LLM-planning - 2026-01-26

Spatial-Agent: Agentic Geo-spatial Reasoning with Scientific Core Concepts

Authors:Riyang Bao, Cheng Yang, Dazhou Yu, Zhexiang Tang, Gengchen Mai, Liang Zhao
Date:2026-01-23 18:33:45

Geospatial reasoning is essential for real-world applications such as urban analytics, transportation planning, and disaster response. However, existing LLM-based agents often fail at genuine geospatial computation, relying instead on web search or pattern matching while hallucinating spatial relationships. We present Spatial-Agent, an AI agent grounded in foundational theories of spatial information science. Our approach formalizes geo-analytical question answering as a concept transformation problem, where natural-language questions are parsed into executable workflows represented as GeoFlow Graphs -- directed acyclic graphs with nodes corresponding to spatial concepts and edges representing transformations. Drawing on spatial information theory, Spatial-Agent extracts spatial concepts, assigns functional roles with principled ordering constraints, and composes transformation sequences through template-based generation. Extensive experiments on MapEval-API and MapQA benchmarks demonstrate that Spatial-Agent significantly outperforms existing baselines including ReAct and Reflexion, while producing interpretable and executable geospatial workflows.

AgentDrive: An Open Benchmark Dataset for Agentic AI Reasoning with LLM-Generated Scenarios in Autonomous Systems

Authors:Mohamed Amine Ferrag, Abderrahmane Lakas, Merouane Debbah
Date:2026-01-23 18:33:41

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has sparked growing interest in their integration into autonomous systems for reasoning-driven perception, planning, and decision-making. However, evaluating and training such agentic AI models remains challenging due to the lack of large-scale, structured, and safety-critical benchmarks. This paper introduces AgentDrive, an open benchmark dataset containing 300,000 LLM-generated driving scenarios designed for training, fine-tuning, and evaluating autonomous agents under diverse conditions. AgentDrive formalizes a factorized scenario space across seven orthogonal axes: scenario type, driver behavior, environment, road layout, objective, difficulty, and traffic density. An LLM-driven prompt-to-JSON pipeline generates semantically rich, simulation-ready specifications that are validated against physical and schema constraints. Each scenario undergoes simulation rollouts, surrogate safety metric computation, and rule-based outcome labeling. To complement simulation-based evaluation, we introduce AgentDrive-MCQ, a 100,000-question multiple-choice benchmark spanning five reasoning dimensions: physics, policy, hybrid, scenario, and comparative reasoning. We conduct a large-scale evaluation of fifty leading LLMs on AgentDrive-MCQ. Results show that while proprietary frontier models perform best in contextual and policy reasoning, advanced open models are rapidly closing the gap in structured and physics-grounded reasoning. We release the AgentDrive dataset, AgentDrive-MCQ benchmark, evaluation code, and related materials at https://github.com/maferrag/AgentDrive

GTA: Generative Traffic Agents for Simulating Realistic Mobility Behavior

Authors:Simon Lämmer, Mark Colley, Patrick Ebel
Date:2026-01-23 14:24:09

People's transportation choices reflect complex trade-offs shaped by personal preferences, social norms, and technology acceptance. Predicting such behavior at scale is a critical challenge with major implications for urban planning and sustainable transport. Traditional methods use handcrafted assumptions and costly data collection, making them impractical for early-stage evaluations of new technologies or policies. We introduce Generative Traffic Agents (GTA) for simulating large-scale, context-sensitive transportation choices using LLM-powered, persona-based agents. GTA generates artificial populations from census-based sociodemographic data. It simulates activity schedules and mode choices, enabling scalable, human-like simulations without handcrafted rules. We evaluate GTA in Berlin-scale experiments, comparing simulation results against empirical data. While agents replicate patterns, such as modal split by socioeconomic status, they show systematic biases in trip length and mode preference. GTA offers new opportunities for modeling how future innovations, from bike lanes to transit apps, shape mobility decisions.

Timely Machine: Awareness of Time Makes Test-Time Scaling Agentic

Authors:Yichuan Ma, Linyang Li, Yongkang chen, Peiji Li, Xiaozhe Li, Qipeng Guo, Dahua Lin, Kai Chen
Date:2026-01-23 06:28:52

As large language models (LLMs) increasingly tackle complex reasoning tasks, test-time scaling has become critical for enhancing capabilities. However, in agentic scenarios with frequent tool calls, the traditional generation-length-based definition breaks down: tool latency decouples inference time from generation length. We propose Timely Machine, redefining test-time as wall-clock time, where models dynamically adjust strategies based on time budgets. We introduce Timely-Eval, a benchmark spanning high-frequency tool calls, low-frequency tool calls, and time-constrained reasoning. By varying tool latency, we find smaller models excel with fast feedback through more interactions, while larger models dominate high-latency settings via superior interaction quality. Moreover, existing models fail to adapt reasoning to time budgets. We propose Timely-RL to address this gap. After cold-start supervised fine-tuning, we use reinforcement learning to enhance temporal planning. Timely-RL improves time budget awareness and consistently boosts performance across Timely-Eval. We hope our work offers a new perspective on test-time scaling for the agentic era.

Grounding Large Language Models in Reaction Knowledge Graphs for Synthesis Retrieval

Authors:Olga Bunkova, Lorenzo Di Fruscia, Sophia Rupprecht, Artur M. Schweidtmann, Marcel J. T. Reinders, Jana M. Weber
Date:2026-01-22 15:11:02

Large Language Models (LLMs) can aid synthesis planning in chemistry, but standard prompting methods often yield hallucinated or outdated suggestions. We study LLM interactions with a reaction knowledge graph by casting reaction path retrieval as a Text2Cypher (natural language to graph query) generation problem, and define single- and multi-step retrieval tasks. We compare zero-shot prompting to one-shot variants using static, random, and embedding-based exemplar selection, and assess a checklist-driven validator/corrector loop. To evaluate our framework, we consider query validity and retrieval accuracy. We find that one-shot prompting with aligned exemplars consistently performs best. Our checklist-style self-correction loop mainly improves executability in zero-shot settings and offers limited additional retrieval gains once a good exemplar is present. We provide a reproducible Text2Cypher evaluation setup to facilitate further work on KG-grounded LLMs for synthesis planning. Code is available at https://github.com/Intelligent-molecular-systems/KG-LLM-Synthesis-Retrieval.

TeNet: Text-to-Network for Compact Policy Synthesis

Authors:Ariyan Bighashdel, Kevin Sebastian Luck
Date:2026-01-22 12:42:30

Robots that follow natural-language instructions often either plan at a high level using hand-designed interfaces or rely on large end-to-end models that are difficult to deploy for real-time control. We propose TeNet (Text-to-Network), a framework for instantiating compact, task-specific robot policies directly from natural language descriptions. TeNet conditions a hypernetwork on text embeddings produced by a pretrained large language model (LLM) to generate a fully executable policy, which then operates solely on low-dimensional state inputs at high control frequencies. By using the language only once at the policy instantiation time, TeNet inherits the general knowledge and paraphrasing robustness of pretrained LLMs while remaining lightweight and efficient at execution time. To improve generalization, we optionally ground language in behavior during training by aligning text embeddings with demonstrated actions, while requiring no demonstrations at inference time. Experiments on MuJoCo and Meta-World benchmarks show that TeNet produces policies that are orders of magnitude smaller than sequence-based baselines, while achieving strong performance in both multi-task and meta-learning settings and supporting high-frequency control. These results show that text-conditioned hypernetworks offer a practical way to build compact, language-driven controllers for ressource-constrained robot control tasks with real-time requirements.

ErrorMap and ErrorAtlas: Charting the Failure Landscape of Large Language Models

Authors:Shir Ashury-Tahan, Yifan Mai, Elron Bandel, Michal Shmueli-Scheuer, Leshem Choshen
Date:2026-01-22 09:52:39

Large Language Models (LLM) benchmarks tell us when models fail, but not why they fail. A wrong answer on a reasoning dataset may stem from formatting issues, calculation errors, or dataset noise rather than weak reasoning. Without disentangling such causes, benchmarks remain incomplete and cannot reliably guide model improvement. We introduce ErrorMap, the first method to chart the sources of LLM failure. It extracts a model's unique "failure signature", clarifies what benchmarks measure, and broadens error identification to reduce blind spots. This helps developers debug models, aligns benchmark goals with outcomes, and supports informed model selection. ErrorMap works on any model or dataset with the same logic. Applying our method to 35 datasets and 83 models we generate ErrorAtlas, a taxonomy of model errors, revealing recurring failure patterns. ErrorAtlas highlights error types that are currently underexplored in LLM research, such as omissions of required details in the output and question misinterpretation. By shifting focus from where models succeed to why they fail, ErrorMap and ErrorAtlas enable advanced evaluation - one that exposes hidden weaknesses and directs progress. Unlike success, typically measured by task-level metrics, our approach introduces a deeper evaluation layer that can be applied globally across models and tasks, offering richer insights into model behavior and limitations. We make the taxonomy and code publicly available with plans to periodically update ErrorAtlas as new benchmarks and models emerge.

VitalDiagnosis: AI-Driven Ecosystem for 24/7 Vital Monitoring and Chronic Disease Management

Authors:Zhikai Xue, Tianqianjin Lin, Pengwei Yan, Ruichun Wang, Yuxin Liu, Zhuoren Jiang, Xiaozhong Liu
Date:2026-01-22 09:31:19

Chronic diseases have become the leading cause of death worldwide, a challenge intensified by strained medical resources and an aging population. Individually, patients often struggle to interpret early signs of deterioration or maintain adherence to care plans. In this paper, we introduce VitalDiagnosis, an LLM-driven ecosystem designed to shift chronic disease management from passive monitoring to proactive, interactive engagement. By integrating continuous data from wearable devices with the reasoning capabilities of LLMs, the system addresses both acute health anomalies and routine adherence. It analyzes triggers through context-aware inquiries, produces provisional insights within a collaborative patient-clinician workflow, and offers personalized guidance. This approach aims to promote a more proactive and cooperative care paradigm, with the potential to enhance patient self-management and reduce avoidable clinical workload.

Bridging the Perception Gap: A Lightweight Coarse-to-Fine Architecture for Edge Audio Systems

Authors:Hengfan Zhang, Yueqian Lin, Hai Helen Li, Yiran Chen
Date:2026-01-22 05:57:25

Deploying Audio-Language Models (Audio-LLMs) on edge infrastructure exposes a persistent tension between perception depth and computational efficiency. Lightweight local models tend to produce passive perception - generic summaries that miss the subtle evidence required for multi-step audio reasoning - while indiscriminate cloud offloading incurs unacceptable latency, bandwidth cost, and privacy risk. We propose CoFi-Agent (Tool-Augmented Coarse-to-Fine Agent), a hybrid architecture targeting edge servers and gateways. It performs fast local perception and triggers conditional forensic refinement only when uncertainty is detected. CoFi-Agent runs an initial single-pass on a local 7B Audio-LLM, then a cloud controller gates difficult cases and issues lightweight plans for on-device tools such as temporal re-listening and local ASR. On the MMAR benchmark, CoFi-Agent improves accuracy from 27.20% to 53.60%, while achieving a better accuracy-efficiency trade-off than an always-on investigation pipeline. Overall, CoFi-Agent bridges the perception gap via tool-enabled, conditional edge-cloud collaboration under practical system constraints.

TransportAgents: a multi-agents LLM framework for traffic accident severity prediction

Authors:Zhichao Yang, Jiashu He, Jinxuan Fan, Cirillo Cinzia
Date:2026-01-21 23:14:05

Accurate prediction of traffic crash severity is critical for improving emergency response and public safety planning. Although recent large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong reasoning capabilities, their single-agent architectures often struggle with heterogeneous, domain-specific crash data and tend to generate biased or unstable predictions. To address these limitations, this paper proposes TransportAgents, a hybrid multi-agent framework that integrates category-specific LLM reasoning with a multilayer perceptron (MLP) integration module. Each specialized agent focuses on a particular subset of traffic information, such as demographics, environmental context, or incident details, to produce intermediate severity assessments that are subsequently fused into a unified prediction. Extensive experiments on two complementary U.S. datasets, the Consumer Product Safety Risk Management System (CPSRMS) and the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS), demonstrate that TransportAgents consistently outperforms both traditional machine learning and advanced LLM-based baselines. Across three representative backbones, including closed-source models such as GPT-3.5 and GPT-4o, as well as open-source models such as LLaMA-3.3, the framework exhibits strong robustness, scalability, and cross-dataset generalizability. A supplementary distributional analysis further shows that TransportAgents produces more balanced and well-calibrated severity predictions than standard single-agent LLM approaches, highlighting its interpretability and reliability for safety-critical decision support applications.

A Universal Large Language Model -- Drone Command and Control Interface

Authors:Javier N. Ramos-Silva, Peter J. Burke
Date:2026-01-21 21:37:54

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) for drone control can have a transformative impact on drone capabilities, especially when real world information can be integrated with drone sensing, command, and control, part of a growing field of physical AI. Large language models (LLMs) can be advantageous if trained at scale on general knowledge, but especially and in particular when the training data includes information such as detailed map geography topology of the entire planet, as well as the ability to access real time situational data such as weather. However, challenges remain in the interface between drones and LLMs in general, with each application requiring a tedious, labor intensive effort to connect the LLM trained knowledge to drone command and control. Here, we solve that problem, using an interface strategy that is LLM agnostic and drone agnostic, providing the first universal, versatile, comprehensive and easy to use drone control interface. We do this using the new model context protocol (MCP) standard, an open standard that provides a universal way for AI systems to access external data, tools, and services. We develop and deploy a cloud based Linux machine hosting an MCP server that supports the Mavlink protocol, an ubiquitous drone control language used almost universally by millions of drones including Ardupilot and PX4 framework.We demonstrate flight control of a real unmanned aerial vehicle. In further testing, we demonstrate extensive flight planning and control capability in a simulated drone, integrated with a Google Maps MCP server for up to date, real time navigation information. This demonstrates a universal approach to integration of LLMs with drone command and control, a paradigm that leverages and exploits virtually all of modern AI industry with drone technology in an easy to use interface that translates natural language to drone control.

Game-Theoretic Lens on LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems

Authors:Jianing Hao, Han Ding, Yuanjian Xu, Tianze Sun, Ran Chen, Wanbo Zhang, Guang Zhang, Siguang Li
Date:2026-01-21 14:50:34

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning, planning, and communication abilities, enabling them to operate as autonomous agents in open environments. While single-agent systems remain limited in adaptability and coordination, recent progress has shifted attention toward multi-agent systems (MAS) composed of interacting LLMs that pursue cooperative, competitive, or mixed objectives. This emerging paradigm provides a powerful testbed for studying social dynamics and strategic behaviors among intelligent agents. However, current research remains fragmented and lacks a unifying theoretical foundation. To address this gap, we present a comprehensive survey of LLM-based multi-agent systems through a game-theoretic lens. By organizing existing studies around the four key elements of game theory: players, strategies, payoffs, and information, we establish a systematic framework for understanding, comparing, and guiding future research on the design and analysis of LLM-based MAS.

CodeDelegator: Mitigating Context Pollution via Role Separation in Code-as-Action Agents

Authors:Tianxiang Fei, Cheng Chen, Yue Pan, Mao Zheng, Mingyang Song
Date:2026-01-21 11:55:30

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) allow agents to represent actions as executable code, offering greater expressivity than traditional tool-calling. However, real-world tasks often demand both strategic planning and detailed implementation. Using a single agent for both leads to context pollution from debugging traces and intermediate failures, impairing long-horizon performance. We propose CodeDelegator, a multi-agent framework that separates planning from implementation via role specialization. A persistent Delegator maintains strategic oversight by decomposing tasks, writing specifications, and monitoring progress without executing code. For each sub-task, a new Coder agent is instantiated with a clean context containing only its specification, shielding it from prior failures. To coordinate between agents, we introduce Ephemeral-Persistent State Separation (EPSS), which isolates each Coder's execution state while preserving global coherence, preventing debugging traces from polluting the Delegator's context. Experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of CodeDelegator across diverse scenarios.

Strategic Doctrine Language Models (sdLM): A Learning-System Framework for Doctrinal Consistency and Geopolitical Forecasting

Authors:Olaf Yunus Laitinen Imanov, Taner Yilmaz, Derya Umut Kulali
Date:2026-01-21 10:45:17

We introduce Strategic Doctrine Language Models (sdLM), a learning-system framework for multi-document strategic reasoning with doctrinal consistency constraints and calibrated uncertainty. The approach combines multi-document attention, temporal encoding, and a doctrine-consistency layer to improve long-horizon forecasting and plan plausibility while reducing severe doctrinal violations. We evaluate sdLM using (i) expert-panel scoring of strategic scenarios (N=47), (ii) doctrine consistency on 336 doctrine publications (12,847 statements), and (iii) geopolitical forecasting on 127 historical counterfactuals (1945-2020) across 12-60 month horizons. Across these benchmarks, sdLM achieves higher strategic quality and better calibration than strong general-purpose LLM baselines, and remains competitive with human experts on long-horizon judgments. We further report ablations, scaling trends, and deployment-oriented performance/latency characteristics to clarify which components drive improvements and how they translate to operational settings.

DARA: Few-shot Budget Allocation in Online Advertising via In-Context Decision Making with RL-Finetuned LLMs

Authors:Mingxuan Song, Yusen Huo, Bohan Zhou, Shenglin Yin, Zhen Xiao, Jieyi Long, Zhilin Zhang, Chuan Yu
Date:2026-01-21 06:58:44

Optimizing the advertiser's cumulative value of winning impressions under budget constraints poses a complex challenge in online advertising, under the paradigm of AI-Generated Bidding (AIGB). Advertisers often have personalized objectives but limited historical interaction data, resulting in few-shot scenarios where traditional reinforcement learning (RL) methods struggle to perform effectively. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising alternative for AIGB by leveraging their in-context learning capabilities to generalize from limited data. However, they lack the numerical precision required for fine-grained optimization. To address this limitation, we introduce GRPO-Adaptive, an efficient LLM post-training strategy that enhances both reasoning and numerical precision by dynamically updating the reference policy during training. Built upon this foundation, we further propose DARA, a novel dual-phase framework that decomposes the decision-making process into two stages: a few-shot reasoner that generates initial plans via in-context prompting, and a fine-grained optimizer that refines these plans using feedback-driven reasoning. This separation allows DARA to combine LLMs' in-context learning strengths with precise adaptability required by AIGB tasks. Extensive experiments on both real-world and synthetic data environments demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing baselines in terms of cumulative advertiser value under budget constraints.

3D Space as a Scratchpad for Editable Text-to-Image Generation

Authors:Oindrila Saha, Vojtech Krs, Radomir Mech, Subhransu Maji, Matheus Gadelha, Kevin Blackburn-Matzen
Date:2026-01-21 02:40:19

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has shown that reasoning improves when intermediate thoughts are externalized into explicit workspaces, such as chain-of-thought traces or tool-augmented reasoning. Yet, visual language models (VLMs) lack an analogous mechanism for spatial reasoning, limiting their ability to generate images that accurately reflect geometric relations, object identities, and compositional intent. We introduce the concept of a spatial scratchpad -- a 3D reasoning substrate that bridges linguistic intent and image synthesis. Given a text prompt, our framework parses subjects and background elements, instantiates them as editable 3D meshes, and employs agentic scene planning for placement, orientation, and viewpoint selection. The resulting 3D arrangement is rendered back into the image domain with identity-preserving cues, enabling the VLM to generate spatially consistent and visually coherent outputs. Unlike prior 2D layout-based methods, our approach supports intuitive 3D edits that propagate reliably into final images. Empirically, it achieves a 32% improvement in text alignment on GenAI-Bench, demonstrating the benefit of explicit 3D reasoning for precise, controllable image generation. Our results highlight a new paradigm for vision-language models that deliberate not only in language, but also in space. Code and visualizations at https://oindrilasaha.github.io/3DScratchpad/

On the Generalization Gap in LLM Planning: Tests and Verifier-Reward RL

Authors:Valerio Belcamino, Nicholas Attolino, Alessio Capitanelli, Fulvio Mastrogiovanni
Date:2026-01-20 20:25:37

Recent work shows that fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) can achieve high valid plan rates on PDDL planning tasks. However, it remains unclear whether this reflects transferable planning competence or domain-specific memorization. In this work, we fine-tune a 1.7B-parameter LLM on 40,000 domain-problem-plan tuples from 10 IPC 2023 domains, and evaluate both in-domain and cross-domain generalization. While the model reaches 82.9% valid plan rate in in-domain conditions, it achieves 0% on two unseen domains. To analyze this failure, we introduce three diagnostic interventions, namely (i) instance-wise symbol anonymization, (ii) compact plan serialization, and (iii) verifier-reward fine-tuning using the VAL validator as a success-focused reinforcement signal. Symbol anonymization and compact serialization cause significant performance drops despite preserving plan semantics, thus revealing strong sensitivity to surface representations. Verifier-reward fine-tuning reaches performance saturation in half the supervised training epochs, but does not improve cross-domain generalization. For the explored configurations, in-domain performance plateaus around 80%, while cross-domain performance collapses, suggesting that our fine-tuned model relies heavily on domain-specific patterns rather than transferable planning competence in this setting. Our results highlight a persistent generalization gap in LLM-based planning and provide diagnostic tools for studying its causes.

Agentic AI Meets Edge Computing in Autonomous UAV Swarms

Authors:Thuan Minh Nguyen, Vu Tuan Truong, Long Bao Le
Date:2026-01-20 19:45:33

The integration of agentic AI, powered by large language models (LLMs) with autonomous reasoning, planning, and execution, into unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms opens new operational possibilities and brings the vision of the Internet of Drones closer to reality. However, infrastructure constraints, dynamic environments, and the computational demands of multi-agent coordination limit real-world deployment in high-risk scenarios such as wildfires and disaster response. This paper investigates the integration of LLM-based agentic AI and edge computing to realize scalable and resilient autonomy in UAV swarms. We first discuss three architectures for supporting UAV swarms - standalone, edge-enabled, and edge-cloud hybrid deployment - each optimized for varying autonomy and connectivity levels. Then, a use case for wildfire search and rescue (SAR) is designed to demonstrate the efficiency of the edge-enabled architecture, enabling high SAR coverage, reduced mission completion times, and a higher level of autonomy compared to traditional approaches. Finally, we highlight open challenges in integrating LLMs and edge computing for mission-critical UAV-swarm applications.

CREATE: Cross-Layer Resilience Characterization and Optimization for Efficient yet Reliable Embodied AI Systems

Authors:Tong Xie, Yijiahao Qi, Jinqi Wen, Zishen Wan, Yanchi Dong, Zihao Wang, Shaofei Cai, Yitao Liang, Tianyu Jia, Yuan Wang, Runsheng Wang, Meng Li
Date:2026-01-20 16:40:09

Embodied Artificial Intelligence (AI) has recently attracted significant attention as it bridges AI with the physical world. Modern embodied AI systems often combine a Large Language Model (LLM)-based planner for high-level task planning and a reinforcement learning (RL)-based controller for low-level action generation, enabling embodied agents to tackle complex tasks in real-world environments. However, deploying embodied agents remains challenging due to their high computation requirements, especially for battery-powered local devices. Although techniques like lowering operating voltage can improve energy efficiency, they can introduce bit errors and result in task failures. In this work, we propose CREATE, a general design principle that leverages heterogeneous resilience at different layers for synergistic energy-reliability co-optimization. For the first time, we conduct a comprehensive error injection study on modern embodied AI systems and observe an inherent but heterogeneous fault tolerance. Building upon these insights, we develop an anomaly detection and clearance mechanism at the circuit level to eliminate outlier errors. At the model level, we propose a weight-rotation-enhanced planning algorithm to improve the fault tolerance of the LLM-based planner. Furthermore, we introduce an application-level technique, autonomy-adaptive voltage scaling, to dynamically adjust the operating voltage of the controllers. The voltage scaling circuit is co-designed to enable online voltage adjustment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that without compromising task quality, CREATE achieves 40.6% computational energy savings on average over nominal-voltage baselines and 35.0% over prior-art techniques. This further leads to 29.5% to 37.3% chip-level energy savings and approximately a 15% to 30% improvement in battery life.

Zero-shot adaptable task planning for autonomous construction robots: a comparative study of lightweight single and multi-AI agent systems

Authors:Hossein Naderi, Alireza Shojaei, Lifu Huang, Philip Agee, Kereshmeh Afsari, Abiola Akanmu
Date:2026-01-20 15:54:33

Robots are expected to play a major role in the future construction industry but face challenges due to high costs and difficulty adapting to dynamic tasks. This study explores the potential of foundation models to enhance the adaptability and generalizability of task planning in construction robots. Four models are proposed and implemented using lightweight, open-source large language models (LLMs) and vision language models (VLMs). These models include one single agent and three multi-agent teams that collaborate to create robot action plans. The models are evaluated across three construction roles: Painter, Safety Inspector, and Floor Tiling. Results show that the four-agent team outperforms the state-of-the-art GPT-4o in most metrics while being ten times more cost-effective. Additionally, teams with three and four agents demonstrate the improved generalizability. By discussing how agent behaviors influence outputs, this study enhances the understanding of AI teams and supports future research in diverse unstructured environments beyond construction.

VirtualCrime: Evaluating Criminal Potential of Large Language Models via Sandbox Simulation

Authors:Yilin Tang, Yu Wang, Lanlan Qiu, Wenchang Gao, Yunfei Ma, Baicheng Chen, Tianxing He
Date:2026-01-20 13:59:53

Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities in multi-step decision-making, planning and actions, and are increasingly integrated into various real-world applications. It is concerning whether their strong problem-solving abilities may be misused for crimes. To address this gap, we propose VirtualCrime, a sandbox simulation framework based on a three-agent system to evaluate the criminal capabilities of models. Specifically, this framework consists of an attacker agent acting as the leader of a criminal team, a judge agent determining the outcome of each action, and a world manager agent updating the environment state and entities. Furthermore, we design 40 diverse crime tasks within this framework, covering 11 maps and 13 crime objectives such as theft, robbery, kidnapping, and riot. We also introduce a human player baseline for reference to better interpret the performance of LLM agents. We evaluate 8 strong LLMs and find (1) All agents in the simulation environment compliantly generate detailed plans and execute intelligent crime processes, with some achieving relatively high success rates; (2) In some cases, agents take severe action that inflicts harm to NPCs to achieve their goals. Our work highlights the need for safety alignment when deploying agentic AI in real-world settings.

Small Models, Big Impact: Tool-Augmented AI Agents for Wireless Network Planning

Authors:Yongqiang Zhang, Mustafa A. Kishk, Mohamed-Slim Alouini
Date:2026-01-20 10:53:47

Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT promise revolutionary capabilities for Sixth-Generation (6G) wireless networks but their massive computational requirements and tendency to generate technically incorrect information create deployment barriers. In this work, we introduce MAINTAINED: autonomous artificial intelligence agent for wireless network deployment. Instead of encoding domain knowledge within model parameters, our approach orchestrates specialized computational tools for geographic analysis, signal propagation modeling, and network optimization. In a real-world case study, MAINTAINED outperforms state-of-the-art LLMs including ChatGPT-4o, Claude Sonnet 4, and DeepSeek-R1 by up to 100-fold in verified performance metrics while requiring less computational resources. This paradigm shift, moving from relying on parametric knowledge towards externalizing domain knowledge into verifiable computational tools, eliminates hallucination in technical specifications and enables edge-deployable Artificial Intelligence (AI) for wireless communications.

TransMode-LLM: Feature-Informed Natural Language Modeling with Domain-Enhanced Prompting for Travel Behavior Modeling

Authors:Meijing Zhang, Ying Xu
Date:2026-01-20 09:14:20

Understanding traveler behavior and accurately predicting travel mode choice are at the heart of transportation planning and policy-making. This study proposes TransMode-LLM, an innovative framework that integrates statistical methods with LLM-based techniques to predict travel modes from travel survey data. The framework operates through three phases: (1) statistical analysis identifies key behavioral features, (2) natural language encoding transforms structured data into contextual descriptions, and (3) LLM adaptation predicts travel mode through multiple learning paradigms including zero-shot and one/few-shot learning and domain-enhanced prompting. We evaluate TransMode-LLM using both general-purpose models (GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini) and reasoning-focused models (o3-mini, o4-mini) with varying sample sizes on real-world travel survey data. Extensive experiment results demonstrate that the LLM-based approach achieves competitive accuracy compared to state-of-the-art baseline classifiers models. Moreover, few-shot learning significantly improves prediction accuracy, with models like o3-mini showing consistent improvements of up to 42.9\% with 5 provided examples. However, domain-enhanced prompting shows divergent effects across LLM architectures. In detail, it is helpful to improve performance for general-purpose models with GPT-4o achieving improvements of 2.27% to 12.50%. However, for reasoning-oriented models (o3-mini, o4-mini), domain knowledge enhancement does not universally improve performance. This study advances the application of LLMs in travel behavior modeling, providing promising and valuable insights for both academic research and transportation policy-making in the future.

Understanding Mental States to Guide Social Influence in Multi-Person Group Dialogue

Authors:Zhichao Liang, Satoshi Nakamura
Date:2026-01-20 07:41:26

Existing dynamic Theory of Mind (ToM) benchmarks mostly place language models in a passive role: the model reads a sequence of connected scenarios and reports what people believe, feel, intend, and do as these states change. In real social interaction, ToM is also used for action: a speaker plans what to say in order to shift another person's mental-state trajectory toward a goal. We introduce SocialMindChange, a benchmark that moves from tracking minds to changing minds in social interaction. Each instance defines a social context with 4 characters and five connected scenes. The model plays one character and generates dialogue across the five scenes to reach the target while remaining consistent with the evolving states of all participants. SocialMindChange also includes selected higher-order states. Using a structured four-step framework, we construct 1,200 social contexts, covering 6000 scenarios and over 90,000 questions, each validated for realism and quality. Evaluations on ten state-of-the-art LLMs show that their average performance is 54.2% below human performance. This gap suggests that current LLMs still struggle to maintain and change mental-state representations across long, linked interactions.

PINA: Prompt Injection Attack against Navigation Agents

Authors:Jiani Liu, Yixin He, Lanlan Fan, Qidi Zhong, Yushi Cheng, Meng Zhang, Yanjiao Chen, Wenyuan Xu
Date:2026-01-20 05:28:23

Navigation agents powered by large language models (LLMs) convert natural language instructions into executable plans and actions. Compared to text-based applications, their security is far more critical: a successful prompt injection attack does not just alter outputs but can directly misguide physical navigation, leading to unsafe routes, mission failure, or real-world harm. Despite this high-stakes setting, the vulnerability of navigation agents to prompt injection remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose PINA, an adaptive prompt optimization framework tailored to navigation agents under black-box, long-context, and action-executable constraints. Experiments on indoor and outdoor navigation agents show that PINA achieves high attack success rates with an average ASR of 87.5%, surpasses all baselines, and remains robust under ablation and adaptive-attack conditions. This work provides the first systematic investigation of prompt injection attacks in navigation and highlights their urgent security implications for embodied LLM agents.

LogicEnvGen: Task-Logic Driven Generation of Diverse Simulated Environments for Embodied AI

Authors:Jianan Wang, Siyang Zhang, Bin Li, Juan Chen, Jingtao Qi, Zhuo Zhang, Chen Qian
Date:2026-01-20 03:28:07

Simulated environments play an essential role in embodied AI, functionally analogous to test cases in software engineering. However, existing environment generation methods often emphasize visual realism (e.g., object diversity and layout coherence), overlooking a crucial aspect: logical diversity from the testing perspective. This limits the comprehensive evaluation of agent adaptability and planning robustness in distinct simulated environments. To bridge this gap, we propose LogicEnvGen, a novel method driven by Large Language Models (LLMs) that adopts a top-down paradigm to generate logically diverse simulated environments as test cases for agents. Given an agent task, LogicEnvGen first analyzes its execution logic to construct decision-tree-structured behavior plans and then synthesizes a set of logical trajectories. Subsequently, it adopts a heuristic algorithm to refine the trajectory set, reducing redundant simulation. For each logical trajectory, which represents a potential task situation, LogicEnvGen correspondingly instantiates a concrete environment. Notably, it employs constraint solving for physical plausibility. Furthermore, we introduce LogicEnvEval, a novel benchmark comprising four quantitative metrics for environment evaluation. Experimental results verify the lack of logical diversity in baselines and demonstrate that LogicEnvGen achieves 1.04-2.61x greater diversity, significantly improving the performance in revealing agent faults by 4.00%-68.00%.

A Lightweight Modular Framework for Constructing Autonomous Agents Driven by Large Language Models: Design, Implementation, and Applications in AgentForge

Authors:Akbar Anbar Jafari, Cagri Ozcinar, Gholamreza Anbarjafari
Date:2026-01-19 20:33:26

The emergence of LLMs has catalyzed a paradigm shift in autonomous agent development, enabling systems capable of reasoning, planning, and executing complex multi-step tasks. However, existing agent frameworks often suffer from architectural rigidity, vendor lock-in, and prohibitive complexity that impedes rapid prototyping and deployment. This paper presents AgentForge, a lightweight, open-source Python framework designed to democratize the construction of LLM-driven autonomous agents through a principled modular architecture. AgentForge introduces three key innovations: (1) a composable skill abstraction that enables fine-grained task decomposition with formally defined input-output contracts, (2) a unified LLM backend interface supporting seamless switching between cloud-based APIs and local inference engines, and (3) a declarative YAML-based configuration system that separates agent logic from implementation details. We formalize the skill composition mechanism as a directed acyclic graph (DAG) and prove its expressiveness for representing arbitrary sequential and parallel task workflows. Comprehensive experimental evaluation across four benchmark scenarios demonstrates that AgentForge achieves competitive task completion rates while reducing development time by 62% compared to LangChain and 78% compared to direct API integration. Latency measurements confirm sub-100ms orchestration overhead, rendering the framework suitable for real-time applications. The modular design facilitates extension: we demonstrate the integration of six built-in skills and provide comprehensive documentation for custom skill development. AgentForge addresses a critical gap in the LLM agent ecosystem by providing researchers and practitioners with a production-ready foundation for constructing, evaluating, and deploying autonomous agents without sacrificing flexibility or performance.

RegCheck: A tool for automating comparisons between study registrations and papers

Authors:Jamie Cummins, Beth Clarke, Ian Hussey, Malte Elson
Date:2026-01-19 19:10:45

Across the social and medical sciences, researchers recognize that specifying planned research activities (i.e., 'registration') prior to the commencement of research has benefits for both the transparency and rigour of science. Despite this, evidence suggests that study registrations frequently go unexamined, minimizing their effectiveness. In a way this is no surprise: manually checking registrations against papers is labour- and time-intensive, requiring careful reading across formats and expertise across domains. The advent of AI unlocks new possibilities in facilitating this activity. We present RegCheck, a modular LLM-assisted tool designed to help researchers, reviewers, and editors from across scientific disciplines compare study registrations with their corresponding papers. Importantly, RegCheck keeps human expertise and judgement in the loop by (i) ensuring that users are the ones who determine which features should be compared, and (ii) presenting the most relevant text associated with each feature to the user, facilitating (rather than replacing) human discrepancy judgements. RegCheck also generates shareable reports with unique RegCheck IDs, enabling them to be easily shared and verified by other users. RegCheck is designed to be adaptable across scientific domains, as well as registration and publication formats. In this paper we provide an overview of the motivation, workflow, and design principles of RegCheck, and we discuss its potential as an extensible infrastructure for reproducible science with an example use case.

Aligning Agentic World Models via Knowledgeable Experience Learning

Authors:Baochang Ren, Yunzhi Yao, Rui Sun, Shuofei Qiao, Ningyu Zhang, Huajun Chen
Date:2026-01-19 17:33:31

Current Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit a critical modal disconnect: they possess vast semantic knowledge but lack the procedural grounding to respect the immutable laws of the physical world. Consequently, while these agents implicitly function as world models, their simulations often suffer from physical hallucinations-generating plans that are logically sound but physically unexecutable. Existing alignment strategies predominantly rely on resource-intensive training or fine-tuning, which attempt to compress dynamic environmental rules into static model parameters. However, such parametric encapsulation is inherently rigid, struggling to adapt to the open-ended variability of physical dynamics without continuous, costly retraining. To bridge this gap, we introduce WorldMind, a framework that autonomously constructs a symbolic World Knowledge Repository by synthesizing environmental feedback. Specifically, it unifies Process Experience to enforce physical feasibility via prediction errors and Goal Experience to guide task optimality through successful trajectories. Experiments on EB-ALFRED and EB-Habitat demonstrate that WorldMind achieves superior performance compared to baselines with remarkable cross-model and cross-environment transferability.

LLM-VLM Fusion Framework for Autonomous Maritime Port Inspection using a Heterogeneous UAV-USV System

Authors:Muhayy Ud Din, Waseem Akram, Ahsan B. Bakht, Irfan Hussain
Date:2026-01-19 14:36:50

Maritime port inspection plays a critical role in ensuring safety, regulatory compliance, and operational efficiency in complex maritime environments. However, existing inspection methods often rely on manual operations and conventional computer vision techniques that lack scalability and contextual understanding. This study introduces a novel integrated engineering framework that utilizes the synergy between Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) to enable autonomous maritime port inspection using cooperative aerial and surface robotic platforms. The proposed framework replaces traditional state-machine mission planners with LLM-driven symbolic planning and improved perception pipelines through VLM-based semantic inspection, enabling context-aware and adaptive monitoring. The LLM module translates natural language mission instructions into executable symbolic plans with dependency graphs that encode operational constraints and ensure safe UAV-USV coordination. Meanwhile, the VLM module performs real-time semantic inspection and compliance assessment, generating structured reports with contextual reasoning. The framework was validated using the extended MBZIRC Maritime Simulator with realistic port infrastructure and further assessed through real-world robotic inspection trials. The lightweight on-board design ensures suitability for resource-constrained maritime platforms, advancing the development of intelligent, autonomous inspection systems. Project resources (code and videos) can be found here: https://github.com/Muhayyuddin/llm-vlm-fusion-port-inspection