LLM-agent - 2025-12-26

Scaling Laws for Economic Productivity: Experimental Evidence in LLM-Assisted Consulting, Data Analyst, and Management Tasks

Authors:Ali Merali
Date:2025-12-24 18:24:29

This paper derives `Scaling Laws for Economic Impacts' -- empirical relationships between the training compute of Large Language Models (LLMs) and professional productivity. In a preregistered experiment, over 500 consultants, data analysts, and managers completed professional tasks using one of 13 LLMs. We find that each year of AI model progress reduced task time by 8%, with 56% of gains driven by increased compute and 44% by algorithmic progress. However, productivity gains were significantly larger for non-agentic analytical tasks compared to agentic workflows requiring tool use. These findings suggest continued model scaling could boost U.S. productivity by approximately 20% over the next decade.

A Plan Reuse Mechanism for LLM-Driven Agent

Authors:Guopeng Li, Ruiqi Wu, Haisheng Tan
Date:2025-12-24 18:08:03

Integrating large language models (LLMs) into personal assistants, like Xiao Ai and Blue Heart V, effectively enhances their ability to interact with humans, solve complex tasks, and manage IoT devices. Such assistants are also termed LLM-driven agents. Upon receiving user requests, the LLM-driven agent generates plans using an LLM, executes these plans through various tools, and then returns the response to the user. During this process, the latency for generating a plan with an LLM can reach tens of seconds, significantly degrading user experience. Real-world dataset analysis shows that about 30% of the requests received by LLM-driven agents are identical or similar, which allows the reuse of previously generated plans to reduce latency. However, it is difficult to accurately define the similarity between the request texts received by the LLM-driven agent through directly evaluating the original request texts. Moreover, the diverse expressions of natural language and the unstructured format of plan texts make implementing plan reuse challenging. To address these issues, we present and implement a plan reuse mechanism for LLM-driven agents called AgentReuse. AgentReuse leverages the similarities and differences among requests' semantics and uses intent classification to evaluate the similarities between requests and enable the reuse of plans. Experimental results based on a real-world dataset demonstrate that AgentReuse achieves a 93% effective plan reuse rate, an F1 score of 0.9718, and an accuracy of 0.9459 in evaluating request similarities, reducing latency by 93.12% compared with baselines without using the reuse mechanism.

CoTDeceptor:Adversarial Code Obfuscation Against CoT-Enhanced LLM Code Agents

Authors:Haoyang Li, Mingjin Li, Jinxin Zuo, Siqi Li, Xiao Li, Hao Wu, Yueming Lu, Xiaochuan He
Date:2025-12-24 15:55:42

LLM-based code agents(e.g., ChatGPT Codex) are increasingly deployed as detector for code review and security auditing tasks. Although CoT-enhanced LLM vulnerability detectors are believed to provide improved robustness against obfuscated malicious code, we find that their reasoning chains and semantic abstraction processes exhibit exploitable systematic weaknesses.This allows attackers to covertly embed malicious logic, bypass code review, and propagate backdoored components throughout real-world software supply chains.To investigate this issue, we present CoTDeceptor, the first adversarial code obfuscation framework targeting CoT-enhanced LLM detectors. CoTDeceptor autonomously constructs evolving, hard-to-reverse multi-stage obfuscation strategy chains that effectively disrupt CoT-driven detection logic.We obtained malicious code provided by security enterprise, experimental results demonstrate that CoTDeceptor achieves stable and transferable evasion performance against state-of-the-art LLMs and vulnerability detection agents. CoTDeceptor bypasses 14 out of 15 vulnerability categories, compared to only 2 bypassed by prior methods. Our findings highlight potential risks in real-world software supply chains and underscore the need for more robust and interpretable LLM-powered security analysis systems.

LookPlanGraph: Embodied Instruction Following Method with VLM Graph Augmentation

Authors:Anatoly O. Onishchenko, Alexey K. Kovalev, Aleksandr I. Panov
Date:2025-12-24 15:36:21

Methods that use Large Language Models (LLM) as planners for embodied instruction following tasks have become widespread. To successfully complete tasks, the LLM must be grounded in the environment in which the robot operates. One solution is to use a scene graph that contains all the necessary information. Modern methods rely on prebuilt scene graphs and assume that all task-relevant information is available at the start of planning. However, these approaches do not account for changes in the environment that may occur between the graph construction and the task execution. We propose LookPlanGraph - a method that leverages a scene graph composed of static assets and object priors. During plan execution, LookPlanGraph continuously updates the graph with relevant objects, either by verifying existing priors or discovering new entities. This is achieved by processing the agents egocentric camera view using a Vision Language Model. We conducted experiments with changed object positions VirtualHome and OmniGibson simulated environments, demonstrating that LookPlanGraph outperforms methods based on predefined static scene graphs. To demonstrate the practical applicability of our approach, we also conducted experiments in a real-world setting. Additionally, we introduce the GraSIF (Graph Scenes for Instruction Following) dataset with automated validation framework, comprising 514 tasks drawn from SayPlan Office, BEHAVIOR-1K, and VirtualHome RobotHow. Project page available at https://lookplangraph.github.io .

ClarifyMT-Bench: Benchmarking and Improving Multi-Turn Clarification for Conversational Large Language Models

Authors:Sichun Luo, Yi Huang, Mukai Li, Shichang Meng, Fengyuan Liu, Zefa Hu, Junlan Feng, Qi Liu
Date:2025-12-24 11:39:00

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as conversational assistants in open-domain, multi-turn settings, where users often provide incomplete or ambiguous information. However, existing LLM-focused clarification benchmarks primarily assume single-turn interactions or cooperative users, limiting their ability to evaluate clarification behavior in realistic settings. We introduce \textbf{ClarifyMT-Bench}, a benchmark for multi-turn clarification grounded in a five-dimensional ambiguity taxonomy and a set of six behaviorally diverse simulated user personas. Through a hybrid LLM-human pipeline, we construct 6,120 multi-turn dialogues capturing diverse ambiguity sources and interaction patterns. Evaluating ten representative LLMs uncovers a consistent under-clarification bias: LLMs tend to answer prematurely, and performance degrades as dialogue depth increases. To mitigate this, we propose \textbf{ClarifyAgent}, an agentic approach that decomposes clarification into perception, forecasting, tracking, and planning, substantially improving robustness across ambiguity conditions. ClarifyMT-Bench establishes a reproducible foundation for studying when LLMs should ask, when they should answer, and how to navigate ambiguity in real-world human-LLM interactions.

Agentic Explainable Artificial Intelligence (Agentic XAI) Approach To Explore Better Explanation

Authors:Tomoaki Yamaguchi, Yutong Zhou, Masahiro Ryo, Keisuke Katsura
Date:2025-12-24 09:19:15

Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) enables data-driven understanding of factor associations with response variables, yet communicating XAI outputs to laypersons remains challenging, hindering trust in AI-based predictions. Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as promising tools for translating technical explanations into accessible narratives, yet the integration of agentic AI, where LLMs operate as autonomous agents through iterative refinement, with XAI remains unexplored. This study proposes an agentic XAI framework combining SHAP-based explainability with multimodal LLM-driven iterative refinement to generate progressively enhanced explanations. As a use case, we tested this framework as an agricultural recommendation system using rice yield data from 26 fields in Japan. The Agentic XAI initially provided a SHAP result and explored how to improve the explanation through additional analysis iteratively across 11 refinement rounds (Rounds 0-10). Explanations were evaluated by human experts (crop scientists) (n=12) and LLMs (n=14) against seven metrics: Specificity, Clarity, Conciseness, Practicality, Contextual Relevance, Cost Consideration, and Crop Science Credibility. Both evaluator groups confirmed that the framework successfully enhanced recommendation quality with an average score increase of 30-33% from Round 0, peaking at Rounds 3-4. However, excessive refinement showed a substantial drop in recommendation quality, indicating a bias-variance trade-off where early rounds lacked explanation depth (bias) while excessive iteration introduced verbosity and ungrounded abstraction (variance), as revealed by metric-specific analysis. These findings suggest that strategic early stopping (regularization) is needed for optimizing practical utility, challenging assumptions about monotonic improvement and providing evidence-based design principles for agentic XAI systems.

Agentic Multi-Persona Framework for Evidence-Aware Fake News Detection

Authors:Roopa Bukke, Soumya Pandey, Suraj Kumar, Soumi Chattopadhyay, Chandranath Adak
Date:2025-12-24 08:06:52

The rapid proliferation of online misinformation poses significant risks to public trust, policy, and safety, necessitating reliable automated fake news detection. Existing methods often struggle with multimodal content, domain generalization, and explainability. We propose AMPEND-LS, an agentic multi-persona evidence-grounded framework with LLM-SLM synergy for multimodal fake news detection. AMPEND-LS integrates textual, visual, and contextual signals through a structured reasoning pipeline powered by LLMs, augmented with reverse image search, knowledge graph paths, and persuasion strategy analysis. To improve reliability, we introduce a credibility fusion mechanism combining semantic similarity, domain trustworthiness, and temporal context, and a complementary SLM classifier to mitigate LLM uncertainty and hallucinations. Extensive experiments across three benchmark datasets demonstrate that AMPEND-LS consistently outperformed state-of-the-art baselines in accuracy, F1 score, and robustness. Qualitative case studies further highlight its transparent reasoning and resilience against evolving misinformation. This work advances the development of adaptive, explainable, and evidence-aware systems for safeguarding online information integrity.

Artificial or Just Artful? Do LLMs Bend the Rules in Programming?

Authors:Oussama Ben Sghaier, Kevin Delcourt, Houari Sahraoui
Date:2025-12-24 07:51:15

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used for automated code generation, yet their apparent successes often mask a tension between pretraining objectives and alignment choices. While pretraining encourages models to exploit all available signals to maximize success, alignment, whether through fine-tuning or prompting, may restrict their use. This conflict is especially salient in agentic AI settings, for instance when an agent has access to unit tests that, although intended for validation, act as strong contextual signals that can be leveraged regardless of explicit prohibitions. In this paper, we investigate how LLMs adapt their code generation strategies when exposed to test cases under different prompting conditions. Using the BigCodeBench (Hard) dataset, we design five prompting conditions that manipulate test visibility and impose explicit or implicit restrictions on their use. We evaluate five LLMs (four open-source and one closed-source) across correctness, code similarity, program size, and code churn, and analyze cross-model consistency to identify recurring adaptation strategies. Our results show that test visibility dramatically alters performance, correctness nearly doubles for some models, while explicit restrictions or partial exposure only partially mitigate this effect. Beyond raw performance, we identify four recurring adaptation strategies, with test-driven refinement emerging as the most frequent. These results highlight how LLMs adapt their behavior when exposed to contextual signals that conflict with explicit instructions, providing useful insight into how models reconcile pretraining objectives with alignment constraints.

Policy-Conditioned Policies for Multi-Agent Task Solving

Authors:Yue Lin, Shuhui Zhu, Wenhao Li, Ang Li, Dan Qiao, Pascal Poupart, Hongyuan Zha, Baoxiang Wang
Date:2025-12-24 07:42:10

In multi-agent tasks, the central challenge lies in the dynamic adaptation of strategies. However, directly conditioning on opponents' strategies is intractable in the prevalent deep reinforcement learning paradigm due to a fundamental ``representational bottleneck'': neural policies are opaque, high-dimensional parameter vectors that are incomprehensible to other agents. In this work, we propose a paradigm shift that bridges this gap by representing policies as human-interpretable source code and utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) as approximate interpreters. This programmatic representation allows us to operationalize the game-theoretic concept of \textit{Program Equilibrium}. We reformulate the learning problem by utilizing LLMs to perform optimization directly in the space of programmatic policies. The LLM functions as a point-wise best-response operator that iteratively synthesizes and refines the ego agent's policy code to respond to the opponent's strategy. We formalize this process as \textit{Programmatic Iterated Best Response (PIBR)}, an algorithm where the policy code is optimized by textual gradients, using structured feedback derived from game utility and runtime unit tests. We demonstrate that this approach effectively solves several standard coordination matrix games and a cooperative Level-Based Foraging environment.

LLM-Empowered Agentic AI for QoE-Aware Network Slicing Management in Industrial IoT

Authors:Xudong Wang, Lei Feng, Ruichen Zhang, Fanqin Zhou, Hongyang Du, Wenjing Li, Dusit Niyato, Abbas Jamalipour, Ping Zhang
Date:2025-12-24 06:49:43

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) requires networks that deliver ultra-low latency, high reliability, and cost efficiency, which traditional optimization methods and deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based approaches struggle to provide under dynamic and heterogeneous workloads. To address this gap, large language model (LLM)-empowered agentic AI has emerged as a promising paradigm, integrating reasoning, planning, and adaptation to enable QoE-aware network management. In this paper, we explore the integration of agentic AI into QoE-aware network slicing for IIoT. We first review the network slicing management architecture, QoE metrics for IIoT applications, and the challenges of dynamically managing heterogeneous network slices, while highlighting the motivations and advantages of adopting agentic AI. We then present the workflow of agentic AI-based slicing management, illustrating the full lifecycle of AI agents from processing slice requests to constructing slice instances and performing dynamic adjustments. Furthermore, we propose an LLM-empowered agentic AI approach for slicing management, which integrates a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) module for semantic intent inference, a DRL-based orchestrator for slicing configuration, and an incremental memory mechanism for continual learning and adaptation. Through a case study on heterogeneous slice management, we demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly outperforms other baselines in balancing latency, reliability, and cost, and achieves up to a 19% improvement in slice availability ratio.

TrafficSimAgent: A Hierarchical Agent Framework for Autonomous Traffic Simulation with MCP Control

Authors:Yuwei Du, Jun Zhang, Jie Feng, Zhicheng Liu, Jian Yuan, Yong Li
Date:2025-12-24 06:48:04

Traffic simulation is important for transportation optimization and policy making. While existing simulators such as SUMO and MATSim offer fully-featured platforms and utilities, users without too much knowledge about these platforms often face significant challenges when conducting experiments from scratch and applying them to their daily work. To solve this challenge, we propose TrafficSimAgent, an LLM-based agent framework that serves as an expert in experiment design and decision optimization for general-purpose traffic simulation tasks. The framework facilitates execution through cross-level collaboration among expert agents: high-level expert agents comprehend natural language instructions with high flexibility, plan the overall experiment workflow, and invoke corresponding MCP-compatible tools on demand; meanwhile, low-level expert agents select optimal action plans for fundamental elements based on real-time traffic conditions. Extensive experiments across multiple scenarios show that TrafficSimAgent effectively executes simulations under various conditions and consistently produces reasonable outcomes even when user instructions are ambiguous. Besides, the carefully designed expert-level autonomous decision-driven optimization in TrafficSimAgent yields superior performance when compared with other systems and SOTA LLM based methods.

AegisAgent: An Autonomous Defense Agent Against Prompt Injection Attacks in LLM-HARs

Authors:Yihan Wang, Huanqi Yang, Shantanu Pal, Weitao Xu
Date:2025-12-24 06:29:24

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into wearable sensing is creating a new class of mobile applications capable of nuanced human activity understanding. However, the reliability of these systems is critically undermined by their vulnerability to prompt injection attacks, where attackers deliberately input deceptive instructions into LLMs. Traditional defenses, based on static filters and rigid rules, are insufficient to address the semantic complexity of these new attacks. We argue that a paradigm shift is needed -- from passive filtering to active protection and autonomous reasoning. We introduce AegisAgent, an autonomous agent system designed to ensure the security of LLM-driven HAR systems. Instead of merely blocking threats, AegisAgent functions as a cognitive guardian. It autonomously perceives potential semantic inconsistencies, reasons about the user's true intent by consulting a dynamic memory of past interactions, and acts by generating and executing a multi-step verification and repair plan. We implement AegisAgent as a lightweight, full-stack prototype and conduct a systematic evaluation on 15 common attacks with five state-of-the-art LLM-based HAR systems on three public datasets. Results show it reduces attack success rate by 30\% on average while incurring only 78.6 ms of latency overhead on a GPU workstation. Our work makes the first step towards building secure and trustworthy LLM-driven HAR systems.

SPOT!: Map-Guided LLM Agent for Unsupervised Multi-CCTV Dynamic Object Tracking

Authors:Yujin Noh, Inho Jake Park, Chigon Hwang
Date:2025-12-24 06:04:58

CCTV-based vehicle tracking systems face structural limitations in continuously connecting the trajectories of the same vehicle across multiple camera environments. In particular, blind spots occur due to the intervals between CCTVs and limited Fields of View (FOV), which leads to object ID switching and trajectory loss, thereby reducing the reliability of real-time path prediction. This paper proposes SPOT (Spatial Prediction Over Trajectories), a map-guided LLM agent capable of tracking vehicles even in blind spots of multi-CCTV environments without prior training. The proposed method represents road structures (Waypoints) and CCTV placement information as documents based on 2D spatial coordinates and organizes them through chunking techniques to enable real-time querying and inference. Furthermore, it transforms the vehicle's position into the actual world coordinate system using the relative position and FOV information of objects observed in CCTV images. By combining map spatial information with the vehicle's moving direction, speed, and driving patterns, a beam search is performed at the intersection level to derive candidate CCTV locations where the vehicle is most likely to enter after the blind spot. Experimental results based on the CARLA simulator in a virtual city environment confirmed that the proposed method accurately predicts the next appearing CCTV even in blind spot sections, maintaining continuous vehicle trajectories more effectively than existing techniques.

DAO-Agent: Zero Knowledge-Verified Incentives for Decentralized Multi-Agent Coordination

Authors:Yihan Xia, Taotao Wang, Wenxin Xu, Shengli Zhang
Date:2025-12-24 06:00:39

Autonomous Large Language Model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems have emerged as a promising paradigm for facilitating cross-application and cross-organization collaborations. These autonomous agents often operate in trustless environments, where centralized coordination faces significant challenges, such as the inability to ensure transparent contribution measurement and equitable incentive distribution. While blockchain is frequently proposed as a decentralized coordination platform, it inherently introduces high on-chain computation costs and risks exposing sensitive execution information of the agents. Consequently, the core challenge lies in enabling auditable task execution and fair incentive distribution for autonomous LLM agents in trustless environments, while simultaneously preserving their strategic privacy and minimizing on-chain costs. To address this challenge, we propose DAO-Agent, a novel framework that integrates three key technical innovations: (1) an on-chain decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) governance mechanism for transparent coordination and immutable logging; (2) a ZKP mechanism approach that enables Shapley-based contribution measurement off-chain, and (3) a hybrid on-chain/off-chain architecture that verifies ZKP-validated contribution measurements on-chain with minimal computational overhead. We implement DAO-Agent and conduct end-to-end experiments using a crypto trading task as a case study. Experimental results demonstrate that DAO-Agent achieves up to 99.9% reduction in verification gas costs compared to naive on-chain alternatives, with constant-time verification complexity that remains stable as coalition size increases, thereby establishing a scalable foundation for agent coordination in decentralized environments.

Can Agentic AI Match the Performance of Human Data Scientists?

Authors:An Luo, Jin Du, Fangqiao Tian, Xun Xian, Robert Specht, Ganghua Wang, Xuan Bi, Charles Fleming, Jayanth Srinivasa, Ashish Kundu, Mingyi Hong, Jie Ding
Date:2025-12-24 05:31:42

Data science plays a critical role in transforming complex data into actionable insights across numerous domains. Recent developments in large language models (LLMs) have significantly automated data science workflows, but a fundamental question persists: Can these agentic AI systems truly match the performance of human data scientists who routinely leverage domain-specific knowledge? We explore this question by designing a prediction task where a crucial latent variable is hidden in relevant image data instead of tabular features. As a result, agentic AI that generates generic codes for modeling tabular data cannot perform well, while human experts could identify the important hidden variable using domain knowledge. We demonstrate this idea with a synthetic dataset for property insurance. Our experiments show that agentic AI that relies on generic analytics workflow falls short of methods that use domain-specific insights. This highlights a key limitation of the current agentic AI for data science and underscores the need for future research to develop agentic AI systems that can better recognize and incorporate domain knowledge.

One Tool Is Enough: Reinforcement Learning for Repository-Level LLM Agents

Authors:Zhaoxi Zhang, Yitong Duan, Yanzhi Zhang, Yiming Xu, Jiyan He, Yunfang Wu
Date:2025-12-24 05:27:53

Locating the files and functions requiring modification in large open-source software (OSS) repositories is challenging due to their scale and structural complexity. Existing large language model (LLM)-based methods typically treat this as a repository-level retrieval task and rely on multiple auxiliary tools, which overlook code execution logic and complicate model control. We propose RepoNavigator, an LLM agent equipped with a single execution-aware tool-jumping to the definition of an invoked symbol. This unified design reflects the actual flow of code execution while simplifying tool manipulation. RepoNavigator is trained end-to-end via Reinforcement Learning (RL) directly from a pretrained model, without any closed-source distillation. Experiments demonstrate that RL-trained RepoNavigator achieves state-of-the-art performance, with the 7B model outperforming 14B baselines, the 14B model surpassing 32B competitors, and even the 32B model exceeding closed-source models such as Claude-3.7. These results confirm that integrating a single, structurally grounded tool with RL training provides an efficient and scalable solution for repository-level issue localization.

The Silent Scholar Problem: A Probabilistic Framework for Breaking Epistemic Asymmetry in LLM Agents

Authors:Zan-Kai Chong, Hiroyuki Ohsaki, Bryan Ng
Date:2025-12-24 02:02:25

Autonomous agents powered by LLMs and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) are proficient consumers of digital content but remain unidirectional, a limitation we term epistemic asymmetry. This isolation leads to redundant reasoning and stagnates collective intelligence. Current self-reflection frameworks remain largely heuristic and private, lacking a probabilistic foundation to quantify certainty or justify external interaction.To bridge this gap, we propose a formal probabilistic framework that provides agents with a non-altruistic motive for bidirectional knowledge exchange. We model an agent's belief in a proposition using a Beta-Bernoulli distribution with a forgetting factor ($γ$). This allows us to isolate epistemic uncertainty as the variance of belief, establishing a dual drive for interaction: A homeostatic motive: The need to maintain certainty against the temporal decay introduced by $γ$. An optimal learning strategy: Targeting points of maximum ambiguity ($\mathbb{E}[θ]=0.5$) to maximize information gain. Under this framework, public contribution is reframed as optimal active learning: sharing solutions to elicit feedback is the most efficient method for an agent to reduce its own uncertainty. To ensure scalability, we introduce epistemic caching, which leverages the forgetting factor to dynamically prioritize resources for the active head of non-stationary knowledge distributions. Finally, we demonstrate how these accumulated belief states serve as verifiable reward signals for Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and high-quality data filters for Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). Simulation results validate that this uncertainty-driven strategy significantly outperforms random baselines in heterogeneous (Zipfian) environments, maintaining high adaptability to concept drift.

MAR:Multi-Agent Reflexion Improves Reasoning Abilities in LLMs

Authors:Onat Ozer, Grace Wu, Yuchen Wang, Daniel Dosti, Honghao Zhang, Vivi De La Rue
Date:2025-12-23 23:47:31

LLMs have shown the capacity to improve their performance on reasoning tasks through reflecting on their mistakes, and acting with these reflections in mind. However, continual reflections of the same LLM onto itself exhibit degeneration of thought, where the LLM continues to repeat the same errors again and again even with the knowledge that its wrong. To address this problem, we instead introduce multi-agent with multi-persona debators as the method to generate reflections. Through out extensive experimentation, we've found that the leads to better diversity of in the reflections generated by the llm agent. We demonstrate an accuracy of 47% EM HotPot QA (question answering) and 82.7% on HumanEval (programming), both performances surpassing reflection with a single llm.

X-GridAgent: An LLM-Powered Agentic AI System for Assisting Power Grid Analysis

Authors:Yihan, Wen, Xin Chen
Date:2025-12-23 21:36:20

The growing complexity of power system operations has created an urgent need for intelligent, automated tools to support reliable and efficient grid management. Conventional analysis tools often require significant domain expertise and manual effort, which limits their accessibility and adaptability. To address these challenges, this paper presents X-GridAgent, a novel large language model (LLM)-powered agentic AI system designed to automate complex power system analysis through natural language queries. The system integrates domain-specific tools and specialized databases under a three-layer hierarchical architecture comprising planning, coordination, and action layers. This architecture offers high flexibility and adaptability to previously unseen tasks, while providing a modular and extensible framework that can be readily expanded to incorporate new tools, data sources, or analytical capabilities. To further enhance performance, we introduce two novel algorithms: (1) LLM-driven prompt refinement with human feedback, and (2) schema-adaptive hybrid retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for accurate information retrieval from large-scale structured grid datasets. Experimental evaluations across a variety of user queries and power grid cases demonstrate the effectiveness and reliability of X-GridAgent in automating interpretable and rigorous power system analysis.

AgentMath: Empowering Mathematical Reasoning for Large Language Models via Tool-Augmented Agent

Authors:Haipeng Luo, Huawen Feng, Qingfeng Sun, Can Xu, Kai Zheng, Yufei Wang, Tao Yang, Han Hu, Yansong Tang, Di Wang
Date:2025-12-23 19:57:49

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) like o3 and DeepSeek-R1 have achieved remarkable progress in natural language reasoning with long chain-of-thought. However, they remain computationally inefficient and struggle with accuracy when solving problems requiring complex mathematical operations. In this work, we present AgentMath, an agent framework that seamlessly integrates language models' reasoning capabilities with code interpreters' computational precision to efficiently tackle complex mathematical problems. Our approach introduces three key innovations: (1) An automated method that converts natural language chain-of-thought into structured tool-augmented trajectories, generating high-quality supervised fine-tuning (SFT) data to alleviate data scarcity; (2) A novel agentic reinforcement learning (RL) paradigm that dynamically interleaves natural language generation with real-time code execution. This enables models to autonomously learn optimal tool-use strategies through multi-round interactive feedback, while fostering emergent capabilities in code refinement and error correction; (3) An efficient training system incorporating innovative techniques, including request-level asynchronous rollout scheduling, agentic partial rollout, and prefix-aware weighted load balancing, achieving 4-5x speedup and making efficient RL training feasible on ultra-long sequences with scenarios with massive tool calls.Extensive evaluations show that AgentMath achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging mathematical competition benchmarks including AIME24, AIME25, and HMMT25. Specifically, AgentMath-30B-A3B attains 90.6%, 86.4%, and 73.8% accuracy respectively, achieving advanced capabilities.These results validate the effectiveness of our approach and pave the way for building more sophisticated and scalable mathematical reasoning agents.

LongVideoAgent: Multi-Agent Reasoning with Long Videos

Authors:Runtao Liu, Ziyi Liu, Jiaqi Tang, Yue Ma, Renjie Pi, Jipeng Zhang, Qifeng Chen
Date:2025-12-23 18:59:49

Recent advances in multimodal LLMs and systems that use tools for long-video QA point to the promise of reasoning over hour-long episodes. However, many methods still compress content into lossy summaries or rely on limited toolsets, weakening temporal grounding and missing fine-grained cues. We propose a multi-agent framework in which a master LLM coordinates a grounding agent to localize question-relevant segments and a vision agent to extract targeted textual observations. The master agent plans with a step limit, and is trained with reinforcement learning to encourage concise, correct, and efficient multi-agent cooperation. This design helps the master agent focus on relevant clips via grounding, complements subtitles with visual detail, and yields interpretable trajectories. On our proposed LongTVQA and LongTVQA+ which are episode-level datasets aggregated from TVQA/TVQA+, our multi-agent system significantly outperforms strong non-agent baselines. Experiments also show reinforcement learning further strengthens reasoning and planning for the trained agent. Code and data will be shared at https://longvideoagent.github.io/.

SpatialTree: How Spatial Abilities Branch Out in MLLMs

Authors:Yuxi Xiao, Longfei Li, Shen Yan, Xinhang Liu, Sida Peng, Yunchao Wei, Xiaowei Zhou, Bingyi Kang
Date:2025-12-23 18:59:46

Cognitive science suggests that spatial ability develops progressively-from perception to reasoning and interaction. Yet in multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), this hierarchy remains poorly understood, as most studies focus on a narrow set of tasks. We introduce SpatialTree, a cognitive-science-inspired hierarchy that organizes spatial abilities into four levels: low-level perception (L1), mental mapping (L2), simulation (L3), and agentic competence (L4). Based on this taxonomy, we construct the first capability-centric hierarchical benchmark, thoroughly evaluating mainstream MLLMs across 27 sub-abilities. The evaluation results reveal a clear structure: L1 skills are largely orthogonal, whereas higher-level skills are strongly correlated, indicating increasing interdependency. Through targeted supervised fine-tuning, we uncover a surprising transfer dynamic-negative transfer within L1, but strong cross-level transfer from low- to high-level abilities with notable synergy. Finally, we explore how to improve the entire hierarchy. We find that naive RL that encourages extensive "thinking" is unreliable: it helps complex reasoning but hurts intuitive perception. We propose a simple auto-think strategy that suppresses unnecessary deliberation, enabling RL to consistently improve performance across all levels. By building SpatialTree, we provide a proof-of-concept framework for understanding and systematically scaling spatial abilities in MLLMs.

Automated stereotactic radiosurgery planning using a human-in-the-loop reasoning large language model agent

Authors:Humza Nusrat, Luke Francisco, Bing Luo, Hassan Bagher-Ebadian, Joshua Kim, Karen Chin-Snyder, Salim Siddiqui, Mira Shah, Eric Mellon, Mohammad Ghassemi, Anthony Doemer, Benjamin Movsas, Kundan Thind
Date:2025-12-23 18:32:17

Stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) demands precise dose shaping around critical structures, yet black-box AI systems have limited clinical adoption due to opacity concerns. We tested whether chain-of-thought reasoning improves agentic planning in a retrospective cohort of 41 patients with brain metastases treated with 18 Gy single-fraction SRS. We developed SAGE (Secure Agent for Generative Dose Expertise), an LLM-based planning agent for automated SRS treatment planning. Two variants generated plans for each case: one using a non-reasoning model, one using a reasoning model. The reasoning variant showed comparable plan dosimetry relative to human planners on primary endpoints (PTV coverage, maximum dose, conformity index, gradient index; all p > 0.21) while reducing cochlear dose below human baselines (p = 0.022). When prompted to improve conformity, the reasoning model demonstrated systematic planning behaviors including prospective constraint verification (457 instances) and trade-off deliberation (609 instances), while the standard model exhibited none of these deliberative processes (0 and 7 instances, respectively). Content analysis revealed that constraint verification and causal explanation concentrated in the reasoning agent. The optimization traces serve as auditable logs, offering a path toward transparent automated planning.

LLM-Based Authoring of Agent-Based Narratives through Scene Descriptions

Authors:Vinayak Regmi, Christos Mousas
Date:2025-12-23 17:46:15

This paper presents a system for procedurally generating agent-based narratives using large language models (LLMs). Users could drag and drop multiple agents and objects into a scene, with each entity automatically assigned semantic metadata describing its identity, role, and potential interactions. The scene structure is then serialized into a natural language prompt and sent to an LLM, which returns a structured string describing a sequence of actions and interactions among agents and objects. The returned string encodes who performed which actions, when, and how. A custom parser interprets this string and triggers coordinated agent behaviors, animations, and interaction modules. The system supports agent-based scenes, dynamic object manipulation, and diverse interaction types. Designed for ease of use and rapid iteration, the system enables the generation of virtual agent activity suitable for prototyping agent narratives. The performance of the developed system was evaluated using four popular lightweight LLMs. Each model's process and response time were measured under multiple complexity scenarios. The collected data were analyzed to compare consistency across the examined scenarios and to highlight the relative efficiency and suitability of each model for procedural agent-based narratives generation. The results demonstrate that LLMs can reliably translate high-level scene descriptions into executable agent-based behaviors.

Step-DeepResearch Technical Report

Authors:Chen Hu, Haikuo Du, Heng Wang, Lin Lin, Mingrui Chen, Peng Liu, Ruihang Miao, Tianchi Yue, Wang You, Wei Ji, Wei Yuan, Wenjin Deng, Xiaojian Yuan, Xiaoyun Zhang, Xiangyu Liu, Xikai Liu, Yanming Xu, Yicheng Cao, Yifei Zhang, Yongyao Wang, Yubo Shu, Yurong Zhang, Yuxiang Zhang, Zheng Gong, Zhichao Chang, Binyan Li, Dan Ma, Furong Jia, Hongyuan Wang, Jiayu Liu, Jing Bai, Junlan Liu, Manjiao Liu, Na Wang, Qiuping Wu, Qinxin Du, Shiwei Li, Wen Sun, Yifeng Gong, Yonglin Chen, Yuling Zhao, Yuxuan Lin, Ziqi Ren, Zixuan Wang, Aihu Zhang, Brian Li, Buyun Ma, Kang An, Li Xie, Mingliang Li, Pan Li, Shidong Yang, Xi Chen, Xiaojia Liu, Yuchu Luo, Yuan Song, YuanHao Ding, Yuanwei Liang, Zexi Li, Zhaoning Zhang, Zixin Zhang, Binxing Jiao, Daxin Jiang, Jiansheng Chen, Jing Li, Xiangyu Zhang, Yibo Zhu
Date:2025-12-23 16:32:27

As LLMs shift toward autonomous agents, Deep Research has emerged as a pivotal metric. However, existing academic benchmarks like BrowseComp often fail to meet real-world demands for open-ended research, which requires robust skills in intent recognition, long-horizon decision-making, and cross-source verification. To address this, we introduce Step-DeepResearch, a cost-effective, end-to-end agent. We propose a Data Synthesis Strategy Based on Atomic Capabilities to reinforce planning and report writing, combined with a progressive training path from agentic mid-training to SFT and RL. Enhanced by a Checklist-style Judger, this approach significantly improves robustness. Furthermore, to bridge the evaluation gap in the Chinese domain, we establish ADR-Bench for realistic deep research scenarios. Experimental results show that Step-DeepResearch (32B) scores 61.4% on Scale AI Research Rubrics. On ADR-Bench, it significantly outperforms comparable models and rivals SOTA closed-source models like OpenAI and Gemini DeepResearch. These findings prove that refined training enables medium-sized models to achieve expert-level capabilities at industry-leading cost-efficiency.

SweRank+: Multilingual, Multi-Turn Code Ranking for Software Issue Localization

Authors:Revanth Gangi Reddy, Ye Liu, Wenting Zhao, JaeHyeok Doo, Tarun Suresh, Daniel Lee, Caiming Xiong, Yingbo Zhou, Semih Yavuz, Shafiq Joty
Date:2025-12-23 16:18:39

Maintaining large-scale, multilingual codebases hinges on accurately localizing issues, which requires mapping natural-language error descriptions to the relevant functions that need to be modified. However, existing ranking approaches are often Python-centric and perform a single-pass search over the codebase. This work introduces SweRank+, a framework that couples SweRankMulti, a cross-lingual code ranking tool, with SweRankAgent, an agentic search setup, for iterative, multi-turn reasoning over the code repository. SweRankMulti comprises a code embedding retriever and a listwise LLM reranker, and is trained using a carefully curated large-scale issue localization dataset spanning multiple popular programming languages. SweRankAgent adopts an agentic search loop that moves beyond single-shot localization with a memory buffer to reason and accumulate relevant localization candidates over multiple turns. Our experiments on issue localization benchmarks spanning various languages demonstrate new state-of-the-art performance with SweRankMulti, while SweRankAgent further improves localization over single-pass ranking.

Laser: Governing Long-Horizon Agentic Search via Structured Protocol and Context Register

Authors:Shuting Wang, Qiaolin Xia, Hao Wang, Yu Lu, Bobsimons, Zhicheng Dou
Date:2025-12-23 15:53:33

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have enabled agentic search systems that interleave multi-step reasoning with external tool use. However, existing frameworks largely rely on unstructured natural-language reasoning and accumulate raw intermediate traces in the context, which often leads to unstable reasoning trajectories, context overflow, and degraded performance on complex multi-hop queries. In this study, we introduce Laser, a general framework for stabilizing and scaling agentic search. Laser defines a symbolic action protocol that organizes agent behaviors into three spaces: planning, task-solving, and retrospection. Each action is specified with explicit semantics and a deterministic execution format, enabling structured and logical reasoning processes and reliable action parsing. This design makes intermediate decisions interpretable and traceable, enhancing explicit retrospection and fine-grained control over reasoning trajectories. In coordination with parsable actions, Laser further maintains a compact context register that stores only essential states of the reasoning process, allowing the agent to reason over long horizons without uncontrolled context expansion. Experiments on Qwen2.5/3-series models across challenging multi-hop QA datasets show that Laser consistently outperforms existing agentic search baselines under both prompting-only and fine-tuning settings, demonstrating that Laser provides a principled and effective foundation for robust, scalable agentic search.

CRAFT: Continuous Reasoning and Agentic Feedback Tuning for Multimodal Text-to-Image Generation

Authors:V. Kovalev, A. Kuvshinov, A. Buzovkin, D. Pokidov, D. Timonin
Date:2025-12-23 13:44:41

Recent work has shown that inference-time reasoning and reflection can improve text-to-image generation without retraining. However, existing approaches often rely on implicit, holistic critiques or unconstrained prompt rewrites, making their behavior difficult to interpret, control, or stop reliably. In contrast, large language models have benefited from explicit, structured forms of **thinking** based on verification, targeted correction, and early stopping. We introduce CRAFT (Continuous Reasoning and Agentic Feedback Tuning), a training-free, model-agnostic framework that brings this structured reasoning paradigm to multimodal image generation. CRAFT decomposes a prompt into dependency-structured visual questions, veries generated images using a vision-language model, and applies targeted prompt edits through an LLM agent only where constraints fail. The process iterates with an explicit stopping criterion once all constraints are satised, yielding an interpretable and controllable inference-time renement loop. Across multiple model families and challenging benchmarks, CRAFT consistently improves compositional accuracy, text rendering, and preference-based evaluations, with particularly strong gains for lightweight generators. Importantly, these improvements incur only a negligible inference-time overhead, allowing smaller or cheaper models to approach the quality of substantially more expensive systems. Our results suggest that explicitly structured, constraint-driven inference-time reasoning is a key ingredient for improving the reliability of multimodal generative models.

TableGPT-R1: Advancing Tabular Reasoning Through Reinforcement Learning

Authors:Saisai Yang, Qingyi Huang, Jing Yuan, Liangyu Zha, Kai Tang, Yuhang Yang, Ning Wang, Yucheng Wei, Liyao Li, Wentao Ye, Hao Chen, Tao Zhang, Junlin Zhou, Haobo Wang, Gang Chen, Junbo Zhao
Date:2025-12-23 12:30:37

Tabular data serves as the backbone of modern data analysis and scientific research. While Large Language Models (LLMs) fine-tuned via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) have significantly improved natural language interaction with such structured data, they often fall short in handling the complex, multi-step reasoning and robust code execution required for real-world table tasks. Reinforcement Learning (RL) offers a promising avenue to enhance these capabilities, yet its application in the tabular domain faces three critical hurdles: the scarcity of high-quality agentic trajectories with closed-loop code execution and environment feedback on diverse table structures, the extreme heterogeneity of feedback signals ranging from rigid SQL execution to open-ended data interpretation, and the risk of catastrophic forgetting of general knowledge during vertical specialization. To overcome these challenges and unlock advanced reasoning on complex tables, we introduce \textbf{TableGPT-R1}, a specialized tabular model built on a systematic RL framework. Our approach integrates a comprehensive data engineering pipeline that synthesizes difficulty-stratified agentic trajectories for both supervised alignment and RL rollouts, a task-adaptive reward system that combines rule-based verification with a criteria-injected reward model and incorporates process-level step reward shaping with behavioral regularization, and a multi-stage training framework that progressively stabilizes reasoning before specializing in table-specific tasks. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that TableGPT-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on authoritative benchmarks, significantly outperforming baseline models while retaining robust general capabilities. Our model is available at https://huggingface.co/tablegpt/TableGPT-R1.

AprielGuard

Authors:Jaykumar Kasundra, Anjaneya Praharaj, Sourabh Surana, Lakshmi Sirisha Chodisetty, Sourav Sharma, Abhigya Verma, Abhishek Bhardwaj, Debasish Kanhar, Aakash Bhagat, Khalil Slimi, Seganrasan Subramanian, Sathwik Tejaswi Madhusudhan, Ranga Prasad Chenna, Srinivas Sunkara
Date:2025-12-23 12:01:32

Safeguarding large language models (LLMs) against unsafe or adversarial behavior is critical as they are increasingly deployed in conversational and agentic settings. Existing moderation tools often treat safety risks (e.g. toxicity, bias) and adversarial threats (e.g. prompt injections, jailbreaks) as separate problems, limiting their robustness and generalizability. We introduce AprielGuard, an 8B parameter safeguard model that unify these dimensions within a single taxonomy and learning framework. AprielGuard is trained on a diverse mix of open and synthetic data covering standalone prompts, multi-turn conversations, and agentic workflows, augmented with structured reasoning traces to improve interpretability. Across multiple public and proprietary benchmarks, AprielGuard achieves strong performance in detecting harmful content and adversarial manipulations, outperforming existing opensource guardrails such as Llama-Guard and Granite Guardian, particularly in multi-step and reasoning intensive scenarios. By releasing the model, we aim to advance transparent and reproducible research on reliable safeguards for LLMs.