LLM-agent - 2026-05-06

Safety and accuracy follow different scaling laws in clinical large language models

Authors:Sebastian Wind, Tri-Thien Nguyen, Jeta Sopa, Mahshad Lotfinia, Sebastian Bickelhaup, Michael Uder, Harald Köstler, Gerhard Wellein, Sven Nebelung, Daniel Truhn, Andreas Maier, Soroosh Tayebi Arasteh
Date:2026-05-05 17:57:19

Clinical LLMs are often scaled by increasing model size, context length, retrieval complexity, or inference-time compute, with the implicit expectation that higher accuracy implies safer behavior. This assumption is incomplete in medicine, where a few confident, high-risk, or evidence-contradicting errors can matter more than average benchmark performance. We introduce SaFE-Scale, a framework for measuring how clinical LLM safety changes across model scale, evidence quality, retrieval strategy, context exposure, and inference-time compute. To instantiate this framework, we introduce RadSaFE-200, a Radiology Safety-Focused Evaluation benchmark of 200 multiple-choice questions with clinician-defined clean evidence, conflict evidence, and option-level labels for high-risk error, unsafe answer, and evidence contradiction. We evaluated 34 locally deployed LLMs across six deployment conditions: closed-book prompting (zero-shot), clean evidence, conflict evidence, standard RAG, agentic RAG, and max-context prompting. Clean evidence produced the strongest improvement, increasing mean accuracy from 73.5% to 94.1%, while reducing high-risk error from 12.0% to 2.6%, contradiction from 12.7% to 2.3%, and dangerous overconfidence from 8.0% to 1.6%. Standard RAG and agentic RAG did not reproduce this safety profile: agentic RAG improved accuracy over standard RAG and reduced contradiction, but high-risk error and dangerous overconfidence remained elevated. Max-context prompting increased latency without closing the safety gap, and additional inference-time compute produced only limited gains. Worst-case analysis showed that clinically consequential errors concentrated in a small subset of questions. Clinical LLM safety is therefore not a passive consequence of scaling, but a deployment property shaped by evidence quality, retrieval design, context construction, and collective failure behavior.

OpenSeeker-v2: Pushing the Limits of Search Agents with Informative and High-Difficulty Trajectories

Authors:Yuwen Du, Rui Ye, Shuo Tang, Keduan Huang, Xinyu Zhu, Yuzhu Cai, Siheng Chen
Date:2026-05-05 17:55:25

Deep search capabilities have become an indispensable competency for frontier Large Language Model (LLM) agents, yet their development remains dominated by industrial giants. The typical industry recipe involves a highly resource-intensive pipeline spanning pre-training, continual pre-training (CPT), supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and reinforcement learning (RL). In this report, we show that when fueled with informative and high-difficulty trajectories, a simple SFT approach could be surprisingly powerful for training frontier search agents. By introducing three simple data synthesis modifications: scaling knowledge graph size for richer exploration, expanding the tool set size for broader functionality, and strict low-step filtering, we establish a stronger baseline. Trained on merely 10.6k data points, our OpenSeeker-v2 achieves state-of-the-art performance across 4 benchmarks (30B-sized agents with ReAct paradigm): 46.0% on BrowseComp, 58.1% on BrowseComp-ZH, 34.6% on Humanity's Last Exam, and 78.0% on xbench, surpassing even Tongyi DeepResearch trained with heavy CPT+SFT+RL pipeline, which achieves 43.4%, 46.7%, 32.9%, and 75.0%, respectively. Notably, OpenSeeker-v2 represents the first state-of-the-art search agent within its model scale and paradigm to be developed by a purely academic team using only SFT. We are excited to open-source the OpenSeeker-v2 model weights and share our simple yet effective findings to make frontier search agent research more accessible to the community.

SymptomAI: Towards a Conversational AI Agent for Everyday Symptom Assessment

Authors:Joseph Breda, Fadi Yousif, Beszel Hawkins, Marinela Cotoi, Miao Liu, Ray Luo, Po-Hsuan Cameron Chen, Mike Schaekermann, Samuel Schmidgall, Xin Liu, Girish Narayanswamy, Samuel Solomon, Maxwell A. Xu, Xiaoran Fan, Longfei Shangguan, Anran Wang, Bhavna Daryani, Buddy Herkenham, Cara Tan, Mark Malhotra, Shwetak Patel, John B. Hernandez, Quang Duong, Yun Liu, Zach Wasson, Dimitrios Antos, Bob Lou, Matthew Thompson, Jonathan Richina, Anupam Pathak, Nichole Young-Lin, Jake Sunshine, Daniel McDuff
Date:2026-05-05 17:36:12

Language models excel at diagnostic assessments on currated medical case-studies and vignettes, performing on par with, or better than, clinical professionals. However, existing studies focus on complex scenarios with rich context making it difficult to draw conclusions about how these systems perform for patients reporting symptoms in everyday life. We deployed SymptomAI, a set of conversational AI agents for end-to-end patient interviewing and differential diagnosis (DDx), via the Fitbit app in a study that randomized participants (N=13,917) to interact with five AI agents. This corpus captures diverse communication and a realistic distribution of illnesses from a real world population. A subset of 1,228 participants reported a clinician-provided diagnosis, and 517 of these were further evaluated by a panel of clinicians during over 250 hours of annotation. SymptomAI DDx were significantly more accurate (OR = 2.47, p < 0.001) than those from independent clinicians given the same dialogue in a blinded randomized comparison. Moreover, agentic strategies which conduct a dedicated symptom interview that elicit additional symptom information before providing a diagnosis, perform substantially better than baseline, user-guided conversations (p < 0.001). An auxiliary analysis on 1,509 conversations from a general US population panel validated that these results generalize beyond wearable device users. We used SymptomAI diagnoses as labels for all 13,917 participants to analyze over 500,000 days of wearable metrics across nearly 400 unique conditions. We identified strong associations between acute infections and physiological shifts (e.g., OR > 7 for influenza). While limited by self-reported ground truth, these results demonstrate the benefits of a dedicated and complete symptom interview compared to a user-guided symptom discussion, which is the default of most consumer LLMs.

Physics-Grounded Multi-Agent Architecture for Traceable, Risk-Aware Human-AI Decision Support in Manufacturing

Authors:Danny Hoang, Ryan Matthiessen, Christopher Miller, Nasir Mannan, Ruby ElKharboutly, David Gorsich, Matthew P. Castanier, Farhad Imani
Date:2026-05-05 17:24:53

High-precision CNC machining of free-form aerospace components requires bounded compensations informed by inspection, simulation, and process knowledge. Off-the-shelf large language model (LLM) assistants can generate text, but they do not reliably execute risk-constrained multi-step numerical workflows or provide auditable provenance for high-stakes decisions. We present multi-agent knowledge analysis (MAKA), a human-in-the-loop decision-support architecture that separates intent routing, tools-only quantitative analysis, knowledge graph retrieval, and critic-based verification that enforces physical plausibility, safety bounds, and provenance completeness before recommendations are surfaced for human approval. MAKA is instantiated on a Ti-6Al-4V rotor blade machining testbed by fusing virtual-machining path-tracking error fields, cutting-force and deflection simulations, and scan-based 3D inspection deviation maps from 16 blades. The analysis decomposes deviation into an evidence-linked pathing component, a drift-based wear proxy capturing systematic evolution across parts, a residual systematic compliance term, and a variability proxy for instability-aware escalation. In a three-level tool-orchestration benchmark (single-step through $\geq$3-step stateful sequences), MAKA improves successful tool execution by up to 87.5 percentage points relative to an unstructured single-model interaction pattern with identical tool access. Digital twin what-if studies show MAKA can coordinate traceable compensation candidates that reduce predicted surface deviation from order $10^{-2}$in to approximately $\pm 10^{-3}$in over most of the blade within the simulation environment, providing a pre-deployment verification signal for risk-aware human decision-making.

Mitigating False Positives in Static Memory Safety Analysis of Rust Programs via Reinforcement Learning

Authors:P Akilesh, Leuson Da Silva, Foutse Khomh, Sridhar Chimalakonda
Date:2026-05-05 17:21:40

Static analysis tools are essential for ensuring memory safety in Rust programs, particularly as Rust gains adoption in safety-critical domains. However, existing tools such as Rudra and MirChecker suffer from high false positive rates, which diminish developer trust, increase manual review effort, and may obscure genuine vulnerabilities. This paper presents a novel reinforcement learning (RL)-based approach for automatically classifying and suppressing spurious warnings in static memory safety analysis for Rust. To achieve this, we design an RL agent that learns a warning suppression policy by extracting contextual features from Rust's Mid-level Intermediate Representation (MIR) and optimizing its decisions through interaction with static analysis outputs. To improve decision quality, we integrate dynamic validation via cargo-fuzz as an auxiliary feedback mechanism, allowing the agent to selectively validate suspicious warnings through targeted fuzz testing. Our evaluation shows that the proposed approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art LLM-based baselines, achieving 65.2% accuracy and an F1 score of 0.659, an improvement of 17.1% over the best LLM baseline. With a recall of 74.6%, our method successfully identifies nearly three-quarters of true bugs while substantially reducing false positives, improving precision from 25.6% in raw Rudra output to 59.0%. Incorporating dynamic fuzzing further boosts performance, yielding additional improvements of 10.7 percentage points in accuracy and 8.6 percentage points in F1 score over the RL-only variant. Overall, our work demonstrates that combining reinforcement learning with hybrid static-dynamic analysis can substantially reduce false positives and improve the practical usability of memory safety verification tools for Rust.

From Intent to Execution: Composing Agentic Workflows with Agent Recommendation

Authors:Kishan Athrey, Ramin Pishehvar, Brian Riordan, Mahesh Viswanathan
Date:2026-05-05 17:08:26

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) built using AI agents fulfill a variety of user intents that may be used to design and build a family of related applications. However, the creation of such MAS currently involves manual composition of the plan, manual selection of appropriate agents, and manual creation of execution graphs. This paper introduces a framework for the automated creation of multi-agent systems which replaces multiple manual steps with an automated framework. The proposed framework consists of software modules and a workflow to orchestrate the requisite task- specific application. The modules include: an LLM-derived planner, a set of tasks described in natural language, a dynamic call graph, an orchestrator for map agents to tasks, and an agent recommender that finds the most suitable agent(s) from local and global agent registries. The agent recommender uses a two-stage information retrieval (IR) system comprising a fast retriever and an LLM-based re-ranker. We implemented a series of experiments exploring the choice of embedders, re- rankers, agent description enrichment, and supervising critique agent. We benchmarked this system end-to-end, evaluating the combination of planning, agent selection, and task completion, with our proposed approach. Our experimental results show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the- art in terms of the recall rate and is more robust and scalable compared to previous approaches. The critique agent holistically reevaluates both agent and tool recommendations against the overall plan. We show that the inclusion of the critique agent further enhances the recall score, proving that the comprehensive review and revision of task-based agent selection is an essential step in building end-to-end multi-agent systems.

Generating Proof-of-Vulnerability Tests to Help Enhance the Security of Complex Software

Authors:Shravya Kanchi, Xiaoyan Zang, Ying Zhang, Danfeng Yao, Na Meng
Date:2026-05-05 16:39:29

Developers create modern software applications (Apps) on top of third-party libraries (Libs). When library vulnerabilities are reachable through application code, the applications can be vulnerable to software supply chain attacks. Prior work shows that developers often require concrete and executable evidence, i.e., proof-of-vulnerability (PoV) tests, to decide whether a reported dependency vulnerability poses a practical security risk to their application. However, manually crafting such tests is challenging, and existing tool support is insufficient to automate the procedure. To streamline test generation, we created PoVSmith -- a new approach that combines call path analysis, exemplar test, code context, and feedback into multiple prompts to guide a coding agent (i.e., Codex) and a large language model (i.e., GPT) for test generation, execution, and assessment. We evaluated PoVSmith on 33 $\langle$App, Lib$\rangle$ Java program pairs, where each App depends on a vulnerable Lib. PoVSmith revealed 158 unique application-level entry points (i.e., public methods) calling vulnerable library APIs; 152 (96\%) of them were correctly found, together with the call paths properly recognized. With such method call information, PoVSmith generated 152 tests, 84 (55\%) of which demonstrated feasible ways of attacking Apps by exploiting Lib vulnerabilities. PoVSmith substantially outperforms the state-of-the-art LLM-based approach, as it reduces human involvement while dramatically improving test quality. Our work contributes (1) a novel approach of agent-based test generation, (2) an iterative code refinement process driven by execution feedback, and (3) LLM-based quality assessment grounded in both the test context and execution logs.

QKVShare: Quantized KV-Cache Handoff for Multi-Agent On-Device LLMs

Authors:Pratik Honavar, Tejpratap GVSL
Date:2026-05-05 15:44:29

Multi-agent LLM systems on edge devices need to hand off latent context efficiently, but the practical choices today are expensive re-prefill or full-precision KV transfer. We study QKVShare, a framework for quantized KV-cache handoff between agents that combines token-level mixed-precision allocation, a self-contained CacheCard representation, and a HuggingFace-compatible cache injection path. Our current results support a narrower but clearer story than the original draft: on 150 GSM8K problems with Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, adaptive quantization remains competitive under repeated handoff and shows its clearest gains against uniform quantization in deeper-hop, higher budget settings; for handoff latency, the QKVShare path reduces TTFT relative to full re prefill at every tested context, from 130.7 ms vs. 150.2 ms at nominal 1K context to 397.1 ms vs. 1029.7 ms at nominal 8K context;. Stage timing shows that post-injection generation, not card creation, dominates the current QKVShare latency path. These results position quantized KV handoff as a promising on-device systems direction while also highlighting the need for stronger controller ablations and apples-to-apples runtime comparisons.

Deco: Extending Personal Physical Objects into Pervasive AI Companion through a Dual-Embodiment Framework

Authors:Zhihan Jiang, Mengyuan Millie Wu, Ruishi Zou, Shiyu Xu, Xun Qian, Emma Macmanus, Steven Liao, Ping Zhang, Bingsheng Yao, Tingyu Cheng, James L. David, Nabila El-Bassel, Lena Mamykina, Frances R. Levin, Ryan Sultan, Dakuo Wang, Xuhai Xu
Date:2026-05-05 15:42:11

Individuals frequently form deep attachments to physical objects (e.g., plush toys) that usually cannot sense or respond to their emotions. While AI companions offer responsiveness and personalization, they exist independently of these physical objects and lack an ongoing connection to them. To bridge this gap, we conducted a formative study (N=9) to explore how digital agents could inherit and extend the emotional bond, deriving four design principles (Faithful Identity, Calibrated Agency, Ambient Presence, and Reciprocal Memory). We then present the Dual-Embodiment Companion Framework, instantiated as Deco, a mobile system integrating multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) and Augmented Reality to create synchronized digital embodiments of users' physical companions. A within-subjects study (N=25) showed Deco significantly outperformed a personalized LLM-empowered digital companion baseline on perceived companionship, emotional bond, and design-principle scales (all p<0.01). A seven-day field deployment (N=17) showed sustained engagement, subjective well-being improvement (p=.040), and three key relational patterns: digital activities retroactively vitalized physical objects, bond deepening was driven by emotional engagement depth rather than interaction frequency, and users sustained bonds while actively navigating digital companions' AI nature. This work highlights a promising alternative for designing digital companions: moving from creating new relationships to dual embodiment, where digital agents seamlessly extend the emotional history of physical objects.

Evaluating Generative Models as Interactive Emergent Representations of Human-Like Collaborative Behavior

Authors:Shinas Shaji, Teena Chakkalayil Hassan, Sebastian Houben, Alex Mitrevski
Date:2026-05-05 15:20:15

Human-AI collaboration requires AI agents to understand human behavior for effective coordination. While advances in foundation models show promising capabilities in understanding and showing human-like behavior, their application in embodied collaborative settings needs further investigation. This work examines whether embodied foundation model agents exhibit emergent collaborative behaviors indicating underlying mental models of their collaborators, which is an important aspect of effective coordination. This paper develops a 2D collaborative game environment where large language model agents and humans complete color-matching tasks requiring coordination. We define five collaborative behaviors as indicators of emergent mental model representation: perspective-taking, collaborator-aware planning, introspection, theory of mind, and clarification. An automated behavior detection system using LLM-based judges identifies these behaviors, achieving fair to substantial agreement with human annotations. Results from the automated behavior detection system show that foundation models consistently exhibit emergent collaborative behaviors without being explicitly trained to do so. These behaviors occur at varying frequencies during collaboration stages, with distinct patterns across different LLMs. A user study was also conducted to evaluate human satisfaction and perceived collaboration effectiveness, with the results indicating positive collaboration experiences. Participants appreciated the agents' task focus, plan verbalization, and initiative, while suggesting improvements in response times and human-like interactions. This work provides an experimental framework for human-AI collaboration, empirical evidence of collaborative behaviors in embodied LLM agents, a validated behavioral analysis methodology, and an assessment of collaboration effectiveness.

TRACE: A Metrologically-Grounded Engineering Framework for Trustworthy Agentic AI Systems in Operationally Critical Domains

Authors:Serhii Zabolotnii
Date:2026-05-05 15:05:00

We introduce TRACE, a cross-domain engineering framework for trustworthy agentic AI in operationally critical domains. TRACE combines a four-layer reference architecture with an explicit classical-ML vs. LLM-validator split (L2a/L2b), a stateful orchestration-and-escalation policy (L3), and bounded human supervision (L4); a metrologically grounded trust-metric suite mapped to GUM/VIM/ISO 17025; and a Model-Parsimony principle quantified by the Computational Parsimony Ratio (CPR). Three instantiations--clinical decision support, industrial multi-domain operations, and a judicial AI assistant--transfer the samearchitecture and metrics across principally different governance contexts. The L2a/L2b separation makes the use of large language models a deliberate design decision rather than an architectural default, with parsimony quantified through CPR. TRACE introduces CPR as a first-class design principle in trustworthy-AI engineering.

Agentic-imodels: Evolving agentic interpretability tools via autoresearch

Authors:Chandan Singh, Yan Shuo Tan, Weijia Xu, Zelalem Gero, Weiwei Yang, Michel Galley, Jianfeng Gao
Date:2026-05-05 14:35:47

Agentic data science (ADS) systems are rapidly improving their capability to autonomously analyze, fit, and interpret data, potentially moving towards a future where agents conduct the vast majority of data-science work. However, current ADS systems use statistical tools designed to be interpretable by humans, rather than interpretable by agents. To address this, we introduce Agentic-imodels, an agentic autoresearch loop that evolves data-science tools designed to be interpretable by agents. Specifically, it develops a library of scikit-learn-compatible regressors for tabular data that are optimized for both predictive performance and a novel LLM-based interpretability metric. The metric measures a suite of LLM-graded tests that probe whether a fitted model's string representation is "simulatable" by an LLM, i.e. whether the LLM can answer questions about the model's behavior by reading its string output alone. We find that the evolved models jointly improve predictive performance and agent-facing interpretability, generalizing to new datasets and new interpretability tests. Furthermore, these evolved models improve downstream end-to-end ADS, increasing performance for Copilot CLI, Claude Code, and Codex on the BLADE benchmark by up to 73%

ScrapMem: A Bio-inspired Framework for On-device Personalized Agent Memory via Optical Forgetting

Authors:Jiale Chang, Yuxiang Ren
Date:2026-05-05 14:30:30

Long-term personalized memory for LLM agents is challenging on resource-limited edge devices due to high storage costs and multimodal complexity. To address this, we propose ScrapMem, a framework that integrates multimodal data into "Scrapbook Page." ScrapMem introduces Optical Forgetting, an optical compression mechanism that progressively reduces the resolution of older memories, lowering storage cost while suppressing low-value details. To maintain semantic consistency, we construct an Episodic Memory Graph (EM-Graph) that organizes key events into a causal-temporal structure. Extensive experiments on the multimodal ATM-Bench showcase that ScrapMem provides three main benefits: (1) strong performance, achieving a new state-of-the-art with a 51.0% Joint@10 score; (2) high storage efficiency, reducing memory usage by up to 93% via optical forgetting; and (3) improved recall, increasing Recall@10 to 70.3% through structured aggregation. ScrapMem offers an effective and storage-efficient solution for on-device long-term memory in multimodal LLM agents.

Say the Mission, Execute the Swarm: Agent-Enhanced LLM Reasoning in the Web-of-Drones

Authors:Andrea Iannoli, Lorenzo Gigli, Luca Sciullo, Angelo Trotta, Marco Di Felice
Date:2026-05-05 14:14:57

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly explored as high-level reasoning engines for cyber-physical systems, yet their application to real-time UAV swarm management remains challenging due to heterogeneous interfaces, limited grounding, and the need for long-running closed-loop execution. This paper presents a mission-agnostic, agent-enhanced LLM framework for UAV swarm control, where users express mission objectives in natural language and the system autonomously executes them through grounded, real-time interactions. The proposed architecture combines an LLM-based Agent Core with a Model Context Protocol (MCP) gateway and a Web-of-Drones abstraction based on W3C Web of Things (WoT) standards. By exposing drones, sensors, and services as standardized WoT Things, the framework enables structured tool-based interaction, continuous state observation, and safe actuation without relying on code generation. We evaluate the framework using ArduPilot-based simulation across four swarm missions and six state-of-the-art LLMs. Results show that, despite strong reasoning abilities, current general-purpose LLMs still struggle to achieve reliable execution - even for simple swarm tasks - when operating without explicit grounding and execution support. Task-specific planning tools and runtime guardrails substantially improve robustness, while token consumption alone is not indicative of execution quality or reliability.

The Infinite Mutation Engine? Measuring Polymorphism in LLM-Generated Offensive Code

Authors:Gabriel Hortea, Juan Tapiador
Date:2026-05-05 10:44:49

Malware authors have traditionally relied on polymorphic techniques to produce variants in the same malware family, complicating signature-based detection. Integrating generative AI into offensive toolchains enables attackers to synthesize structurally diverse payloads with identical behavior, raising the question of how much polymorphism LLMs provide. Recent work has assumed that LLMs can produce sufficiently polymorphic payloads, leaving unquantified the variation that emerges when an attacker repeatedly builds the same payload, or explicitly instructs the model to avoid prior implementations. In this work, we measure the polymorphic capacity of a commercial model (Claude Opus 4.6) as an automated malware generator. We build a dual-agent, four-stage pipeline that generates, tests, and refines a data-exfiltration payload comprising file traversal, encryption, exfiltration, and integration. We produce payloads in two settings: using prompts that specify only functional requirements, and using prompts that inject a structured history of prior outcomes to force divergence. We measure pairwise distances along structural (AST) and semantic (embedding) axes, finding that when polymorphism is not explicitly required, structural distances are high while semantic distances remain low; i.e., implementations diverge widely without changing high-level behavior. Explicit prompting substantially amplifies this structural diversity while preserving correctness, at the cost of roughly 5 times more tokens but only a small increase in LLM calls (from $4.2$ to $4.5$ per payload, with effective API costs of \$0.41 and \$0.73). These results show that a single commercial LLM can cheaply generate large populations of behaviorally equivalent yet structurally diverse payloads, facilitating the evasion of signature-based detection rules and similarity-based clustering.

Multi-Agent Strategic Games with LLMs

Authors:Maxim Chupilkin
Date:2026-05-05 10:28:17

This paper asks whether large language models (LLMs) can be used to study the strategic foundations of conflict and cooperation. I introduce LLMs as experimental subjects in a repeated security dilemma and evaluate whether they reproduce canonical mechanisms from international relations theory. The baseline game is extended along three theoretically central dimensions: multipolarity, finite time horizons, and the availability of communication. Across multiple models, the results exhibit systematic and consistent patterns: multipolarity increases the likelihood of conflict, finite horizons induce universal unraveling consistent with backward-induction logic, and communication reduces conflict by enabling signaling and reciprocity. Beyond observed behavior, the design provides access to agents' private reasoning and public messages, allowing choices to be linked to underlying strategic logics such as preemption, cooperation under uncertainty, and trust-building. The contribution is primarily methodological. LLM-based experiments offer a scalable, transparent, and replicable approach to probing theoretical mechanisms.

Multi-Agent Systems for Root Cause Analysis in Microservices

Authors:Alexander Naakka, Yuqing Wang, Mika V Mäntylä
Date:2026-05-05 08:39:42

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled early attempts to automate root cause analysis (RCA) in microservice-based systems (MSS). Yet, prior works typically rely on a linear reasoning process that proceeds along a single diagnostic path. In this paper, we propose LATS-RCA, an LLM-based multi-agent framework for RCA in MSS. LATS-RCA formulates RCA as a reflection-guided tree-structured search using a Language Agent Tree Search algorithm. In LATS-RCA, multiple LLM-driven agents iteratively perform RCA for each microservice by reasoning over its execution logs and performance metrics to collect operational evidence for root cause exploration. Reflection scores derived from intermediate diagnostic states are used to guide the search toward the most likely root cause based on accumulated evidence. We evaluate LATS-RCA on the open-source industrial MSS, Light-OAuth2 (LO2), using a publicly available dataset and in a production microservice environment (Prod) in a case company with substantially higher operational complexity. LO2 is a small-team Java system with a homogeneous technology stack. The results on LO2 show that LATS-RCA achieves high diagnostic accuracy, and we further benchmark its associated computational costs. Compared to LO2, Prod attains lower diagnostic accuracy and incurs higher computational cost. The Prod deployment demonstrates the practical applicability of LATS-RCA in real-world MSS and reflects the challenges introduced by polyglot tech stack, varied logging practices of source components, and multi-factor root-causes by production-scale MSS.

MEMSAD: Gradient-Coupled Anomaly Detection for Memory Poisoning in Retrieval-Augmented Agents

Authors:Ishrith Gowda
Date:2026-05-05 08:15:41

Persistent external memory enables LLM agents to maintain context across sessions, yet its security properties remain formally uncharacterized. We formalize memory poisoning attacks on retrieval-augmented agents as a Stackelberg game with a unified evaluation framework spanning three attack classes with escalating access assumptions. Correcting an evaluation protocol inconsistency in the triggered-query specification of Chen et al. (2024), we show faithful evaluation increases measured attack success by $4\times$ (ASR-R: $0.25 \to 1.00$). Our primary contribution is MEMSAD (Semantic Anomaly Detection), a calibration-based defense grounded in a gradient coupling theorem: under encoder regularity, the anomaly score gradient and the retrieval objective gradient are provably identical, so any continuous perturbation that reduces detection risk necessarily degrades retrieval rank. This coupling yields a certified detection radius guaranteeing correct classification regardless of adversary strategy. We prove minimax optimality via Le Cam's method, showing any threshold detector requires $Ω(1/ρ^2)$ calibration samples and MEMSAD achieves this up to $\log(1/δ)$ factors. We further derive online regret bounds for rolling calibration at rate $O(σ^{2/3}Δ^{1/3})$, and formally characterize a discrete synonym-invariance loophole that marks the boundary of what continuous-space defenses can guarantee. Experiments on a $3 \times 5$ attack-defense matrix with bootstrap confidence intervals, Bonferroni-corrected hypothesis tests, and Clopper-Pearson validation ($n=1{,}000$) confirm: composite defenses achieve TPR $= 1.00$, FPR $= 0.00$ across all attacks, while synonym substitution evades detection at $Δ$ ASR-R $\approx 0$, exposing a gap existing embedding-based defenses cannot close.

CuraView: A Multi-Agent Framework for Medical Hallucination Detection with GraphRAG-Enhanced Knowledge Verification

Authors:Severin Ye, Xiao Kong, Xiaopeng He, Guangsu Yan, Dongsuk Oh
Date:2026-05-05 08:05:31

Discharge summaries require extracting critical information from lengthy electronic health records (EHRs), a process that is labor-intensive when performed manually. Large language models (LLMs) can improve generation efficiency; however, they are prone to producing faithfulness hallucinations, statements that contradict source records, posing direct risks to patient safety. To address this, we present CuraView, a multi-agent framework for sentence-level detection and evidence-grounded explanation of faithfulness hallucinations in discharge summaries. CuraView constructs a GraphRAG-based knowledge graph from patient-level EHRs and implements a closed-loop generation-detection pipeline with sentence-level evidence retrieval and classification spanning four evidence grades from strong support to direct contradiction (E1-E4), yielding structured and interpretable evidence chains. We evaluate CuraView on a subset of 250 patients from the Discharge-Me benchmark, with 50 patients held out for testing. Our fine-tuned Qwen3-14B detection model achieves an F1 of 0.831 on the safety-critical E4 metric (90.9% recall, 76.5% precision) and an F1 of 0.823 on E3+E4, representing a 50.0% relative improvement over the base model and outperforming RAGTruth-style and QAGS-style baselines. These results demonstrate that evidence-chain-based graph retrieval verification substantially improves the factual reliability of clinical documentation, while simultaneously producing reusable annotated datasets for downstream model training and distillation.

Robust Agent Compensation (RAC): Teaching AI Agents to Compensate

Authors:Srinath Perera, Kaviru Hapuarachchi, Frank Leymann, Rania Khalaf
Date:2026-05-05 06:27:34

We present Robust Agent Compensation (RAC), a log-based recovery paradigm (providing a safety net) implemented through an architectural extension that can be applied to most Agent frameworks to support reliable executions (avoiding unintended side effects). Users can choose to enable RAC without changing their current agent code (e.g., LangGraph agents). The proposed approach can be implemented in most existing agent frameworks via their existing extension points. We present an implementation based on LangChain, demonstrate its viability through the $τ$-bench and REALM-Bench, and show that when solving complex problems, RAC is 1.5-8X or more better in both latency and token economy compared to state-of-the-art LLM-based recovery approaches.

GeoDecider: A Coarse-to-Fine Agentic Workflow for Explainable Lithology Classification

Authors:Jiahao Wang, Mingyue Cheng, Yitong Zhou, Qingyang Mao, Xiaoyu Tao, Qi Liu, Enhong Chen
Date:2026-05-05 05:42:51

Lithology classification aims to infer subsurface rock types from well-logging signals, supporting downstream applications like reservoir characterization. Despite substantial progress, most existing methods still treat lithology classification as a single-pass classification task. In contrast, practical experts incorporate geological principles, external knowledge, and tool-use capabilities to perform accurate classification. In this work, we propose GeoDecider, a coarse-to-fine agentic workflow that enables accurate and explainable lithology classification through training-free use of large language models (LLMs). GeoDecider reformulates lithology classification as an expert-like structured process and organizes it into a multi-stage workflow involving coarse-to-fine reasoning. Specifically, GeoDecider includes the following stages: (1) base classifier-guided coarse classification, which uses a pre-trained classifier to provide a rough reference for downstream tasks, thus reducing the overall cost of downstream reasoning, (2) tool-augmented reasoning, which utilizes several tools such as contextual analysis and neighbor retrieval to achieve finer and more precise classifications, (3) geological refinement, which post-processes the final results to enforce geological consistency. Experiments on four benchmarks show that GeoDecider outperforms representative baselines. Further analysis demonstrates that the proposed framework produces geologically interpretable predictions while achieving a better trade-off between classification performance and inference efficiency.

ARGUS: Defending LLM Agents Against Context-Aware Prompt Injection

Authors:Shihao Weng, Yang Feng, Jinrui Zhang, Xiaofei Xie, Jiongchi Yu, Jia Liu
Date:2026-05-05 05:37:00

The rise of Large Language Model (LLM) agents, augmented with tool use, skills, and external knowledge, has introduced new security risks. Among them, prompt injection attacks, where adversaries embed malicious instructions into the agent workflow, have emerged as the primary threat. However, existing benchmarks and defenses are fundamentally limited as they assume context-insensitive settings in which the agent works under a fully specified user instruction, and the attacks are straightforward and context-independent. As a result, they fail to capture real-world deployments where agent behavior usually depends on dynamic context, not just the user prompt, and adversaries can adapt their attacks to different context. Similarly, existing defenses built on this narrow threat model overlook the nature of real-world agent delegation. In this paper, we present AgentLure, a benchmark that captures context-dependent tasks and context-aware prompt injection attacks. AgentLure spans four agentic domains and eight attack vectors across diverse attack surfaces. Our evaluation shows that existing defenses often struggle in this setting, yielding poor performance against such attacks in agentic systems. To address this limitation, we propose ARGUS, a defense mechanism that enforces provenance-aware decision auditing for LLM agents. ARGUS constructs an influence provenance graph to track how untrusted context propagates into agent decisions and verify whether a decision is justified by trustworthy evidence before execution. Our evaluation shows ARGUS reduces attack success rate to 3.8% while preserving 87.5% task utility, significantly outperforming existing defenses and remaining robust against adaptive white-box adversaries.

What Happens Inside Agent Memory? Circuit Analysis from Emergence to Diagnosis

Authors:Xutao Mao, Jinman Zhao, Gerald Penn, Cong Wang
Date:2026-05-05 04:17:22

Agent memory failures are silent: an LLM-based agent can produce a fluent response even when it fails to extract, retain, or retrieve the information needed across sessions. The write-manage-read loop describes the external pipeline of these systems but leaves open which internal computations implement each stage. Tracing internal feature circuits across the Qwen-3 family (0.6B--14B) and two memory frameworks (mem0 and A-MEM), we report three findings. First, control is detectable before content: routing circuitry is causally active at 0.6B, while content circuitry produces no detectable signal until 4B under our tracing setup, creating a deployment regime where small models route with apparent competence but silently fail at extraction and grounding. Second, within the content group, Write and Read share a late-layer hub that operates as a context-grounding substrate already present in the base model; only memory framing recruits a functional grounding direction on this substrate, and the hub transfers across both frameworks. Third, emergence does not imply steerability: although the content circuit becomes detectable at 4B, it becomes reliably steerable only at 8B, indicating that detection and intervention have distinct scale thresholds. As a practical implication, the feature-space separation between the two circuit groups enables per-operation failure localization at 76.2% accuracy without supervision, providing a stage-level diagnostic for otherwise silent agent-memory failures.

SkCC: Portable and Secure Skill Compilation for Cross-Framework LLM Agents

Authors:Yipeng Ouyang, Yi Xiao, Yuhao Gu, Xianwei Zhang
Date:2026-05-05 04:15:48

LLM-Agents have evolved into autonomous systems for complex task execution, with the SKILL.md specification emerging as a de facto standard for encapsulating agent capabilities. However, a critical bottleneck remains: different agent frameworks exhibit starkly different sensitivities to prompt formatting, causing up to 40% performance variation, yet nearly all skills exist as a single, format-agnostic Markdown version. Manual per-platform rewriting creates an unsustainable maintenance burden, while prior audits have found that over one third of community skills contain security vulnerabilities. To address this, we present SkCC, a compilation framework that introduces classical compiler design into agent skill development. At its core, SkIR - a strongly-typed intermediate representation - decouples skill semantics from platform-specific formatting, enabling portable deployment across heterogeneous agent frameworks. Around this IR, a compile-time Analyzer enforces security constraints via Anti-Skill Injection before deployment. Through a four-phase pipeline, SkCC reduces adaptation complexity from $O(m \times n)$ to $O(m + n)$. Experiments on SkillsBench demonstrate that compiled skills consistently outperform their original counterparts, improving pass rates from 21.1% to 33.3% on Claude Code and from 35.1% to 48.7% on Kimi CLI, while achieving sub-10ms compilation latency, a 94.8% proactive security trigger rate, and 10-46% runtime token savings across platforms.

LLM-ADAM: A Generalizable LLM Agent Framework for Pre-Print Anomaly Detection in Additive Manufacturing

Authors:Ahmadreza Eslaminia, Chuhan Cai, Cameron Smith, Ruo-Syuan Mei, Shichen Li, Rajiv Malhotra, Klara Nahrstedt, Chenhui Shao
Date:2026-05-05 03:38:05

Additive manufacturing (AM) continues to transform modern manufacturing by enabling flexible, on-demand production of complex geometries across diverse industries. Fused filament fabrication (FFF) has extended AM to laboratories, classrooms, and small production environments, but this accessibility shifts process-planning responsibility to users who may lack manufacturing expertise. A syntactically valid slicer profile can still encode thermally or geometrically harmful settings, and subtle G-code edits can alter extrusion, cooling, or adhesion before a print begins. Pre-print G-code screening catches accidental or adversarial machine-program errors before material or machine time is wasted. This paper proposes LLM-ADAM as a generalizable LLM framework for pre-print anomaly detection in AM. The framework decomposes the task into three roles: Extractor-LLM maps a G-code file to a structured process-parameter schema; Reference-LLM converts printer and material documentation into aligned operating ranges; and Judge-LLM interprets a deterministic deviation table and G-code evidence to decide whether a part is non-defective or belongs to an anomaly class. Printers, materials, and LLM backbones are interchangeable test conditions, not fixed assumptions. We evaluate the framework on an N=200 FFF G-code corpus spanning two desktop printer families, two materials, and five classes including non-defective, under-extrusion, over-extrusion, warping, and stringing. The best framework configuration reaches 87.5% accuracy, compared with 59.5% for the strongest engineered single-LLM baseline. The results show that structured decomposition, rather than backbone strength alone, is the dominant source of improvement, with defect classes identified at or near ceiling for leading configurations while residual errors concentrate on conservative false alarms for non-defective samples.

Coordination as an Architectural Layer for LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems

Authors:Maksym Nechepurenko, Pavel Shuvalov
Date:2026-05-05 02:56:44

Multi-agent LLM systems fail in production at rates between 41% and 87%, mostly due to coordination defects rather than base-model capability. Existing responses split between cataloguing failure modes empirically and shipping declarative orchestration frameworks as engineering tools; neither delivers a principled mapping from coordination configuration to predictable failure-mode signature. We argue that coordination should be treated as a configurable architectural layer, separable from agent logic and from information access, enabling architectural reasoning rather than only engineering productivity. We instantiate this with an information-controlled design on prediction markets: a single LLM, fixed tools, fixed per-call output cap, and fixed prompt template across five reference coordination configurations, with total compute per question treated as an endogenous architectural output. The Murphy decomposition of the Brier score separates calibration from discriminative power, so configurations leave distinguishable signatures even when aggregate scores coincide. On 100 Polymarket binary markets resolved after the model's training cutoff (claude-opus-4-6) we report Murphy signatures, a cost-quality Pareto frontier, category-conditioned analysis, and a bootstrap power-projection. Three of five pre-specified predictions are upheld in direction; two configurations dominate the Pareto frontier within this regime; exploratory bootstrap intervals separate consensus alignment from others, though pairwise tests do not survive Bonferroni correction at n=100. We also deploy the same configurations as live agents on Foresight Arena under web-search-enabled conditions, as an on-chain replication channel accumulating in parallel. Harness, trace dataset, and production agents are released. We position this as a methodology-validating first instantiation, not a general cross-model claim.

Attention: What Prevents Young Adults from Speaking Up Against Cyberbullying in an LLM-Powered Social Media Simulation

Authors:Qian Yang, Jessie Jia, Elaine Tsai, Amy Li, Nader Akoury, Natalie N. Bazarova
Date:2026-05-05 02:17:20

Interactive, multi-agent social simulation systems have shown promise for helping users practice navigating various complex social situations across domains. This paper asks: To what extent can such systems help young adult (YA) bystanders speak up publicly against cyberbullying, a task often thwarted by complex, multi-party social dynamics? We created Upstanders' Practicum, a multi-AI-agent social media simulation powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), as a probe and observed 34 YAs freely practicing public bystander intervention across three iteratively refined versions. We found that practicing public bystander intervention in the simulation was helpful, but after participants made three attention shifts: (1) from inattention to paying true attention, (2) from self-focus ("I don't usually do this'') to attending to those directly involved, and (3) from resolving the private conflict between bully and victim ("maybe I could set up the meeting between them'') to addressing the broader audience online ("public comment is about norm-setting"). Only after these shifts did practice in the simulation start to help: participants then saw a reason to speak up publicly and, through continued practice, crafted tactful public messages without explicit instruction. These findings illuminate new design and research opportunities for bystander education beyond social skill instruction, namely, designing for true attention, for fostering a vocal upstander identity, and for seeing bystander intervention as public norm setting. In addition, we open-source Truman Agents (cornell-design-aigroup.github.io/TrumanAgents/), the first-of-its-kind multi-LLM-agent social media simulation platform that Upstanders' Practicum builds upon, for future cyberbullying and social media research.

Enhancing Agent Safety Judgment: Controlled Benchmark Rewriting and Analogical Reasoning for Deceptive Out-of-Distribution Scenarios

Authors:Zuoyu Zhang, Yancheng Zhu
Date:2026-05-05 00:21:00

Tool-using agent systems powered by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed across web, app, operating-system, and transactional environments. Yet existing safety benchmarks still emphasize explicit risks, potentially overstating a model's ability to judge deceptive or ambiguous trajectories. To address this gap, we introduce ROME (Red-team Orchestrated Multi-agent Evolution), a controlled benchmark-construction pipeline that rewrites known unsafe trajectories into more deceptive evaluation instances while preserving their underlying risk labels. Starting from 100 unsafe source trajectories, ROME produces 300 challenge instances spanning contextual ambiguity, implicit risks, and shortcut decision-making. Experiments show that these challenge sets substantially degrade safety-judgment performance, with hidden-risk cases remaining particularly non-trivial even for recent frontier models. We further study ARISE (Analogical Reasoning for Inference-time Safety Enhancement), a retrieval-guided inference-time enhancement that retrieves ReAct-style analogical safety trajectories from an external analogical base and injects them as structured reasoning exemplars. ARISE improves judgment quality without retraining, but is best viewed as a task-specific robustness enhancement rather than a standalone safety guarantee. Together, ROME and ARISE provide practical tools for stress-testing and improving agent safety judgment under deceptive distribution shifts.

MAGE: Safeguarding LLM Agents against Long-Horizon Threats via Shadow Memory

Authors:Yuhui Wang, Tanqiu Jiang, Jiacheng Liang, Charles Fleming, Ting Wang
Date:2026-05-04 23:46:19

As large language model (LLM)-powered agents are increasingly deployed to perform complex, real-world tasks, they face a growing class of attacks that exploit extended user-agent-environment interactions to pursue malicious objectives improbable in single-turn settings. Such long-horizon threats pose significant risks to the safe deployment of LLM agents in critical domains. In this paper, we present MAGE (Memory As Guardrail Enforcement), a novel defensive framework designed to counter a wide range of long-horizon threats. Inspired by the "shadow stack" abstraction in systems security, MAGE maintains a dedicated, safety-focused agentic memory that distills and retains safety-critical context across the agent's full execution trajectory, leveraging this shadow memory to proactively assess the risk of pending actions prior to their execution. Extensive evaluation demonstrates that MAGE substantially outperforms existing defenses across diverse long-horizon threats in detection accuracy, achieves early-stage detection for the majority of attacks, and introduces only negligible overhead to agent utility. To our best knowledge, MAGE represents the first framework to detect and mitigate long-horizon threats using an agentic memory approach, establishing a new paradigm for this critical challenge and opening promising directions for future research.

Enwar 3.0: An Agentic Multi-Modal LLM Orchestrator for Situation-Aware Beamforming, Blockage Prediction, and Handover Management

Authors:Ahmad M. Nazar, Abdulkadir Celik, Asmaa Abdallah, Mohamed Y. Selim, Daji Qiao, Ahmed M. Eltawil
Date:2026-05-04 23:10:34

Maintaining robust millimeter-wave (mmWave) connectivity in vehicular networks requires real-time adaptation to environmental dynamics, sensor degradation, and link variability. This paper presents Enwar 3.0, an environment-aware reasoning framework that unifies multi-modal sensing, agentic large language models (LLMs), and context-driven model selection for predictive beamforming, blockage detection, and handover management. Building upon prior iterations of Enwar, the proposed architecture integrates a classifier-driven assessment of sensor health with a primed LLM that orchestrates multiple specialized agents through structured, task-aware prompting. A novel synthetic degradation pipeline enables the training of a sensor degradation classifier that detects real-time impairments across camera, radar, LiDAR, and GPS inputs, achieving over 99% accuracy. The LLM, trained via chain-of-thought (CoT) priming and human-in-the-loop feedback, coordinates agent calls for beam selection, blockage forecasting, and environment perception while dynamically loading sensor-specific models based on environmental context. Extensive evaluations across 15 sensor combinations demonstrate that Enwar 3.0 delivers state-of-the-art performance in both predictive accuracy and interpretability, with beam selection accuracy exceeding 88%, blockage F1-scores surpassing 98%, and reasoning correctness reaching 87% on complex decision prompts. This work establishes a scalable foundation for LLM-integrated wireless systems that reason, perceive, and adapt in real-time.