This paper introduces a novel Deep Researcher architecture designed to generate detailed research reports on complex PhD level topics by addressing the inherent limitations of the Parallel Scaling paradigm. Our system utilizes two key innovations: Sequential Research Plan Refinement via Reflection and a Candidates Crossover algorithm. The sequential refinement process is demonstrated as an efficient method that allows the agent to maintain a centralized Global Research Context, enabling it to look back at current progress, reason about the research plan, and intelligently make changes at runtime. This dynamic adaptation contrasts with parallel approaches, which often suffer from siloed knowledge. The Candidates Crossover algorithm further enhances search efficiency by deploying multiple LLM candidates with varied parameters to explore a larger search space, with their findings synthesized to curate a comprehensive final research response. The process concludes with One Shot Report Generation, ensuring the final document is informed by a unified narrative and high fact density. Powered by the Gemini 2.5 Pro model, our Deep Researcher was evaluated on the DeepResearch Bench, a globally recognized benchmark of 100 doctoral level research tasks. Our architecture achieved an overall score of 46.21, demonstrating superior performance by surpassing leading deep research agents such as Claude Researcher, Nvidia AIQ Research Assistant, Perplexity Research, Kimi Researcher and Grok Deeper Search present on the DeepResearch Bench actively running leaderboard. This performance marginally exceeds our previous work, Static DRA, and reinforces the finding that sequential scaling consistently outperforms the parallel self consistency paradigm.
Autonomous scientific discovery with large language model (LLM)-based agents has recently made substantial progress, demonstrating the ability to automate end-to-end research workflows. However, existing systems largely rely on runtime-centric execution paradigms, repeatedly reading, summarizing, and reasoning over large volumes of scientific literature online. This on-the-spot computation strategy incurs high computational cost, suffers from context window limitations, and often leads to brittle reasoning and hallucination. We propose Idea2Story, a pre-computation-driven framework for autonomous scientific discovery that shifts literature understanding from online reasoning to offline knowledge construction. Idea2Story continuously collects peer-reviewed papers together with their review feedback, extracts core methodological units, composes reusable research patterns, and organizes them into a structured methodological knowledge graph. At runtime, underspecified user research intents are aligned to established research paradigms, enabling efficient retrieval and reuse of high-quality research patterns instead of open-ended generation and trial-and-error. By grounding research planning and execution in a pre-built knowledge graph, Idea2Story alleviates the context window bottleneck of LLMs and substantially reduces repeated runtime reasoning over literature. We conduct qualitative analyses and preliminary empirical studies demonstrating that Idea2Story can generate coherent, methodologically grounded, and novel research patterns, and can produce several high-quality research demonstrations in an end-to-end setting. These results suggest that offline knowledge construction provides a practical and scalable foundation for reliable autonomous scientific discovery.
Family learning takes place in everyday routines where children and caregivers read, practice, and develop new skills together. Despite growing interest in AI tutors, most existing systems are designed for single learners or classroom settings and do not address the distributed planning, coordination, and execution demands of learning at home. This paper introduces ParPal, a human-centred, LLM-powered system that supports multi-actor family learning by decomposing learning goals into actionable subtasks, allocating them across caregivers under realistic availability and expertise constraints, and providing caregiver-in-the-loop tutoring support with visibility into individual and collective contributions. Through expert evaluation of generated weekly learning plans and a one-week field deployment with 11 families, we identify systematic failure modes in current LLM-based planning, including misalignment with role expertise, unnecessary or costly collaboration, missing pedagogical learning trajectories, and physically or temporally infeasible tasks. While ParPal improves coordination clarity and recognition of caregiving effort, these findings expose fundamental limitations in how current LLMs operationalize pedagogical knowledge, reason about collaboration, and account for real-world, embodied constraints. We discuss implications for human-centred AI design and AI methodology, positioning multi-actor family learning as a critical testbed for advancing planning, adaptation, and pedagogical structure in next-generation AI systems.
Multi-robot systems have been widely deployed in real-world applications, providing significant improvements in efficiency and reductions in labor costs. However, most existing multi-robot collaboration methods rely on extensive task-specific training, which limits their adaptability to new or diverse scenarios. Recent research leverages the language understanding and reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to enable more flexible collaboration without specialized training. Yet, current LLM-empowered approaches remain inefficient: when confronted with identical or similar tasks, they must replan from scratch because they omit task-level similarities. To address this limitation, we propose MeCo, a similarity-aware multi-robot collaboration framework that applies the principle of ``cache and reuse'' (a.k.a., memoization) to reduce redundant computation. Unlike simple task repetition, identifying and reusing solutions for similar but not identical tasks is far more challenging, particularly in multi-robot settings. To this end, MeCo introduces a new similarity testing method that retrieves previously solved tasks with high relevance, enabling effective plan reuse without re-invoking LLMs. Furthermore, we present MeCoBench, the first benchmark designed to evaluate performance on similar-task collaboration scenarios. Experimental results show that MeCo substantially reduces planning costs and improves success rates compared with state-of-the-art approaches.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled automated heuristic design (AHD) for combinatorial optimization problems (COPs), but existing frameworks' reliance on fixed evolutionary rules and static prompt templates often leads to myopic heuristic generation, redundant evaluations, and limited reasoning about how new heuristics should be derived. We propose a novel multi-agent reasoning framework, referred to as Planning through World Model for Automated Heuristic Design via Self-Evolving LLMs (PathWise), which formulates heuristic generation as a sequential decision process over an entailment graph serving as a compact, stateful memory of the search trajectory. This approach allows the system to carry forward past decisions and reuse or avoid derivation information across generations. A policy agent plans evolutionary actions, a world model agent generates heuristic rollouts conditioned on those actions, and critic agents provide routed reflections summarizing lessons from prior steps, shifting LLM-based AHD from trial-and-error evolution toward state-aware planning through reasoning. Experiments across diverse COPs show that PathWise converges faster to better heuristics, generalizes across different LLM backbones, and scales to larger problem sizes.
Large Language Models show great potential with external tools, but face significant challenges in complex, multi-turn tool invocation. They often exhibit weak planning, tool hallucination, erroneous parameter generation, and struggle with robust interaction. To tackle these issues, we present PEARL, a novel framework to enhance LLM planning and execution for sophisticated tool use. PEARL adopts a two-stage approach: an offline phase where the agent explores tools to learn valid usage patterns and failure conditions, and an online reinforcement learning phase. In the online phase, a dedicated Planner is trained via group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a carefully designed reward function that provides distinct signals for planning quality. Experiments on the ToolHop and T-Eval benchmarks show PEARL significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving a new state-of-the-art success rate of \textbf{56.5\%} on ToolHop while maintaining a low invocation error rate. Our work marks a key advance in addressing the complex planning challenges of tool use, contributing to the development of more robust and reliable LLM-based agents.
Robotic manipulation has increasingly adopted vision-language-action (VLA) models, which achieve strong performance but typically require task-specific demonstrations and fine-tuning, and often generalize poorly under domain shift. We investigate whether general-purpose large language model (LLM) agent frameworks, originally developed for software engineering, can serve as an alternative control paradigm for embodied manipulation. We introduce FAEA (Frontier Agent as Embodied Agent), which applies an LLM agent framework directly to embodied manipulation without modification. Using the same iterative reasoning that enables software agents to debug code, FAEA enables embodied agents to reason through manipulation strategies. We evaluate an unmodified frontier agent, Claude Agent SDK, across the LIBERO, ManiSkill3, and MetaWorld benchmarks. With privileged environment state access, FAEA achieves success rates of 84.9%, 85.7%, and 96%, respectively. This level of task success approaches that of VLA models trained with less than 100 demonstrations per task, without requiring demonstrations or fine-tuning. With one round of human feedback as an optional optimization, performance increases to 88.2% on LIBERO. This demonstration-free capability has immediate practical value: FAEA can autonomously explore novel scenarios in simulation and generate successful trajectories for training data augmentation in embodied learning. Our results indicate that general-purpose agents are sufficient for a class of manipulation tasks dominated by deliberative, task-level planning. This opens a path for robotics systems to leverage actively maintained agent infrastructure and benefit directly from ongoing advances in frontier models. Code is available at https://github.com/robiemusketeer/faea-sim
As an important part of urbanization, the development monitoring of newly constructed parks is of great significance for evaluating the effect of urban planning and optimizing resource allocation. However, traditional change detection methods based on remote sensing imagery have obvious limitations in high-level and intelligent analysis, and thus are difficult to meet the requirements of current urban planning and management. In face of the growing demand for complex multi-modal data analysis in urban park development monitoring, these methods often fail to provide flexible analysis capabilities for diverse application scenarios. This study proposes a multi-modal LLM agent framework, which aims to make full use of the semantic understanding and reasoning capabilities of LLM to meet the challenges in urban park development monitoring. In this framework, a general horizontal and vertical data alignment mechanism is designed to ensure the consistency and effective tracking of multi-modal data. At the same time, a specific toolkit is constructed to alleviate the hallucination issues of LLM due to the lack of domain-specific knowledge. Compared to vanilla GPT-4o and other agents, our approach enables robust multi-modal information fusion and analysis, offering reliable and scalable solutions tailored to the diverse and evolving demands of urban park development monitoring.
With the deep integration of artificial intelligence and smart home technologies, the intelligent transformation of traditional household appliances has become an inevitable trend. This paper presents AirAgent--an LLM-driven autonomous agent framework designed for home air systems. Leveraging a voice-based dialogue interface, AirAgent autonomously and personally manages indoor air quality through comprehensive perception, reasoning, and control. The framework innovatively adopts a two-layer cooperative architecture: Memory-Based Tag Extraction and Reasoning-Driven Planning. First, a dynamic memory tag extraction module continuously updates personalized user profiles. Second, a reasoning-planning model integrates real-time environmental sensor data, user states, and domain-specific prior knowledge (e.g., public health guidelines) to generate context-aware decisions. To support both interpretability and execution, we design a semi-streaming output mechanism that uses special tokens to segment the model's output stream in real time, simultaneously producing human-readable Chain-of-Thought explanations and structured, device-executable control commands. The system handles planning across 25 distinct complex dimensions while satisfying more than 20 customized constraints. As a result, AirAgent endows home air systems with proactive perception, service, and orchestration capabilities, enabling seamless, precise, and personalized air management responsive to dynamic indoor and outdoor conditions. Experimental results demonstrate up to 94.9 percent accuracy and more than 20 percent improvement in user experience metrics compared to competing commercial solutions.
Prior work suggests that language models, while trained on next token prediction, show implicit planning behavior: they may select the next token in preparation to a predicted future token, such as a likely rhyming word, as supported by a prior qualitative study of Claude 3.5 Haiku using a cross-layer transcoder. We propose much simpler techniques for assessing implicit planning in language models. With case studies on rhyme poetry generation and question answering, we demonstrate that our methodology easily scales to many models. Across models, we find that the generated rhyme (e.g. "-ight") or answer to a question ("whale") can be manipulated by steering at the end of the preceding line with a vector, affecting the generation of intermediate tokens leading up to the rhyme or answer word. We show that implicit planning is a universal mechanism, present in smaller models than previously thought, starting from 1B parameters. Our methodology offers a widely applicable direct way to study implicit planning abilities of LLMs. More broadly, understanding planning abilities of language models can inform decisions in AI safety and control.
Large language model (LLM)-powered agents can translate high-level user intents into plans and actions in an environment. Yet after observing an outcome, users may wonder: What if I had phrased my intent differently? We introduce a framework that enables such counterfactual reasoning in agentic LLM-driven control scenarios, while providing formal reliability guarantees. Our approach models the closed-loop interaction between a user, an LLM-based agent, and an environment as a structural causal model (SCM), and leverages test-time scaling to generate multiple candidate counterfactual outcomes via probabilistic abduction. Through an offline calibration phase, the proposed conformal counterfactual generation (CCG) yields sets of counterfactual outcomes that are guaranteed to contain the true counterfactual outcome with high probability. We showcase the performance of CCG on a wireless network control use case, demonstrating significant advantages compared to naive re-execution baselines.
Today, E-commerce sellers face several key challenges, including difficulties in discovering and effectively utilizing available programs and tools, and struggling to understand and utilize rich data from various tools. We therefore aim to develop Insight Agents (IA), a conversational multi-agent Data Insight system, to provide E-commerce sellers with personalized data and business insights through automated information retrieval. Our hypothesis is that IA will serve as a force multiplier for sellers, thereby driving incremental seller adoption by reducing the effort required and increase speed at which sellers make good business decisions. In this paper, we introduce this novel LLM-backed end-to-end agentic system built on a plan-and-execute paradigm and designed for comprehensive coverage, high accuracy, and low latency. It features a hierarchical multi-agent structure, consisting of manager agent and two worker agents: data presentation and insight generation, for efficient information retrieval and problem-solving. We design a simple yet effective ML solution for manager agent that combines Out-of-Domain (OOD) detection using a lightweight encoder-decoder model and agent routing through a BERT-based classifier, optimizing both accuracy and latency. Within the two worker agents, a strategic planning is designed for API-based data model that breaks down queries into granular components to generate more accurate responses, and domain knowledge is dynamically injected to to enhance the insight generator. IA has been launched for Amazon sellers in US, which has achieved high accuracy of 90% based on human evaluation, with latency of P90 below 15s.
Natural-language planning often involves vague predicates (e.g., suitable substitute, stable enough) whose satisfaction is inherently graded. Existing category-theoretic planners provide compositional structure and pullback-based hard-constraint verification, but treat applicability as crisp, forcing thresholding that collapses meaningful distinctions and cannot track quality degradation across multi-step plans. We propose Fuzzy Category-theoretic Planning (FCP), which annotates each action (morphism) with a degree in [0,1], composes plan quality via a t-norm Lukasiewicz, and retains crisp executability checks via pullback verification. FCP grounds graded applicability from language using an LLM with k-sample median aggregation and supports meeting-in-the-middle search using residuum-based backward requirements. We evaluate on (i) public PDDL3 preference/oversubscription benchmarks and (ii) RecipeNLG-Subs, a missing-substitute recipe-planning benchmark built from RecipeNLG with substitution candidates from Recipe1MSubs and FoodKG. FCP improves success and reduces hard-constraint violations on RecipeNLG-Subs compared to LLM-only and ReAct-style baselines, while remaining competitive with classical PDDL3 planners.
Inference-time planning with large language models frequently breaks under partial observability: when task-critical preconditions are not specified at query time, models tend to hallucinate missing facts or produce plans that violate hard constraints. We introduce \textbf{Self-Querying Bidirectional Categorical Planning (SQ-BCP)}, which explicitly represents precondition status (\texttt{Sat}/\texttt{Viol}/\texttt{Unk}) and resolves unknowns via (i) targeted self-queries to an oracle/user or (ii) \emph{bridging} hypotheses that establish the missing condition through an additional action. SQ-BCP performs bidirectional search and invokes a pullback-based verifier as a categorical certificate of goal compatibility, while using distance-based scores only for ranking and pruning. We prove that when the verifier succeeds and hard constraints pass deterministic checks, accepted plans are compatible with goal requirements; under bounded branching and finite resolution depth, SQ-BCP finds an accepting plan when one exists. Across WikiHow and RecipeNLG tasks with withheld preconditions, SQ-BCP reduces resource-violation rates to \textbf{14.9\%} and \textbf{5.8\%} (vs.\ \textbf{26.0\%} and \textbf{15.7\%} for the best baseline), while maintaining competitive reference quality.
Emerging 6G networks rely on complex cross-layer optimization, yet manually translating high-level intents into mathematical formulations remains a bottleneck. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promise, monolithic approaches often lack sufficient domain grounding, constraint awareness, and verification capabilities. To address this, we present ComAgent, a multi-LLM agentic AI framework. ComAgent employs a closed-loop Perception-Planning-Action-Reflection cycle, coordinating specialized agents for literature search, coding, and scoring to autonomously generate solver-ready formulations and reproducible simulations. By iteratively decomposing problems and self-correcting errors, the framework effectively bridges the gap between user intent and execution. Evaluations demonstrate that ComAgent achieves expert-comparable performance in complex beamforming optimization and outperforms monolithic LLMs across diverse wireless tasks, highlighting its potential for automating design in emerging wireless networks.
Interactive recommender systems can dynamically adapt to user feedback, but often suffer from content homogeneity and filter bubble effects due to overfitting short-term user preferences. While recent efforts aim to improve content diversity, they predominantly operate in static or one-shot settings, neglecting the long-term evolution of user interests. Reinforcement learning provides a principled framework for optimizing long-term user satisfaction by modeling sequential decision-making processes. However, its application in recommendation is hindered by sparse, long-tailed user-item interactions and limited semantic planning capabilities. In this work, we propose LLM-Enhanced Reinforcement Learning (LERL), a novel hierarchical recommendation framework that integrates the semantic planning power of LLM with the fine-grained adaptability of RL. LERL consists of a high-level LLM-based planner that selects semantically diverse content categories, and a low-level RL policy that recommends personalized items within the selected semantic space. This hierarchical design narrows the action space, enhances planning efficiency, and mitigates overexposure to redundant content. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that LERL significantly improves long-term user satisfaction when compared with state-of-the-art baselines. The implementation of LERL is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/code3-18D3/.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently empowered agentic frameworks to exhibit advanced reasoning and planning capabilities. However, their integration in robotic control pipelines remains limited in two aspects: (1) prior \ac{llm}-based approaches often lack modular, agentic execution mechanisms, limiting their ability to plan, reflect on outcomes, and revise actions in a closed-loop manner; and (2) existing benchmarks for manipulation tasks focus on low-level control and do not systematically evaluate multistep reasoning and linguistic variation. In this paper, we propose Agentic LLM for Robot Manipulation (ALRM), an LLM-driven agentic framework for robotic manipulation. ALRM integrates policy generation with agentic execution through a ReAct-style reasoning loop, supporting two complementary modes: Code-asPolicy (CaP) for direct executable control code generation, and Tool-as-Policy (TaP) for iterative planning and tool-based action execution. To enable systematic evaluation, we also introduce a novel simulation benchmark comprising 56 tasks across multiple environments, capturing linguistically diverse instructions. Experiments with ten LLMs demonstrate that ALRM provides a scalable, interpretable, and modular approach for bridging natural language reasoning with reliable robotic execution. Results reveal Claude-4.1-Opus as the top closed-source model and Falcon-H1-7B as the top open-source model under CaP.
Preparing an oral case presentation (OCP) is a crucial skill for medical students, requiring clear communication of patient information, clinical findings, and treatment plans. However, inconsistent student participation and limited guidance can make this task challenging. While Large Language Models (LLMs) can provide structured content to streamline the process, their role in facilitating skill development and supporting medical education integration remains underexplored. To address this, we conducted a formative study with six medical educators and developed CaseMaster, an interactive probe that leverages LLM-generated content tailored to medical education to help users enhance their OCP skills. The controlled study suggests CaseMaster has the potential to both improve presentation quality and reduce workload compared to traditional methods, an implication reinforced by expert feedback. We propose guidelines for educators to develop adaptive, user-centered training methods using LLMs, while considering the implications of integrating advanced technologies into medical education.
Most existing memory-enhanced Large Language Model (LLM) approaches implicitly assume that memory validity can be established either through external evaluators that provide task-specific success signals or through internal model cognition, such as reflection, for editing memory entries. However, these assumptions often break down in practical environments with dynamic drifts. We propose the Global Verifier (GLOVE), a framework that introduces a new design dimension for LLM memory systems by establishing a relative notion of truth. Through active probing to detect inconsistencies between retrieved memories and fresh observations, GLOVE enables memory-environment realignment by verifying and updating memory without access to ground-truth supervision or strong reliance on model introspection. We evaluate GLOVE on diverse benchmarks spanning web navigation, planning, and control, augmented with controlled environmental drifts that introduce non-stationarity beyond the original benchmark settings. Our results show that GLOVE substantially improves agent success rates, suggesting a robust pathway to cognitive agents capable of self-evolving.
Autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems are increasingly deployed in safety-critical, networked environments where they must operate reliably in the presence of malicious adversaries. While recent benchmarks have evaluated large language model (LLM)-based UAV agents in reasoning, navigation, and efficiency, systematic assessment of security, resilience, and trust under adversarial conditions remains largely unexplored, particularly in emerging 6G-enabled settings. We introduce $α^{3}$-SecBench, the first large-scale evaluation suite for assessing the security-aware autonomy of LLM-based UAV agents under realistic adversarial interference. Building on multi-turn conversational UAV missions from $α^{3}$-Bench, the framework augments benign episodes with 20,000 validated security overlay attack scenarios targeting seven autonomy layers, including sensing, perception, planning, control, communication, edge/cloud infrastructure, and LLM reasoning. $α^{3}$-SecBench evaluates agents across three orthogonal dimensions: security (attack detection and vulnerability attribution), resilience (safe degradation behavior), and trust (policy-compliant tool usage). We evaluate 23 state-of-the-art LLMs from major industrial providers and leading AI labs using thousands of adversarially augmented UAV episodes sampled from a corpus of 113,475 missions spanning 175 threat types. While many models reliably detect anomalous behavior, effective mitigation, vulnerability attribution, and trustworthy control actions remain inconsistent. Normalized overall scores range from 12.9% to 57.1%, highlighting a significant gap between anomaly detection and security-aware autonomous decision-making. We release $α^{3}$-SecBench on GitHub: https://github.com/maferrag/AlphaSecBench
Building world models is essential for planning in real-world domains such as businesses. Since such domains have rich semantics, we can leverage world knowledge to effectively model complex action effects and causal relationships from limited data. In this work, we propose CASSANDRA, a neurosymbolic world modeling approach that leverages an LLM as a knowledge prior to construct lightweight transition models for planning. CASSANDRA integrates two components: (1) LLM-synthesized code to model deterministic features, and (2) LLM-guided structure learning of a probabilistic graphical model to capture causal relationships among stochastic variables. We evaluate CASSANDRA in (i) a small-scale coffee-shop simulator and (ii) a complex theme park business simulator, where we demonstrate significant improvements in transition prediction and planning over baselines.
Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive formal reasoning abilities, they often break down when problems require complex proof planning. One promising approach for improving LLM reasoning abilities involves translating problems into formal logic and using a logic solver. Although off-the-shelf logic solvers are in principle substantially more efficient than LLMs at logical reasoning, they assume that all relevant facts are provided in a question and are unable to deal with missing commonsense relations. In this work, we propose a novel method that uses feedback from the logic solver to augment a logic problem with commonsense relations provided by the LLM, in an iterative manner. This involves a search procedure through potential commonsense assumptions to maximize the chance of finding useful facts while keeping cost tractable. On a collection of pure-logical reasoning datasets, from which some commonsense information has been removed, our method consistently achieves considerable improvements over existing techniques, demonstrating the value in balancing neural and symbolic elements when working in human contexts.
Generalist LLM agents are often post-trained on a narrow set of environments but deployed across far broader, unseen domains. In this work, we investigate the challenge of agentic post-training when the eventual test domains are unknown. Specifically, we analyze which properties of reinforcement learning (RL) environments and modeling choices have the greatest influence on out-of-domain performance. First, we identify two environment axes that strongly correlate with cross-domain generalization: (i) state information richness, i.e., the amount of information for the agent to process from the state, and (ii) planning complexity, estimated via goal reachability and trajectory length under a base policy. Notably, domain realism and text-level similarity are not the primary factors; for instance, the simple grid-world domain Sokoban leads to even stronger generalization in SciWorld than the more realistic ALFWorld. Motivated by these findings, we further show that increasing state information richness alone can already effectively improve cross-domain robustness. We propose a randomization technique, which is low-overhead and broadly applicable: add small amounts of distractive goal-irrelevant features to the state to make it richer without altering the task. Beyond environment-side properties, we also examine several modeling choices: (a) SFT warmup or mid-training helps prevent catastrophic forgetting during RL but undermines generalization to domains that are not included in the mid-training datamix; and (b) turning on step-by-step thinking during RL, while not always improving in-domain performance, plays a crucial role in preserving generalization.
While agent evaluation has shifted toward long-horizon tasks, most benchmarks still emphasize local, step-level reasoning rather than the global constrained optimization (e.g., time and financial budgets) that demands genuine planning ability. Meanwhile, existing LLM planning benchmarks underrepresent the active information gathering and fine-grained local constraints typical of real-world settings. To address this, we introduce DeepPlanning, a challenging benchmark for practical long-horizon agent planning. It features multi-day travel planning and multi-product shopping tasks that require proactive information acquisition, local constrained reasoning, and global constrained optimization. Evaluations on DeepPlanning show that even frontier agentic LLMs struggle with these problems, highlighting the importance of reliable explicit reasoning patterns and parallel tool use for achieving better effectiveness-efficiency trade-offs. Error analysis further points to promising directions for improving agentic LLMs over long planning horizons. We open-source the code and data to support future research.
Despite the growing adoption of large language models (LLMs) in scientific research workflows, automated support for academic rebuttal, a crucial step in academic communication and peer review, remains largely underexplored. Existing approaches typically rely on off-the-shelf LLMs or simple pipelines, which struggle with long-context understanding and often fail to produce targeted and persuasive responses. In this paper, we propose DRPG, an agentic framework for automatic academic rebuttal generation that operates through four steps: Decompose reviews into atomic concerns, Retrieve relevant evidence from the paper, Plan rebuttal strategies, and Generate responses accordingly. Notably, the Planner in DRPG reaches over 98% accuracy in identifying the most feasible rebuttal direction. Experiments on data from top-tier conferences demonstrate that DRPG significantly outperforms existing rebuttal pipelines and achieves performance beyond the average human level using only an 8B model. Our analysis further demonstrates the effectiveness of the planner design and its value in providing multi-perspective and explainable suggestions. We also showed that DRPG works well in a more complex multi-round setting. These results highlight the effectiveness of DRPG and its potential to provide high-quality rebuttal content and support the scaling of academic discussions. Codes for this work are available at https://github.com/ulab-uiuc/DRPG-RebuttalAgent.
Text-to-SQL has emerged as a prominent research area, particularly with the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs). By enabling users to query databases through natural language rather than SQL, this technology significantly lowers the barrier to data analysis. However, generating accurate SQL from natural language remains challenging due to ambiguity in user queries, the complexity of schema linking, limited generalization across SQL dialects, and the need for domain-specific understanding. In this study, we propose a Single-Agent Self-Refinement with Ensemble Voting (SSEV) pipeline built on PET-SQL that operates without ground-truth data, integrating self-refinement with Weighted Majority Voting (WMV) and its randomized variant (RWMA). Experimental results show that the SSEV achieves competitive performance across multiple benchmarks, attaining execution accuracies of 85.5% on Spider 1.0-Dev, 86.4% on Spider 1.0-Test, and 66.3% on BIRD-Dev. Building on insights from the SSEV pipeline, we further propose ReCAPAgent-SQL (Refinement-Critique-Act-Plan agent-based SQL framework) to address the growing complexity of enterprise databases and real-world Text-to-SQL tasks. The framework integrates multiple specialized agents for planning, external knowledge retrieval, critique, action generation, self-refinement, schema linking, and result validation, enabling iterative refinement of SQL predictions through agent collaboration. ReCAPAgent-SQL's WMA results achieve 31% execution accuracy on the first 100 queries of Spider 2.0-Lite, demonstrating significant improvements in handling real-world enterprise scenarios. Overall, our work facilitates the deployment of scalable Text-to-SQL systems in practical settings, supporting better data-driven decision-making at lower cost and with greater efficiency.
LLM agents excel when environments are mostly static and the needed information fits in a model's context window, but they often fail in open-ended investigations where explanations must be constructed by iteratively mining evidence from massive, heterogeneous operational data. These investigations exhibit hidden dependency structure: entities interact, signals co-vary, and the importance of a fact may only become clear after other evidence is discovered. Because the context window is bounded, agents must summarize intermediate findings before their significance is known, increasing the risk of discarding key evidence. ReAct-style agents are especially brittle in this regime. Their retrieve-summarize-reason loop makes conclusions sensitive to exploration order and introduces run-to-run non-determinism, producing a reliability gap where Pass-at-k may be high but Majority-at-k remains low. Simply sampling more rollouts or generating longer reasoning traces does not reliably stabilize results, since hypotheses cannot be autonomously checked as new evidence arrives and there is no explicit mechanism for belief bookkeeping and revision. In addition, ReAct entangles semantic reasoning with controller duties such as tool orchestration and state tracking, so execution errors and plan drift degrade reasoning while consuming scarce context. We address these issues by formulating investigation as abductive reasoning over a dependency graph and proposing EoG (Explanations over Graphs), a disaggregated framework in which an LLM performs bounded local evidence mining and labeling (cause vs symptom) while a deterministic controller manages traversal, state, and belief propagation to compute a minimal explanatory frontier. On a representative ITBench diagnostics task, EoG improves both accuracy and run-to-run consistency over ReAct baselines, including a 7x average gain in Majority-at-k entity F1.
LLM-powered search agents are increasingly being used for multi-step information seeking tasks, yet the IR community lacks empirical understanding of how agentic search sessions unfold and how retrieved evidence is used. This paper presents a large-scale log analysis of agentic search based on 14.44M search requests (3.97M sessions) collected from DeepResearchGym, i.e. an open-source search API accessed by external agentic clients. We sessionize the logs, assign session-level intents and step-wise query-reformulation labels using LLM-based annotation, and propose Context-driven Term Adoption Rate (CTAR) to quantify whether newly introduced query terms are traceable to previously retrieved evidence. Our analyses reveal distinctive behavioral patterns. First, over 90% of multi-turn sessions contain at most ten steps, and 89% of inter-step intervals fall under one minute. Second, behavior varies by intent. Fact-seeking sessions exhibit high repetition that increases over time, while sessions requiring reasoning sustain broader exploration. Third, agents reuse evidence across steps. On average, 54% of newly introduced query terms appear in the accumulated evidence context, with contributions from earlier steps beyond the most recent retrieval. The findings suggest that agentic search may benefit from repetition-aware early stopping, intent-adaptive retrieval budgets, and explicit cross-step context tracking. We plan to release the anonymized logs to support future research.
Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled the development of increasingly complex agentic and multi-agent systems capable of planning, tool use and task decomposition. However, empirical evidence shows that many of these systems suffer from fundamental reliability issues, including hallucinated actions, unexecutable plans and brittle coordination. Crucially, these failures do not stem from limitations of the underlying models themselves, but from the absence of explicit architectural structure linking goals, capabilities and execution. This paper presents a declarative, model-independent architectural layer for grounded agentic workflows that addresses this gap. The proposed layer, referred to as DALIA (Declarative Agentic Layer for Intelligent Agents), formalises executable capabilities, exposes tasks through a declarative discovery protocol, maintains a federated directory of agents and their execution resources, and constructs deterministic task graphs grounded exclusively in declared operations. By enforcing a clear separation between discovery, planning and execution, the architecture constrains agent behaviour to a verifiable operational space, reducing reliance on speculative reasoning and free-form coordination. We present the architecture and design principles of the proposed layer and illustrate its operation through a representative task-oriented scenario, demonstrating how declarative grounding enables reproducible and verifiable agentic workflows across heterogeneous environments.
Mobile graphical user interface (GUI) agents are designed to automate everyday tasks on smartphones. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced the capabilities of mobile GUI agents. However, most LLM-powered mobile GUI agents operate in stepwise query-act loops, which incur high latency due to repeated LLM queries. We present GraphPilot, a mobile GUI agent that leverages knowledge graphs of the target apps to complete user tasks in almost one LLM query. GraphPilot operates in two complementary phases to enable efficient and reliable LLM-powered GUI task automation. In the offline phase, it explores target apps, records and analyzes interaction history, and constructs an app-specific knowledge graph that encodes functions of pages and elements as well as transition rules for each app. In the online phase, given an app and a user task, it leverages the knowledge graph of the given app to guide the reasoning process of LLM. When the reasoning process encounters uncertainty, GraphPilot dynamically requests the HTML representation of the current interface to refine subsequent reasoning. Finally, a validator checks the generated sequence of actions against the transition rules in the knowledge graph, performing iterative corrections to ensure it is valid. The structured, informative information in the knowledge graph allows the LLM to plan the complete sequence of actions required to complete the user task. On the DroidTask benchmark, GraphPilot improves task completion rate over Mind2Web and AutoDroid, while substantially reducing latency and the number of LLM queries.