LLM-agent - 2026-04-21

Agentic Forecasting using Sequential Bayesian Updating of Linguistic Beliefs

Authors:Kevin Murphy
Date:2026-04-20 17:57:51

We present BLF (Bayesian Linguistic Forecaster), an agentic system for binary forecasting that achieves state-of-the-art performance on the ForecastBench benchmark. The system is built on three ideas. (1) A Bayesian linguistic belief state: a semi-structured representation combining numerical probability estimates with natural-language evidence summaries, updated by the LLM at each step of an iterative tool-use loop. This contrasts with the common approach of appending all retrieved evidence to an ever-growing context. (2) Hierarchical multi-trial aggregation: running $K$ independent trials and combining them using logit-space shrinkage with a data-dependent prior. (3) Hierarchical calibration: Platt scaling with a hierarchical prior, which avoids over-shrinking extreme predictions for sources with skewed base rates. On 400 backtesting questions from the ForecastBench leaderboard, BLF outperforms all the top public methods, including Cassi, GPT-5, Grok~4.20, and Foresight-32B. Ablation studies show that the structured belief state is as impactful as web search access, and that shrinkage aggregation and hierarchical calibration each provide significant additional gains. In addition, we develop a robust back-testing framework with a leakage rate below 1.5\%, and use rigorous statistical methodology to compare different methods while controlling for various sources of noise.

MASS-RAG: Multi-Agent Synthesis Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Authors:Xingchen Xiao, Heyan Huang, Runheng Liu, Jincheng Xie
Date:2026-04-20 17:00:38

Large language models (LLMs) are widely used in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to incorporate external knowledge at inference time. However, when retrieved contexts are noisy, incomplete, or heterogeneous, a single generation process often struggles to reconcile evidence effectively. We propose \textbf{MASS-RAG}, a multi-agent synthesis approach to retrieval-augmented generation that structures evidence processing into multiple role-specialized agents. MASS-RAG applies distinct agents for evidence summarization, evidence extraction, and reasoning over retrieved documents, and combines their outputs through a dedicated synthesis stage to produce the final answer. This design exposes multiple intermediate evidence views, allowing the model to compare and integrate complementary information before answer generation. Experiments on four benchmarks show that MASS-RAG consistently improves performance over strong RAG baselines, particularly in settings where relevant evidence is distributed across retrieved contexts.

Progressive Online Video Understanding with Evidence-Aligned Timing and Transparent Decisions

Authors:Kecheng Zhang, Zongxin Yang, Mingfei Han, Haihong Hao, Yunzhi Zhuge, Changlin Li, Junhan Zhao, Zhihui Li, Xiaojun Chang
Date:2026-04-20 16:15:33

Visual agents operating in the wild must respond to queries precisely when sufficient evidence first appears in a video stream, a critical capability that is overlooked by conventional video LLMs evaluated in offline settings. The shift to an online, streaming paradigm introduces significant challenges: a lack of decision transparency, the difficulty of aligning response timing with visual evidence, and the need to maintain a global, causally consistent understanding under tight computational budgets. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework that decouples reasoning control from memory integration. We introduce \textbf{\model{}}, an instantiation of this framework with two core components. First, the \emph{Active Thinking Decision Maker (ATDM)} is a transparent reasoning controller that externalizes its decision process using observable progress ($\boldsymbolρ$) and confidence ($\boldsymbol{c}$) metrics. This allows it to precisely time its response $t_r$ to match the first-sufficient-evidence timestamp $t^\star$ while streaming its reasoning to the user. Second, the \emph{Hierarchical Progressive Semantic Integration (HPSI)} module acts as an efficient memory system. It employs a set of learnable, multi-level aggregation tokens that are propagated across clips to build a rich, global cognitive state without exceeding token budgets. %Our approach sets a new standard on key online video understanding benchmarks, achieving strong performance of \textbf{71.6\%} on StreamingBench and \textbf{46.9\%} on OVOBench, demonstrating a robust solution for evidence-aligned and transparent online video analysis. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of ATDM and HPSI, e.g., Thinking-QwenVL improves the accuracy of the previous state-of-the-art from 67.63\% to 71.60\% on the StreamingBench benchmark.

MedProbeBench: Systematic Benchmarking at Deep Evidence Integration for Expert-level Medical Guideline

Authors:Jiyao Liu, Jianghan Shen, Sida Song, Tianbin Li, Xiaojia Liu, Rongbin Li, Ziyan Huang, Jiashi Lin, Junzhi Ning, Changkai Ji, Siqi Luo, Wenjie Li, Chenglong Ma, Ming Hu, Jing Xiong, Jin Ye, Bin Fu, Ningsheng Xu, Yirong Chen, Lei Jin, Hong Chen, Junjun He
Date:2026-04-20 15:37:46

Recent advances in deep research systems enable large language models to retrieve, synthesize, and reason over large-scale external knowledge. In medicine, developing clinical guidelines critically depends on such deep evidence integration. However, existing benchmarks fail to evaluate this capability in realistic workflows requiring multi-step evidence integration and expert-level judgment. To address this gap, we introduce MedProbeBench, the first benchmark leveraging high-quality clinical guidelines as expert-level references. Medical guidelines, with their rigorous standards in neutrality and verifiability, represent the pinnacle of medical expertise and pose substantial challenges for deep research agents. For evaluation, we propose MedProbe-Eval, a comprehensive evaluation framework featuring: (1) Holistic Rubrics with 1,200+ task-adaptive rubric criteria for comprehensive quality assessment, and (2) Fine-grained Evidence Verification for rigorous validation of evidence precision, grounded in 5,130+ atomic claims. Evaluation of 17 LLMs and deep research agents reveals critical gaps in evidence integration and guideline generation, underscoring the substantial distance between current capabilities and expert-level clinical guideline development. Project: https://github.com/uni-medical/MedProbeBench

TypeScript Repository Indexing for Code Agent Retrieval

Authors:Junsong Pu, Yichen Li, Zhuangbin Chen
Date:2026-04-20 15:31:41

Graph-based code indexing can improve context retrieval for LLM-based code agents by preserving call chains and dependency relationships that keyword search and similarity retrieval often miss. ABCoder is an open-source framework that parses codebases into a function-level code index called UniAST, but its existing parsers combine lightweight AST parsers for syntactic analysis with language servers for semantic resolution, but because LSP-based resolution requires a JSON-RPC call for each symbol lookup, these per-symbol calls become a bottleneck on large TypeScript repositories. We present abcoder-ts-parser, a TypeScript parser built on the TypeScript Compiler API that works directly with the compiler's AST, semantic information, and module resolution logic. We evaluate the parser on three open-source TypeScript projects with up to 1.2 million lines of code and find that it produces reliable indexes significantly more efficiently than the existing architecture. For a live demonstration, watch: https://youtu.be/ryssr7ouvdE

StepPO: Step-Aligned Policy Optimization for Agentic Reinforcement Learning

Authors:Daoyu Wang, Qingchuan Li, Mingyue Cheng, Jie Ouyang, Shuo Yu, Qi Liu, Enhong Chen
Date:2026-04-20 15:22:39

General agents have given rise to phenomenal applications such as OpenClaw and Claude Code. As these agent systems (a.k.a. Harnesses) strive for bolder goals, they demand increasingly stronger agentic capabilities from foundation Large Language Models (LLMs). Agentic Reinforcement Learning (RL) is emerging as a central post-training paradigm for empowering LLMs with these capabilities and is playing an increasingly pivotal role in agent training. Unlike single-turn token-level alignment or reasoning enhancement, as in RLHF and RLVR, Agentic RL targets multi-turn interactive settings, where the goal is to optimize core agentic capabilities such as decision making and tool use while addressing new challenges including delayed and sparse rewards, as well as long and variable context. As a result, the token-centric modeling and optimization paradigm inherited from traditional LLM RL is becoming increasingly inadequate for capturing real LLM agent behavior. In this paper, we present StepPO as a position on step-level Agentic RL. We argue that the conventional token-level Markov Decision Process (MDP) should be advanced to a step-level MDP formulation, and that the step, rather than the token, should be regarded as the proper action representation for LLM agents. We then propose step-level credit assignment as the natural optimization counterpart of this formulation, thereby aligning policy optimization and reward propagation with the granularity of agent decisions. Finally, we discuss the key systems designs required to realize step-level Agentic RL in practice and preliminary experiments provide initial evidence for the effectiveness of this perspective. We hope that the step-aligned, step-level paradigm embodied in StepPO offers the Agentic RL community a useful lens for understanding agent behavior and helps advance LLMs toward stronger general-agent capabilities.

OpenGame: Open Agentic Coding for Games

Authors:Yilei Jiang, Jinyuan Hu, Qianyin Xiao, Yaozhi Zheng, Ruize Ma, Kaituo Feng, Jiaming Han, Tianshuo Peng, Kaixuan Fan, Manyuan Zhang, Xiangyu Yue
Date:2026-04-20 15:17:03

Game development sits at the intersection of creative design and intricate software engineering, demanding the joint orchestration of game engines, real-time loops, and tightly coupled state across many files. While Large Language Models (LLMs) and code agents now solve isolated programming tasks with ease, they consistently stumble when asked to produce a fully playable game from a high-level design, collapsing under cross-file inconsistencies, broken scene wiring, and logical incoherence. We bridge this gap with OpenGame, the first open-source agentic framework explicitly designed for end-to-end web game creation. At its core lies Game Skill, a reusable, evolving capability composed of a Template Skill that grows a library of project skeletons from experience and a Debug Skill that maintains a living protocol of verified fixes - together enabling the agent to scaffold stable architectures and systematically repair integration errors rather than patch isolated syntax bugs. Powering this framework is GameCoder-27B, a code LLM specialized for game engine mastery through a three-stage pipeline of continual pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, and execution-grounded reinforcement learning. Since verifying interactive playability is fundamentally harder than checking static code, we further introduce OpenGame-Bench, an evaluation pipeline that scores agentic game generation along Build Health, Visual Usability, and Intent Alignment via headless browser execution and VLM judging. Across 150 diverse game prompts, OpenGame establishes a new state-of-the-art. We hope OpenGame pushes code agents beyond discrete software engineering problems and toward building complex, interactive real-world applications. Our framework will be fully open-sourced.

Dissecting AI Trading: Behavioral Finance and Market Bubbles

Authors:Shumiao Ouyang, Pengfei Sui
Date:2026-04-20 15:00:53

We study how AI agents form expectations and trade in experimental asset markets. Using a simulated open-call auction populated by autonomous Large Language Model (LLM) agents, we document three main findings. First, AI agents exhibit classic behavioral patterns: a pronounced disposition effect and recency-weighted extrapolative beliefs. Second, these individual-level patterns aggregate into equilibrium dynamics that replicate classic experimental findings (Smith et al., 1988), including the predictive power of excess demand for future prices and the positive relationship between disagreement and trading volume. Third, by analyzing the agents' reasoning text through a twenty-mechanism scoring framework, we show that targeted prompt interventions causally amplify or suppress specific behavioral mechanisms, significantly altering the magnitude of market bubbles.

Training and Agentic Inference Strategies for LLM-based Manim Animation Generation

Authors:Ravidu Suien Rammuni Silva, Ahmad Lotfi, Isibor Kennedy Ihianle, Golnaz Shahtahmassebi, Jordan J. Bird
Date:2026-04-20 14:54:06

Generating programmatic animation using libraries such as Manim presents unique challenges for Large Language Models (LLMs), requiring spatial reasoning, temporal sequencing, and familiarity with domain-specific APIs that are underrepresented in general pre-training data. A systematic study of how training and inference strategies interact in this setting is lacking in current research. This study introduces ManimTrainer, a training pipeline that combines Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT) with Reinforcement Learning (RL) based Group Relative Policy Optimisation (GRPO) using a unified reward signal that fuses code and visual assessment signals, and ManimAgent, an inference pipeline featuring Renderer-in-the-loop (RITL) and API documentation-augmented RITL (RITL-DOC) strategies. Using these techniques, this study presents the first unified training and inference study for text-to-code-to-video transformation with Manim. It evaluates 17 open-source sub-30B LLMs across nine combinations of training and inference strategies using ManimBench. Results show that SFT generally improves code quality, while GRPO enhances visual outputs and increases the models' responsiveness to extrinsic signals during self-correction at inference time. The Qwen 3 Coder 30B model with GRPO and RITL-DOC achieved the highest overall performance, with a 94% Render Success Rate (RSR) and 85.7% Visual Similarity (VS) to reference videos, surpassing the baseline GPT-4.1 model by +3 percentage points in VS. Additionally, the analysis shows that the correlation between code and visual metrics strengthens with SFT and GRPO but weakens with inference-time enhancements, highlighting the complementary roles of training and agentic inference strategies in Manim animation generation.

ComPASS: Towards Personalized Agentic Social Support via Tool-Augmented Companionship

Authors:Zhaopei Huang, Yanfeng Jia, Jiayi Zhao, Xinjie Zhang, Wenxuan Wang, Qin Jin
Date:2026-04-20 14:49:16

Developing compassionate interactive systems requires agents to not only understand user emotions but also provide diverse, substantive support. While recent works explore empathetic dialogue generation, they remain limited in response form and content, struggling to satisfy diverse needs across users and contexts. To address this, we explore empowering agents with external tools to execute diverse actions. Grounded in the psychological concept of "social support", this paradigm delivers substantive, human-like companionship. Specifically, we first design a dozen user-centric tools simulating various multimedia applications, which can cover different types of social support behaviors in human-agent interaction scenarios. We then construct ComPASS-Bench, the first personalized social support benchmark for LLM-based agents, via multi-step automated synthesis and manual refinement. Based on ComPASS-Bench, we further synthesize tool use records to fine-tune the Qwen3-8B model, yielding a task-specific ComPASS-Qwen. Comprehensive evaluations across two settings reveal that while the evaluated LLMs can generate valid tool-calling requests with high success rates, significant gaps remain in final response quality. Moreover, tool-augmented responses achieve better overall performance than directly producing conversational empathy. Notably, our trained ComPASS-Qwen demonstrates substantial improvements over its base model, achieving comparable performance to several large-scale models. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/hzp3517/ComPASS.

HiGMem: A Hierarchical and LLM-Guided Memory System for Long-Term Conversational Agents

Authors:Shuqi Cao, Jingyi He, Fei Tan
Date:2026-04-20 14:44:12

Long-term conversational large language model (LLM) agents require memory systems that can recover relevant evidence from historical interactions without overwhelming the answer stage with irrelevant context. However, existing memory systems, including hierarchical ones, still often rely solely on vector similarity for retrieval. It tends to produce bloated evidence sets: adding many superficially similar dialogue turns yields little additional recall, but lowers retrieval precision, increases answer-stage context cost, and makes retrieved memories harder to inspect and manage. To address this, we propose HiGMem (Hierarchical and LLM-Guided Memory System), a two-level event-turn memory system that allows LLMs to use event summaries as semantic anchors to predict which related turns are worth reading. This allows the model to inspect high-level event summaries first and then focus on a smaller set of potentially useful turns, providing a concise and reliable evidence set through reasoning, while avoiding the retrieval overhead that would be excessively high compared to vector retrieval. On the LoCoMo10 benchmark, HiGMem achieves the best F1 on four of five question categories and improves adversarial F1 from 0.54 to 0.78 over A-Mem, while retrieving an order of magnitude fewer turns. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/ZeroLoss-Lab/HiGMem.

AJ-Bench: Benchmarking Agent-as-a-Judge for Environment-Aware Evaluation

Authors:Wentao Shi, Yu Wang, Yuyang Zhao, Yuxin Chen, Fuli Feng, Xueyuan Hao, Xi Su, Qi Gu, Hui Su, Xunliang Cai, Xiangnan He
Date:2026-04-20 13:23:38

As reinforcement learning continues to scale the training of large language model-based agents, reliably verifying agent behaviors in complex environments has become increasingly challenging. Existing approaches rely on rule-based verifiers or LLM-as-a-Judge models, which struggle to generalize beyond narrow domains. Agent-as-a-Judge addresses this limitation by actively interacting with environments and tools to acquire verifiable evidence, yet its capabilities remain underexplored. We introduce a benchmark AJ-Bench to systematically evaluate Agent-as-a-Judge across three domains-search, data systems, and graphical user interfaces-comprising 155 tasks and 516 annotated trajectories. The benchmark comprehensively assesses judge agents' abilities in information acquisition, state verification, and process verification. Experiments demonstrate consistent performance gains over LLM-as-a-Judge baselines, while also revealing substantial open challenges in agent-based verification. Our data and code are available at https://aj-bench.github.io/.

AgenTEE: Confidential LLM Agent Execution on Edge Devices

Authors:Sina Abdollahi, Mohammad M Maheri, Javad Forough, Amir Al Sadi, Josh Millar, David Kotz, Marios Kogias, Hamed Haddadi
Date:2026-04-20 13:13:31

Large Language Model (LLM) agents provide powerful automation capabilities, but they also create a substantially broader attack surface than traditional applications due to their tight integration with non-deterministic models and third-party services. While current deployments primarily rely on cloud-hosted services, emerging designs increasingly execute agents directly on edge devices to reduce latency and enhance user privacy. However, securely hosting such complex agent pipelines on edge devices remains challenging. These deployments must protect proprietary assets (e.g., system prompts and model weights) and sensitive runtime state on heterogeneous platforms that are vulnerable to software attacks and potentially controlled by malicious users. To address these challenges, we present AgenTEE, a system for deploying confidential agent pipelines on edge devices. AgenTEE places the agent runtime, inference engine, and third-party applications into independently attested confidential virtual machines (cVMs) and mediates their interaction through explicit, verifiable communication channels. Built on Arm Confidential Compute Architecture (CCA), a recent extension to Arm platforms, AgenTEE enforces strong system-level isolation of sensitive assets and runtime state. Our evaluation shows that such multi-cVMs system is practical, achieving near-native performance with less than 5.15% runtime overhead compared to commodity OS multi-process deployments.

Towards an Agentic LLM-based Approach to Requirement Formalization from Unstructured Specifications

Authors:Alberto Tagliaferro, Bruno Guindani, Livia Lestingi, Matteo Rossi
Date:2026-04-20 13:12:04

Early-stage specifications of safety-critical systems are typically expressed in natural language, making it difficult to derive formal properties suitable for verification and needed to guarantee safety. While recent Large Language Model (LLM)-based approaches can generate formal artifacts from text, they mainly focus on syntactic correctness and do not ensure semantic alignment between informal requirements and formally verifiable properties. We propose an agentic methodology that automatically extracts verification-ready properties from unstructured specifications. The modular pipeline combines requirement extraction, compatibility filtering with respect to a target formalism, and translation into formal properties. Experimental results across three scenarios show that the pipeline generates syntactically and semantically aligned formal properties with a 77.8% accuracy. By explicitly accounting for modeling and verification constraints, the approach is a paving step towards exploiting Artificial Intelligence (AI) to bridge the gap between informal descriptions and semantically meaningful formal verification.

WebCompass: Towards Multimodal Web Coding Evaluation for Code Language Models

Authors:Xinping Lei, Xinyu Che, Junqi Xiong, Chenchen Zhang, Yukai Huang, Chenyu Zhou, Haoyang Huang, Minghao Liu, Letian Zhu, Hongyi Ye, Jinhua Hao, Ken Deng, Zizheng Zhan, Han Li, Dailin Li, Yifan Yao, Ming Sun, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Jiaheng Liu
Date:2026-04-20 13:09:38

Large language models are rapidly evolving into interactive coding agents capable of end-to-end web coding, yet existing benchmarks evaluate only narrow slices of this capability, typically text-conditioned generation with static-correctness metrics, leaving visual fidelity, interaction quality, and codebase-level reasoning largely unmeasured. We introduce WebCompass, a multimodal benchmark that provides unified lifecycle evaluation of web engineering capability. Recognizing that real-world web coding is an iterative cycle of generation, editing, and repair, WebCompass spans three input modalities (text, image, video) and three task types (generation, editing, repair), yielding seven task categories that mirror professional workflows. Through a multi-stage, human-in-the-loop pipeline, we curate instances covering 15 generation domains, 16 editing operation types, and 11 repair defect types, each annotated at Easy/Medium/Hard levels. For evaluation, we adopt a checklist-guided LLM-as-a-Judge protocol for editing and repair, and propose a novel Agent-as-a-Judge paradigm for generation that autonomously executes generated websites in a real browser, explores interactive behaviors via the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and iteratively synthesizes targeted test cases, closely approximating human acceptance testing. We evaluate representative closed-source and open-source models and observe that: (1) closed-source models remain substantially stronger and more balanced; (2) editing and repair exhibit distinct difficulty profiles, with repair preserving interactivity better but remaining execution-challenging; (3) aesthetics is the most persistent bottleneck, especially for open-source models; and (4) framework choice materially affects outcomes, with Vue consistently challenging while React and Vanilla/HTML perform more strongly depending on task type.

Training LLM Agents for Spontaneous, Reward-Free Self-Evolution via World Knowledge Exploration

Authors:Qifan Zhang, Dongyang Ma, Tianqing Fang, Jia Li, Jing Tang, Nuo Chen, Haitao Mi, Yan Wang
Date:2026-04-20 11:54:20

Most agents today ``self-evolve'' by following rewards and rules defined by humans. However, this process remains fundamentally dependent on external supervision; without human guidance, the evolution stops. In this work, we train agents to possess an intrinsic meta-evolution capability to spontaneously learn about unseen environments prior to task execution. To instill this ability, we design an outcome-based reward mechanism that measures how much an agent's self-generated world knowledge improves its success rate on downstream tasks. This reward signal is used exclusively during the training phase to teach the model how to explore and summarize effectively. At inference time, the agent requires no external rewards or human instructions. It spontaneously performs native self-evolution to adapt to unknown environments using its internal parameters. When applied to Qwen3-30B and Seed-OSS-36B, this shift to native evolution yields a 20% performance increase on WebVoyager and WebWalker. Most strikingly, the generated world knowledge even enables a compact 14B Qwen3 model to outperform the unassisted Gemini-2.5-Flash, establishing a new paradigm for truly evolving agents.

Architectural Design Decisions in AI Agent Harnesses

Authors:Hu Wei
Date:2026-04-20 10:39:34

AI agent systems increasingly rely on reusable non-LLM engineering infrastructure that packages tool mediation, context handling, delegation, safety control, and orchestration. Yet the architectural design decisions in this surrounding infrastructure remain understudied. This paper presents a protocol-guided, source-grounded empirical study of 70 publicly available agent-system projects, addressing three questions: which design-decision dimensions recur across projects, which co-occurrences structure those decisions, and which typical architectural patterns emerge. Methodologically, we contribute a transparent investigation procedure for analyzing heterogeneous agent-system corpora through source-code and technical-material reading. Empirically, we identify five recurring design dimensions (subagent architecture, context management, tool systems, safety mechanisms, and orchestration) and find that the corpus favors file-persistent, hybrid, and hierarchical context strategies; registry-oriented tool systems remain dominant while MCP- and plugin-oriented extensions are emerging; and intermediate isolation is common but high-assurance audit is rare. Cross-project co-occurrence analysis reveals that deeper coordination pairs with more explicit context services, stronger execution environments with more structured governance, and formalized tool-registration boundaries with broader ecosystem ambitions. We synthesize five recurring architectural patterns spanning lightweight tools, balanced CLI frameworks, multi-agent orchestrators, enterprise systems, and scenario-verticalized projects. The result provides an evidence-based account of architectural regularities in agent-system engineering, with grounded guidance for framework designers, selectors, and researchers.

First, Do No Harm (With LLMs): Mitigating Racial Bias via Agentic Workflows

Authors:Sihao Xing, Zaur Gouliev
Date:2026-04-20 10:02:38

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in clinical settings, raising concerns about racial bias in both generated medical text and clinical reasoning. Existing studies have identified bias in medical LLMs, but many focus on single models and give less attention to mitigation. This study uses the EU AI Act as a governance lens to evaluate five widely used LLMs across two tasks, namely synthetic patient-case generation and differential diagnosis ranking. Using race-stratified epidemiological distributions in the United States and expert differential diagnosis lists as benchmarks, we apply structured prompt templates and a two-part evaluation design to examine implicit and explicit racial bias. All models deviated from observed racial distributions in the synthetic case generation task, with GPT-4.1 showing the smallest overall deviation. In the differential diagnosis task, DeepSeek V3 produced the strongest overall results across the reported metrics. When embedded in an agentic workflow, DeepSeek V3 showed an improvement of 0.0348 in mean p-value, 0.1166 in median p-value, and 0.0949 in mean difference relative to the standalone model, although improvement was not uniform across every metric. These findings support multi-metric bias evaluation for AI systems used in medical settings and suggest that retrieval-based agentic workflows may reduce some forms of explicit bias in benchmarked diagnostic tasks. Detailed prompt templates, experimental datasets, and code pipelines are available on our GitHub.

Topology-Aware LLM-Driven Social Simulation: A Unified Framework for Efficient and Realistic Agent Dynamics

Authors:Yuwei Xu, Shulun Zhang, Yingli Zhou, Shipei Zeng, Laks V. S. Lakshmanan, Chenhao Ma
Date:2026-04-20 09:33:47

Social simulation is essential for understanding collective human behavior by modeling how individual interactions give rise to large-scale social dynamics. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled multi-agent frameworks with human-like reasoning and communication capabilities. However, existing LLM-based simulations treat social networks as fixed communication scaffolds, failing to leverage the structural signals that shape behavioral convergence and heterogeneous influence in real-world systems, which often leads to inefficient and unrealistic dynamics. To address this challenge, we propose TopoSim, a unified topology-aware social simulation framework that explicitly integrates structural reasoning into agent interactions along two complementary dimensions. First, TopoSim aligns agents with similar structural roles and interaction contexts into shared backbone units, enabling coordinated updates that reduce redundant computation while preserving emergent social dynamics. Second, TopoSim models social influence as a structure-induced signal, introducing heterogeneous interaction patterns grounded in network topology rather than uniform influence assumptions. Extensive experiments across three social simulation frameworks and diverse datasets demonstrate that TopoSim achieves comparable or improved simulation fidelity while reducing token consumption by 50 - 90%. Moreover, our approach more accurately reproduces key structural phenomena observed in real-world social systems and exhibits strong generalization and scalability.

Diversity Collapse in Multi-Agent LLM Systems: Structural Coupling and Collective Failure in Open-Ended Idea Generation

Authors:Nuo Chen, Yicheng Tong, Yuzhe Yang, Yufei He, Xueyi Zhang, Zou Qingyun, Qian Wang, Bingsheng He
Date:2026-04-20 09:27:49

Multi-agent systems (MAS) are increasingly used for open-ended idea generation, driven by the expectation that collective interaction will broaden the exploration diversity. However, when and why such collaboration truly expands the solution space remains unclear. We present a systematic empirical study of diversity in MAS-based ideation across three bottom-up levels: model intelligence, agent cognition, and system dynamics. At the model level, we identify a compute efficiency paradox, where stronger, highly aligned models yield diminishing marginal diversity despite higher per-sample quality. At the cognition level, authority-driven dynamics suppress semantic diversity compared to junior-dominated groups. At the system level, group-size scaling yields diminishing returns and dense communication topologies accelerate premature convergence. We characterize these outcomes as collective failures emerging from structural coupling, a process where interaction inadvertently contracts agent exploration and triggers diversity collapse. Our analysis shows that this collapse arises primarily from the interaction structure rather than inherent model insufficiency, highlighting the importance of preserving independence and disagreement when designing MAS for creative tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/Xtra-Computing/MAS_Diversity.

AIT Academy: Cultivating the Complete Agent with a Confucian Three-Domain Curriculum

Authors:Jiaqi Li, Lvyang Zhang, Yang Zhao, Wen Lu, Lidong Zhai
Date:2026-04-20 09:12:47

What does it mean to give an AI agent a complete education? Current agent development produces specialists systems optimized for a single capability dimension, whether tool use, code generation, or security awareness that exhibit predictable deficits wherever they were not trained. We argue this pattern reflects a structural absence: there is no curriculum theory for agents, no principled account of what a fully developed agent should know, be, and be able to do across the full scope of intelligent behavior. This paper introduces the AIT Academy (Agents Institute of Technology Academy), a curriculum framework for cultivating AI agents across the tripartite structure of human knowledge. Grounded in Kagan's Three Cultures and UNESCO ISCED-F 2013, AIT organizes agent capability development into three domains: Natural Science and Technical Reasoning (Domain I), Humanities and Creative Expression (Domain II), and Social Science and Ethical Reasoning (Domain III). The Confucian Six Arts (liuyi) a 2,500-year-old holistic education system are reinterpreted as behavioral archetypes that map directly onto trainable agent capabilities within each domain. Three representative training grounds instantiate the framework across multiple backbone LLMs: the ClawdGO Security Dojo (Domain I), Athen's Academy (Domain II), and the Alt Mirage Stage (Domain III). Experiments demonstrate a 15.9-point improvement in security capability scores under weakest-first curriculum scheduling, and a 7-percentage-point gain in social reasoning performance under principled attribution modeling. A cross-domain finding Security Awareness Calibration Pathology (SACP), in which over-trained Domain I agents fail on out-of-distribution evaluation illustrates the diagnostic value of a multi-domain perspective unavailable to any single-domain framework.

RAVEN: Retrieval-Augmented Vulnerability Exploration Network for Memory Corruption Analysis in User Code and Binary Programs

Authors:Parteek Jamwal, Minghao Shao, Boyuan Chen, Achyuta Muthuvelan, Asini Subanya, Boubacar Ballo, Kashish Satija, Mariam Shafey, Mohamed Mahmoud, Moncif Dahaji Bouffi, Pasindu Wickramasinghe, Siyona Goel, Yaakulya Sabbani, Hakim Hacid, Mthandazo Ndhlovu, Eleanna Kafeza, Sanjay Rawat, Muhammad Shafique
Date:2026-04-20 08:29:48

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various cybersecurity tasks, including vulnerability classification, detection, and patching. However, their potential in automated vulnerability report documentation and analysis remains underexplored. We present RAVEN (Retrieval Augmented Vulnerability Exploration Network), a framework leveraging LLM agents and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to synthesize comprehensive vulnerability analysis reports. Given vulnerable source code, RAVEN generates reports following the Google Project Zero Root Cause Analysis template. The framework uses four modules: an Explorer agent for vulnerability identification, a RAG engine retrieving relevant knowledge from curated databases including Google Project Zero reports and CWE entries, an Analyst agent for impact and exploitation assessment, and a Reporter agent for structured report generation. To ensure quality, RAVEN includes a task specific LLM Judge evaluating reports across structural integrity, ground truth alignment, code reasoning quality, and remediation quality. We evaluate RAVEN on 105 vulnerable code samples covering 15 CWE types from the NIST-SARD dataset. Results show an average quality score of 54.21%, supporting the effectiveness of our approach for automated vulnerability documentation.

LiteResearcher: A Scalable Agentic RL Training Framework for Deep Research Agent

Authors:Wanli Li, Bince Qu, Bo Pan, Jianyu Zhang, Zheng Liu, Pan Zhang, Wei Chen, Bo Zhang
Date:2026-04-20 08:11:09

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful training paradigm for LLM-based agents. However, scaling agentic RL for deep research remains constrained by two coupled challenges: hand-crafted synthetic data fails to elicit genuine real-world search capabilities, and real-world search dependency during RL training introduces instability and prohibitive cost, which limits the scalability of Agentic RL. LiteResearcher is a training framework that makes Agentic RL scalable: by constructing a lite virtual world that mirrors real-world search dynamics, we enable a continuously improving training recipe that empowers a tiny search agent to outperform large-scale open-source and commercial models (e.g., Tongyi DeepResearch and Claude-4.5 Sonnet). Specifically, on common benchmarks such as GAIA and Xbench, our LiteResearcher-4B achieves open-source state-of-the-art results of 71.3% and 78.0% respectively, demonstrating that scalable RL training is a key enabler for Deep Research Agents.

Latent Preference Modeling for Cross-Session Personalized Tool Calling

Authors:Yejin Yoon, Minseo Kim, Taeuk Kim
Date:2026-04-20 06:57:50

Users often omit essential details in their requests to LLM-based agents, resulting in under-specified inputs for tool use. This poses a fundamental challenge for tool-augmented agents, as API execution typically requires complete arguments, highlighting the need for personalized tool calling. To study this problem, we introduce MPT, a benchmark comprising 265 multi-session dialogues that cover three challenges: Preference Recall, Preference Induction, and Preference Transfer. We also propose PRefine, a test-time memory-augmented method that represents user preferences as evolving hypotheses. Through a generate--verify--refine loop, it extracts reusable constraints from history and improves tool-calling accuracy while using only 1.24% of the tokens required by full-history prompting. These results indicate that robust personalization in agentic systems depends on memory that captures the reasons behind user choices, not just the choices themselves.

GraSP: Graph-Structured Skill Compositions for LLM Agents

Authors:Tianle Xia, Lingxiang Hu, Yiding Sun, Ming Xu, Lan Xu, Siying Wang, Wei Xu, Jie Jiang
Date:2026-04-20 06:31:11

Skill ecosystems for LLM agents have matured rapidly, yet recent benchmarks show that providing agents with more skills does not monotonically improve performance -- focused sets of 2-3 skills outperform comprehensive documentation, and excessive skills actually hurt. The bottleneck has shifted from skill availability to skill orchestration: agents need not more skills, but a structural mechanism to select, compose, and execute them with explicit causal dependencies. We propose GraSP, the first executable skill graph architecture that introduces a compilation layer between skill retrieval and execution. GraSP transforms flat skill sets into typed directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) with precondition-effect edges, executes them with node-level verification, and performs locality-bounded repair through five typed operators -- reducing replanning from O(N) to O(d^h). Across ALFWorld, ScienceWorld, WebShop, and InterCode with eight LLM backbones, GraSP outperforms ReAct, Reflexion, ExpeL, and flat skill baselines in every configuration, improving reward by up to +19 points over the strongest baseline while cutting environment steps by up to 41%. GraSP's advantage grows with task complexity and is robust to both skill over-retrieval and quality degradation, confirming that structured orchestration -- not larger skill libraries -- is the key to reliable agent execution.

TitanCA: Lessons from Orchestrating LLM Agents to Discover 100+ CVEs

Authors:Ting Zhang, Yikun Li, Chengran Yang, Ratnadira Widyasari, Yue Liu, Ngoc Tan Bui, Phuc Thanh Nguyen, Yan Naing Tun, Ivana Clairine Irsan, Huu Hung Nguyen, Huihui Huang, Jinfeng Jiang, Lwin Khin Shar, Eng Lieh Ouh, David Lo, Hong Jin Kang, Yide Yin, Wen Bin Leow
Date:2026-04-20 06:12:51

Software vulnerabilities remain one of the most persistent threats to modern digital infrastructure. While static application security testing (SAST) tools have long served as the first line of defense, they suffer from high false-positive rates. This article presents TitanCA, a collaborative project between Singapore Management University and GovTech Singapore that orchestrates multiple large language model (LLM)-powered agents into a unified vulnerability discovery pipeline. Applied in open-source software, TitanCA has discovered 203 confirmed zero-day vulnerabilities and yielded 118 CVEs. We describe the four-module architecture, i.e., matching, filtering, inspection, and adaptation, and share key lessons from building and deploying an LLM-based vulnerability discovery solution in practice.

Learning from AVA: Early Lessons from a Curated and Trustworthy Generative AI for Policy and Development Research

Authors:Nimisha Karnatak, Mohamad Chatila, Daniel Alejandro Pinzón Hernández, Reza Yazdanfar, Michelle Dugas, Renos Vakis
Date:2026-04-20 05:53:52

General-purpose LLMs pose misinformation risks for development and policy experts, lacking epistemic humility for verifiable outputs. We present AVA (AI + Verified Analysis), a GenAI platform built on a curated library of over 4,000 World Bank Reports with multilingual capabilities. AVA's multi-agent pipeline enables users to query and receive evidence-based syntheses. It operationalizes epistemic humility through two mechanisms: citation verifiability (tracing claims to sources) and reasoned abstention (declining unsupported queries with justification and redirection). We conducted an in-the-wild evaluation with over 2,200 individuals from heterogeneous organisations and roles in 116 countries, via log analysis, surveys, and 20 interviews. Difference-in-Differences estimates associate sustained engagement with 2.4-3.9 hours saved weekly. Qualitatively, participants used AVA as a specialized "evidence engine"; reasoned abstention clarified scope boundaries, and trust was calibrated through institutional provenance and page-anchored citations. We contribute design guidelines for specialized AI and articulate a vision for "ecosystem-aware" Humble AI.

WebUncertainty: Dual-Level Uncertainty Driven Planning and Reasoning For Autonomous Web Agent

Authors:Lingfeng Zhang, yongan sun, Jinpeng Hu, Hui Ma, yang ying, Kuien Liu, Zenglin Shi, Meng Wang
Date:2026-04-20 05:19:49

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have empowered autonomous web agents to execute natural language instructions directly on real-world webpages. However, existing agents often struggle with complex tasks involving dynamic interactions and long-horizon execution due to rigid planning strategies and hallucination-prone reasoning. To address these limitations, we propose WebUncertainty, a novel autonomous agent framework designed to tackle dual-level uncertainty in planning and reasoning. Specifically, we design a Task Uncertainty-Driven Adaptive Planning Mechanism that adaptively selects planning modes to navigate unknown environments. Furthermore, we introduce an Action Uncertainty-Driven Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) Reasoning Mechanism. This mechanism incorporates the Confidence-induced Action Uncertainty (ConActU) strategy to quantify both aleatoric uncertainty (AU) and epistemic uncertainty (EU), thereby optimizing the search process and guiding robust decision-making. Experimental results on the WebArena and WebVoyager benchmarks demonstrate that WebUncertainty achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

Do LLMs Need to See Everything? A Benchmark and Study of Failures in LLM-driven Smartphone Automation using Screentext vs. Screenshots

Authors:Shiquan Zhang, Tianyi Zhang, Le Fang, Simon D'Alfonso, Hong Jia, Vassilis Kostakos
Date:2026-04-20 05:15:14

With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), mobile agents have emerged as promising tools for phone automation, simulating human interactions on screens to accomplish complex tasks. However, these agents often suffer from low accuracy, misinterpretation of user instructions, and failure on challenging tasks, with limited prior work examining why and where they fail. To address this, we introduce DailyDroid, a benchmark of 75 tasks in five scenarios across 25 Android apps, spanning three difficulty levels to mimic everyday smartphone use. We evaluate it using text-only and multimodal (text + screenshot) inputs on GPT-4o and o4-mini across 300 trials, revealing comparable performance with multimodal inputs yielding marginally higher success rates. Through in-depth failure analysis, we compile a handbook of common failures. Our findings reveal critical issues in UI accessibility, input modalities, and LLM/app design, offering implications for future mobile agents, applications, and UI development.

Bridging the Reasoning Gap in Vietnamese with Small Language Models via Test-Time Scaling

Authors:Bui The Trung, Do Minh Duc, Nguyen Van Vinh, Bui Nguyen Quoc Trinh
Date:2026-04-20 04:36:03

The democratization of ubiquitous AI hinges on deploying sophisticated reasoning capabilities on resource-constrained devices. However, Small Language Models (SLMs) often face a "reasoning gap", particularly in non-English languages like Vietnamese, where they struggle to maintain coherent chains of thought. This paper investigates Test-Time Scaling strategies for the Qwen3-1.7B architecture within the context of Vietnamese Elementary Mathematics. We introduce Vi-S1K, a high-fidelity reasoning dataset localized via a Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite powered pipeline, and Vi-Elementary-Bench, a dual-resource benchmark for rigorous evaluation. Using an LLM-as-a-Judge protocol, we reveal that the base model possesses robust latent knowledge (Accuracy: 4.05/5.00) but suffers from a severe "formatting gap" in communication. Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) acts as a critical "reasoning unlocker", yielding a 77% improvement in Explanation Quality and bridging the gap between raw calculation and pedagogical coherence. Furthermore, our analysis of prompting strategies uncovers a significant trade-off: structured frameworks like ReAct impose a "cognitive tax" on the 1.7B parameter capacity, degrading performance relative to pure Chain-of-Thought (CoT) combined with Self-Consistency. These findings establish a deployment hierarchy for SLMs, demonstrating that SFT combined with simplified test-time scaling is superior to complex agentic workflows for edge-based reasoning.