LLM-planning - 2025-12-20

Vision-Language-Action Models for Autonomous Driving: Past, Present, and Future

Authors:Tianshuai Hu, Xiaolu Liu, Song Wang, Yiyao Zhu, Ao Liang, Lingdong Kong, Guoyang Zhao, Zeying Gong, Jun Cen, Zhiyu Huang, Xiaoshuai Hao, Linfeng Li, Hang Song, Xiangtai Li, Jun Ma, Shaojie Shen, Jianke Zhu, Dacheng Tao, Ziwei Liu, Junwei Liang
Date:2025-12-18 16:57:44

Autonomous driving has long relied on modular "Perception-Decision-Action" pipelines, where hand-crafted interfaces and rule-based components often break down in complex or long-tailed scenarios. Their cascaded design further propagates perception errors, degrading downstream planning and control. Vision-Action (VA) models address some limitations by learning direct mappings from visual inputs to actions, but they remain opaque, sensitive to distribution shifts, and lack structured reasoning or instruction-following capabilities. Recent progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) and multimodal learning has motivated the emergence of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) frameworks, which integrate perception with language-grounded decision making. By unifying visual understanding, linguistic reasoning, and actionable outputs, VLAs offer a pathway toward more interpretable, generalizable, and human-aligned driving policies. This work provides a structured characterization of the emerging VLA landscape for autonomous driving. We trace the evolution from early VA approaches to modern VLA frameworks and organize existing methods into two principal paradigms: End-to-End VLA, which integrates perception, reasoning, and planning within a single model, and Dual-System VLA, which separates slow deliberation (via VLMs) from fast, safety-critical execution (via planners). Within these paradigms, we further distinguish subclasses such as textual vs. numerical action generators and explicit vs. implicit guidance mechanisms. We also summarize representative datasets and benchmarks for evaluating VLA-based driving systems and highlight key challenges and open directions, including robustness, interpretability, and instruction fidelity. Overall, this work aims to establish a coherent foundation for advancing human-compatible autonomous driving systems.

DataFlow: An LLM-Driven Framework for Unified Data Preparation and Workflow Automation in the Era of Data-Centric AI

Authors:Hao Liang, Xiaochen Ma, Zhou Liu, Zhen Hao Wong, Zhengyang Zhao, Zimo Meng, Runming He, Chengyu Shen, Qifeng Cai, Zhaoyang Han, Meiyi Qiang, Yalin Feng, Tianyi Bai, Zewei Pan, Ziyi Guo, Yizhen Jiang, Jingwen Deng, Qijie You, Peichao Lai, Tianyu Guo, Chi Hsu Tsai, Hengyi Feng, Rui Hu, Wenkai Yu, Junbo Niu, Bohan Zeng, Ruichuan An, Lu Ma, Jihao Huang, Yaowei Zheng, Conghui He, Linpeng Tang, Bin Cui, Weinan E, Wentao Zhang
Date:2025-12-18 15:46:15

The rapidly growing demand for high-quality data in Large Language Models (LLMs) has intensified the need for scalable, reliable, and semantically rich data preparation pipelines. However, current practices remain dominated by ad-hoc scripts and loosely specified workflows, which lack principled abstractions, hinder reproducibility, and offer limited support for model-in-the-loop data generation. To address these challenges, we present DataFlow, a unified and extensible LLM-driven data preparation framework. DataFlow is designed with system-level abstractions that enable modular, reusable, and composable data transformations, and provides a PyTorch-style pipeline construction API for building debuggable and optimizable dataflows. The framework consists of nearly 200 reusable operators and six domain-general pipelines spanning text, mathematical reasoning, code, Text-to-SQL, agentic RAG, and large-scale knowledge extraction. To further improve usability, we introduce DataFlow-Agent, which automatically translates natural-language specifications into executable pipelines via operator synthesis, pipeline planning, and iterative verification. Across six representative use cases, DataFlow consistently improves downstream LLM performance. Our math, code, and text pipelines outperform curated human datasets and specialized synthetic baselines, achieving up to +3\% execution accuracy in Text-to-SQL over SynSQL, +7\% average improvements on code benchmarks, and 1--3 point gains on MATH, GSM8K, and AIME. Moreover, a unified 10K-sample dataset produced by DataFlow enables base models to surpass counterparts trained on 1M Infinity-Instruct data. These results demonstrate that DataFlow provides a practical and high-performance substrate for reliable, reproducible, and scalable LLM data preparation, and establishes a system-level foundation for future data-centric AI development.

Synthelite: Chemist-aligned and feasibility-aware synthesis planning with LLMs

Authors:Nguyen Xuan-Vu, Daniel Armstrong, Milena Wehrbach, Andres M Bran, Zlatko Jončev, Philippe Schwaller
Date:2025-12-18 11:24:30

Computer-aided synthesis planning (CASP) has long been envisioned as a complementary tool for synthetic chemists. However, existing frameworks often lack mechanisms to allow interaction with human experts, limiting their ability to integrate chemists' insights. In this work, we introduce Synthelite, a synthesis planning framework that uses large language models (LLMs) to directly propose retrosynthetic transformations. Synthelite can generate end-to-end synthesis routes by harnessing the intrinsic chemical knowledge and reasoning capabilities of LLMs, while allowing expert intervention through natural language prompts. Our experiments demonstrate that Synthelite can flexibly adapt its planning trajectory to diverse user-specified constraints, achieving up to 95\% success rates in both strategy-constrained and starting-material-constrained synthesis tasks. Additionally, Synthelite exhibits the ability to account for chemical feasibility during route design. We envision Synthelite to be both a useful tool and a step toward a paradigm where LLMs are the central orchestrators of synthesis planning.

AMUSE: Audio-Visual Benchmark and Alignment Framework for Agentic Multi-Speaker Understanding

Authors:Sanjoy Chowdhury, Karren D. Yang, Xudong Liu, Fartash Faghri, Pavan Kumar Anasosalu Vasu, Oncel Tuzel, Dinesh Manocha, Chun-Liang Li, Raviteja Vemulapalli
Date:2025-12-18 07:01:47

Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) such as GPT-4o and Qwen3-Omni show strong perception but struggle in multi-speaker, dialogue-centric settings that demand agentic reasoning tracking who speaks, maintaining roles, and grounding events across time. These scenarios are central to multimodal audio-video understanding, where models must jointly reason over audio and visual streams in applications such as conversational video assistants and meeting analytics. We introduce AMUSE, a benchmark designed around tasks that are inherently agentic, requiring models to decompose complex audio-visual interactions into planning, grounding, and reflection steps. It evaluates MLLMs across three modes zero-shot, guided, and agentic and six task families, including spatio-temporal speaker grounding and multimodal dialogue summarization. Across all modes, current models exhibit weak multi-speaker reasoning and inconsistent behavior under both non-agentic and agentic evaluation. Motivated by the inherently agentic nature of these tasks and recent advances in LLM agents, we propose RAFT, a data-efficient agentic alignment framework that integrates reward optimization with intrinsic multimodal self-evaluation as reward and selective parameter adaptation for data and parameter efficient updates. Using RAFT, we achieve up to 39.52\% relative improvement in accuracy on our benchmark. Together, AMUSE and RAFT provide a practical platform for examining agentic reasoning in multimodal models and improving their capabilities.

PDE-Agent: A toolchain-augmented multi-agent framework for PDE solving

Authors:Jianming Liu, Ren Zhu, Jian Xu, Kun Ding, Xu-Yao Zhang, Gaofeng Meng, Cheng-Lin Liu
Date:2025-12-18 06:02:50

Solving Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) is a cornerstone of engineering and scientific research. Traditional methods for PDE solving are cumbersome, relying on manual setup and domain expertise. While Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINNs) introduced end-to-end neural network-based solutions, and frameworks like DeepXDE further enhanced automation, these approaches still depend on expert knowledge and lack full autonomy. In this work, we frame PDE solving as tool invocation via LLM-driven agents and introduce PDE-Agent, the first toolchain-augmented multi-agent collaboration framework, inheriting the reasoning capacity of LLMs and the controllability of external tools and enabling automated PDE solving from natural language descriptions. PDE-Agent leverages the strengths of multi-agent and multi-tool collaboration through two key innovations: (1) A Prog-Act framework with graph memory for multi-agent collaboration, which enables effective dynamic planning and error correction via dual-loop mechanisms (localized fixes and global revisions). (2) A Resource-Pool integrated with a tool-parameter separation mechanism for multi-tool collaboration. This centralizes the management of runtime artifacts and resolves inter-tool dependency gaps in existing frameworks. To validate and evaluate this new paradigm for PDE solving , we develop PDE-Bench, a multi-type PDE Benchmark for agent-based tool collaborative solving, and propose multi-level metrics for assessing tool coordination. Evaluations verify that PDE-Agent exhibits superior applicability and performance in complex multi-step, cross-step dependent tasks. This new paradigm of toolchain-augmented multi-agent PDE solving will further advance future developments in automated scientific computing. Our source code and dataset will be made publicly available.

Ev-Trust: A Strategy Equilibrium Trust Mechanism for Evolutionary Games in LLM-Based Multi-Agent Services

Authors:Shiduo Yang, Jiye Wang, Jiayu Qin, Jianbin Li, Yu Wang, Yuanhe Zhao, Kenan Guo
Date:2025-12-18 04:39:13

The rapid evolution of the Web toward an agent-centric paradigm, driven by large language models (LLMs), has enabled autonomous agents to reason, plan, and interact in complex decentralized environments. However, the openness and heterogeneity of LLM-based multi-agent systems also amplify the risks of deception, fraud, and misinformation, posing severe challenges to trust establishment and system robustness. To address this issue, we propose Ev-Trust, a strategy-equilibrium trust mechanism grounded in evolutionary game theory. This mechanism integrates direct trust, indirect trust, and expected revenue into a dynamic feedback structure that guides agents' behavioral evolution toward equilibria. Within a decentralized "Request-Response-Payment-Evaluation" service framework, Ev-Trust enables agents to adaptively adjust strategies, naturally excluding malicious participants while reinforcing high-quality collaboration. Furthermore, our theoretical derivation based on replicator dynamics equations proves the existence and stability of local evolutionary equilibria. Experimental results indicate that our approach effectively reflects agent trustworthiness in LLM-driven open service interaction scenarios, reduces malicious strategies, and increases collective revenue. We hope Ev-Trust can provide a new perspective on trust modeling for the agentic service web in group evolutionary game scenarios.

HEPTAPOD: Orchestrating High Energy Physics Workflows Towards Autonomous Agency

Authors:Tony Menzo, Alexander Roman, Sergei Gleyzer, Konstantin Matchev, George T. Fleming, Stefan Höche, Stephen Mrenna, Prasanth Shyamsundar
Date:2025-12-17 19:00:03

Many workflows in high-energy-physics (HEP) stand to benefit from recent advances in transformer-based large language models (LLMs). While early applications of LLMs focused on text generation and code completion, modern LLMs now support orchestrated agency: the coordinated execution of complex, multi-step tasks through tool use, structured context, and iterative reasoning. We introduce the HEP Toolkit for Agentic Planning, Orchestration, and Deployment (HEPTAPOD), an orchestration framework designed to bring this emerging paradigm to HEP pipelines. The framework enables LLMs to interface with domain-specific tools, construct and manage simulation workflows, and assist in common utility and data analysis tasks through schema-validated operations and run-card-driven configuration. To demonstrate these capabilities, we consider a representative Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) Monte Carlo validation pipeline that spans model generation, event simulation, and downstream analysis within a unified, reproducible workflow. HEPTAPOD provides a structured and auditable layer between human researchers, LLMs, and computational infrastructure, establishing a foundation for transparent, human-in-the-loop systems.

Autoregressive Language Models are Secretly Energy-Based Models: Insights into the Lookahead Capabilities of Next-Token Prediction

Authors:Mathieu Blondel, Michael E. Sander, Germain Vivier-Ardisson, Tianlin Liu, Vincent Roulet
Date:2025-12-17 17:14:26

Autoregressive models (ARMs) currently constitute the dominant paradigm for large language models (LLMs). Energy-based models (EBMs) represent another class of models, which have historically been less prevalent in LLM development, yet naturally characterize the optimal policy in post-training alignment. In this paper, we provide a unified view of these two model classes. Taking the chain rule of probability as a starting point, we establish an explicit bijection between ARMs and EBMs in function space, which we show to correspond to a special case of the soft Bellman equation in maximum entropy reinforcement learning. Building upon this bijection, we derive the equivalence between supervised learning of ARMs and EBMs. Furthermore, we analyze the distillation of EBMs into ARMs by providing theoretical error bounds. Our results provide insights into the ability of ARMs to plan ahead, despite being based on the next-token prediction paradigm.

ORACLE: Time-Dependent Recursive Summary Graphs for Foresight on News Data Using LLMs

Authors:Lev Kharlashkin, Eiaki Morooka, Yehor Tereshchenko, Mika Hämäläinen
Date:2025-12-17 12:49:42

ORACLE turns daily news into week-over-week, decision-ready insights for one of the Finnish University of Applied Sciences. The platform crawls and versions news, applies University-specific relevance filtering, embeds content, classifies items into PESTEL dimensions and builds a concise Time-Dependent Recursive Summary Graph (TRSG): two clustering layers summarized by an LLM and recomputed weekly. A lightweight change detector highlights what is new, removed or changed, then groups differences into themes for PESTEL-aware analysis. We detail the pipeline, discuss concrete design choices that make the system stable in production and present a curriculum-intelligence use case with an evaluation plan.

CangLing-KnowFlow: A Unified Knowledge-and-Flow-fused Agent for Comprehensive Remote Sensing Applications

Authors:Zhengchao Chen, Haoran Wang, Jing Yao, Pedram Ghamisi, Jun Zhou, Peter M. Atkinson, Bing Zhang
Date:2025-12-17 09:31:57

The automated and intelligent processing of massive remote sensing (RS) datasets is critical in Earth observation (EO). Existing automated systems are normally task-specific, lacking a unified framework to manage diverse, end-to-end workflows--from data preprocessing to advanced interpretation--across diverse RS applications. To address this gap, this paper introduces CangLing-KnowFlow, a unified intelligent agent framework that integrates a Procedural Knowledge Base (PKB), Dynamic Workflow Adjustment, and an Evolutionary Memory Module. The PKB, comprising 1,008 expert-validated workflow cases across 162 practical RS tasks, guides planning and substantially reduces hallucinations common in general-purpose agents. During runtime failures, the Dynamic Workflow Adjustment autonomously diagnoses and replans recovery strategies, while the Evolutionary Memory Module continuously learns from these events, iteratively enhancing the agent's knowledge and performance. This synergy enables CangLing-KnowFlow to adapt, learn, and operate reliably across diverse, complex tasks. We evaluated CangLing-KnowFlow on the KnowFlow-Bench, a novel benchmark of 324 workflows inspired by real-world applications, testing its performance across 13 top Large Language Model (LLM) backbones, from open-source to commercial. Across all complex tasks, CangLing-KnowFlow surpassed the Reflexion baseline by at least 4% in Task Success Rate. As the first most comprehensive validation along this emerging field, this research demonstrates the great potential of CangLing-KnowFlow as a robust, efficient, and scalable automated solution for complex EO challenges by leveraging expert knowledge (Knowledge) into adaptive and verifiable procedures (Flow).

MCP-SafetyBench: A Benchmark for Safety Evaluation of Large Language Models with Real-World MCP Servers

Authors:Xuanjun Zong, Zhiqi Shen, Lei Wang, Yunshi Lan, Chao Yang
Date:2025-12-17 08:00:32

Large language models (LLMs) are evolving into agentic systems that reason, plan, and operate external tools. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a key enabler of this transition, offering a standardized interface for connecting LLMs with heterogeneous tools and services. Yet MCP's openness and multi-server workflows introduce new safety risks that existing benchmarks fail to capture, as they focus on isolated attacks or lack real-world coverage. We present MCP-SafetyBench, a comprehensive benchmark built on real MCP servers that supports realistic multi-turn evaluation across five domains: browser automation, financial analysis, location navigation, repository management, and web search. It incorporates a unified taxonomy of 20 MCP attack types spanning server, host, and user sides, and includes tasks requiring multi-step reasoning and cross-server coordination under uncertainty. Using MCP-SafetyBench, we systematically evaluate leading open- and closed-source LLMs, revealing large disparities in safety performance and escalating vulnerabilities as task horizons and server interactions grow. Our results highlight the urgent need for stronger defenses and establish MCP-SafetyBench as a foundation for diagnosing and mitigating safety risks in real-world MCP deployments.

Imitation Game: Reproducing Deep Learning Bugs Leveraging an Intelligent Agent

Authors:Mehil B Shah, Mohammad Masudur Rahman, Foutse Khomh
Date:2025-12-17 00:50:58

Despite their wide adoption in various domains (e.g., healthcare, finance, software engineering), Deep Learning (DL)-based applications suffer from many bugs, failures, and vulnerabilities. Reproducing these bugs is essential for their resolution, but it is extremely challenging due to the inherent nondeterminism of DL models and their tight coupling with hardware and software environments. According to recent studies, only about 3% of DL bugs can be reliably reproduced using manual approaches. To address these challenges, we present RepGen, a novel, automated, and intelligent approach for reproducing deep learning bugs. RepGen constructs a learning-enhanced context from a project, develops a comprehensive plan for bug reproduction, employs an iterative generate-validate-refine mechanism, and thus generates such code using an LLM that reproduces the bug at hand. We evaluate RepGen on 106 real-world deep learning bugs and achieve a reproduction rate of 80.19%, a 19.81% improvement over the state-of-the-art measure. A developer study involving 27 participants shows that RepGen improves the success rate of DL bug reproduction by 23.35%, reduces the time to reproduce by 56.8%, and lowers participants' cognitive load.

Spoken DialogSum: An Emotion-Rich Conversational Dataset for Spoken Dialogue Summarization

Authors:Yen-Ju Lu, Kunxiao Gao, Mingrui Liang, Helin Wang, Thomas Thebaud, Laureano Moro-Velazquez, Najim Dehak, Jesus Villalba
Date:2025-12-16 18:54:20

Recent audio language models can follow long conversations. However, research on emotion-aware or spoken dialogue summarization is constrained by the lack of data that links speech, summaries, and paralinguistic cues. We introduce Spoken DialogSum, the first corpus aligning raw conversational audio with factual summaries, emotion-rich summaries, and utterance-level labels for speaker age, gender, and emotion. The dataset is built in two stages: first, an LLM rewrites DialogSum scripts with Switchboard-style fillers and back-channels, then tags each utterance with emotion, pitch, and speaking rate. Second, an expressive TTS engine synthesizes speech from the tagged scripts, aligned with paralinguistic labels. Spoken DialogSum comprises 13,460 emotion-diverse dialogues, each paired with both a factual and an emotion-focused summary. We release an online demo at https://fatfat-emosum.github.io/EmoDialog-Sum-Audio-Samples/, with plans to release the full dataset in the near future. Baselines show that an Audio-LLM raises emotional-summary ROUGE-L by 28% relative to a cascaded ASR-LLM system, confirming the value of end-to-end speech modeling.

Model-First Reasoning LLM Agents: Reducing Hallucinations through Explicit Problem Modeling

Authors:Annu Rana, Gaurav Kumar
Date:2025-12-16 15:07:36

Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with complex multi-step planning tasks, showing high rates of constraint violations and inconsistent solutions. Existing strategies such as Chain-of-Thought and ReAct rely on implicit state tracking and lack an explicit problem representation. Inspired by classical AI planning, we propose Model-First Reasoning (MFR), a two-phase paradigm in which the LLM first constructs an explicit model of the problem, defining entities, state variables, actions, and constraints, before generating a solution plan. Across multiple planning domains, including medical scheduling, route planning, resource allocation, logic puzzles, and procedural synthesis, MFR reduces constraint violations and improves solution quality compared to Chain-of-Thought and ReAct. Ablation studies show that the explicit modeling phase is critical for these gains. Our results suggest that many LLM planning failures stem from representational deficiencies rather than reasoning limitations, highlighting explicit modeling as a key component for robust and interpretable AI agents. All prompts, evaluation procedures, and task datasets are documented to facilitate reproducibility.

LAPPI: Interactive Optimization with LLM-Assisted Preference-Based Problem Instantiation

Authors:So Kuroki, Manami Nakagawa, Shigeo Yoshida, Yuki Koyama, Kozuno Tadashi
Date:2025-12-16 06:43:38

Many real-world tasks, such as trip planning or meal planning, can be formulated as combinatorial optimization problems. However, using optimization solvers is difficult for end users because it requires problem instantiation: defining candidate items, assigning preference scores, and specifying constraints. We introduce LAPPI (LLM-Assisted Preference-based Problem Instantiation), an interactive approach that uses large language models (LLMs) to support users in this instantiation process. Through natural language conversations, the system helps users transform vague preferences into well-defined optimization problems. These instantiated problems are then passed to existing optimization solvers to generate solutions. In a user study on trip planning, our method successfully captured user preferences and generated feasible plans that outperformed both conventional and prompt-engineering approaches. We further demonstrate LAPPI's versatility by adapting it to an additional use case.

Cornserve: Efficiently Serving Any-to-Any Multimodal Models

Authors:Jeff J. Ma, Jae-Won Chung, Jisang Ahn, Yizhuo Liang, Akshay Jajoo, Myungjin Lee, Mosharaf Chowdhury
Date:2025-12-16 05:14:41

We present Cornserve, an efficient online serving system for an emerging class of multimodal models called Any-to-Any models. Any-to-Any models accept combinations of text and multimodal data (e.g., image, video, audio) as input and also generate combinations of text and multimodal data as output, introducing request type, computation path, and computation scaling heterogeneity in model serving. Cornserve allows model developers to describe the computation graph of generic Any-to-Any models, which consists of heterogeneous components such as multimodal encoders, autoregressive models like Large Language Models (LLMs), and multimodal generators like Diffusion Transformers (DiTs). Given this, Cornserve's planner automatically finds an optimized deployment plan for the model, including whether and how to disaggregate the model into smaller components based on model and workload characteristics. Cornserve's distributed runtime then executes the model per the plan, efficiently handling Any-to-Any model heterogeneity during online serving. Evaluations show that Cornserve can efficiently serve diverse Any-to-Any models and workloads, delivering up to 3.81$\times$ throughput improvement and up to 5.79$\times$ tail latency reduction over existing solutions.

A Scientific Reasoning Model for Organic Synthesis Procedure Generation

Authors:Guoqing Liu, Junren Li, Zihan Zhao, Eray Inanc, Krzysztof Maziarz, Jose Garrido Torres, Victor Garcia Satorras, Shoko Ueda, Christopher M. Bishop, Marwin Segler
Date:2025-12-15 18:55:39

Solving computer-aided synthesis planning is essential for enabling fully automated, robot-assisted synthesis workflows and improving the efficiency of drug discovery. A key challenge, however, is bridging the gap between computational route design and practical laboratory execution, particularly the accurate prediction of viable experimental procedures for each synthesis step. In this work, we present QFANG, a scientific reasoning language model capable of generating precise, structured experimental procedures directly from reaction equations, with explicit chain-of-thought reasoning. To develop QFANG, we curated a high-quality dataset comprising 905,990 chemical reactions paired with structured action sequences, extracted and processed from patent literature using large language models. We introduce a Chemistry-Guided Reasoning (CGR) framework that produces chain-of-thought data grounded in chemical knowledge at scale. The model subsequently undergoes supervised fine-tuning to elicit complex chemistry reasoning. Finally, we apply Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) to further enhance procedural accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that QFANG outperforms advanced general-purpose reasoning models and nearest-neighbor retrieval baselines, measured by traditional NLP similarity metrics and a chemically aware evaluator using an LLM-as-a-judge. Moreover, QFANG generalizes to certain out-of-domain reaction classes and adapts to variations in laboratory conditions and user-specific constraints. We believe that QFANG's ability to generate high-quality synthesis procedures represents an important step toward bridging the gap between computational synthesis planning and fully automated laboratory synthesis.

Large Language Models for Power System Applications: A Comprehensive Literature Survey

Authors:Muhammad Sarwar, Muhammad Rizwan, Mubushra Aziz, Abdul Rehman Sudais
Date:2025-12-15 05:56:19

This comprehensive literature review examines the emerging applications of Large Language Models (LLMs) in power system engineering. Through a systematic analysis of recent research published between 2020 and 2025, we explore how LLMs are being integrated into various aspects of power system operations, planning, and management. The review covers key application areas including fault diagnosis, load forecasting, cybersecurity, control and optimization, system planning, simulation, and knowledge management. Our findings indicate that while LLMs show promising potential in enhancing power system operations through their advanced natural language processing and reasoning capabilities, significant challenges remain in their practical implementation. These challenges include limited domain-specific training data, concerns about reliability and safety in critical infrastructure, and the need for enhanced explainability. The review also highlights emerging trends such as the development of power system-specific LLMs and hybrid approaches combining LLMs with traditional power engineering methods. We identify crucial research directions for advancing the field, including the development of specialized architectures, improved security frameworks, and enhanced integration with existing power system tools. This survey provides power system researchers and practitioners with a comprehensive overview of the current state of LLM applications in the field and outlines future pathways for research and development.

Beyond Task Completion: An Assessment Framework for Evaluating Agentic AI Systems

Authors:Sreemaee Akshathala, Bassam Adnan, Mahisha Ramesh, Karthik Vaidhyanathan, Basil Muhammed, Kannan Parthasarathy
Date:2025-12-14 18:17:40

Recent advances in agentic AI have shifted the focus from standalone Large Language Models (LLMs) to integrated systems that combine LLMs with tools, memory, and other agents to perform complex tasks. These multi-agent architectures enable coordinated reasoning, planning, and execution across diverse domains, allowing agents to collaboratively automate complex workflows. Despite these advances, evaluation and assessment of LLM agents and the multi-agent systems they constitute remain a fundamental challenge. Although various approaches have been proposed in the software engineering literature for evaluating conventional software components, existing methods for AI-based systems often overlook the non-deterministic nature of models. This non-determinism introduces behavioral uncertainty during execution, yet existing evaluations rely on binary task completion metrics that fail to capture it. Evaluating agentic systems therefore requires examining additional dimensions, including the agent ability to invoke tools, ingest and retrieve memory, collaborate with other agents, and interact effectively with its environment. These challenges emerged during our ongoing industry collaboration with MontyCloud Inc., when we deployed an agentic system in production. These limitations surfaced during deployment, highlighting practical gaps in the current evaluation methods and the need for a systematic assessment of agent behavior beyond task outcomes. Informed by these observations and established definitions of agentic systems, we propose an end-to-end Agent Assessment Framework with four evaluation pillars encompassing LLMs, Memory, Tools, and Environment. We validate the framework on a representative Autonomous CloudOps use case, where experiments reveal behavioral deviations overlooked by conventional metrics, demonstrating its effectiveness in capturing runtime uncertainties.

CoDA: A Context-Decoupled Hierarchical Agent with Reinforcement Learning

Authors:Xuanzhang Liu, Jianglun Feng, Zhuoran Zhuang, Junzhe Zhao, Maofei Que, Jieting Li, Dianlei Wang, Hao Tong, Ye Chen, Pan Li
Date:2025-12-14 14:41:29

Large Language Model (LLM) agents trained with reinforcement learning (RL) show great promise for solving complex, multi-step tasks. However, their performance is often crippled by "Context Explosion", where the accumulation of long text outputs overwhelms the model's context window and leads to reasoning failures. To address this, we introduce CoDA, a Context-Decoupled hierarchical Agent, a simple but effective reinforcement learning framework that decouples high-level planning from low-level execution. It employs a single, shared LLM backbone that learns to operate in two distinct, contextually isolated roles: a high-level Planner that decomposes tasks within a concise strategic context, and a low-level Executor that handles tool interactions in an ephemeral, isolated workspace. We train this unified agent end-to-end using PECO (Planner-Executor Co-Optimization), a reinforcement learning methodology that applies a trajectory-level reward to jointly optimize both roles, fostering seamless collaboration through context-dependent policy updates. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CoDA achieves significant performance improvements over state-of-the-art baselines on complex multi-hop question-answering benchmarks, and it exhibits strong robustness in long-context scenarios, maintaining stable performance while all other baselines suffer severe degradation, thus further validating the effectiveness of our hierarchical design in mitigating context overload.

Emergence: Overcoming Privileged Information Bias in Asymmetric Embodied Agents via Active Querying

Authors:Shaun Baek, Sam Liu, Joseph Ukpong
Date:2025-12-13 17:17:51

Large Language Models (LLMs) act as powerful reasoning engines but struggle with "symbol grounding" in embodied environments, particularly when information is asymmetrically distributed. We investigate the Privileged Information Bias (or "Curse of Knowledge"), where a knowledgeable "Leader" agent fails to guide a sensor-limited "Follower" due to a lack of Theory of Mind. To quantify this phenomenon, we propose a novel Asymmetric Assistive Reasoning framework within AI2-THOR. Our experiments reveal a significant "Success Gap": while the Leader successfully perceives the target in 35.0% of episodes, the collaborative team succeeds only 17.0% of the time, implying that nearly 50% of feasible plans fail solely due to communicative grounding errors. We demonstrate that a "Pull-based" protocol (active querying) is significantly more robust than standard "Push-based" instruction, with successful episodes featuring 2x the frequency of clarification requests. This research isolates the mechanism of active uncertainty reduction as a prerequisite for safe human-AI and robot-robot collaboration.

Floorplan2Guide: LLM-Guided Floorplan Parsing for BLV Indoor Navigation

Authors:Aydin Ayanzadeh, Tim Oates
Date:2025-12-13 04:49:26

Indoor navigation remains a critical challenge for people with visual impairments. The current solutions mainly rely on infrastructure-based systems, which limit their ability to navigate safely in dynamic environments. We propose a novel navigation approach that utilizes a foundation model to transform floor plans into navigable knowledge graphs and generate human-readable navigation instructions. Floorplan2Guide integrates a large language model (LLM) to extract spatial information from architectural layouts, reducing the manual preprocessing required by earlier floorplan parsing methods. Experimental results indicate that few-shot learning improves navigation accuracy in comparison to zero-shot learning on simulated and real-world evaluations. Claude 3.7 Sonnet achieves the highest accuracy among the evaluated models, with 92.31%, 76.92%, and 61.54% on the short, medium, and long routes, respectively, under 5-shot prompting of the MP-1 floor plan. The success rate of graph-based spatial structure is 15.4% higher than that of direct visual reasoning among all models, which confirms that graphical representation and in-context learning enhance navigation performance and make our solution more precise for indoor navigation of Blind and Low Vision (BLV) users.

Keep the Lights On, Keep the Lengths in Check: Plug-In Adversarial Detection for Time-Series LLMs in Energy Forecasting

Authors:Hua Ma, Ruoxi Sun, Minhui Xue, Xingliang Yuan, Carsten Rudolph, Surya Nepal, Ling Liu
Date:2025-12-13 03:24:36

Accurate time-series forecasting is increasingly critical for planning and operations in low-carbon power systems. Emerging time-series large language models (TS-LLMs) now deliver this capability at scale, requiring no task-specific retraining, and are quickly becoming essential components within the Internet-of-Energy (IoE) ecosystem. However, their real-world deployment is complicated by a critical vulnerability: adversarial examples (AEs). Detecting these AEs is challenging because (i) adversarial perturbations are optimized across the entire input sequence and exploit global temporal dependencies, which renders local detection methods ineffective, and (ii) unlike traditional forecasting models with fixed input dimensions, TS-LLMs accept sequences of variable length, increasing variability that complicates detection. To address these challenges, we propose a plug-in detection framework that capitalizes on the TS-LLM's own variable-length input capability. Our method uses sampling-induced divergence as a detection signal. Given an input sequence, we generate multiple shortened variants and detect AEs by measuring the consistency of their forecasts: Benign sequences tend to produce stable predictions under sampling, whereas adversarial sequences show low forecast similarity, because perturbations optimized for a full-length sequence do not transfer reliably to shorter, differently-structured subsamples. We evaluate our approach on three representative TS-LLMs (TimeGPT, TimesFM, and TimeLLM) across three energy datasets: ETTh2 (Electricity Transformer Temperature), NI (Hourly Energy Consumption), and Consumption (Hourly Electricity Consumption and Production). Empirical results confirm strong and robust detection performance across both black-box and white-box attack scenarios, highlighting its practicality as a reliable safeguard for TS-LLM forecasting in real-world energy systems.

Exploring MLLM-Diffusion Information Transfer with MetaCanvas

Authors:Han Lin, Xichen Pan, Ziqi Huang, Ji Hou, Jialiang Wang, Weifeng Chen, Zecheng He, Felix Juefei-Xu, Junzhe Sun, Zhipeng Fan, Ali Thabet, Mohit Bansal, Chu Wang
Date:2025-12-12 11:07:11

Multimodal learning has rapidly advanced visual understanding, largely via multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that use powerful LLMs as cognitive cores. In visual generation, however, these powerful core models are typically reduced to global text encoders for diffusion models, leaving most of their reasoning and planning ability unused. This creates a gap: current multimodal LLMs can parse complex layouts, attributes, and knowledge-intensive scenes, yet struggle to generate images or videos with equally precise and structured control. We propose MetaCanvas, a lightweight framework that lets MLLMs reason and plan directly in spatial and spatiotemporal latent spaces and interface tightly with diffusion generators. We empirically implement MetaCanvas on three different diffusion backbones and evaluate it across six tasks, including text-to-image generation, text/image-to-video generation, image/video editing, and in-context video generation, each requiring precise layouts, robust attribute binding, and reasoning-intensive control. MetaCanvas consistently outperforms global-conditioning baselines, suggesting that treating MLLMs as latent-space planners is a promising direction for narrowing the gap between multimodal understanding and generation.

Towards Logic-Aware Manipulation: A Knowledge Primitive for VLM-Based Assistants in Smart Manufacturing

Authors:Suchang Chen, Daqiang Guo
Date:2025-12-12 04:36:06

Existing pipelines for vision-language models (VLMs) in robotic manipulation prioritize broad semantic generalization from images and language, but typically omit execution-critical parameters required for contact-rich actions in manufacturing cells. We formalize an object-centric manipulation-logic schema, serialized as an eight-field tuple τ, which exposes object, interface, trajectory, tolerance, and force/impedance information as a first-class knowledge signal between human operators, VLM-based assistants, and robot controllers. We instantiate τ and a small knowledge base (KB) on a 3D-printer spool-removal task in a collaborative cell, and analyze τ-conditioned VLM planning using plan-quality metrics adapted from recent VLM/LLM planning benchmarks, while demonstrating how the same schema supports taxonomy-tagged data augmentation at training time and logic-aware retrieval-augmented prompting at test time as a building block for assistant systems in smart manufacturing enterprises.

TriFlow: A Progressive Multi-Agent Framework for Intelligent Trip Planning

Authors:Yuxing Chen, Basem Suleiman, Qifan Chen
Date:2025-12-12 04:27:22

Real-world trip planning requires transforming open-ended user requests into executable itineraries under strict spatial, temporal, and budgetary constraints while aligning with user preferences. Existing LLM-based agents struggle with constraint satisfaction, tool coordination, and efficiency, often producing infeasible or costly plans. To address these limitations, we present TriFlow, a progressive multi-agent framework that unifies structured reasoning and language-based flexibility through a three-stage pipeline of retrieval, planning, and governance. By this design, TriFlow progressively narrows the search space, assembles constraint-consistent itineraries via rule-LLM collaboration, and performs bounded iterative refinement to ensure global feasibility and personalisation. Evaluations on TravelPlanner and TripTailor benchmarks demonstrated state-of-the-art results, achieving 91.1% and 97% final pass rates, respectively, with over 10x runtime efficiency improvement compared to current SOTA.

Automated Penetration Testing with LLM Agents and Classical Planning

Authors:Lingzhi Wang, Xinyi Shi, Ziyu Li, Yi Jiang, Shiyu Tan, Yuhao Jiang, Junjie Cheng, Wenyuan Chen, Xiangmin Shen, Zhenyuan LI, Yan Chen
Date:2025-12-11 22:04:39

While penetration testing plays a vital role in cybersecurity, achieving fully automated, hands-off-the-keyboard execution remains a significant research challenge. In this paper, we introduce the "Planner-Executor-Perceptor (PEP)" design paradigm and use it to systematically review existing work and identify the key challenges in this area. We also evaluate existing penetration testing systems, with a particular focus on the use of Large Language Model (LLM) agents for this task. The results show that the out-of-the-box Claude Code and Sonnet 4.5 exhibit superior penetration capabilities observed to date, substantially outperforming all prior systems. However, a detailed analysis of their testing processes reveals specific strengths and limitations; notably, LLM agents struggle with maintaining coherent long-horizon plans, performing complex reasoning, and effectively utilizing specialized tools. These limitations significantly constrain its overall capability, efficiency, and stability. To address these limitations, we propose CHECKMATE, a framework that integrates enhanced classical planning with LLM agents, providing an external, structured "brain" that mitigates the inherent weaknesses of LLM agents. Our evaluation shows that CHECKMATE outperforms the state-of-the-art system (Claude Code) in penetration capability, improving benchmark success rates by over 20%. In addition, it delivers substantially greater stability, cutting both time and monetary costs by more than 50%.

Thinking While Driving: A Concurrent Framework for Real-Time, LLM-Based Adaptive Routing

Authors:Xiaopei Tan, Muyang Fan
Date:2025-12-11 13:04:37

We present Thinking While Driving, a concurrent routing framework that integrates LLMs into a graph-based traffic environment. Unlike approaches that require agents to stop and deliberate, our system enables LLM-based route planning while agents are moving, significantly reducing intersection wait times. Under high traffic, agents average just 0.75 seconds of decision latency. To coordinate many agents in real-time, we implement a non-blocking asynchronous architecture using Unity coroutines and a dedicated request manager. The environment is a weighted undirected graph with live congestion metrics, updated continuously by the agents to enable shared perception. Our results show LLM-driven agents can dynamically adapt to traffic, reroute around congestion, and exhibit behaviors beyond static pathfinding, all while maintaining real-time performance. This work provides a reproducible framework for future research in adaptive routing and multi-agent cooperation.

LEO-RobotAgent: A General-purpose Robotic Agent for Language-driven Embodied Operator

Authors:Lihuang Chen, Xiangyu Luo, Jun Meng
Date:2025-12-11 12:58:36

We propose LEO-RobotAgent, a general-purpose language-driven intelligent agent framework for robots. Under this framework, LLMs can operate different types of robots to complete unpredictable complex tasks across various scenarios. This framework features strong generalization, robustness, and efficiency. The application-level system built around it can fully enhance bidirectional human-robot intent understanding and lower the threshold for human-robot interaction. Regarding robot task planning, the vast majority of existing studies focus on the application of large models in single-task scenarios and for single robot types. These algorithms often have complex structures and lack generalizability. Thus, the proposed LEO-RobotAgent framework is designed with a streamlined structure as much as possible, enabling large models to independently think, plan, and act within this clear framework. We provide a modular and easily registrable toolset, allowing large models to flexibly call various tools to meet different requirements. Meanwhile, the framework incorporates a human-robot interaction mechanism, enabling the algorithm to collaborate with humans like a partner. Experiments have verified that this framework can be easily adapted to mainstream robot platforms including unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), robotic arms, and wheeled robot, and efficiently execute a variety of carefully designed tasks with different complexity levels. Our code is available at https://github.com/LegendLeoChen/LEO-RobotAgent.

NormCode: A Semi-Formal Language for Context-Isolated AI Planning

Authors:Xin Guan
Date:2025-12-11 11:50:50

Multistep workflows that chain large language model (LLM) calls suffer from context pollution: as information accumulates across steps, models hallucinate, confuse intermediate outputs, and lose track of task constraints. We present NormCode, a semiformal language for constructing plans of inferences, structured decompositions where each step operates in data isolation and receives only explicitly passed inputs, which eliminates crossstep contamination by design. NormCode enforces a strict separation between semantic operations (LLMdriven reasoning, nondeterministic) and syntactic operations (deterministic data restructuring), enabling precise cost and reliability tracing. The language exists in three isomorphic formats: .ncds for human authoring, .ncd for machine execution, and .ncn for human verification, supporting progressive formalization from sketch to production. We validate NormCode through two demonstrations: (1) a base X addition algorithm achieving 100 percent accuracy on arbitrary length inputs, and (2) self hosted execution of NormCode's own five phase compiler pipeline. The working orchestrator provides dependency driven scheduling, SQLite backed checkpointing, and loop management, making AI workflows auditable by design and addressing a critical need for transparency in high stakes domains such as legal reasoning, medical decision making, and financial analysis.