LLM-agent - 2026-01-06

Project Ariadne: A Structural Causal Framework for Auditing Faithfulness in LLM Agents

Authors:Sourena Khanzadeh
Date:2026-01-05 18:05:29

As Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly tasked with high-stakes autonomous decision-making, the transparency of their reasoning processes has become a critical safety concern. While \textit{Chain-of-Thought} (CoT) prompting allows agents to generate human-readable reasoning traces, it remains unclear whether these traces are \textbf{faithful} generative drivers of the model's output or merely \textbf{post-hoc rationalizations}. We introduce \textbf{Project Ariadne}, a novel XAI framework that utilizes Structural Causal Models (SCMs) and counterfactual logic to audit the causal integrity of agentic reasoning. Unlike existing interpretability methods that rely on surface-level textual similarity, Project Ariadne performs \textbf{hard interventions} ($do$-calculus) on intermediate reasoning nodes -- systematically inverting logic, negating premises, and reversing factual claims -- to measure the \textbf{Causal Sensitivity} ($φ$) of the terminal answer. Our empirical evaluation of state-of-the-art models reveals a persistent \textit{Faithfulness Gap}. We define and detect a widespread failure mode termed \textbf{Causal Decoupling}, where agents exhibit a violation density ($ρ$) of up to $0.77$ in factual and scientific domains. In these instances, agents arrive at identical conclusions despite contradictory internal logic, proving that their reasoning traces function as "Reasoning Theater" while decision-making is governed by latent parametric priors. Our findings suggest that current agentic architectures are inherently prone to unfaithful explanation, and we propose the Ariadne Score as a new benchmark for aligning stated logic with model action.

Code for Machines, Not Just Humans: Quantifying AI-Friendliness with Code Health Metrics

Authors:Markus Borg, Nadim Hagatulah, Adam Tornhill, Emma Söderberg
Date:2026-01-05 15:23:55

We are entering a hybrid era in which human developers and AI coding agents work in the same codebases. While industry practice has long optimized code for human comprehension, it is increasingly important to ensure that LLMs with different capabilities can edit code reliably. In this study, we investigate the concept of ``AI-friendly code'' via LLM-based refactoring on a dataset of 5,000 Python files from competitive programming. We find a meaningful association between CodeHealth, a quality metric calibrated for human comprehension, and semantic preservation after AI refactoring. Our findings confirm that human-friendly code is also more compatible with AI tooling. These results suggest that organizations can use CodeHealth to guide where AI interventions are lower risk and where additional human oversight is warranted. Investing in maintainability not only helps humans; it also prepares for large-scale AI adoption.

Confidence Estimation for LLMs in Multi-turn Interactions

Authors:Caiqi Zhang, Ruihan Yang, Xiaochen Zhu, Chengzu Li, Tiancheng Hu, Yijiang River Dong, Deqing Yang, Nigel Collier
Date:2026-01-05 14:58:04

While confidence estimation is a promising direction for mitigating hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs), current research dominantly focuses on single-turn settings. The dynamics of model confidence in multi-turn conversations, where context accumulates and ambiguity is progressively resolved, remain largely unexplored. Reliable confidence estimation in multi-turn settings is critical for many downstream applications, such as autonomous agents and human-in-the-loop systems. This work presents the first systematic study of confidence estimation in multi-turn interactions, establishing a formal evaluation framework grounded in two key desiderata: per-turn calibration and monotonicity of confidence as more information becomes available. To facilitate this, we introduce novel metrics, including a length-normalized Expected Calibration Error (InfoECE), and a new "Hinter-Guesser" paradigm for generating controlled evaluation datasets. Our experiments reveal that widely-used confidence techniques struggle with calibration and monotonicity in multi-turn dialogues. We propose P(Sufficient), a logit-based probe that achieves comparatively better performance, although the task remains far from solved. Our work provides a foundational methodology for developing more reliable and trustworthy conversational agents.

EverMemOS: A Self-Organizing Memory Operating System for Structured Long-Horizon Reasoning

Authors:Chuanrui Hu, Xingze Gao, Zuyi Zhou, Dannong Xu, Yi Bai, Xintong Li, Hui Zhang, Tong Li, Chong Zhang, Lidong Bing, Yafeng Deng
Date:2026-01-05 14:39:43

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as long-term interactive agents, yet their limited context windows make it difficult to sustain coherent behavior over extended interactions. Existing memory systems often store isolated records and retrieve fragments, limiting their ability to consolidate evolving user states and resolve conflicts. We introduce EverMemOS, a self-organizing memory operating system that implements an engram-inspired lifecycle for computational memory. Episodic Trace Formation converts dialogue streams into MemCells that capture episodic traces, atomic facts, and time-bounded Foresight signals. Semantic Consolidation organizes MemCells into thematic MemScenes, distilling stable semantic structures and updating user profiles. Reconstructive Recollection performs MemScene-guided agentic retrieval to compose the necessary and sufficient context for downstream reasoning. Experiments on LoCoMo and LongMemEval show that EverMemOS achieves state-of-the-art performance on memory-augmented reasoning tasks. We further report a profile study on PersonaMem v2 and qualitative case studies illustrating chat-oriented capabilities such as user profiling and Foresight. Code is available at https://github.com/EverMind-AI/EverMemOS.

MDAgent2: Large Language Model for Code Generation and Knowledge Q&A in Molecular Dynamics

Authors:Zhuofan Shi, Hubao A, Yufei Shao, Mengyan Dai, Yadong Yu, Pan Xiang, Dongliang Huang, Hongxu An, Chunxiao Xin, Haiyang Shen, Zhenyu Wang, Yunshan Na, Gang Huang, Xiang Jing
Date:2026-01-05 12:56:51

Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations are essential for understanding atomic-scale behaviors in materials science, yet writing LAMMPS scripts remains highly specialized and time-consuming tasks. Although LLMs show promise in code generation and domain-specific question answering, their performance in MD scenarios is limited by scarce domain data, the high deployment cost of state-of-the-art LLMs, and low code executability. Building upon our prior MDAgent, we present MDAgent2, the first end-to-end framework capable of performing both knowledge Q&A and code generation within the MD domain. We construct a domain-specific data-construction pipeline that yields three high-quality datasets spanning MD knowledge, question answering, and code generation. Based on these datasets, we adopt a three stage post-training strategy--continued pre-training (CPT), supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and reinforcement learning (RL)--to train two domain-adapted models, MD-Instruct and MD-Code. Furthermore, we introduce MD-GRPO, a closed-loop RL method that leverages simulation outcomes as reward signals and recycles low-reward trajectories for continual refinement. We further build MDAgent2-RUNTIME, a deployable multi-agent system that integrates code generation, execution, evaluation, and self-correction. Together with MD-EvalBench proposed in this work, the first benchmark for LAMMPS code generation and question answering, our models and system achieve performance surpassing several strong baselines.This work systematically demonstrates the adaptability and generalization capability of large language models in industrial simulation tasks, laying a methodological foundation for automatic code generation in AI for Science and industrial-scale simulations. URL: https://github.com/FredericVAN/PKU_MDAgent2

AgentVNE: LLM-Augmented Graph Reinforcement Learning for Affinity-Aware Multi-Agent Placement in Edge Agentic AI

Authors:Runze Zheng, Yuqing Zheng, Zhengyi Cheng, Long Luo, Haoxiang Luo, Gang Sun, Hongfang Yu, Dusit Niyato
Date:2026-01-05 11:30:04

The Internet of Agents is propelling edge computing toward agentic AI and edge general intelligence (EGI). However, deploying multi-agent service (MAS) on resource-constrained edge infrastructure presents severe challenges. MAS service workflows are driven by complex cross-node interactions, dynamic memory accumulation, and collaborative tool usage. Exhibiting chain-like topological dependencies and strict affinity constraints, these workflows demand real-time responsiveness that exceeds the capabilities of traditional VNE algorithms designed for static resources. To address this, we propose AgentVNE, a cloud-edge collaborative framework utilizing a dual-layer architecture. First, AgentVNE employs a large language model (LLM) to identify implicit semantic constraints and generate affinity-based resource augmentation to resolve physical dependency issues. Second, it constructs a resource similarity-aware neural network, utilizing a pre-training and PPO fine-tuning strategy to precisely capture topological similarities between dynamic workflows and heterogeneous networks. By coupling semantic perception with topological reasoning, this mechanism effectively bridges the gap between dynamic service requirements and physical infrastructure. Simulation results demonstrate that AgentVNE reduces workflow communication latency to less than 40% of baselines and improves the service acceptance rate by approximately 5%-10% under high-load scenarios. Ultimately, this work provides a foundational solution for the semantic-aware deployment of agentic AI.

MindChat: A Privacy-preserving Large Language Model for Mental Health Support

Authors:Dong Xue, Jicheng Tu, Ming Wang, Xin Yan, Fangzhou Liu, Jie Hu
Date:2026-01-05 10:54:18

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for mental health support, yet training such models is constrained by the scarcity and sensitivity of real counseling dialogues. In this article, we present MindChat, a privacy-preserving LLM for mental health support, together with MindCorpus, a synthetic multi-turn counseling dataset constructed via a multi-agent role-playing framework. To synthesize high-quality counseling data, the developed dialogue-construction framework employs a dual closed-loop feedback design to integrate psychological expertise and counseling techniques through role-playing: (i) turn-level critique-and-revision to improve coherence and counseling appropriateness within a session, and (ii) session-level strategy refinement to progressively enrich counselor behaviors across sessions. To mitigate privacy risks under decentralized data ownership, we fine-tune the base model using federated learning with parameter-efficient LoRA adapters and incorporate differentially private optimization to reduce membership and memorization risks. Experiments on synthetic-data quality assessment and counseling capability evaluation show that MindCorpus improves training effectiveness and that MindChat is competitive with existing general and counseling-oriented LLM baselines under both automatic LLM-judge and human evaluation protocols, while exhibiting reduced privacy leakage under membership inference attacks.

Agentic Memory: Learning Unified Long-Term and Short-Term Memory Management for Large Language Model Agents

Authors:Yi Yu, Liuyi Yao, Yuexiang Xie, Qingquan Tan, Jiaqi Feng, Yaliang Li, Libing Wu
Date:2026-01-05 08:24:16

Large language model (LLM) agents face fundamental limitations in long-horizon reasoning due to finite context windows, making effective memory management critical. Existing methods typically handle long-term memory (LTM) and short-term memory (STM) as separate components, relying on heuristics or auxiliary controllers, which limits adaptability and end-to-end optimization. In this paper, we propose Agentic Memory (AgeMem), a unified framework that integrates LTM and STM management directly into the agent's policy. AgeMem exposes memory operations as tool-based actions, enabling the LLM agent to autonomously decide what and when to store, retrieve, update, summarize, or discard information. To train such unified behaviors, we propose a three-stage progressive reinforcement learning strategy and design a step-wise GRPO to address sparse and discontinuous rewards induced by memory operations. Experiments on five long-horizon benchmarks demonstrate that AgeMem consistently outperforms strong memory-augmented baselines across multiple LLM backbones, achieving improved task performance, higher-quality long-term memory, and more efficient context usage.

Jenius Agent: Towards Experience-Driven Accuracy Optimization in Real-World Scenarios

Authors:Defei Xia, Bingfeng Pi, Shenbin Zhang, Song Hua, Yunfei Wei, Lei Zuo
Date:2026-01-05 07:35:12

As agent systems powered by large language models (LLMs) advance, improving the task performance of an autonomous agent, especially in context understanding, tool usage, and response generation, has become increasingly critical. Although prior studies have advanced the overall design of LLM-based agents, systematic optimization of their internal reasoning and tool-use pipelines remains underexplored. This paper introduces an agent framework grounded in real-world practical experience, with three key innovations: (1) an adaptive prompt generation strategy that aligns with the agent's state and task goals to improve reliability and robustness; (2) a context-aware tool orchestration module that performs tool categorization, semantic retrieval, and adaptive invocation based on user intent and context; and (3) a layered memory mechanism that integrates session memory, task history, and external summaries to improve relevance and efficiency through dynamic summarization and compression. An end-to-end framework named Jenius-Agent has been integrated with three key optimizations, including tools based on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), file input/output (I/O), and execution feedback. The experiments show a 20 percent improvement in task accuracy, along with a reduced token cost, response latency, and invocation failures. The framework is already deployed in Jenius (https://www.jenius.cn), providing a lightweight and scalable solution for robust, protocol-compatible autonomous agents.

Clinical Knowledge Graph Construction and Evaluation with Multi-LLMs via Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Authors:Udiptaman Das, Krishnasai B. Atmakuri, Duy Ho, Chi Lee, Yugyung Lee
Date:2026-01-05 07:16:29

Large language models (LLMs) offer new opportunities for constructing knowledge graphs (KGs) from unstructured clinical narratives. However, existing approaches often rely on structured inputs and lack robust validation of factual accuracy and semantic consistency, limitations that are especially problematic in oncology. We introduce an end-to-end framework for clinical KG construction and evaluation directly from free text using multi-agent prompting and a schema-constrained Retrieval-Augmented Generation (KG-RAG) strategy. Our pipeline integrates (1) prompt-driven entity, attribute, and relation extraction; (2) entropy-based uncertainty scoring; (3) ontology-aligned RDF/OWL schema generation; and (4) multi-LLM consensus validation for hallucination detection and semantic refinement. Beyond static graph construction, the framework supports continuous refinement and self-supervised evaluation, enabling iterative improvement of graph quality. Applied to two oncology cohorts (PDAC and BRCA), our method produces interpretable, SPARQL-compatible, and clinically grounded knowledge graphs without relying on gold-standard annotations. Experimental results demonstrate consistent gains in precision, relevance, and ontology compliance over baseline methods.

AI Agent Systems: Architectures, Applications, and Evaluation

Authors:Bin Xu
Date:2026-01-05 02:38:40

AI agents -- systems that combine foundation models with reasoning, planning, memory, and tool use -- are rapidly becoming a practical interface between natural-language intent and real-world computation. This survey synthesizes the emerging landscape of AI agent architectures across: (i) deliberation and reasoning (e.g., chain-of-thought-style decomposition, self-reflection and verification, and constraint-aware decision making), (ii) planning and control (from reactive policies to hierarchical and multi-step planners), and (iii) tool calling and environment interaction (retrieval, code execution, APIs, and multimodal perception). We organize prior work into a unified taxonomy spanning agent components (policy/LLM core, memory, world models, planners, tool routers, and critics), orchestration patterns (single-agent vs.\ multi-agent; centralized vs.\ decentralized coordination), and deployment settings (offline analysis vs.\ online interactive assistance; safety-critical vs.\ open-ended tasks). We discuss key design trade-offs -- latency vs.\ accuracy, autonomy vs.\ controllability, and capability vs.\ reliability -- and highlight how evaluation is complicated by non-determinism, long-horizon credit assignment, tool and environment variability, and hidden costs such as retries and context growth. Finally, we summarize measurement and benchmarking practices (task suites, human preference and utility metrics, success under constraints, robustness and security) and identify open challenges including verification and guardrails for tool actions, scalable memory and context management, interpretability of agent decisions, and reproducible evaluation under realistic workloads.

Lying with Truths: Open-Channel Multi-Agent Collusion for Belief Manipulation via Generative Montage

Authors:Jinwei Hu, Xinmiao Huang, Youcheng Sun, Yi Dong, Xiaowei Huang
Date:2026-01-04 22:50:23

As large language models (LLMs) transition to autonomous agents synthesizing real-time information, their reasoning capabilities introduce an unexpected attack surface. This paper introduces a novel threat where colluding agents steer victim beliefs using only truthful evidence fragments distributed through public channels, without relying on covert communications, backdoors, or falsified documents. By exploiting LLMs' overthinking tendency, we formalize the first cognitive collusion attack and propose Generative Montage: a Writer-Editor-Director framework that constructs deceptive narratives through adversarial debate and coordinated posting of evidence fragments, causing victims to internalize and propagate fabricated conclusions. To study this risk, we develop CoPHEME, a dataset derived from real-world rumor events, and simulate attacks across diverse LLM families. Our results show pervasive vulnerability across 14 LLM families: attack success rates reach 74.4% for proprietary models and 70.6% for open-weights models. Counterintuitively, stronger reasoning capabilities increase susceptibility, with reasoning-specialized models showing higher attack success than base models or prompts. Furthermore, these false beliefs then cascade to downstream judges, achieving over 60% deception rates, highlighting a socio-technical vulnerability in how LLM-based agents interact with dynamic information environments. Our implementation and data are available at: https://github.com/CharlesJW222/Lying_with_Truth/tree/main.

HeurekaBench: A Benchmarking Framework for AI Co-scientist

Authors:Siba Smarak Panigrahi, Jovana Videnović, Maria Brbić
Date:2026-01-04 22:16:42

LLM-based reasoning models have enabled the development of agentic systems that act as co-scientists, assisting in multi-step scientific analysis. However, evaluating these systems is challenging, as it requires realistic, end-to-end research scenarios that integrate data analysis, interpretation, and the generation of new insights from the experimental data. To address this limitation, we introduce HeurekaBench, a framework to create benchmarks with exploratory, open-ended research questions for experimental datasets. Each such question is grounded in a scientific study and its corresponding code repository, and is created using a semi-automated pipeline that leverages multiple LLMs to extract insights and generate candidate workflows, which are then verified against reported findings. We instantiate the framework in single-cell biology to obtain sc-HeurekaBench benchmark and use it to compare state-of-the-art single-cell agents. We further showcase the benefits of our benchmark for quantitatively analyzing current design choices in agentic systems. We find that the addition of a critic module can improve ill-formed responses for open-source LLM-based agents by up to 22% and close the gap with their closed-source counterparts. Overall, HeurekaBench sets a path toward rigorous, end-to-end evaluation of scientific agents, grounding benchmark construction in real scientific workflows.

Exposing Hidden Interfaces: LLM-Guided Type Inference for Reverse Engineering macOS Private Frameworks

Authors:Arina Kharlamova, Youcheng Sun, Ting Yu
Date:2026-01-04 21:44:55

Private macOS frameworks underpin critical services and daemons but remain undocumented and distributed only as stripped binaries, complicating security analysis. We present MOTIF, an agentic framework that integrates tool-augmented analysis with a finetuned large language model specialized for Objective-C type inference. The agent manages runtime metadata extraction, binary inspection, and constraint checking, while the model generates candidate method signatures that are validated and refined into compilable headers. On MOTIF-Bench, a benchmark built from public frameworks with groundtruth headers, MOTIF improves signature recovery from 15% to 86% compared to baseline static analysis tooling, with consistent gains in tool-use correctness and inference stability. Case studies on private frameworks show that reconstructed headers compile, link, and facilitate downstream security research and vulnerability studies. By transforming opaque binaries into analyzable interfaces, MOTIF establishes a scalable foundation for systematic auditing of macOS internals.

OpenRT: An Open-Source Red Teaming Framework for Multimodal LLMs

Authors:Xin Wang, Yunhao Chen, Juncheng Li, Yixu Wang, Yang Yao, Tianle Gu, Jie Li, Yan Teng, Xingjun Ma, Yingchun Wang, Xia Hu
Date:2026-01-04 16:41:33

The rapid integration of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) into critical applications is increasingly hindered by persistent safety vulnerabilities. However, existing red-teaming benchmarks are often fragmented, limited to single-turn text interactions, and lack the scalability required for systematic evaluation. To address this, we introduce OpenRT, a unified, modular, and high-throughput red-teaming framework designed for comprehensive MLLM safety evaluation. At its core, OpenRT architects a paradigm shift in automated red-teaming by introducing an adversarial kernel that enables modular separation across five critical dimensions: model integration, dataset management, attack strategies, judging methods, and evaluation metrics. By standardizing attack interfaces, it decouples adversarial logic from a high-throughput asynchronous runtime, enabling systematic scaling across diverse models. Our framework integrates 37 diverse attack methodologies, spanning white-box gradients, multi-modal perturbations, and sophisticated multi-agent evolutionary strategies. Through an extensive empirical study on 20 advanced models (including GPT-5.2, Claude 4.5, and Gemini 3 Pro), we expose critical safety gaps: even frontier models fail to generalize across attack paradigms, with leading models exhibiting average Attack Success Rates as high as 49.14%. Notably, our findings reveal that reasoning models do not inherently possess superior robustness against complex, multi-turn jailbreaks. By open-sourcing OpenRT, we provide a sustainable, extensible, and continuously maintained infrastructure that accelerates the development and standardization of AI safety.

OpenNovelty: An LLM-powered Agentic System for Verifiable Scholarly Novelty Assessment

Authors:Ming Zhang, Kexin Tan, Yueyuan Huang, Yujiong Shen, Chunchun Ma, Li Ju, Xinran Zhang, Yuhui Wang, Wenqing Jing, Jingyi Deng, Huayu Sha, Binze Hu, Jingqi Tong, Changhao Jiang, Yage Geng, Yuankai Ying, Yue Zhang, Zhangyue Yin, Zhiheng Xi, Shihan Dou, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
Date:2026-01-04 15:48:51

Evaluating novelty is critical yet challenging in peer review, as reviewers must assess submissions against a vast, rapidly evolving literature. This report presents OpenNovelty, an LLM-powered agentic system for transparent, evidence-based novelty analysis. The system operates through four phases: (1) extracting the core task and contribution claims to generate retrieval queries; (2) retrieving relevant prior work based on extracted queries via semantic search engine; (3) constructing a hierarchical taxonomy of core-task-related work and performing contribution-level full-text comparisons against each contribution; and (4) synthesizing all analyses into a structured novelty report with explicit citations and evidence snippets. Unlike naive LLM-based approaches, \textsc{OpenNovelty} grounds all assessments in retrieved real papers, ensuring verifiable judgments. We deploy our system on 500+ ICLR 2026 submissions with all reports publicly available on our website, and preliminary analysis suggests it can identify relevant prior work, including closely related papers that authors may overlook. OpenNovelty aims to empower the research community with a scalable tool that promotes fair, consistent, and evidence-backed peer review.

CaveAgent: Transforming LLMs into Stateful Runtime Operators

Authors:Maohao Ran, Zhenglin Wan, Cooper Lin, Yanting Zhang, Hongyu Xin, Hongwei Fan, Yibo Xu, Beier Luo, Yaxin Zhou, Wangbo Zhao, Lijie Yang, Lang Feng, Fuchao Yang, Jingxuan Wu, Yiqiao Huang, Chendong Ma, Dailing Jiang, Jianbo Deng, Sihui Han, Bo An, Yike Guo, Jun Song
Date:2026-01-04 15:32:47

LLM-based agents are increasingly capable of complex task execution, yet current agentic systems remain constrained by text-centric paradigms. Traditional approaches rely on procedural JSON-based function calling, which often struggles with long-horizon tasks due to fragile multi-turn dependencies and context drift. In this paper, we present CaveAgent, a framework that transforms the paradigm from "LLM-as-Text-Generator" to "LLM-as-Runtime-Operator." We introduce a Dual-stream Context Architecture that decouples state management into a lightweight semantic stream for reasoning and a persistent, deterministic Python Runtime stream for execution. In addition to leveraging code generation to efficiently resolve interdependent sub-tasks (e.g., loops, conditionals) in a single step, we introduce \textit{Stateful Runtime Management} in CaveAgent. Distinct from existing code-based approaches that remain text-bound and lack the support for external object injection and retrieval, CaveAgent injects, manipulates, and retrieves complex Python objects (e.g., DataFrames, database connections) that persist across turns. This persistence mechanism acts as a high-fidelity external memory to eliminate context drift, avoid catastrophic forgetting, while ensuring that processed data flows losslessly to downstream applications. Comprehensive evaluations on Tau$^2$-bench, BFCL and various case studies across representative SOTA LLMs demonstrate CaveAgent's superiority. Specifically, our framework achieves a 10.5\% success rate improvement on retail tasks and reduces total token consumption by 28.4\% in multi-turn scenarios. On data-intensive tasks, direct variable storage and retrieval reduces token consumption by 59\%, allowing CaveAgent to handle large-scale data that causes context overflow failures in both JSON-based and Code-based agents.

EmoHarbor: Evaluating Personalized Emotional Support by Simulating the User's Internal World

Authors:Jing Ye, Lu Xiang, Yaping Zhang, Chengqing Zong
Date:2026-01-04 13:46:51

Current evaluation paradigms for emotional support conversations tend to reward generic empathetic responses, yet they fail to assess whether the support is genuinely personalized to users' unique psychological profiles and contextual needs. We introduce EmoHarbor, an automated evaluation framework that adopts a User-as-a-Judge paradigm by simulating the user's inner world. EmoHarbor employs a Chain-of-Agent architecture that decomposes users' internal processes into three specialized roles, enabling agents to interact with supporters and complete assessments in a manner similar to human users. We instantiate this benchmark using 100 real-world user profiles that cover a diverse range of personality traits and situations, and define 10 evaluation dimensions of personalized support quality. Comprehensive evaluation of 20 advanced LLMs on EmoHarbor reveals a critical insight: while these models excel at generating empathetic responses, they consistently fail to tailor support to individual user contexts. This finding reframes the central challenge, shifting research focus from merely enhancing generic empathy to developing truly user-aware emotional support. EmoHarbor provides a reproducible and scalable framework to guide the development and evaluation of more nuanced and user-aware emotional support systems.

Bayesian Orchestration of Multi-LLM Agents for Cost-Aware Sequential Decision-Making

Authors:Danial Amin
Date:2026-01-04 13:19:27

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous decision agents in settings with asymmetric error costs: hiring (missed talent vs wasted interviews), medical triage (missed emergencies vs unnecessary escalation), and fraud detection (approved fraud vs declined legitimate payments). The dominant design queries a single LLM for a posterior over states, thresholds "confidence," and acts; we prove this is inadequate for sequential decisions with costs. We propose a Bayesian, cost-aware multi-LLM orchestration framework that treats LLMs as approximate likelihood models rather than classifiers. For each candidate state, we elicit likelihoods via contrastive prompting, aggregate across diverse models with robust statistics, and update beliefs with Bayes rule under explicit priors as new evidence arrives. This enables coherent belief updating, expected-cost action selection, principled information gathering via value of information, and fairness gains via ensemble bias mitigation. In resume screening with costs of 40000 USD per missed hire, 2500 USD per interview, and 150 USD per phone screen, experiments on 1000 resumes using five LLMs (GPT-4o, Claude 4.5 Sonnet, Gemini Pro, Grok, DeepSeek) reduce total cost by 294000 USD (34 percent) versus the best single-LLM baseline and improve demographic parity by 45 percent (max group gap 22 to 5 percentage points). Ablations attribute 51 percent of savings to multi-LLM aggregation, 43 percent to sequential updating, and 20 percent to disagreement-triggered information gathering, consistent with the theoretical benefits of correct probabilistic foundations.

From Failure to Mastery: Generating Hard Samples for Tool-use Agents

Authors:Bingguang Hao, Zengzhuang Xu, Yuntao Wen, Xinyi Xu, Yang Liu, Tong Zhao, Maolin Wang, Long Chen, Dong Wang, Yicheng Chen, Cunyin Peng, Xiangyu Zhao, Chenyi Zhuang, Ji Zhang
Date:2026-01-04 11:56:33

The advancement of LLM agents with tool-use capabilities requires diverse and complex training corpora. Existing data generation methods, which predominantly follow a paradigm of random sampling and shallow generation, often yield simple and homogeneous trajectories that fail to capture complex, implicit logical dependencies. To bridge this gap, we introduce HardGen, an automatic agentic pipeline designed to generate hard tool-use training samples with verifiable reasoning. Firstly, HardGen establishes a dynamic API Graph built upon agent failure cases, from which it samples to synthesize hard traces. Secondly, these traces serve as conditional priors to guide the instantiation of modular, abstract advanced tools, which are subsequently leveraged to formulate hard queries. Finally, the advanced tools and hard queries enable the generation of verifiable complex Chain-of-Thought (CoT), with a closed-loop evaluation feedback steering the continuous refinement of the process. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that a 4B parameter model trained with our curated dataset achieves superior performance compared to several leading open-source and closed-source competitors (e.g., GPT-5.2, Gemini-3-Pro and Claude-Opus-4.5). Our code, models, and dataset will be open-sourced to facilitate future research.

From Emotion Classification to Emotional Reasoning: Enhancing Emotional Intelligence in Large Language Models

Authors:Arjhun Sreedar, Rohan Pillay, Laukik Patade
Date:2026-01-04 07:08:37

This work investigates whether synthetic emotional chain-of-thought data can improve the emotional reasoning abilities of smaller open large language models (LLMs). We design a multi-agent generation pipeline that produces therapy-style conversations and converts them into structured emotion multiple-choice questions (MCQs) with explanations. We propose that fine-tuning a variety of 7B models on this dataset should yield substantial gains in emotional understanding and emotional awareness on EmoBench-style evaluations, suggesting that emotional reasoning can be induced without architectural changes. Our results demonstrate that fine-tuned Mistral 7B achieves EU improvements from 10.5 to 20.5 and EA improvements from 40.5 to 60.0, validating the effectiveness of synthetic emotional reasoning data for enhancing model capabilities in nuanced emotional tasks.

Towards LLM-enabled autonomous combustion research: A literature-aware agent for self-corrective modeling workflows

Authors:Ke Xiao, Haoze Zhang, Runze Mao, Han Li, Zhi X. Chen
Date:2026-01-04 04:00:28

The rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs) is transforming artificial intelligence into autonomous research partners, yet a critical gap persists in complex scientific domains such as combustion modeling. Here, practical AI assistance requires the seamless integration of domain literature knowledge with robust execution capabilities for expertise-intensive tools such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD) codes. To bridge this gap, we introduce FlamePilot, an LLM agent designed to empower combustion modeling research through automated and self-corrective CFD workflows. FlamePilot differentiates itself through an architecture that leverages atomic tools to ensure the robust setup and execution of complex simulations in both OpenFOAM and extended frameworks such as DeepFlame. The system is also capable of learning from scientific articles, extracting key information to guide the simulation from initial setup to optimized results. Validation on a public benchmark shows FlamePilot achieved a perfect 1.0 executability score and a 0.438 success rate, surpassing the prior best reported agent scores of 0.625 and 0.250, respectively. Furthermore, a detailed case study on Moderate or Intense Low-oxygen Dilution (MILD) combustion simulation demonstrates its efficacy as a collaborative research copilot, where FlamePilot autonomously translated a research paper into a configured simulation, conducted the simulation, post-processed the results, proposed evidence-based refinements, and managed a multi-step parameter study to convergence under minimal human intervention. By adopting a transparent and interpretable paradigm, FlamePilot establishes a foundational framework for AI-empowered combustion modeling, fostering a collaborative partnership where the agent manages workflow orchestration, freeing the researcher for high-level analysis.

AppellateGen: A Benchmark for Appellate Legal Judgment Generation

Authors:Hongkun Yang, Lionel Z. Wang, Wei Fan, Yiran Hu, Lixu Wang, Chenyu Liu, Shenghong Fu, Haoyang Li, Xin Xu, Jiexin Zheng, Wei Dong
Date:2026-01-04 02:15:17

Legal judgment generation is a critical task in legal intelligence. However, existing research in legal judgment generation has predominantly focused on first-instance trials, relying on static fact-to-verdict mappings while neglecting the dialectical nature of appellate (second-instance) review. To address this, we introduce AppellateGen, a benchmark for second-instance legal judgment generation comprising 7,351 case pairs. The task requires models to draft legally binding judgments by reasoning over the initial verdict and evidentiary updates, thereby modeling the causal dependency between trial stages. We further propose a judicial Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)-based Legal Multi-Agent System (SLMAS) to simulate judicial workflows, which decomposes the generation process into discrete stages of issue identification, retrieval, and drafting. Experimental results indicate that while SLMAS improves logical consistency, the complexity of appellate reasoning remains a substantial challenge for current LLMs. The dataset and code are publicly available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AppellateGen-5763.

Warp-Cortex: An Asynchronous, Memory-Efficient Architecture for Million-Agent Cognitive Scaling on Consumer Hardware

Authors:Jorge L. Ruiz Williams
Date:2026-01-03 23:11:21

Current multi-agent Large Language Model (LLM) frameworks suffer from linear memory scaling, rendering "System 2" parallel reasoning impractical on consumer hardware. We present Warp Cortex, an asynchronous architecture that theoretically enables million-agent cognitive scaling by decoupling agent logic from physical memory. Through Singleton Weight Sharing and a novel Topological Synapse--inspired by hybrid landmarking techniques from Topological Data Analysis (TDA)--we reduce memory complexity from O(N * L) to O(1) for weights and O(N * k) for context, where k << L. By treating the KV-cache as a point cloud in latent space, we apply witness-complex-inspired sparsification to preserve persistent homological features of the context manifold. On a single NVIDIA RTX 4090, we empirically demonstrate 100 concurrent agents at 2.2 GB total VRAM, with theoretical capacity exceeding 1,000 agents before compute latency becomes the bottleneck. We further introduce Referential Injection, a non-intrusive KV-cache update mechanism that allows asynchronous sub-agents to influence primary generation without stream disruption.

MCP-SandboxScan: WASM-based Secure Execution and Runtime Analysis for MCP Tools

Authors:Zhuoran Tan, Run Hao, Jeremy Singer, Yutian Tang, Christos Anagnostopoulos
Date:2026-01-03 17:25:38

Tool-augmented LLM agents raise new security risks: tool executions can introduce runtime-only behaviors, including prompt injection and unintended exposure of external inputs (e.g., environment secrets or local files). While existing scanners often focus on static artifacts, analyzing runtime behavior is challenging because directly executing untrusted tools can itself be dangerous. We present MCP-SandboxScan, a lightweight framework motivated by the Model Context Protocol (MCP) that safely executes untrusted tools inside a WebAssembly/WASI sandbox and produces auditable reports of external-to-sink exposures. Our prototype (i) extracts LLM-relevant sinks from runtime outputs (prompt/messages and structured tool-return fields), (ii) instantiates external-input candidates from environment values, mounted file contents, and output-surfaced HTTP fetch intents, and (iii) links sources to sinks via snippet-based substring matching. Case studies on three representative tools show that MCP-SandboxScan can surface provenance evidence when external inputs appear in prompt/messages or tool-return payloads, and can expose filesystem capability violations as runtime evidence. We further compare against a lightweight static string-signature baseline and use a micro-benchmark to characterize false negatives under transformations and false positives from short-token collisions.

Atomizer: An LLM-based Collaborative Multi-Agent Framework for Intent-Driven Commit Untangling

Authors:Kangchen Zhu, Zhiliang Tian, Shangwen Wang, Mingyue Leng, Xiaoguang Mao
Date:2026-01-03 16:43:05

Composite commits, which entangle multiple unrelated concerns, are prevalent in software development and significantly hinder program comprehension and maintenance. Existing automated untangling methods, particularly state-of-the-art graph clustering-based approaches, are fundamentally limited by two issues. (1) They over-rely on structural information, failing to grasp the crucial semantic intent behind changes, and (2) they operate as ``single-pass'' algorithms, lacking a mechanism for the critical reflection and refinement inherent in human review processes. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Atomizer, a novel collaborative multi-agent framework for composite commit untangling. To address the semantic deficit, Atomizer employs an Intent-Oriented Chain-of-Thought (IO-CoT) strategy, which prompts large language models (LLMs) to infer the intent of each code change according to both the structure and the semantic information of code. To overcome the limitations of ``single-pass'' grouping, we employ two agents to establish a grouper-reviewer collaborative refinement loop, which mirrors human review practices by iteratively refining groupings until all changes in a cluster share the same underlying semantic intent. Extensive experiments on two benchmark C# and Java datasets demonstrate that Atomizer significantly outperforms several representative baselines. On average, it surpasses the state-of-the-art graph-based methods by over 6.0% on the C# dataset and 5.5% on the Java dataset. This superiority is particularly pronounced on complex commits, where Atomizer's performance advantage widens to over 16%.

ScienceDB AI: An LLM-Driven Agentic Recommender System for Large-Scale Scientific Data Sharing Services

Authors:Qingqing Long, Haotian Chen, Chenyang Zhao, Xiaolei Du, Xuezhi Wang, Pengyao Wang, Chengzan Li, Yuanchun Zhou, Hengshu Zhu
Date:2026-01-03 08:42:53

The rapid growth of AI for Science (AI4S) has underscored the significance of scientific datasets, leading to the establishment of numerous national scientific data centers and sharing platforms. Despite this progress, efficiently promoting dataset sharing and utilization for scientific research remains challenging. Scientific datasets contain intricate domain-specific knowledge and contexts, rendering traditional collaborative filtering-based recommenders inadequate. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer unprecedented opportunities to build conversational agents capable of deep semantic understanding and personalized recommendations. In response, we present ScienceDB AI, a novel LLM-driven agentic recommender system developed on Science Data Bank (ScienceDB), one of the largest global scientific data-sharing platforms. ScienceDB AI leverages natural language conversations and deep reasoning to accurately recommend datasets aligned with researchers' scientific intents and evolving requirements. The system introduces several innovations: a Scientific Intention Perceptor to extract structured experimental elements from complicated queries, a Structured Memory Compressor to manage multi-turn dialogues effectively, and a Trustworthy Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Trustworthy RAG) framework. The Trustworthy RAG employs a two-stage retrieval mechanism and provides citable dataset references via Citable Scientific Task Record (CSTR) identifiers, enhancing recommendation trustworthiness and reproducibility. Through extensive offline and online experiments using over 10 million real-world datasets, ScienceDB AI has demonstrated significant effectiveness. To our knowledge, ScienceDB AI is the first LLM-driven conversational recommender tailored explicitly for large-scale scientific dataset sharing services. The platform is publicly accessible at: https://ai.scidb.cn/en.

Harm in AI-Driven Societies: An Audit of Toxicity Adoption on Chirper.ai

Authors:Erica Coppolillo, Luca Luceri, Emilio Ferrara
Date:2026-01-03 06:33:08

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded in autonomous agents that participate in online social ecosystems, where interactions are sequential, cumulative, and only partially controlled. While prior work has documented the generation of toxic content by LLMs, far less is known about how exposure to harmful content shapes agent behavior over time, particularly in environments composed entirely of interacting AI agents. In this work, we study toxicity adoption of LLM-driven agents on Chirper.ai, a fully AI-driven social platform. Specifically, we model interactions in terms of stimuli (posts) and responses (comments), and by operationalizing exposure through observable interactions rather than inferred recommendation mechanisms. We conduct a large-scale empirical analysis of agent behavior, examining how response toxicity relates to stimulus toxicity, how repeated exposure affects the likelihood of toxic responses, and whether toxic behavior can be predicted from exposure alone. Our findings show that while toxic responses are more likely following toxic stimuli, a substantial fraction of toxicity emerges spontaneously, independent of exposure. At the same time, cumulative toxic exposure significantly increases the probability of toxic responding. We further introduce two influence metrics, the Influence-Driven Response Rate and the Spontaneous Response Rate, revealing a strong trade-off between induced and spontaneous toxicity. Finally, we show that the number of toxic stimuli alone enables accurate prediction of whether an agent will eventually produce toxic content. These results highlight exposure as a critical risk factor in the deployment of LLM agents and suggest that monitoring encountered content may provide a lightweight yet effective mechanism for auditing and mitigating harmful behavior in the wild.

ElecTwit: A Framework for Studying Persuasion in Multi-Agent Social Systems

Authors:Michael Bao
Date:2026-01-02 22:10:09

This paper introduces ElecTwit, a simulation framework designed to study persuasion within multi-agent systems, specifically emulating the interactions on social media platforms during a political election. By grounding our experiments in a realistic environment, we aimed to overcome the limitations of game-based simulations often used in prior research. We observed the comprehensive use of 25 specific persuasion techniques across most tested LLMs, encompassing a wider range than previously reported. The variations in technique usage and overall persuasion output between models highlight how different model architectures and training can impact the dynamics in realistic social simulations. Additionally, we observed unique phenomena such as "kernel of truth" messages and spontaneous developments with an "ink" obsession, where agents collectively demanded written proof. Our study provides a foundation for evaluating persuasive LLM agents in real-world contexts, ensuring alignment and preventing dangerous outcomes.

LLM Agents for Combinatorial Efficient Frontiers: Investment Portfolio Optimization

Authors:Simon Paquette-Greenbaum, Jiangbo Yu
Date:2026-01-02 18:02:13

Investment portfolio optimization is a task conducted in all major financial institutions. The Cardinality Constrained Mean-Variance Portfolio Optimization (CCPO) problem formulation is ubiquitous for portfolio optimization. The challenge of this type of portfolio optimization, a mixed-integer quadratic programming (MIQP) problem, arises from the intractability of solutions from exact solvers, where heuristic algorithms are used to find approximate portfolio solutions. CCPO entails many laborious and complex workflows and also requires extensive effort pertaining to heuristic algorithm development, where the combination of pooled heuristic solutions results in improved efficient frontiers. Hence, common approaches are to develop many heuristic algorithms. Agentic frameworks emerge as a promising candidate for many problems within combinatorial optimization, as they have been shown to be equally efficient with regard to automating large workflows and have been shown to be excellent in terms of algorithm development, sometimes surpassing human-level performance. This study implements a novel agentic framework for the CCPO and explores several concrete architectures. In benchmark problems, the implemented agentic framework matches state-of-the-art algorithms. Furthermore, complex workflows and algorithm development efforts are alleviated, while in the worst case, lower but acceptable error is reported.