This study presents a conceptual framework and a prototype assessment for Large Language Model (LLM)-based Building Energy Management System (BEMS) AI agents to facilitate context-aware energy management in smart buildings through natural language interaction. The proposed framework comprises three modules: perception (sensing), central control (brain), and action (actuation and user interaction), forming a closed feedback loop that captures, analyzes, and interprets energy data to respond intelligently to user queries and manage connected appliances. By leveraging the autonomous data analytics capabilities of LLMs, the BEMS AI agent seeks to offer context-aware insights into energy consumption, cost prediction, and device scheduling, thereby addressing limitations in existing energy management systems. The prototype's performance was evaluated using 120 user queries across four distinct real-world residential energy datasets and different evaluation metrics, including latency, functionality, capability, accuracy, and cost-effectiveness. The generalizability of the framework was demonstrated using ANOVA tests. The results revealed promising performance, measured by response accuracy in device control (86%), memory-related tasks (97%), scheduling and automation (74%), and energy analysis (77%), while more complex cost estimation tasks highlighted areas for improvement with an accuracy of 49%. This benchmarking study moves toward formalizing the assessment of LLM-based BEMS AI agents and identifying future research directions, emphasizing the trade-off between response accuracy and computational efficiency.
Over the past years, memes have evolved from being exclusively a medium of humorous exchanges to one that allows users to express a range of emotions freely and easily. With the ever-growing utilization of memes in expressing depressive sentiments, we conduct a study on identifying depressive symptoms exhibited by memes shared by users of online social media platforms. We introduce RESTOREx as a vital resource for detecting depressive symptoms in memes on social media through the Large Language Model (LLM) generated and human-annotated explanations. We introduce MAMAMemeia, a collaborative multi-agent multi-aspect discussion framework grounded in the clinical psychology method of Cognitive Analytic Therapy (CAT) Competencies. MAMAMemeia improves upon the current state-of-the-art by 7.55% in macro-F1 and is established as the new benchmark compared to over 30 methods.
Agentic crafting requires LLMs to operate in real-world environments over multiple turns by taking actions, observing outcomes, and iteratively refining artifacts. Despite its importance, the open-source community lacks a principled, end-to-end ecosystem to streamline agent development. We introduce the Agentic Learning Ecosystem (ALE), a foundational infrastructure that optimizes the production pipeline for agent LLMs. ALE consists of three components: ROLL, a post-training framework for weight optimization; ROCK, a sandbox environment manager for trajectory generation; and iFlow CLI, an agent framework for efficient context engineering. We release ROME (ROME is Obviously an Agentic Model), an open-source agent grounded by ALE and trained on over one million trajectories. Our approach includes data composition protocols for synthesizing complex behaviors and a novel policy optimization algorithm, Interaction-based Policy Alignment (IPA), which assigns credit over semantic interaction chunks rather than individual tokens to improve long-horizon training stability. Empirically, we evaluate ROME within a structured setting and introduce Terminal Bench Pro, a benchmark with improved scale and contamination control. ROME demonstrates strong performance across benchmarks like SWE-bench Verified and Terminal Bench, proving the effectiveness of the ALE infrastructure.
In light of the recent convergence between Agentic AI and our field of Algorithmization, this paper seeks to restore conceptual clarity and provide a structured analytical framework for an increasingly fragmented discourse. First, (a) it examines the contemporary landscape and proposes precise definitions for the key notions involved, ranging from intelligence to Agentic AI. Second, (b) it reviews our prior body of work to contextualize the evolution of methodologies and technological advances developed over the past decade, highlighting their interdependencies and cumulative trajectory. Third, (c) by distinguishing Machine and Learning efforts within the field of Machine Learning (d) it introduces the first Machine in Machine Learning (M1) as the underlying platform enabling today's LLM-based Agentic AI, conceptualized as an extension of B2C information-retrieval user experiences now being repurposed for B2B transformation. Building on this distinction, (e) the white paper develops the notion of the second Machine in Machine Learning (M2) as the architectural prerequisite for holistic, production-grade B2B transformation, characterizing it as Strategies-based Agentic AI and grounding its definition in the structural barriers-to-entry that such systems must overcome to be operationally viable. Further, (f) it offers conceptual and technical insight into what appears to be the first fully realized implementation of an M2. Finally, drawing on the demonstrated accuracy of the two previous decades of professional and academic experience in developing the foundational architectures of Algorithmization, (g) it outlines a forward-looking research and transformation agenda for the coming two decades.
Competitive access to modern observatories has intensified as proposal volumes outpace available telescope time, making timely, consistent, and transparent peer review a critical bottleneck for the advancement of astronomy. Automating parts of this process is therefore both scientifically significant and operationally necessary to ensure fair allocation and reproducible decisions at scale. We present AstroReview, an open-source, agent-based framework that automates proposal review in three stages: (i) novelty and scientific merit, (ii) feasibility and expected yield, and (iii) meta-review and reliability verification. Task isolation and explicit reasoning traces curb hallucinations and improve transparency. Without any domain specific fine tuning, AstroReview used in our experiments only for the last stage, correctly identifies genuinely accepted proposals with an accuracy of 87%. The AstroReview in Action module replicates the review and refinement loop; with its integrated Proposal Authoring Agent, the acceptance rate of revised drafts increases by 66% after two iterations, showing that iterative feedback combined with automated meta-review and reliability verification delivers measurable quality gains. Together, these results point to a practical path toward scalable, auditable, and higher throughput proposal review for resource limited facilities.
Fault diagnosis of lithium-ion batteries is critical for system safety. While existing deep learning methods exhibit superior detection accuracy, their "black-box" nature hinders interpretability. Furthermore, restricted by binary classification paradigms, they struggle to provide root cause analysis and maintenance recommendations. To address these limitations, this paper proposes BatteryAgent, a hierarchical framework that integrates physical knowledge features with the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). The framework comprises three core modules: (1) A Physical Perception Layer that utilizes 10 mechanism-based features derived from electrochemical principles, balancing dimensionality reduction with physical fidelity; (2) A Detection and Attribution Layer that employs Gradient Boosting Decision Trees and SHAP to quantify feature contributions; and (3) A Reasoning and Diagnosis Layer that leverages an LLM as the agent core. This layer constructs a "numerical-semantic" bridge, combining SHAP attributions with a mechanism knowledge base to generate comprehensive reports containing fault types, root cause analysis, and maintenance suggestions. Experimental results demonstrate that BatteryAgent effectively corrects misclassifications on hard boundary samples, achieving an AUROC of 0.986, which significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the framework extends traditional binary detection to multi-type interpretable diagnosis, offering a new paradigm shift from "passive detection" to "intelligent diagnosis" for battery safety management.
We present R-Debater, an agentic framework for generating multi-turn debates built on argumentative memory. Grounded in rhetoric and memory studies, the system views debate as a process of recalling and adapting prior arguments to maintain stance consistency, respond to opponents, and support claims with evidence. Specifically, R-Debater integrates a debate knowledge base for retrieving case-like evidence and prior debate moves with a role-based agent that composes coherent utterances across turns. We evaluate on standardized ORCHID debates, constructing a 1,000-item retrieval corpus and a held-out set of 32 debates across seven domains. Two tasks are evaluated: next-utterance generation, assessed by InspireScore (subjective, logical, and factual), and adversarial multi-turn simulations, judged by Debatrix (argument, source, language, and overall). Compared with strong LLM baselines, R-Debater achieves higher single-turn and multi-turn scores. Human evaluation with 20 experienced debaters further confirms its consistency and evidence use, showing that combining retrieval grounding with structured planning yields more faithful, stance-aligned, and coherent debates across turns.
We investigate whether large language models (LLMs) can predict whether they will succeed on a given task and whether their predictions improve as they progress through multi-step tasks. We also investigate whether LLMs can learn from in-context experiences to make better decisions about whether to pursue a task in scenarios where failure is costly. All LLMs we tested are overconfident, but most predict their success with better-than-random discriminatory power. We find that newer and larger LLMs generally do not have greater discriminatory power, though Claude models do show such a trend. On multi-step agentic tasks, the overconfidence of several frontier LLMs worsens as they progress through the tasks, and reasoning LLMs perform comparably to or worse than non-reasoning LLMs. With in-context experiences of failure, some but not all LLMs reduce their overconfidence leading to significantly improved decision making, while others do not. Interestingly, all LLMs' decisions are approximately rational given their estimated probabilities of success, yet their overly-optimistic estimates result in poor decision making. These results suggest that current LLM agents are hindered by their lack of awareness of their own capabilities. We discuss the implications of LLMs' awareness of their capabilities for AI misuse and misalignment risks.
LLM-based software engineering is influencing modern software development. In addition to correctness, prior studies have also examined the performance of software artifacts generated by AI agents. However, it is unclear how exactly the agentic AI systems address performance concerns in practice. In this paper, we present an empirical study of performance-related pull requests generated by AI agents. Using LLM-assisted detection and BERTopic-based topic modeling, we identified 52 performance-related topics grouped into 10 higher-level categories. Our results show that AI agents apply performance optimizations across diverse layers of the software stack and that the type of optimization significantly affects pull request acceptance rates and review times. We also found that performance optimization by AI agents primarily occurs during the development phase, with less focus on the maintenance phase. Our findings provide empirical evidence that can support the evaluation and improvement of agentic AI systems with respect to their performance optimization behaviors and review outcomes.
We introduce Youtu-LLM, a lightweight yet powerful language model that harmonizes high computational efficiency with native agentic intelligence. Unlike typical small models that rely on distillation, Youtu-LLM (1.96B) is pre-trained from scratch to systematically cultivate reasoning and planning capabilities. The key technical advancements are as follows: (1) Compact Architecture with Long-Context Support: Built on a dense Multi-Latent Attention (MLA) architecture with a novel STEM-oriented vocabulary, Youtu-LLM supports a 128k context window. This design enables robust long-context reasoning and state tracking within a minimal memory footprint, making it ideal for long-horizon agent and reasoning tasks. (2) Principled "Commonsense-STEM-Agent" Curriculum: We curated a massive corpus of approximately 11T tokens and implemented a multi-stage training strategy. By progressively shifting the pre-training data distribution from general commonsense to complex STEM and agentic tasks, we ensure the model acquires deep cognitive abilities rather than superficial alignment. (3) Scalable Agentic Mid-training: Specifically for the agentic mid-training, we employ diverse data construction schemes to synthesize rich and varied trajectories across math, coding, and tool-use domains. This high-quality data enables the model to internalize planning and reflection behaviors effectively. Extensive evaluations show that Youtu-LLM sets a new state-of-the-art for sub-2B LLMs. On general benchmarks, it achieves competitive performance against larger models, while on agent-specific tasks, it significantly surpasses existing SOTA baselines, demonstrating that lightweight models can possess strong intrinsic agentic capabilities.
Existing Large Language Model (LLM) agent frameworks face two significant challenges: high configuration costs and static capabilities. Building a high-quality agent often requires extensive manual effort in tool integration and prompt engineering, while deployed agents struggle to adapt to dynamic environments without expensive fine-tuning. To address these issues, we propose \textbf{Youtu-Agent}, a modular framework designed for the automated generation and continuous evolution of LLM agents. Youtu-Agent features a structured configuration system that decouples execution environments, toolkits, and context management, enabling flexible reuse and automated synthesis. We introduce two generation paradigms: a \textbf{Workflow} mode for standard tasks and a \textbf{Meta-Agent} mode for complex, non-standard requirements, capable of automatically generating tool code, prompts, and configurations. Furthermore, Youtu-Agent establishes a hybrid policy optimization system: (1) an \textbf{Agent Practice} module that enables agents to accumulate experience and improve performance through in-context optimization without parameter updates; and (2) an \textbf{Agent RL} module that integrates with distributed training frameworks to enable scalable and stable reinforcement learning of any Youtu-Agents in an end-to-end, large-scale manner. Experiments demonstrate that Youtu-Agent achieves state-of-the-art performance on WebWalkerQA (71.47\%) and GAIA (72.8\%) using open-weight models. Our automated generation pipeline achieves over 81\% tool synthesis success rate, while the Practice module improves performance on AIME 2024/2025 by +2.7\% and +5.4\% respectively. Moreover, our Agent RL training achieves 40\% speedup with steady performance improvement on 7B LLMs, enhancing coding/reasoning and searching capabilities respectively up to 35\% and 21\% on Maths and general/multi-hop QA benchmarks.
Large Language Models (LLMs) perform well in language tasks but often lack collaborative awareness and struggle to optimize global performance in multi-agent settings. We present a reinforcement learning-augmented LLM agent framework that formulates cooperation as a decentralized partially observable Markov decision process (Dec-POMDP) and adopts centralized training with decentralized execution (CTDE). We introduce Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to jointly optimize agent policies with access to global signals during training, together with a simplified joint reward that balances task quality, speed, and coordination cost. On collaborative writing and coding benchmarks, our framework delivers a 3x increase in task processing speed over single-agent baselines, 98.7% structural/style consistency in writing, and a 74.6% test pass rate in coding. The approach consistently outperforms strong multi-agent LLM baselines and provides a practical path toward reliable collaboration in complex workflows.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly serving as autonomous agents, and their utilization of external tools via the Model Context Protocol (MCP) is considered a future trend. Current MCP evaluation sets suffer from issues such as reliance on external MCP services and a lack of difficulty awareness. To address these limitations, we propose MCPAgentBench, a benchmark based on real-world MCP definitions designed to evaluate the tool-use capabilities of agents. We construct a dataset containing authentic tasks and simulated MCP tools. The evaluation employs a dynamic sandbox environment that presents agents with candidate tool lists containing distractors, thereby testing their tool selection and discrimination abilities. Furthermore, we introduce comprehensive metrics to measure both task completion rates and execution efficiency. Experiments conducted on various latest mainstream Large Language Models reveal significant performance differences in handling complex, multi-step tool invocations. All code is open-source at Github.
In this paper, we propose a test-time adaptive agent that performs exploratory inference through posterior-guided belief refinement without relying on gradient-based updates or additional training for LLM agent operating under partial observability. Our agent maintains an external structured belief over the environment state, iteratively updates it via action-conditioned observations, and selects actions by maximizing predicted information gain over the belief space. We estimate information gain using a lightweight LLM-based surrogate and assess world alignment through a novel reward that quantifies the consistency between posterior belief and ground-truth environment configuration. Experiments show that our method outperforms inference-time scaling baselines such as prompt-augmented or retrieval-enhanced LLMs, in aligning with latent world states with significantly lower integration overhead.
Customer-service LLM agents increasingly make policy-bound decisions (refunds, rebooking, billing disputes), but the same ``helpful'' interaction style can be exploited: a small fraction of users can induce unauthorized concessions, shifting costs to others and eroding trust in agentic workflows. We present a cross-domain benchmark of profit-seeking direct prompt injection in customer-service interactions, spanning 10 service domains and 100 realistic attack scripts grouped into five technique families. Across five widely used models under a unified rubric with uncertainty reporting, attacks are highly domain-dependent (airline support is most exploitable) and technique-dependent (payload splitting is most consistently effective). We release data and evaluation code to support reproducible auditing and to inform the design of oversight and recovery workflows for trustworthy, human centered agent interfaces.
Sarcasm understanding is a challenging problem in natural language processing, as it requires capturing the discrepancy between the surface meaning of an utterance and the speaker's intentions as well as the surrounding social context. Although recent advances in deep learning and Large Language Models (LLMs) have substantially improved performance, most existing approaches still rely on black-box predictions of a single model, making it difficult to structurally explain the cognitive factors underlying sarcasm. Moreover, while sarcasm often emerges as a mismatch between semantic evaluation and normative expectations or intentions, frameworks that explicitly decompose and model these components remain limited. In this work, we reformulate sarcasm understanding as a world model inspired reasoning process and propose World Model inspired SArcasm Reasoning (WM-SAR), which decomposes literal meaning, context, normative expectation, and intention into specialized LLM-based agents. The discrepancy between literal evaluation and normative expectation is explicitly quantified as a deterministic inconsistency score, and together with an intention score, these signals are integrated by a lightweight Logistic Regression model to infer the final sarcasm probability. This design leverages the reasoning capability of LLMs while maintaining an interpretable numerical decision structure. Experiments on representative sarcasm detection benchmarks show that WM-SAR consistently outperforms existing deep learning and LLM-based methods. Ablation studies and case analyses further demonstrate that integrating semantic inconsistency and intention reasoning is essential for effective sarcasm detection, achieving both strong performance and high interpretability.
Domain-specific enhancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) within the financial context has long been a focal point of industrial application. While previous models such as BloombergGPT and Baichuan-Finance primarily focused on knowledge enhancement, the deepening complexity of financial services has driven a growing demand for models that possess not only domain knowledge but also robust financial reasoning and agentic capabilities. In this paper, we present QianfanHuijin, a financial domain LLM, and propose a generalizable multi-stage training paradigm for industrial model enhancement. Our approach begins with Continual Pre-training (CPT) on financial corpora to consolidate the knowledge base. This is followed by a fine-grained Post-training pipeline designed with increasing specificity: starting with Financial SFT, progressing to Finance Reasoning RL and Finance Agentic RL, and culminating in General RL aligned with real-world business scenarios. Empirical results demonstrate that QianfanHuijin achieves superior performance across various authoritative financial benchmarks. Furthermore, ablation studies confirm that the targeted Reasoning RL and Agentic RL stages yield significant gains in their respective capabilities. These findings validate our motivation and suggest that this fine-grained, progressive post-training methodology is poised to become a mainstream paradigm for various industrial-enhanced LLMs.
The manual, resource-intensive process of complying with the EU Taxonomy presents a significant challenge for companies. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a path to automation, research is hindered by a lack of public benchmark datasets. To address this gap, we introduce a novel, structured dataset from 190 corporate reports, containing ground-truth economic activities and quantitative Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). We use this dataset to conduct the first systematic evaluation of LLMs on the core compliance workflow. Our results reveal a clear performance gap between qualitative and quantitative tasks. LLMs show moderate success in the qualitative task of identifying economic activities, with a multi-step agentic framework modestly enhancing precision. Conversely, the models comprehensively fail at the quantitative task of predicting financial KPIs in a zero-shot setting. We also discover a paradox, where concise metadata often yields superior performance to full, unstructured reports, and find that model confidence scores are poorly calibrated. We conclude that while LLMs are not ready for full automation, they can serve as powerful assistive tools for human experts. Our dataset provides a public benchmark for future research.
We present a training-free graph-based approach for solving interactive reasoning tasks in the ARC-AGI-3 benchmark. ARC-AGI-3 comprises game-like tasks where agents must infer task mechanics through limited interactions, and adapt to increasing complexity as levels progress. Success requires forming hypotheses, testing them, and tracking discovered mechanics. The benchmark has revealed that state-of-the-art LLMs are currently incapable of reliably solving these tasks. Our method combines vision-based frame processing with systematic state-space exploration using graph-structured representations. It segments visual frames into meaningful components, prioritizes actions based on visual salience, and maintains a directed graph of explored states and transitions. By tracking visited states and tested actions, the agent prioritizes actions that provide the shortest path to untested state-action pairs. On the ARC-AGI-3 Preview Challenge, this structured exploration strategy solves a median of 30 out of 52 levels across six games and ranks 3rd on the private leaderboard, substantially outperforming frontier LLM-based agents. These results demonstrate that explicit graph-structured exploration, even without learning, can serve as a strong baseline for interactive reasoning and underscore the importance of systematic state tracking and action prioritization in sparse-feedback environments where current LLMs fail to capture task dynamics. The code is open source and available at https://github.com/dolphin-in-a-coma/arc-agi-3-just-explore.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated a remarkable capacity in understanding user preferences for recommendation systems. However, they are constrained by several critical challenges, including their inherent "Black-Box" characteristics, susceptibility to knowledge hallucination, and limited online learning capacity. These factors compromise their trustworthiness and adaptability. Conversely, cognitive architectures such as Soar offer structured and interpretable reasoning processes, yet their knowledge acquisition is notoriously laborious. To address these complementary challenges, we propose a novel cognitive recommender agent called CogRec which synergizes the strengths of LLMs with the Soar cognitive architecture. CogRec leverages Soar as its core symbolic reasoning engine and leverages an LLM for knowledge initialization to populate its working memory with production rules. The agent operates on a Perception-Cognition-Action(PCA) cycle. Upon encountering an impasse, it dynamically queries the LLM to obtain a reasoned solution. This solution is subsequently transformed into a new symbolic production rule via Soar's chunking mechanism, thereby enabling robust online learning. This learning paradigm allows the agent to continuously evolve its knowledge base and furnish highly interpretable rationales for its recommendations. Extensive evaluations conducted on three public datasets demonstrate that CogRec demonstrates significant advantages in recommendation accuracy, explainability, and its efficacy in addressing the long-tail problem.
The transition from static Large Language Models (LLMs) to self-improving agents is hindered by the lack of structured reasoning in traditional evolutionary approaches. Existing methods often struggle with premature convergence and inefficient exploration in high-dimensional code spaces. To address these challenges, we introduce LoongFlow, a self-evolving agent framework that achieves state-of-the-art solution quality with significantly reduced computational costs. Unlike "blind" mutation operators, LoongFlow integrates LLMs into a cognitive "Plan-Execute-Summarize" (PES) paradigm, effectively mapping the evolutionary search to a reasoning-heavy process. To sustain long-term architectural coherence, we incorporate a hybrid evolutionary memory system. By synergizing Multi-Island models with MAP-Elites and adaptive Boltzmann selection, this system theoretically balances the exploration-exploitation trade-off, maintaining diverse behavioral niches to prevent optimization stagnation. We instantiate LoongFlow with a General Agent for algorithmic discovery and an ML Agent for pipeline optimization. Extensive evaluations on the AlphaEvolve benchmark and Kaggle competitions demonstrate that LoongFlow outperforms leading baselines (e.g., OpenEvolve, ShinkaEvolve) by up to 60% in evolutionary efficiency while discovering superior solutions. LoongFlow marks a substantial step forward in autonomous scientific discovery, enabling the generation of expert-level solutions with reduced computational overhead.
Automatic Prompt Optimization (APO) has emerged as a critical technique for enhancing Large Language Model (LLM) performance, yet current state-of-the-art methods typically rely on large, labeled gold-standard development sets to compute fitness scores for evolutionary or Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches. In real-world software engineering, however, such curated datasets are rarely available during the initial cold start of agent development, where engineers instead face messy production logs and evolving failure modes. We present ROAD (Reflective Optimization via Automated Debugging), a novel framework that bypasses the need for refined datasets by treating optimization as a dynamic debugging investigation rather than a stochastic search. Unlike traditional mutation strategies, ROAD utilizes a specialized multi-agent architecture, comprising an Analyzer for root-cause analysis, an Optimizer for pattern aggregation, and a Coach for strategy integration, to convert unstructured failure logs into robust, structured Decision Tree Protocols. We evaluated ROAD across both a standardized academic benchmark and a live production Knowledge Management engine. Experimental results demonstrate that ROAD is highly sample-efficient, achieving a 5.6 percent increase in success rate (73.6 percent to 79.2 percent) and a 3.8 percent increase in search accuracy within just three automated iterations. Furthermore, on complex reasoning tasks in the retail domain, ROAD improved agent performance by approximately 19 percent relative to the baseline. These findings suggest that mimicking the human engineering loop of failure analysis and patching offers a viable, data-efficient alternative to resource-intensive RL training for deploying reliable LLM agents.
Personalized search demands the ability to model users' evolving, multi-dimensional information needs; a challenge for systems constrained by static profiles or monolithic retrieval pipelines. We present SPARK (Search Personalization via Agent-Driven Retrieval and Knowledge-sharing), a framework in which coordinated persona-based large language model (LLM) agents deliver task-specific retrieval and emergent personalization. SPARK formalizes a persona space defined by role, expertise, task context, and domain, and introduces a Persona Coordinator that dynamically interprets incoming queries to activate the most relevant specialized agents. Each agent executes an independent retrieval-augmented generation process, supported by dedicated long- and short-term memory stores and context-aware reasoning modules. Inter-agent collaboration is facilitated through structured communication protocols, including shared memory repositories, iterative debate, and relay-style knowledge transfer. Drawing on principles from cognitive architectures, multi-agent coordination theory, and information retrieval, SPARK models how emergent personalization properties arise from distributed agent behaviors governed by minimal coordination rules. The framework yields testable predictions regarding coordination efficiency, personalization quality, and cognitive load distribution, while incorporating adaptive learning mechanisms for continuous persona refinement. By integrating fine-grained agent specialization with cooperative retrieval, SPARK provides insights for next-generation search systems capable of capturing the complexity, fluidity, and context sensitivity of human information-seeking behavior.
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have introduced new paradigms in software development, including vibe coding, AI-assisted coding, and agentic coding, fundamentally reshaping how software is designed, implemented, and maintained. Prior research has primarily examined AI-based coding at the individual level or in educational settings, leaving industrial practitioners' perspectives underexplored. This paper addresses this gap by investigating how LLM coding tools are used in professional practice, the associated concerns and risks, and the resulting transformations in development workflows, with particular attention to implications for computing education. We conducted a qualitative analysis of 57 curated YouTube videos published between late 2024 and 2025, capturing reflections and experiences shared by practitioners. Following a filtering and quality assessment process, the selected sources were analyzed to compare LLM-based and traditional programming, identify emerging risks, and characterize evolving workflows. Our findings reveal definitions of AI-based coding practices, notable productivity gains, and lowered barriers to entry. Practitioners also report a shift in development bottlenecks toward code review and concerns regarding code quality, maintainability, security vulnerabilities, ethical issues, erosion of foundational problem-solving skills, and insufficient preparation of entry-level engineers. Building on these insights, we discuss implications for computer science and software engineering education and argue for curricular shifts toward problem-solving, architectural thinking, code review, and early project-based learning that integrates LLM tools. This study offers an industry-grounded perspective on AI-based coding and provides guidance for aligning educational practices with rapidly evolving professional realities.
Large language model (LLM) agents currently depend on predefined tools or brittle tool generation, constraining their capability and adaptability to complex scientific tasks. We introduce CASCADE, a self-evolving agentic framework representing an early instantiation of the transition from "LLM + tool use" to "LLM + skill acquisition". CASCADE enables agents to master complex external tools and codify knowledge through two meta-skills: continuous learning via web search and code extraction, and self-reflection via introspection and knowledge graph exploration, among others. We evaluate CASCADE on SciSkillBench, a benchmark of 116 materials science and chemistry research tasks. CASCADE achieves a 93.3% success rate using GPT-5, compared to 35.4% without evolution mechanisms. We further demonstrate real-world applications in computational analysis, autonomous laboratory experiments, and selective reproduction of published papers. Along with human-agent collaboration and memory consolidation, CASCADE accumulates executable skills that can be shared across agents and scientists, moving toward scalable AI-assisted scientific research.
Much of the reported progress in file-level software defect prediction (SDP) is, in reality, nothing but an illusion of accuracy. Over the last decades, machine learning and deep learning models have reported increasing performance across software versions. However, since most files persist across releases and retain their defect labels, standard evaluation rewards label-persistence bias rather than reasoning about code changes. To address this issue, we reformulate SDP as a change-aware prediction task, in which models reason over code changes of a file within successive project versions, rather than relying on static file snapshots. Building on this formulation, we propose an LLM-driven, change-aware, multi-agent debate framework. Our experiments on multiple PROMISE projects show that traditional models achieve inflated F1, while failing on rare but critical defect-transition cases. In contrast, our change-aware reasoning and multi-agent debate framework yields more balanced performance across evolution subsets and significantly improves sensitivity to defect introductions. These results highlight fundamental flaws in current SDP evaluation practices and emphasize the need for change-aware reasoning in practical defect prediction. The source code is publicly available.
As Large Language Models (LLMs) evolve from code generators into collaborative partners for software engineers, our methods for evaluation are lagging. Current benchmarks, focused on code correctness, fail to capture the nuanced, interactive behaviors essential for successful human-AI partnership. To bridge this evaluation gap, this paper makes two core contributions. First, we present a foundational taxonomy of desirable agent behaviors for enterprise software engineering, derived from an analysis of 91 sets of user-defined agent rules. This taxonomy defines four key expectations of agent behavior: Adhere to Standards and Processes, Ensure Code Quality and Reliability, Solving Problems Effectively, and Collaborating with the User. Second, recognizing that these expectations are not static, we introduce the Context-Adaptive Behavior (CAB) Framework. This emerging framework reveals how behavioral expectations shift along two empirically-derived axes: the Time Horizon (from immediate needs to future ideals), established through interviews with 15 expert engineers, and the Type of Work (from enterprise production to rapid prototyping, for example), identified through a prompt analysis of a prototyping agent. Together, these contributions offer a human-centered foundation for designing and evaluating the next generation of AI agents, moving the field's focus from the correctness of generated code toward the dynamics of true collaborative intelligence.
Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong reasoning and coding capabilities, yet they struggle to generalize to real-world software engineering (SWE) problems that are long-horizon and out of distribution. Existing systems often rely on a single agent to handle the entire workflow-interpreting issues, navigating large codebases, and implementing fixes-within one reasoning chain. Such monolithic designs force the model to retain irrelevant context, leading to spurious correlations and poor generalization. Motivated by how human engineers decompose complex problems, we propose structuring SWE agents as orchestrators coordinating specialized sub-agents for sub-tasks such as localization, editing, and validation. The challenge lies in discovering effective hierarchies automatically: as the number of sub-agents grows, the search space becomes combinatorial, and it is difficult to attribute credit to individual sub-agents within a team. We address these challenges by formulating hierarchy discovery as a multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem, where each arm represents a candidate sub-agent and the reward measures its helpfulness when collaborating with others. This framework, termed Bandit Optimization for Agent Design (BOAD), enables efficient exploration of sub-agent designs under limited evaluation budgets. On SWE-bench-Verified, BOAD outperforms single-agent and manually designed multi-agent systems. On SWE-bench-Live, featuring more recent and out-of-distribution issues, our 36B system ranks second on the leaderboard at the time of evaluation, surpassing larger models such as GPT-4 and Claude. These results demonstrate that automatically discovered hierarchical multi-agent systems significantly improve generalization on challenging long-horizon SWE tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/iamxjy/BOAD-SWE-Agent.
Enabling Large Language Models (LLMs) to reliably invoke external tools remains a critical bottleneck for autonomous agents. Existing approaches suffer from three fundamental challenges: expensive human annotation for high-quality trajectories, poor generalization to unseen tools, and quality ceilings inherent in single-model synthesis that perpetuate biases and coverage gaps. We introduce InfTool, a fully autonomous framework that breaks these barriers through self-evolving multi-agent synthesis. Given only raw API specifications, InfTool orchestrates three collaborative agents (User Simulator, Tool-Calling Assistant, and MCP Server) to generate diverse, verified trajectories spanning single-turn calls to complex multi-step workflows. The framework establishes a closed loop: synthesized data trains the model via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with gated rewards, the improved model generates higher-quality data targeting capability gaps, and this cycle iterates without human intervention. Experiments on the Berkeley Function-Calling Leaderboard (BFCL) demonstrate that InfTool transforms a base 32B model from 19.8% to 70.9% accuracy (+258%), surpassing models 10x larger and rivaling Claude-Opus, and entirely from synthetic data without human annotation.
Powerful autonomous systems, which reason, plan, and converse using and between numerous tools and agents, are made possible by Large Language Models (LLMs), Vision-Language Models (VLMs), and new agentic AI systems, like LangChain and GraphChain. Nevertheless, this agentic environment increases the probability of the occurrence of multimodal prompt injection (PI) attacks, in which concealed or malicious instructions carried in text, pictures, metadata, or agent-to-agent messages may spread throughout the graph and lead to unintended behavior, a breach of policy, or corruption of state. In order to mitigate these risks, this paper suggests a Cross-Agent Multimodal Provenanc- Aware Defense Framework whereby all the prompts, either user-generated or produced by upstream agents, are sanitized and all the outputs generated by an LLM are verified independently before being sent to downstream nodes. This framework contains a Text sanitizer agent, visual sanitizer agent, and output validator agent all coordinated by a provenance ledger, which keeps metadata of modality, source, and trust level throughout the entire agent network. This architecture makes sure that agent-to-agent communication abides by clear trust frames such such that injected instructions are not propagated down LangChain or GraphChain-style-workflows. The experimental assessments show that multimodal injection detection accuracy is significantly enhanced, and the cross-agent trust leakage is minimized, as well as, agentic execution pathways become stable. The framework, which expands the concept of provenance tracking and validation to the multi-agent orchestration, enhances the establishment of secure, understandable and reliable agentic AI systems.