synthesize existing literature on LLMs in education and theories of conversational and dialogic pedagogy - including Vygotsky's sociocultural learning (scaffolding and the Zone of Proximal Development), the Socratic method, and Laurillard's conversational framework - and examine how prompting strategies and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) can align LLM behaviors with these pedagogical theories, and how it can support personalized, adaptive learning. We map educational theories to LLM capabilities, highlighting where LLM-driven dialogue supports established learning principles and where it challenges or falls short of traditional pedagogical assumptions. Notable gaps in applying prior theories to LLMs are identified, such as the models tendency to provide direct answers instead of fostering co-construction of knowledge, and the need to account for the constant availability and broad but non-human expertise of LLM tutors. In response, we propose practical strategies to better align LLM interactions with sound pedagogy - for example, designing prompts that encourage Socratic questioning, scaffolded guidance, and student reflection, as well as integrating retrieval mechanisms to ensure accuracy and contextual relevance. Our aim is to bridge the gap between educational theory and the emerging practice of AI-driven conversational learning, offering insights and tools for making LLM-based dialogues more educationally productive and theory-aligned.
Refactoring is a constant activity in software development and maintenance. Scale and maintain software systems are based on code refactoring. However, this process is still labor intensive, as it requires programmers to analyze the codebases in detail to avoid introducing new defects. In this research, we put forward a large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent system to automate the refactoring process on Haskell code. The objective of this research is to evaluate the effect of LLM-based agents in performing structured and semantically accurate refactoring on Haskell code. Our proposed multi-agent system based on specialized agents with distinct roles, including code analysis, refactoring execution, verification, and debugging. To test the effectiveness and practical applicability of the multi-agent system, we conducted evaluations using different open-source Haskell codebases. The results of the experiments carried out showed that the proposed LLM-based multi-agent system could average 11.03% decreased complexity in code, an improvement of 22.46% in overall code quality, and increase performance efficiency by an average of 13.27%. Furthermore, memory allocation was optimized by up to 14.57%. These results highlight the ability of LLM-based multi-agent in managing refactoring tasks targeted toward functional programming paradigms. Our findings hint that LLM-based multi-agent systems integration into the refactoring of functional programming languages can enhance maintainability and support automated development workflows.
Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) in large-scale urban environments requires embodied agents to ground linguistic instructions in complex scenes and recall relevant experiences over extended time horizons. Prior modular pipelines offer interpretability but lack unified memory, while end-to-end (M)LLM agents excel at fusing vision and language yet remain constrained by fixed context windows and implicit spatial reasoning. We introduce \textbf{Mem4Nav}, a hierarchical spatial-cognition long-short memory system that can augment any VLN backbone. Mem4Nav fuses a sparse octree for fine-grained voxel indexing with a semantic topology graph for high-level landmark connectivity, storing both in trainable memory tokens embedded via a reversible Transformer. Long-term memory (LTM) compresses and retains historical observations at both octree and graph nodes, while short-term memory (STM) caches recent multimodal entries in relative coordinates for real-time obstacle avoidance and local planning. At each step, STM retrieval sharply prunes dynamic context, and, when deeper history is needed, LTM tokens are decoded losslessly to reconstruct past embeddings. Evaluated on Touchdown and Map2Seq across three backbones (modular, state-of-the-art VLN with prompt-based LLM, and state-of-the-art VLN with strided-attention MLLM), Mem4Nav yields 7-13 pp gains in Task Completion, sufficient SPD reduction, and >10 pp nDTW improvement. Ablations confirm the indispensability of both the hierarchical map and dual memory modules. Our codes are open-sourced via https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/Mem4Nav.
Multimodal sarcasm understanding is a high-order cognitive task. Although large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance on many downstream NLP tasks, growing evidence suggests that they struggle with sarcasm understanding. In this paper, we propose Commander-GPT, a modular decision routing framework inspired by military command theory. Rather than relying on a single LLM's capability, Commander-GPT orchestrates a team of specialized LLM agents where each agent will be selectively assigned to a focused sub-task such as context modeling, sentiment analysis, etc. Their outputs are then routed back to the commander, which integrates the information and performs the final sarcasm judgment. To coordinate these agents, we introduce three types of centralized commanders: (1) a trained lightweight encoder-based commander (e.g., multi-modal BERT); (2) four small autoregressive language models, serving as moderately capable commanders (e.g., DeepSeek-VL); (3) two large LLM-based commander (Gemini Pro and GPT-4o) that performs task routing, output aggregation, and sarcasm decision-making in a zero-shot fashion. We evaluate Commander-GPT on the MMSD and MMSD 2.0 benchmarks, comparing five prompting strategies. Experimental results show that our framework achieves 4.4% and 11.7% improvement in F1 score over state-of-the-art (SoTA) baselines on average, demonstrating its effectiveness.
Software engineering (SWE) has recently emerged as a crucial testbed for next-generation LLM agents, demanding inherent capabilities in two critical dimensions: sustained iterative problem-solving (e.g., >50 interaction rounds) and long-context dependency resolution (e.g., >32k tokens). However, the data curation process in SWE remains notoriously time-consuming, as it heavily relies on manual annotation for code file filtering and the setup of dedicated runtime environments to execute and validate unit tests. Consequently, most existing datasets are limited to only a few thousand GitHub-sourced instances. To this end, we propose an incremental, automated data-curation pipeline that systematically scales both the volume and diversity of SWE datasets. Our dataset comprises 10,169 real-world Python task instances from 2,531 distinct GitHub repositories, each accompanied by a task specified in natural language and a dedicated runtime-environment image for automated unit-test validation. We have carefully curated over 8,000 successfully runtime-validated training trajectories from our proposed SWE dataset. When fine-tuning the Skywork-SWE model on these trajectories, we uncover a striking data scaling phenomenon: the trained model's performance for software engineering capabilities in LLMs continues to improve as the data size increases, showing no signs of saturation. Notably, our Skywork-SWE model achieves 38.0% pass@1 accuracy on the SWE-bench Verified benchmark without using verifiers or multiple rollouts, establishing a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) among the Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-based LLMs built on the OpenHands agent framework. Furthermore, with the incorporation of test-time scaling techniques, the performance further improves to 47.0% accuracy, surpassing the previous SOTA results for sub-32B parameter models. We release the Skywork-SWE-32B model checkpoint to accelerate future research.
Multi-agent techniques such as role playing or multi-turn debates have been shown to be effective in improving the performance of large language models (LLMs) in downstream tasks. Despite their differences in workflows, existing LLM-based multi-agent systems mostly use natural language for agent communication. While this is appealing for its simplicity and interpretability, it also introduces inevitable information loss as one model must down sample its continuous state vectors to concrete tokens before transferring them to the other model. Such losses are particularly significant when the information to transfer is not simple facts, but reasoning logics or abstractive thoughts. To tackle this problem, we propose a new communication protocol that transfers both natural language tokens and token-wise state transition trajectory from one agent to another. Particularly, compared to the actual state value, we find that the sequence of state changes in LLMs after generating each token can better reflect the information hidden behind the inference process, so we propose a State Delta Encoding (SDE) method to represent state transition trajectories. The experimental results show that multi-agent systems with SDE achieve SOTA performance compared to other communication protocols, particularly in tasks that involve complex reasoning. This shows the potential of communication augmentation for LLM-based multi-agent systems.
Large language models (LLMs) often struggle with mathematical problems that require exact computation or multi-step algebraic reasoning. Tool-integrated reasoning (TIR) offers a promising solution by leveraging external tools such as code interpreters to ensure correctness, but it introduces inference-time dependencies that hinder scalability and deployment. In this work, we propose a new paradigm for distilling tool knowledge into LLMs purely through natural language. We first construct a Solver Agent that solves math problems by interleaving planning, symbolic tool calls, and reflective reasoning. Then, using a back-translation pipeline powered by multiple LLM-based agents, we convert interleaved TIR traces into natural language reasoning traces. A Translator Agent generates explanations for individual tool calls, while a Rephrase Agent merges them into a fluent and globally coherent narrative. Empirically, we show that fine-tuning a small open-source model on these synthesized traces enables it to internalize both tool knowledge and structured reasoning patterns, yielding gains on competition-level math benchmarks without requiring tool access at inference.
Traditional control system design, reliant on expert knowledge and precise models, struggles with complex, nonlinear, or uncertain dynamics. This paper introduces AgenticControl, a novel multi-agent framework that automates controller design using coordinated Large Language Model (LLM) agents. Through structured JSON communication, these agents handle tasks including controller selection, scenario design, parameter optimization, performance evaluation, and decision-making. Through an actor-critic optimization approach, the system iteratively improves performance while progressing through scenarios of increasing complexity to ensure robustness under nominal conditions, measurement noise, actuator disturbances, and parametric uncertainties. Key innovations include structured multi-agent collaboration, robust optimization mechanisms, and real-time adaptability via in-context learning. Validated across four diverse control systems, namely, DC Motor Position control, Ball and Beam, Inverted Pendulum, and Double Inverted Pendulum, the framework achieves competitive performance against classical methods. Its Full State Feedback solution closely matches Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) results, while the designed PID controller significantly outperforming MATLAB's PIDTuner, reducing PID tracking error by 55% through adaptive parameter exploration. A comparative study of five LLM models reveals distinct optimization profiles, with DeepSeek achieving the fastest convergence. This work demonstrates the potential of LLM-driven control design, paving the way for advanced techniques like model predictive control and reinforcement learning.
This work examines whether activating latent subspaces in language models (LLMs) can steer scientific code generation toward a specific programming language. Five causal LLMs were first evaluated on scientific coding prompts to quantify their baseline bias among four programming languages. A static neuron-attribution method, perturbing the highest activated MLP weight for a C++ or CPP token, proved brittle and exhibited limited generalization across prompt styles and model scales. To address these limitations, a gradient-refined adaptive activation steering framework (G-ACT) was developed: per-prompt activation differences are clustered into a small set of steering directions, and lightweight per-layer probes are trained and refined online to select the appropriate steering vector. In LLaMA-3.2 3B, this approach reliably biases generation towards the CPP language by increasing the average probe classification accuracy by 15% and the early layers (0-6) improving the probe classification accuracy by 61.5% compared to the standard ACT framework. For LLaMA-3.3 70B, where attention-head signals become more diffuse, targeted injections at key layers still improve language selection. Although per-layer probing introduces a modest inference overhead, it remains practical by steering only a subset of layers and enables reproducible model behavior. These results demonstrate a scalable, interpretable and efficient mechanism for concept-level control for practical agentic systems.
Information retrieval is a cornerstone of modern knowledge acquisition, enabling billions of queries each day across diverse domains. However, traditional keyword-based search engines are increasingly inadequate for handling complex, multi-step information needs. Our position is that Large Language Models (LLMs), endowed with reasoning and agentic capabilities, are ushering in a new paradigm termed Agentic Deep Research. These systems transcend conventional information search techniques by tightly integrating autonomous reasoning, iterative retrieval, and information synthesis into a dynamic feedback loop. We trace the evolution from static web search to interactive, agent-based systems that plan, explore, and learn. We also introduce a test-time scaling law to formalize the impact of computational depth on reasoning and search. Supported by benchmark results and the rise of open-source implementations, we demonstrate that Agentic Deep Research not only significantly outperforms existing approaches, but is also poised to become the dominant paradigm for future information seeking. All the related resources, including industry products, research papers, benchmark datasets, and open-source implementations, are collected for the community in https://github.com/DavidZWZ/Awesome-Deep-Research.
Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents are increasingly employed to automate complex software engineering tasks such as program repair and issue resolution. These agents operate by autonomously generating natural language thoughts, invoking external tools, and iteratively refining their solutions. Despite their widespread adoption, the internal decision-making processes of these agents remain largely unexplored, limiting our understanding of their operational dynamics and failure modes. In this paper, we present a large-scale empirical study of the thought-action-result trajectories of three state-of-the-art LLM-based agents: \textsc{RepairAgent}, \textsc{AutoCodeRover}, and \textsc{OpenHands}. We unify their interaction logs into a common format, capturing 120 trajectories and 2822 LLM interactions focused on program repair and issue resolution. Our study combines quantitative analyses of structural properties, action patterns, and token usage with qualitative assessments of reasoning coherence and feedback integration. We identify key trajectory characteristics such as iteration counts and token consumption, recurring action sequences, and the semantic coherence linking thoughts, actions, and their results. Our findings reveal behavioral motifs and anti-patterns that distinguish successful from failed executions, providing actionable insights for improving agent design, including prompting strategies, failure diagnosis, and anti-pattern detection. We release our dataset and annotation framework to support further research on transparent and robust autonomous software engineering agents.
TRIZ, the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving, is a structured, knowledge-based framework for innovation and abstracting problems to find inventive solutions. However, its application is often limited by the complexity and deep interdisciplinary knowledge required. Advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have revealed new possibilities for automating parts of this process. While previous studies have explored single LLMs in TRIZ applications, this paper introduces a multi-agent approach. We propose an LLM-based multi-agent system, called TRIZ agents, each with specialized capabilities and tool access, collaboratively solving inventive problems based on the TRIZ methodology. This multi-agent system leverages agents with various domain expertise to efficiently navigate TRIZ steps. The aim is to model and simulate an inventive process with language agents. We assess the effectiveness of this team of agents in addressing complex innovation challenges based on a selected case study in engineering. We demonstrate the potential of agent collaboration to produce diverse, inventive solutions. This research contributes to the future of AI-driven innovation, showcasing the advantages of decentralized problem-solving in complex ideation tasks.
A potential concern when simulating populations of large language models (LLMs) is data contamination, i.e. the possibility that training data may shape outcomes in unintended ways. While this concern is important and may hinder certain experiments with multi-agent models, it does not preclude the study of genuinely emergent dynamics in LLM populations. The recent critique by Barrie and T\"ornberg [1] of the results of Flint Ashery et al. [2] offers an opportunity to clarify that self-organisation and model-dependent emergent dynamics can be studied in LLM populations, highlighting how such dynamics have been empirically observed in the specific case of social conventions.
Resolution of complex SQL issues persists as a significant bottleneck in real-world database applications. Current Large Language Models (LLMs), while adept at text-to-SQL translation, have not been rigorously evaluated on the more challenging task of debugging SQL issues. To address this gap, we introduce BIRD-CRITIC, a new SQL issue debugging benchmark comprising 530 PostgreSQL tasks (BIRD-CRITIC-PG) and 570 multi-dialect tasks (BIRD-CRITIC-Multi), distilled from authentic user issues and replayed within new environments to facilitate rigorous evaluation. Baseline evaluations underscore the task's complexity, with the leading reasoning model O3-Mini achieving only 38.87% success rate on BIRD-CRITIC-PG and 33.33% on BIRD-CRITIC-Multi. Meanwhile, advancing open-source models for database tasks is crucial for empowering local development while safeguarding data privacy. Therefore, we present Six-Gym (Sql-fIX-Gym), a training environment for elevating open-source model capabilities for SQL issue debugging. This environment leverages SQL-Rewind strategy, which automatically generates executable issue-solution datasets by reverse-engineering issues from verified SQLs. However, popular trajectory-based fine-tuning methods do not explore substantial supervisory signals. We further propose f-Plan Boosting, which extracts high-level debugging plans from SQL solutions, enabling teacher LLMs to produce 73.7% more successful trajectories for training. We integrate these components into an open-source agent, Bird-Fixer. Based on Qwen-2.5-Coder-14B, Bird-Fixer achieves 38.11% success rate on BIRD-CRITIC-PG and 29.65% on BIRD-CRITIC-Multi, surpassing leading proprietary models such as Claude-3.7-Sonnet and GPT-4.1, marking a significant step toward democratizing sophisticated SQL-debugging capabilities. The leaderboard and source code are available: https://bird-critic.github.io/
In the design process of the analog circuit pre-layout phase, device sizing is an important step in determining whether an analog circuit can meet the required performance metrics. Many existing techniques extract the circuit sizing task as a mathematical optimization problem to solve and continuously improve the optimization efficiency from a mathematical perspective. But they ignore the automatic introduction of prior knowledge, fail to achieve effective pruning of the search space, which thereby leads to a considerable compression margin remaining in the search space. To alleviate this problem, we propose a large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent framework for analog circuits' sizing relationships extraction from academic papers. The search space in the sizing process can be effectively pruned based on the sizing relationship extracted by this framework. Eventually, we conducted tests on 3 types of circuits, and the optimization efficiency was improved by $2.32 \sim 26.6 \times$. This work demonstrates that the LLM can effectively prune the search space for analog circuit sizing, providing a new solution for the combination of LLMs and conventional analog circuit design automation methods.
Scientific progress increasingly relies on effective collaboration among researchers, a dynamic that large language models (LLMs) have only begun to emulate. While recent LLM-based scientist agents show promise in autonomous scientific discovery, they often lack the interactive reasoning and evaluation mechanisms essential to real-world research. We propose IDVSCI (Internal Discussion and Vote SCIentists), a multi-agent framework built on LLMs that incorporates two key innovations: a Dynamic Knowledge Exchange mechanism enabling iterative feedback among agents, and a Dual-Diversity Review paradigm that simulates heterogeneous expert evaluation. These components jointly promote deeper reasoning and the generation of more creative and impactful scientific ideas. To evaluate the effectiveness and generalizability of our approach, we conduct experiments on two datasets: a widely used benchmark in computer science and a new dataset we introduce in the health sciences domain. Results show that IDVSCI consistently achieves the best performance across both datasets, outperforming existing systems such as AI Scientist and VIRSCI. These findings highlight the value of modeling interaction and peer review dynamics in LLM-based autonomous research.
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at code generation, but ensuring their outputs to be functionally correct, especially in complex programming tasks, is a persistent challenge. While traditional Test-Driven Development (TDD) offers a path for code refinement, its efficacy with LLMs is often undermined by the scarcity of high-quality test cases or the pitfalls of automated test generation, including biased tests or inaccurate output predictions that can misdirect the correction process. This paper introduces Property-Generated Solver, a novel framework that leverages Property-Based Testing (PBT) to validate high-level program properties or invariants, instead of relying on specific input-output examples. These properties are often simpler to define and verify than directly predicting exhaustive test oracles, breaking the "cycle of self-deception" where tests might share flaws with the code they are meant to validate. Property-Generated Solver employs two collaborative LLM-based agents: a Generator dedicated to code generation and iterative refinement, and a Tester that manages the PBT life-cycle and formulate semantically rich feedback from property violations. The resulting comprehensive and actionable feedback then guides the Generator in its refinement efforts. By establishing PBT as the core validation engine within this iterative, closed-loop paradigm, Property-Generated Solver provides a robust mechanism for steering LLMs towards more correct and generalizable code. Extensive experimental results on multiple code generation benchmarks demonstrate that Property-Generated Solver achieves substantial pass@1 improvements, ranging from 23.1% to 37.3% relative gains over established TDD methods.
Academic writing skills are crucial for students' success, but can feel overwhelming without proper guidance and practice, particularly when writing in a second language. Traditionally, students ask instructors or search dictionaries, which are not universally accessible. Early writing assistants emerged as rule-based systems that focused on detecting misspellings, subject-verb disagreements, and basic punctuation errors; however, they are inaccurate and lack contextual understanding. Machine learning-based assistants demonstrate a strong ability for language understanding but are expensive to train. Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in generating responses in natural languages based on given prompts. Still, they have a fundamental limitation in education: they generate essays without teaching, which can have detrimental effects on learning when misused. To address this limitation, we develop CoachGPT, which leverages large language models (LLMs) to assist individuals with limited educational resources and those who prefer self-paced learning in academic writing. CoachGPT is an AI agent-based web application that (1) takes instructions from experienced educators, (2) converts instructions into sub-tasks, and (3) provides real-time feedback and suggestions using large language models. This unique scaffolding structure makes CoachGPT unique among existing writing assistants. Compared to existing writing assistants, CoachGPT provides a more immersive writing experience with personalized feedback and guidance. Our user studies prove the usefulness of CoachGPT and the potential of large language models for academic writing.
This article demonstrates the transformative impact of Generative AI (GenAI) on actuarial science, illustrated by four implemented case studies. It begins with a historical overview of AI, tracing its evolution from early neural networks to modern GenAI technologies. The first case study shows how Large Language Models (LLMs) improve claims cost prediction by deriving significant features from unstructured textual data, significantly reducing prediction errors in the underlying machine learning task. In the second case study, we explore the automation of market comparisons using the GenAI concept of Retrieval-Augmented Generation to identify and process relevant information from documents. A third case study highlights the capabilities of fine-tuned vision-enabled LLMs in classifying car damage types and extracting contextual information. The fourth case study presents a multi-agent system that autonomously analyzes data from a given dataset and generates a corresponding report detailing the key findings. In addition to these case studies, we outline further potential applications of GenAI in the insurance industry, such as the automation of claims processing and fraud detection, and the verification of document compliance with internal or external policies. Finally, we discuss challenges and considerations associated with the use of GenAI, covering regulatory issues, ethical concerns, and technical limitations, among others.
The rapid progress of Large Language Models (LLMs) has given rise to a new category of autonomous AI systems, referred to as Deep Research (DR) agents. These agents are designed to tackle complex, multi-turn informational research tasks by leveraging a combination of dynamic reasoning, adaptive long-horizon planning, multi-hop information retrieval, iterative tool use, and the generation of structured analytical reports. In this paper, we conduct a detailed analysis of the foundational technologies and architectural components that constitute Deep Research agents. We begin by reviewing information acquisition strategies, contrasting API-based retrieval methods with browser-based exploration. We then examine modular tool-use frameworks, including code execution, multimodal input processing, and the integration of Model Context Protocols (MCPs) to support extensibility and ecosystem development. To systematize existing approaches, we propose a taxonomy that differentiates between static and dynamic workflows, and we classify agent architectures based on planning strategies and agent composition, including single-agent and multi-agent configurations. We also provide a critical evaluation of current benchmarks, highlighting key limitations such as restricted access to external knowledge, sequential execution inefficiencies, and misalignment between evaluation metrics and the practical objectives of DR agents. Finally, we outline open challenges and promising directions for future research. A curated and continuously updated repository of DR agent research is available at: {https://github.com/ai-agents-2030/awesome-deep-research-agent}.