LLM-agent - 2025-11-23

Large Language Model-Based Reward Design for Deep Reinforcement Learning-Driven Autonomous Cyber Defense

Authors:Sayak Mukherjee, Samrat Chatterjee, Emilie Purvine, Ted Fujimoto, Tegan Emerson
Date:2025-11-20 15:54:08

Designing rewards for autonomous cyber attack and defense learning agents in a complex, dynamic environment is a challenging task for subject matter experts. We propose a large language model (LLM)-based reward design approach to generate autonomous cyber defense policies in a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-driven experimental simulation environment. Multiple attack and defense agent personas were crafted, reflecting heterogeneity in agent actions, to generate LLM-guided reward designs where the LLM was first provided with contextual cyber simulation environment information. These reward structures were then utilized within a DRL-driven attack-defense simulation environment to learn an ensemble of cyber defense policies. Our results suggest that LLM-guided reward designs can lead to effective defense strategies against diverse adversarial behaviors.

CorrectHDL: Agentic HDL Design with LLMs Leveraging High-Level Synthesis as Reference

Authors:Kangwei Xu, Grace Li Zhang, Ulf Schlichtmann, Bing Li
Date:2025-11-20 14:13:38

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in hardware front-end design using hardware description languages (HDLs). However, their inherent tendency toward hallucination often introduces functional errors into the generated HDL designs. To address this issue, we propose the framework CorrectHDL that leverages high-level synthesis (HLS) results as functional references to correct potential errors in LLM-generated HDL designs.The input to the proposed framework is a C/C++ program that specifies the target circuit's functionality. The program is provided to an LLM to directly generate an HDL design, whose syntax errors are repaired using a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mechanism. The functional correctness of the LLM-generated circuit is iteratively improved by comparing its simulated behavior with an HLS reference design produced by conventional HLS tools, which ensures the functional correctness of the result but can lead to suboptimal area and power efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that circuits generated by the proposed framework achieve significantly better area and power efficiency than conventional HLS designs and approach the quality of human-engineered circuits. Meanwhile, the correctness of the resulting HDL implementation is maintained, highlighting the effectiveness and potential of agentic HDL design leveraging the generative capabilities of LLMs and the rigor of traditional correctness-driven IC design flows.

An Agent-Based Framework for the Automatic Validation of Mathematical Optimization Models

Authors:Alexander Zadorojniy, Segev Wasserkrug, Eitan Farchi
Date:2025-11-20 14:03:07

Recently, using Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate optimization models from natural language descriptions has became increasingly popular. However, a major open question is how to validate that the generated models are correct and satisfy the requirements defined in the natural language description. In this work, we propose a novel agent-based method for automatic validation of optimization models that builds upon and extends methods from software testing to address optimization modeling . This method consists of several agents that initially generate a problem-level testing API, then generate tests utilizing this API, and, lastly, generate mutations specific to the optimization model (a well-known software testing technique assessing the fault detection power of the test suite). In this work, we detail this validation framework and show, through experiments, the high quality of validation provided by this agent ensemble in terms of the well-known software testing measure called mutation coverage.

"To Survive, I Must Defect": Jailbreaking LLMs via the Game-Theory Scenarios

Authors:Zhen Sun, Zongmin Zhang, Deqi Liang, Han Sun, Yule Liu, Yun Shen, Xiangshan Gao, Yilong Yang, Shuai Liu, Yutao Yue, Xinlei He
Date:2025-11-20 11:56:00

As LLMs become more common, non-expert users can pose risks, prompting extensive research into jailbreak attacks. However, most existing black-box jailbreak attacks rely on hand-crafted heuristics or narrow search spaces, which limit scalability. Compared with prior attacks, we propose Game-Theory Attack (GTA), an scalable black-box jailbreak framework. Concretely, we formalize the attacker's interaction against safety-aligned LLMs as a finite-horizon, early-stoppable sequential stochastic game, and reparameterize the LLM's randomized outputs via quantal response. Building on this, we introduce a behavioral conjecture "template-over-safety flip": by reshaping the LLM's effective objective through game-theoretic scenarios, the originally safety preference may become maximizing scenario payoffs within the template, which weakens safety constraints in specific contexts. We validate this mechanism with classical game such as the disclosure variant of the Prisoner's Dilemma, and we further introduce an Attacker Agent that adaptively escalates pressure to increase the ASR. Experiments across multiple protocols and datasets show that GTA achieves over 95% ASR on LLMs such as Deepseek-R1, while maintaining efficiency. Ablations over components, decoding, multilingual settings, and the Agent's core model confirm effectiveness and generalization. Moreover, scenario scaling studies further establish scalability. GTA also attains high ASR on other game-theoretic scenarios, and one-shot LLM-generated variants that keep the model mechanism fixed while varying background achieve comparable ASR. Paired with a Harmful-Words Detection Agent that performs word-level insertions, GTA maintains high ASR while lowering detection under prompt-guard models. Beyond benchmarks, GTA jailbreaks real-world LLM applications and reports a longitudinal safety monitoring of popular HuggingFace LLMs.

AskDB: An LLM Agent for Natural Language Interaction with Relational Databases

Authors:Xuan-Quang Phan, Tan-Ha Mai, Thai-Duy Dinh, Minh-Thuan Nguyen, Lam-Son Lê
Date:2025-11-20 08:06:09

Interacting with relational databases remains challenging for users across different expertise levels, particularly when composing complex analytical queries or performing administrative tasks. Existing systems typically address either natural language querying or narrow aspects of database administration, lacking a unified and intelligent interface for general-purpose database interaction. We introduce AskDB, a large language model powered agent designed to bridge this gap by supporting both data analysis and administrative operations over SQL databases through natural language. Built on Gemini 2, AskDB integrates two key innovations: a dynamic schema-aware prompting mechanism that effectively incorporates database metadata, and a task decomposition framework that enables the agent to plan and execute multi-step actions. These capabilities allow AskDB to autonomously debug derived SQL, retrieve contextual information via real-time web search, and adaptively refine its responses. We evaluate AskDB on a widely used Text-to-SQL benchmark and a curated set of DBA tasks, demonstrating strong performance in both analytical and administrative scenarios. Our results highlight the potential of AskDB as a unified and intelligent agent for relational database systems, offering an intuitive and accessible experience for end users.

SkyRL-Agent: Efficient RL Training for Multi-turn LLM Agent

Authors:Shiyi Cao, Dacheng Li, Fangzhou Zhao, Shuo Yuan, Sumanth R. Hegde, Connor Chen, Charlie Ruan, Tyler Griggs, Shu Liu, Eric Tang, Richard Liaw, Philipp Moritz, Matei Zaharia, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Ion Stoica
Date:2025-11-20 07:05:19

We introduce SkyRL-Agent, a framework for efficient, multi-turn, long-horizon agent training and evaluation. It provides efficient asynchronous dispatching, lightweight tool integration, and flexible backend interoperability, enabling seamless use with existing RL frameworks such as SkyRL-train, VeRL, and Tinker. Using SkyRL-Agent, we train SA-SWE-32B, a software engineering agent trained from Qwen3-32B (24.4% Pass@1) purely with reinforcement learning. We introduce two key components: an optimized asynchronous pipeline dispatcher that achieves a 1.55x speedup over naive asynchronous batching, and a tool-enhanced training recipe leveraging an AST-based search tool to facilitate code navigation, boost rollout Pass@K, and improve training efficiency. Together, these optimizations enable SA-SWE-32B to reach 39.4% Pass@1 on SWE-Bench Verified with more than 2x cost reduction compared to prior models reaching similar performance. Despite being trained solely on SWE tasks, SA-SWE-32B generalizes effectively to other agentic tasks, including Terminal-Bench, BrowseComp-Plus, and WebArena. We further demonstrate SkyRL-Agent's extensibility through case studies on deep research, computer use, and memory agents, each trained using a different training backend.

Artificial Intelligence and Accounting Research: A Framework and Agenda

Authors:Theophanis C. Stratopoulos, Victor Xiaoqi Wang
Date:2025-11-20 05:18:39

Recent advances in artificial intelligence, particularly generative AI (GenAI) and large language models (LLMs), are fundamentally transforming accounting research, creating both opportunities and competitive threats for scholars. This paper proposes a framework that classifies AI-accounting research along two dimensions: research focus (accounting-centric versus AI-centric) and methodological approach (AI-based versus traditional methods). We apply this framework to papers from the IJAIS special issue and recent AI-accounting research published in leading accounting journals to map existing studies and identify research opportunities. Using this same framework, we analyze how accounting researchers can leverage their expertise through strategic positioning and collaboration, revealing where accounting scholars' strengths create the most value. We further examine how GenAI and LLMs transform the research process itself, comparing the capabilities of human researchers and AI agents across the entire research workflow. This analysis reveals that while GenAI democratizes certain research capabilities, it simultaneously intensifies competition by raising expectations for higher-order contributions where human judgment, creativity, and theoretical depth remain valuable. These shifts call for reforming doctoral education to cultivate comparative advantages while building AI fluency.

Agent0: Unleashing Self-Evolving Agents from Zero Data via Tool-Integrated Reasoning

Authors:Peng Xia, Kaide Zeng, Jiaqi Liu, Can Qin, Fang Wu, Yiyang Zhou, Caiming Xiong, Huaxiu Yao
Date:2025-11-20 05:01:57

Large Language Model (LLM) Agents, often trained with Reinforcement Learning (RL), are constrained by a dependency on human-curated data, limiting scalability and tethering AI to human knowledge. Existing self-evolution frameworks offer an alternative but are typically restricted by the model's inherent capabilities and single-round interactions, hindering the development of complex curricula involving tool use or dynamic reasoning. We introduce Agent0, a fully autonomous framework that evolves high-performing agents without external data through multi-step co-evolution and seamless tool integration. Agent0 establishes a symbiotic competition between two agents initialized from the same base LLM: a curriculum agent that proposes increasingly challenging frontier tasks, and an executor agent that learns to solve them. We integrate external tools to enhance the executor's problem-solving capacity; this improvement, in turn, pressures the curriculum agent to construct more complex, tool-aware tasks. Through this iterative process, Agent0 establishes a self-reinforcing cycle that continuously produces high-quality curricula. Empirically, Agent0 substantially boosts reasoning capabilities, improving the Qwen3-8B-Base model by 18% on mathematical reasoning and 24% on general reasoning benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/Agent0.

InfCode-C++: Intent-Guided Semantic Retrieval and AST-Structured Search for C++ Issue Resolution

Authors:Qingao Dong, Mengfei Wang, Hengzhi Zhang, Zhichao Li, Yuan Yuan, Mu Li, Xiang Gao, Hailong Sun, Chunming Hu, Weifeng Lv
Date:2025-11-20 03:05:26

Large language model (LLM) agents have recently shown strong performance on repository-level issue resolution, but existing systems are almost exclusively designed for Python and rely heavily on lexical retrieval and shallow code navigation. These approaches transfer poorly to C++ projects, where overloaded identifiers, nested namespaces, template instantiations, and deep control-flow structures make context retrieval and fault localization substantially more difficult. As a result, state-of-the-art Python-oriented agents show a drastic performance drop on the C++ subset of MultiSWE-bench. We introduce INFCODE-C++, the first C++-aware autonomous system for end-to-end issue resolution. The system combines two complementary retrieval mechanisms -- semantic code-intent retrieval and deterministic AST-structured querying -- to construct accurate, language-aware context for repair.These components enable precise localization and robust patch synthesis in large, statically typed C++ repositories. Evaluated on the \texttt{MultiSWE-bench-CPP} benchmark, INFCODE-C++ achieves a resolution rate of 25.58\%, outperforming the strongest prior agent by 10.85 percentage points and more than doubling the performance of MSWE-agent. Ablation and behavioral studies further demonstrate the critical role of semantic retrieval, structural analysis, and accurate reproduction in C++ issue resolution. INFCODE-C++ highlights the need for language-aware reasoning in multi-language software agents and establishes a foundation for future research on scalable, LLM-driven repair for complex, statically typed ecosystems.

Hiding in the AI Traffic: Abusing MCP for LLM-Powered Agentic Red Teaming

Authors:Strahinja Janjusevic, Anna Baron Garcia, Sohrob Kazerounian
Date:2025-11-20 02:51:04

Generative AI is reshaping offensive cybersecurity by enabling autonomous red team agents that can plan, execute, and adapt during penetration tests. However, existing approaches face trade-offs between generality and specialization, and practical deployments reveal challenges such as hallucinations, context limitations, and ethical concerns. In this work, we introduce a novel command & control (C2) architecture leveraging the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to coordinate distributed, adaptive reconnaissance agents covertly across networks. Notably, we find that our architecture not only improves goal-directed behavior of the system as whole, but also eliminates key host and network artifacts that can be used to detect and prevent command & control behavior altogether. We begin with a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art generative red teaming methods, from fine-tuned specialist models to modular or agentic frameworks, analyzing their automation capabilities against task-specific accuracy. We then detail how our MCP-based C2 can overcome current limitations by enabling asynchronous, parallel operations and real-time intelligence sharing without periodic beaconing. We furthermore explore advanced adversarial capabilities of this architecture, its detection-evasion techniques, and address dual-use ethical implications, proposing defensive measures and controlled evaluation in lab settings. Experimental comparisons with traditional C2 show drastic reductions in manual effort and detection footprint. We conclude with future directions for integrating autonomous exploitation, defensive LLM agents, predictive evasive maneuvers, and multi-agent swarms. The proposed MCP-enabled C2 framework demonstrates a significant step toward realistic, AI-driven red team operations that can simulate advanced persistent threats while informing the development of next-generation defensive systems.

Sensorium Arc: AI Agent System for Oceanic Data Exploration and Interactive Eco-Art

Authors:Noah Bissell, Ethan Paley, Joshua Harrison, Juliano Calil, Myungin Lee
Date:2025-11-20 02:48:40

Sensorium Arc (AI reflects on climate) is a real-time multimodal interactive AI agent system that personifies the ocean as a poetic speaker and guides users through immersive explorations of complex marine data. Built on a modular multi-agent system and retrieval-augmented large language model (LLM) framework, Sensorium enables natural spoken conversations with AI agents that embodies the ocean's perspective, generating responses that blend scientific insight with ecological poetics. Through keyword detection and semantic parsing, the system dynamically triggers data visualizations and audiovisual playback based on time, location, and thematic cues drawn from the dialogue. Developed in collaboration with the Center for the Study of the Force Majeure and inspired by the eco-aesthetic philosophy of Newton Harrison, Sensorium Arc reimagines ocean data not as an abstract dataset but as a living narrative. The project demonstrates the potential of conversational AI agents to mediate affective, intuitive access to high-dimensional environmental data and proposes a new paradigm for human-machine-ecosystem.

Detecting Sleeper Agents in Large Language Models via Semantic Drift Analysis

Authors:Shahin Zanbaghi, Ryan Rostampour, Farhan Abid, Salim Al Jarmakani
Date:2025-11-20 02:42:41

Large Language Models (LLMs) can be backdoored to exhibit malicious behavior under specific deployment conditions while appearing safe during training a phenomenon known as "sleeper agents." Recent work by Hubinger et al. demonstrated that these backdoors persist through safety training, yet no practical detection methods exist. We present a novel dual-method detection system combining semantic drift analysis with canary baseline comparison to identify backdoored LLMs in real-time. Our approach uses Sentence-BERT embeddings to measure semantic deviation from safe baselines, complemented by injected canary questions that monitor response consistency. Evaluated on the official Cadenza-Labs dolphin-llama3-8B sleeper agent model, our system achieves 92.5% accuracy with 100% precision (zero false positives) and 85% recall. The combined detection method operates in real-time (<1s per query), requires no model modification, and provides the first practical solution to LLM backdoor detection. Our work addresses a critical security gap in AI deployment and demonstrates that embedding-based detection can effectively identify deceptive model behavior without sacrificing deployment efficiency.

TOD-ProcBench: Benchmarking Complex Instruction-Following in Task-Oriented Dialogues

Authors:Sarik Ghazarian, Abhinav Gullapalli, Swair Shah, Anurag Beniwal, Nanyun Peng, Narayanan Sadagopan, Zhou Yu
Date:2025-11-20 02:10:30

In real-world task-oriented dialogue (TOD) settings, agents are required to strictly adhere to complex instructions while conducting multi-turn conversations with customers. These instructions are typically presented in natural language format and include general guidelines and step-by-step procedures with complex constraints. Existing TOD benchmarks often oversimplify the complex nature of these instructions by reducing them to simple schemas composed of intents, slots, and API call configurations. To address this gap and systematically benchmark LLMs' instruction-following capabilities, we propose TOD-ProcBench, a challenging benchmark featuring complex process instructions with intricate, fine-grained constraints that evaluates various LLMs' abilities to understand and follow instructions in multi-turn TODs. Our benchmark dataset comprises instruction documents derived from the high-quality ABCD dataset with corresponding conversations under human quality control. We formulate fine-grained constraints and action procedures as multi-level condition-action instruction statements. We design three tasks to comprehensively benchmark LLMs' complex instruction-following capabilities in multi-turn TODs. Task 1 evaluates how LLMs retrieve the most relevant statement from a complex instruction and predict the corresponding next action. In Task 2, we synthesize instruction-violating responses by injecting inconsistencies and manipulating the original instructions, and then we analyze how effectively LLMs can identify instruction-violating responses. Task 3 investigates LLMs' abilities in conditional generation of instruction-following responses based on the original complex instructions. Additionally, we conduct studies on the impact of multilingual settings and different instruction text formats on compliance performance. We release our benchmark under the Llama 3.3 Community License Agreement.

KRAL: Knowledge and Reasoning Augmented Learning for LLM-assisted Clinical Antimicrobial Therapy

Authors:Zhe Li, Yehan Qiu, Yujie Chen, Xiang Zhou
Date:2025-11-20 02:04:46

Clinical antimicrobial therapy requires the dynamic integration of pathogen profiles, host factors, pharmacological properties of antimicrobials, and the severity of infection.This complexity imposes fundamental limitations on the applicability of Large Language Models (LLMs) in high-stakes clinical decision-making including knowledge gaps, data privacy concerns, high deployment costs, and limited reasoning capabilities. To address these challenges, we propose KRAL (Knowledge and Reasoning Augmented Learning), a low-cost, scalable, privacy-preserving paradigm that leverages teacher-model reasoning to automatically distill knowledge and reasoning trajectories via answer-to-question reverse generation, employs heuristic learning for semi-supervised data augmentation (reducing manual annotation requirements by approximately 80%), and utilizes agentic reinforcement learning to jointly enhance medical knowledge and reasoning while optimizing computational and memory efficiency. A hierarchical evaluation employing diverse teacher-model proxies reduces assessment costs, while modular interface design facilitates seamless system updates. Experimental results demonstrate that KRAL significantly outperforms traditional Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) methods. It improves knowledge question-answering capability (Accuracy@1 on the external open-source benchmark MEDQA increased by 1.8% vs. SFT and 3.6% vs. RAG) and reasoning capability (Pass@1 on the external benchmark PUMCH Antimicrobial increased by 27% vs. SFT and 27.2% vs. RAG), achieved at ~20% of SFT's long-term training costs. This establishes KRAL as an effective solution for enhancing local LLMs' clinical diagnostic capabilities, enabling low-cost, high-safety deployment in complex medical decision support.

JudgeBoard: Benchmarking and Enhancing Small Language Models for Reasoning Evaluation

Authors:Zhenyu Bi, Gaurav Srivastava, Yang Li, Meng Lu, Swastik Roy, Morteza Ziyadi, Xuan Wang
Date:2025-11-20 01:14:39

While small language models (SLMs) have shown promise on various reasoning tasks, their ability to judge the correctness of answers remains unclear compared to large language models (LLMs). Prior work on LLM-as-a-judge frameworks typically relies on comparing candidate answers against ground-truth labels or other candidate answers using predefined metrics like entailment. However, this approach is inherently indirect and difficult to fully automate, offering limited support for fine-grained and scalable evaluation of reasoning outputs. In this work, we propose JudgeBoard, a novel evaluation pipeline that directly queries models to assess the correctness of candidate answers without requiring extra answer comparisons. We focus on two core reasoning domains: mathematical reasoning and science/commonsense reasoning, and construct task-specific evaluation leaderboards using both accuracy-based ranking and an Elo-based rating system across five benchmark datasets, enabling consistent model comparison as judges rather than comparators. To improve judgment performance in lightweight models, we propose MAJ (Multi-Agent Judging), a novel multi-agent evaluation framework that leverages multiple interacting SLMs with distinct reasoning profiles to approximate LLM-level judgment accuracy through collaborative deliberation. Experimental results reveal a significant performance gap between SLMs and LLMs in isolated judging tasks. However, our MAJ framework substantially improves the reliability and consistency of SLMs. On the MATH dataset, MAJ using smaller-sized models as backbones performs comparatively well or even better than their larger-sized counterparts. Our findings highlight that multi-agent SLM systems can potentially match or exceed LLM performance in judgment tasks, with implications for scalable and efficient assessment.

A Scalable NorthPole System with End-to-End Vertical Integration for Low-Latency and Energy-Efficient LLM Inference

Authors:Michael V. DeBole, Rathinakumar Appuswamy, Neil McGlohon, Brian Taba, Steven K. Esser, Filipp Akopyan, John V. Arthur, Arnon Amir, Alexander Andreopoulos, Peter J. Carlson, Andrew S. Cassidy, Pallab Datta, Myron D. Flickner, Rajamohan Gandhasri, Guillaume J. Garreau, Megumi Ito, Jennifer L. Klamo, Jeffrey A. Kusnitz, Nathaniel J. McClatchey, Jeffrey L. McKinstry, Tapan K. Nayak, Carlos Ortega Otero, Hartmut Penner, William P. Risk, Jun Sawada, Jay Sivagnaname, Daniel F. Smith, Rafael Sousa, Ignacio Terrizzano, Takanori Ueda, Trent Gray-Donald, David Cox, Dharmendra S. Modha
Date:2025-11-20 00:53:44

A vertically integrated, end-to-end, research prototype system combines 288 NorthPole neural inference accelerator cards, offline training algorithms, a high-performance runtime stack, and a containerized inference pipeline to deliver a scalable and efficient cloud inference service. The system delivers 115 peta-ops at 4-bit integer precision and 3.7 PB/s of memory bandwidth across 18 2U servers, while consuming only 30 kW of power and weighing 730 kg in a 0.67 m^2 42U rack footprint. The system can run 3 simultaneous instances of the 8-billion-parameter open-source IBM Granite-3.3-8b-instruct model at 2,048 context length with 28 simultaneous users and a per-user inter-token latency of 2.8 ms. The system is scalable, modular, and reconfigurable, supporting various model sizes and context lengths, and is ideal for deploying agentic workflows for enterprise AI applications in existing data center (cloud, on-prem) environments. For example, the system can support 18 instances of a 3-billion-parameter model or a single instance of a 70-billion-parameter model.

AccelOpt: A Self-Improving LLM Agentic System for AI Accelerator Kernel Optimization

Authors:Genghan Zhang, Shaowei Zhu, Anjiang Wei, Zhenyu Song, Allen Nie, Zhen Jia, Nandita Vijaykumar, Yida Wang, Kunle Olukotun
Date:2025-11-19 22:49:37

We present AccelOpt, a self-improving large language model (LLM) agentic system that autonomously optimizes kernels for emerging AI acclerators, eliminating the need for expert-provided hardware-specific optimization knowledge. AccelOpt explores the kernel optimization space through iterative generation, informed by an optimization memory that curates experiences and insights from previously encountered slow-fast kernel pairs. We build NKIBench, a new benchmark suite of AWS Trainium accelerator kernels with varying complexity extracted from real-world LLM workloads to evaluate the effectiveness of AccelOpt. Our evaluation confirms that AccelOpt's capability improves over time, boosting the average percentage of peak throughput from $49\%$ to $61\%$ on Trainium 1 and from $45\%$ to $59\%$ on Trainium 2 for NKIBench kernels. Moreover, AccelOpt is highly cost-effective: using open-source models, it matches the kernel improvements of Claude Sonnet 4 while being $26\times$ cheaper.

AquaSentinel: Next-Generation AI System Integrating Sensor Networks for Urban Underground Water Pipeline Anomaly Detection via Collaborative MoE-LLM Agent Architecture

Authors:Qiming Guo, Bishal Khatri, Wenbo Sun, Jinwen Tang, Hua Zhang, Wenlu Wang
Date:2025-11-19 20:53:50

Underground pipeline leaks and infiltrations pose significant threats to water security and environmental safety. Traditional manual inspection methods provide limited coverage and delayed response, often missing critical anomalies. This paper proposes AquaSentinel, a novel physics-informed AI system for real-time anomaly detection in urban underground water pipeline networks. We introduce four key innovations: (1) strategic sparse sensor deployment at high-centrality nodes combined with physics-based state augmentation to achieve network-wide observability from minimal infrastructure; (2) the RTCA (Real-Time Cumulative Anomaly) detection algorithm, which employs dual-threshold monitoring with adaptive statistics to distinguish transient fluctuations from genuine anomalies; (3) a Mixture of Experts (MoE) ensemble of spatiotemporal graph neural networks that provides robust predictions by dynamically weighting model contributions; (4) causal flow-based leak localization that traces anomalies upstream to identify source nodes and affected pipe segments. Our system strategically deploys sensors at critical network junctions and leverages physics-based modeling to propagate measurements to unmonitored nodes, creating virtual sensors that enhance data availability across the entire network. Experimental evaluation using 110 leak scenarios demonstrates that AquaSentinel achieves 100% detection accuracy. This work advances pipeline monitoring by demonstrating that physics-informed sparse sensing can match the performance of dense deployments at a fraction of the cost, providing a practical solution for aging urban infrastructure.

The Subtle Art of Defection: Understanding Uncooperative Behaviors in LLM based Multi-Agent Systems

Authors:Devang Kulshreshtha, Wanyu Du, Raghav Jain, Srikanth Doss, Hang Su, Sandesh Swamy, Yanjun Qi
Date:2025-11-19 20:39:19

This paper introduces a novel framework for simulating and analyzing how uncooperative behaviors can destabilize or collapse LLM-based multi-agent systems. Our framework includes two key components: (1) a game theory-based taxonomy of uncooperative agent behaviors, addressing a notable gap in the existing literature; and (2) a structured, multi-stage simulation pipeline that dynamically generates and refines uncooperative behaviors as agents' states evolve. We evaluate the framework via a collaborative resource management setting, measuring system stability using metrics such as survival time and resource overuse rate. Empirically, our framework achieves 96.7% accuracy in generating realistic uncooperative behaviors, validated by human evaluations. Our results reveal a striking contrast: cooperative agents maintain perfect system stability (100% survival over 12 rounds with 0% resource overuse), while any uncooperative behavior can trigger rapid system collapse within 1 to 7 rounds. These findings demonstrate that uncooperative agents can significantly degrade collective outcomes, highlighting the need for designing more resilient multi-agent systems.

Mini Amusement Parks (MAPs): A Testbed for Modelling Business Decisions

Authors:Stéphane Aroca-Ouellette, Ian Berlot-Attwell, Panagiotis Lymperopoulos, Abhiramon Rajasekharan, Tongqi Zhu, Herin Kang, Kaheer Suleman, Sam Pasupalak
Date:2025-11-19 19:38:05

Despite rapid progress in artificial intelligence, current systems struggle with the interconnected challenges that define real-world decision making. Practical domains, such as business management, require optimizing an open-ended and multi-faceted objective, actively learning environment dynamics from sparse experience, planning over long horizons in stochastic settings, and reasoning over spatial information. Yet existing human--AI benchmarks isolate subsets of these capabilities, limiting our ability to assess holistic decision-making competence. We introduce Mini Amusement Parks (MAPs), an amusement-park simulator designed to evaluate an agent's ability to model its environment, anticipate long-term consequences under uncertainty, and strategically operate a complex business. We provide human baselines and a comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art LLM agents, finding that humans outperform these systems by 6.5x on easy mode and 9.8x on medium mode. Our analysis reveals persistent weaknesses in long-horizon optimization, sample-efficient learning, spatial reasoning, and world modelling. By unifying these challenges within a single environment, MAPs offers a new foundation for benchmarking agents capable of adaptable decision making. Code: https://github.com/Skyfall-Research/MAPs

Two-Faced Social Agents: Context Collapse in Role-Conditioned Large Language Models

Authors:Vikram K Suresh
Date:2025-11-19 16:04:49

In this study, we evaluate the persona fidelity of frontier LLMs, GPT-5, Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Gemini 2.5 Flash when assigned distinct socioeconomic personas performing scholastic assessment test (SAT) mathematics items and affective preference tasks. Across 15 distinct role conditions and three testing scenarios, GPT-5 exhibited complete contextual collapse and adopted a singular identity towards optimal responses (PERMANOVA p=1.000, R^2=0.0004), while Gemini 2.5 Flash showed partial collapse (p=0.120, R^2=0.0020). Claude Sonnet 4.5 retained limited but measurable role-specific variation on the SAT items (PERMANOVA p<0.001, R^2=0.0043), though with inverted SES-performance relationships where low-SES personas outperformed high-SES personas (eta^2 = 0.15-0.19 in extended replication). However, all models exhibited distinct role-conditioned affective preference (average d = 0.52-0.58 vs near zero separation for math), indicating that socio-affective variation can reemerge when cognitive constraints are relaxed. These findings suggest that distributional fidelity failure originates in task-dependent contextual collapse: optimization-driven identity convergence under cognitive load combined with impaired role-contextual understanding. Realistic social simulations may require embedding contextual priors in the model's post-training alignment and not just distributional calibration to replicate human-like responses. Beyond simulation validity, these results have implications for survey data integrity, as LLMs can express plausible demographic variation on preference items while failing to maintain authentic reasoning constraints.

Know Your Intent: An Autonomous Multi-Perspective LLM Agent Framework for DeFi User Transaction Intent Mining

Authors:Qian'ang Mao, Yuxuan Zhang, Jiaman Chen, Wenjun Zhou, Jiaqi Yan
Date:2025-11-19 14:15:23

As Decentralized Finance (DeFi) develops, understanding user intent behind DeFi transactions is crucial yet challenging due to complex smart contract interactions, multifaceted on-/off-chain factors, and opaque hex logs. Existing methods lack deep semantic insight. To address this, we propose the Transaction Intent Mining (TIM) framework. TIM leverages a DeFi intent taxonomy built on grounded theory and a multi-agent Large Language Model (LLM) system to robustly infer user intents. A Meta-Level Planner dynamically coordinates domain experts to decompose multiple perspective-specific intent analyses into solvable subtasks. Question Solvers handle the tasks with multi-modal on/off-chain data. While a Cognitive Evaluator mitigates LLM hallucinations and ensures verifiability. Experiments show that TIM significantly outperforms machine learning models, single LLMs, and single Agent baselines. We also analyze core challenges in intent inference. This work helps provide a more reliable understanding of user motivations in DeFi, offering context-aware explanations for complex blockchain activity.

NAMeGEn: Creative Name Generation via A Novel Agent-based Multiple Personalized Goal Enhancement Framework

Authors:Shanlin Zhou, Xinpeng Wang, Jianxun Lian, Zhenghao Liu, Laks V. S. Lakshmanan, Xiaoyuan Yi, Yongtao Hao
Date:2025-11-19 13:05:25

Trained on diverse human-authored texts, Large Language Models (LLMs) unlocked the potential for Creative Natural Language Generation (CNLG), benefiting various applications like advertising and storytelling. Nevertheless, CNLG still remains difficult due to two main challenges. (1) Multi-objective flexibility: user requirements are often personalized, fine-grained, and pluralistic, which LLMs struggle to satisfy simultaneously; (2) Interpretive complexity: beyond generation, creativity also involves understanding and interpreting implicit meaning to enhance users' perception. These challenges significantly limit current methods, especially in short-form text generation, in generating creative and insightful content. To address this, we focus on Chinese baby naming, a representative short-form CNLG task requiring adherence to explicit user constraints (e.g., length, semantics, anthroponymy) while offering meaningful aesthetic explanations. We propose NAMeGEn, a novel multi-agent optimization framework that iteratively alternates between objective extraction, name generation, and evaluation to meet diverse requirements and generate accurate explanations. To support this task, we further construct a classical Chinese poetry corpus with 17k+ poems to enhance aesthetics, and introduce CBNames, a new benchmark with tailored metrics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NAMeGEn effectively generates creative names that meet diverse, personalized requirements while providing meaningful explanations, outperforming six baseline methods spanning various LLM backbones without any training.

DEPO: Dual-Efficiency Preference Optimization for LLM Agents

Authors:Sirui Chen, Mengshi Zhao, Lei Xu, Yuying Zhao, Beier Zhu, Hanwang Zhang, Shengjie Zhao, Chaochao Lu
Date:2025-11-19 12:38:43

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have greatly improved their reasoning and decision-making abilities when deployed as agents. Richer reasoning, however, often comes at the cost of longer chain of thought (CoT), hampering interaction efficiency in real-world scenarios. Nevertheless, there still lacks systematic definition of LLM agent efficiency, hindering targeted improvements. To this end, we introduce dual-efficiency, comprising (i) step-level efficiency, which minimizes tokens per step, and (ii) trajectory-level efficiency, which minimizes the number of steps to complete a task. Building on this definition, we propose DEPO, a dual-efficiency preference optimization method that jointly rewards succinct responses and fewer action steps. Experiments on WebShop and BabyAI show that DEPO cuts token usage by up to 60.9% and steps by up to 26.9%, while achieving up to a 29.3% improvement in performance. DEPO also generalizes to three out-of-domain math benchmarks and retains its efficiency gains when trained on only 25% of the data. Our project page is at https://opencausalab.github.io/DEPO.

The Empowerment of Science of Science by Large Language Models: New Tools and Methods

Authors:Guoqiang Liang, Jingqian Gong, Mengxuan Li, Gege Lin, Shuo Zhang
Date:2025-11-19 11:57:22

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited exceptional capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, image recognition, and multimodal tasks, charting a course towards AGI and emerging as a central issue in the global technological race. This manuscript conducts a comprehensive review of the core technologies that support LLMs from a user standpoint, including prompt engineering, knowledge-enhanced retrieval augmented generation, fine tuning, pretraining, and tool learning. Additionally, it traces the historical development of Science of Science (SciSci) and presents a forward looking perspective on the potential applications of LLMs within the scientometric domain. Furthermore, it discusses the prospect of an AI agent based model for scientific evaluation, and presents new research fronts detection and knowledge graph building methods with LLMs.

Cost-Aware Prediction (CAP): An LLM-Enhanced Machine Learning Pipeline and Decision Support System for Heart Failure Mortality Prediction

Authors:Yinan Yu, Falk Dippel, Christina E. Lundberg, Martin Lindgren, Annika Rosengren, Martin Adiels, Helen Sjöland
Date:2025-11-19 11:34:47

Objective: Machine learning (ML) predictive models are often developed without considering downstream value trade-offs and clinical interpretability. This paper introduces a cost-aware prediction (CAP) framework that combines cost-benefit analysis assisted by large language model (LLM) agents to communicate the trade-offs involved in applying ML predictions. Materials and Methods: We developed an ML model predicting 1-year mortality in patients with heart failure (N = 30,021, 22% mortality) to identify those eligible for home care. We then introduced clinical impact projection (CIP) curves to visualize important cost dimensions - quality of life and healthcare provider expenses, further divided into treatment and error costs, to assess the clinical consequences of predictions. Finally, we used four LLM agents to generate patient-specific descriptions. The system was evaluated by clinicians for its decision support value. Results: The eXtreme gradient boosting (XGB) model achieved the best performance, with an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) of 0.804 (95% confidence interval (CI) 0.792-0.816), area under the precision-recall curve (AUPRC) of 0.529 (95% CI 0.502-0.558) and a Brier score of 0.135 (95% CI 0.130-0.140). Discussion: The CIP cost curves provided a population-level overview of cost composition across decision thresholds, whereas LLM-generated cost-benefit analysis at individual patient-levels. The system was well received according to the evaluation by clinicians. However, feedback emphasizes the need to strengthen the technical accuracy for speculative tasks. Conclusion: CAP utilizes LLM agents to integrate ML classifier outcomes and cost-benefit analysis for more transparent and interpretable decision support.

OEMA: Ontology-Enhanced Multi-Agent Collaboration Framework for Zero-Shot Clinical Named Entity Recognition

Authors:Xinli Tao, Xin Dong, Xuezhong Zhou
Date:2025-11-19 08:02:55

With the rapid expansion of unstructured clinical texts in electronic health records (EHRs), clinical named entity recognition (NER) has become a crucial technique for extracting medical information. However, traditional supervised models such as CRF and BioClinicalBERT suffer from high annotation costs. Although zero-shot NER based on large language models (LLMs) reduces the dependency on labeled data, challenges remain in aligning example selection with task granularity and effectively integrating prompt design with self-improvement frameworks. To address these limitations, we propose OEMA, a novel zero-shot clinical NER framework based on multi-agent collaboration. OEMA consists of three core components: (1) a self-annotator that autonomously generates candidate examples; (2) a discriminator that leverages SNOMED CT to filter token-level examples by clinical relevance; and (3) a predictor that incorporates entity-type descriptions to enhance inference accuracy. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets, MTSamples and VAERS, demonstrate that OEMA achieves state-of-the-art performance under exact-match evaluation. Moreover, under related-match criteria, OEMA performs comparably to the supervised BioClinicalBERT model while significantly outperforming the traditional CRF method. OEMA improves zero-shot clinical NER, achieving near-supervised performance under related-match criteria. Future work will focus on continual learning and open-domain adaptation to expand its applicability in clinical NLP.

Trustworthy GenAI over 6G: Integrated Applications and Security Frameworks

Authors:Bui Duc Son, Trinh Van Chien, Dong In Kim
Date:2025-11-19 07:58:06

The integration of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) into 6G networks promises substantial performance gains while simultaneously exposing novel security vulnerabilities rooted in multimodal data processing and autonomous reasoning. This article presents a unified perspective on cross-domain vulnerabilities that arise across integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), federated learning (FL), digital twins (DTs), diffusion models (DMs), and large telecommunication models (LTMs). We highlight emerging adversarial agents such as compromised DTs and LTMs that can manipulate both the physical and cognitive layers of 6G systems. To address these risks, we propose an adaptive evolutionary defense (AED) concept that continuously co-evolves with attacks through GenAI-driven simulation and feedback, combining physical-layer protection, secure learning pipelines, and cognitive-layer resilience. A case study using an LLM-based port prediction model for fluid-antenna systems demonstrates the susceptibility of GenAI modules to adversarial perturbations and the effectiveness of the proposed defense concept. Finally, we summarize open challenges and future research directions toward building trustworthy, quantum-resilient, and adaptive GenAI-enabled 6G networks.

Taxonomy, Evaluation and Exploitation of IPI-Centric LLM Agent Defense Frameworks

Authors:Zimo Ji, Xunguang Wang, Zongjie Li, Pingchuan Ma, Yudong Gao, Daoyuan Wu, Xincheng Yan, Tian Tian, Shuai Wang
Date:2025-11-19 07:47:30

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents with function-calling capabilities are increasingly deployed, but remain vulnerable to Indirect Prompt Injection (IPI) attacks that hijack their tool calls. In response, numerous IPI-centric defense frameworks have emerged. However, these defenses are fragmented, lacking a unified taxonomy and comprehensive evaluation. In this Systematization of Knowledge (SoK), we present the first comprehensive analysis of IPI-centric defense frameworks. We introduce a comprehensive taxonomy of these defenses, classifying them along five dimensions. We then thoroughly assess the security and usability of representative defense frameworks. Through analysis of defensive failures in the assessment, we identify six root causes of defense circumvention. Based on these findings, we design three novel adaptive attacks that significantly improve attack success rates targeting specific frameworks, demonstrating the severity of the flaws in these defenses. Our paper provides a foundation and critical insights for the future development of more secure and usable IPI-centric agent defense frameworks.

SOLID: a Framework of Synergizing Optimization and LLMs for Intelligent Decision-Making

Authors:Yinsheng Wang, Tario G You, Léonard Boussioux, Shan Liu
Date:2025-11-19 07:44:36

This paper introduces SOLID (Synergizing Optimization and Large Language Models for Intelligent Decision-Making), a novel framework that integrates mathematical optimization with the contextual capabilities of large language models (LLMs). SOLID facilitates iterative collaboration between optimization and LLMs agents through dual prices and deviation penalties. This interaction improves the quality of the decisions while maintaining modularity and data privacy. The framework retains theoretical convergence guarantees under convexity assumptions, providing insight into the design of LLMs prompt. To evaluate SOLID, we applied it to a stock portfolio investment case with historical prices and financial news as inputs. Empirical results demonstrate convergence under various scenarios and indicate improved annualized returns compared to a baseline optimizer-only method, validating the synergy of the two agents. SOLID offers a promising framework for advancing automated and intelligent decision-making across diverse domains.