LLM-planning - 2026-03-19

RPMS: Enhancing LLM-Based Embodied Planning through Rule-Augmented Memory Synergy

Authors:Zhenhang Yuan, Shenghai Yuan, Lihua Xie
Date:2026-03-18 15:26:00

LLM agents often fail in closed-world embodied environments because actions must satisfy strict preconditions -- such as location, inventory, and container states -- and failure feedback is sparse. We identify two structurally coupled failure modes: (P1) invalid action generation and (P2) state drift, each amplifying the other in a degenerative cycle. We present RPMS, a conflict-managed architecture that enforces action feasibility via structured rule retrieval, gates memory applicability via a lightweight belief state, and resolves conflicts between the two sources via rules-first arbitration. On ALFWorld (134 unseen tasks), RPMS achieves 59.7% single-trial success with Llama 3.1 8B (+23.9 pp over baseline) and 98.5% with Claude Sonnet 4.5 (+11.9 pp); of the 8B gain, rule retrieval alone contributes +14.9 pp (statistically significant), making it the dominant factor. A key finding is that episodic memory is conditionally useful: it harms performance on some task types when used without grounding, but becomes a stable net positive once filtered by current state and constrained by explicit action rules. Adapting RPMS to ScienceWorld with GPT-4 yields consistent gains across all ablation conditions (avg. score 54.0 vs. 44.9 for the ReAct baseline), providing transfer evidence that the core mechanisms hold across structurally distinct environments.

A Multi-Agent System for Building-Age Cohort Mapping to Support Urban Energy Planning

Authors:Kundan Thota, Thorsten Schlachter, Veit Hagenmeyer
Date:2026-03-18 11:46:54

Determining the age distribution of the urban building stock is crucial for sustainable municipal heat planning and upgrade prioritization. However, existing approaches often rely on datasets gathered via sensors or remote sensing techniques, leaving inconsistencies and gaps in data. We present a multi-agent LLM system comprising three key agents, the Zensus agent, the OSM agent, and the Monument agent, that fuse data from heterogeneous sources. A data orchestrator and harmonizer geocodes and deduplicates building imprints. Using this fused ground truth, we introduce BuildingAgeCNN, a satellite-only classifier based on a ConvNeXt backbone augmented with a Feature Pyramid Network (FPN), CoordConv spatial channels, and Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) blocks. Under spatial cross validation, BuildingAgeCNN attains an overall accuracy of 90.69% but a modest macro-F1 of 67.25%, reflecting strong class imbalance and persistent confusions between adjacent historical cohorts. To mitigate risk for planning applications, the address-to prediction pipeline includes calibrated confidence estimates and flags low-confidence cases for manual review. This multi-agent LLM system not only assists in gathering structured data but also helps energy demand planners optimize district-heating networks and target low-carbon sustainable energy systems.

citecheck: An MCP Server for Automated Bibliographic Verification and Repair in Scholarly Manuscripts

Authors:Junhyeok Lee
Date:2026-03-18 04:10:31

Reference lists in scholarly manuscripts frequently contain errors, including incorrect identifiers, incomplete metadata, misattributed authors, and mismatches between preprint and published versions. These problems are tedious to repair manually and have become more visible in workflows that rely on large language models, which can fabricate or corrupt citations. We present citecheck, a TypeScript system and MCP server for automated bibliographic verification and repair in paper-like project folders. Given a manuscript file or workspace, citecheck selects the most likely paper artifact, extracts references from .bib, .tex, .md, .txt, or .docx, validates entries against PubMed, Crossref, arXiv, and Semantic Scholar, and returns structured correction proposals together with replacement-safety diagnostics. The current repository provides a working research prototype with multi-pass retrieval, manifestation-aware matching, policy-gated rewrite planning, and 47 passing tests covering repair behavior, malformed payload handling, transport failures, and MCP exposure. We position citecheck as infrastructure for agentic scholarly editing and as a practical guardrail against both traditional reference errors and LLM-induced citation hallucinations.

SYMDIREC: A Neuro-Symbolic Divide-Retrieve-Conquer Framework for Enhanced RTL Synthesis and Summarization

Authors:Prashanth Vijayaraghavan, Apoorva Nitsure, Luyao Shi, Charles Mackin, Ashutosh Jadhav, David Beymer, Ehsan Degan, Vandana Mukherjee
Date:2026-03-17 23:15:24

Register-Transfer Level (RTL) synthesis and summarization are central to hardware design automation but remain challenging for Large Language Models (LLMs) due to rigid HDL syntax, limited supervision, and weak alignment with natural language. Existing prompting and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods have not incorporated symbolic planning, limiting their structural precision. We introduce SYMDIREC, a neuro-symbolic framework that decomposes RTL tasks into symbolic subgoals, retrieves relevant code via a fine-tuned retriever, and assembles verified outputs through LLM reasoning. Supporting both Verilog and VHDL without LLM fine-tuning, SYMDIREC achieves ~20% higher Pass@1 rates for synthesis and 15-20% ROUGE-L improvements for summarization over prompting and RAG baselines, demonstrating the benefits of symbolic guidance in RTL tasks.

CODMAS: A Dialectic Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework for Structured RTL Optimization

Authors:Che-Ming Chang, Prashanth Vijayaraghavan, Ashutosh Jadhav, Charles Mackin, Vandana Mukherjee, Hsinyu Tsai, Ehsan Degan
Date:2026-03-17 23:10:07

Optimizing Register Transfer Level (RTL) code is a critical step in Electronic Design Automation (EDA) for improving power, performance, and area (PPA). We present CODMAS (Collaborative Optimization via a Dialectic Multi-Agent System), a framework that combines structured dialectic reasoning with domain-aware code generation and deterministic evaluation to automate RTL optimization. At the core of CODMAS are two dialectic agents: the Articulator, inspired by rubber-duck debugging, which articulates stepwise transformation plans and exposes latent assumptions; and the Hypothesis Partner, which predicts outcomes and reconciles deviations between expected and actual behavior to guide targeted refinements. These agents direct a Domain-Specific Coding Agent (DCA) to generate architecture-aware Verilog edits and a Code Evaluation Agent (CEA) to verify syntax, functionality, and PPA metrics. We introduce RTLOPT, a benchmark of 120 Verilog triples (unoptimized, optimized, testbench) for pipelining and clock-gating transformations. Across proprietary and open LLMs, CODMAS achieves ~25% reduction in critical path delay for pipelining and ~22% power reduction for clock gating, while reducing functional and compilation failures compared to strong prompting and agentic baselines. These results demonstrate that structured multi-agent reasoning can significantly enhance automated RTL optimization and scale to more complex designs and broader optimization tasks.

Learning to Present: Inverse Specification Rewards for Agentic Slide Generation

Authors:Karthik Ragunath Ananda Kumar, Subrahmanyam Arunachalam
Date:2026-03-17 17:45:53

Automated presentation generation remains a challenging task requiring coherent content creation, visual design, and audience-aware communication. This work proposes an OpenEnv-compatible reinforcement learning environment where LLM agents learn to research topics, plan content, and generate professional HTML slide presentations through tool use. We introduce a multi-component reward system combining structural validation, render quality assessment, LLM-based aesthetic scoring, content quality metrics, and an inverse specification reward that measures how faithfully generated slides convey their intended purpose. The inverse specification reward, an "inverse task" where an LLM attempts to recover the original specification from generated slides, provides a holistic quality signal. Our approach fine-tunes Qwen2.5-Coder-7B via GRPO, training only 0.5% of parameters on prompts derived from expert demonstrations collected using Claude Opus 4.6. Experiments on 48 diverse business briefs across six models demonstrate that our fine-tuned 7B model achieves 91.2% of Claude Opus 4.6's quality while improving 33.1% over the base model. The six-model comparison reveals that instruction adherence and tool-use compliance, rather than raw parameter count, determine agentic task performance. We contribute SlideRL, an open-source dataset of 288 multi-turn rollout trajectories across all six models: https://huggingface.co/datasets/KarthikRagunathAnandaKumar/sliderl-multi-turn-rollouts Code: https://github.com/pushing-the-frontier/slide-forge-llm

When Should a Robot Think? Resource-Aware Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning for Embodied Robotic Decision-Making

Authors:Jun Liu, Pu Zhao, Zhenglun Kong, Xuan Shen, Peiyan Dong, Fan Yang, Lin Cui, Hao Tang, Geng Yuan, Wei Niu, Wenbin Zhang, Xue Lin, Gaowen Liu, Yanzhi Wang, Dong Huang
Date:2026-03-17 15:38:50

Embodied robotic systems increasingly rely on large language model (LLM)-based agents to support high-level reasoning, planning, and decision-making during interactions with the environment. However, invoking LLM reasoning introduces substantial computational latency and resource overhead, which can interrupt action execution and reduce system reliability. Excessive reasoning may delay actions, while insufficient reasoning often leads to incorrect decisions and task failures. This raises a fundamental question for embodied agents: when should the agent reason, and when should it act? In this work, we propose RARRL (Resource-Aware Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning), a hierarchical framework for resource-aware orchestration of embodied agents. Rather than learning low-level control policies, RARRL learns a high-level orchestration policy that operates at the agent's decision-making layer. This policy enables the agent to adaptively determine whether to invoke reasoning, which reasoning role to employ, and how much computational budget to allocate based on current observations, execution history, and remaining resources. Extensive experiments, including evaluations with empirical latency profiles derived from the ALFRED benchmark, show that RARRL consistently improves task success rates while reducing execution latency and enhancing robustness compared with fixed or heuristic reasoning strategies. These results demonstrate that adaptive reasoning control is essential for building reliable and efficient embodied robotic agents.

Agentic AI for SAGIN Resource Management_Semantic Awareness, Orchestration, and Optimization

Authors:Linghao Zhang, Haitao Zhao, Bo Xu, Hongbo Zhu, Xianbin Wang
Date:2026-03-17 12:39:08

Space-air-ground integrated networks (SAGIN) promise ubiquitous 6G connectivity but face significant resource management challenges due to heterogeneous infrastructure, dynamic topologies, and stringent quality-of-service (QoS) requirements. Conventional model-driven approaches struggle with scalability and adaptability in such complex environments. This paper presents an agentic artificial intelligence (AI) framework for autonomous SAGIN resource management by embedding large language model (LLM)-based agents into a Monitor-Analyze-Plan- Execute-Knowledge (MAPE-K) control plane. The framework incorporates three specialized agents, namely semantic resource perceivers, intent-driven orchestrators, and adaptive learners, that collaborate through natural language reasoning to bridge the gap between operator intents and network execution. A key innovation is the hierarchical agent-reinforcement learning (RL) collaboration mechanism, wherein LLM-based orchestrators dynamically shape reward functions for RL agents based on semantic network conditions. Validation through UAV-assisted AIGC service orchestration in energy-constrained scenarios demonstrates that LLM-driven reward shaping achieves 14% energy reduction and the lowest average service latency among all compared methods. This agentic paradigm offers a scalable pathway toward adaptive, AI-native 6G networks, capable of autonomously interpreting intents and adapting to dynamic environments.

Efficient LLM Serving for Agentic Workflows: A Data Systems Perspective

Authors:Noppanat Wadlom, Junyi Shen, Yao Lu
Date:2026-03-17 04:03:18

Agentic workflows are composed of sequences of interdependent Large Language Model (LLM) calls, and they have become a dominant workload in modern AI systems. These workflows exhibit extensive redundancy from overlapping prompts and intermediate results due to speculative and parallel exploration. Existing LLM serving systems, such as vLLM, focus on optimizing individual inference calls and overlook cross-call dependencies, leading to significant inefficiencies. This paper rethinks LLM and agent serving from a data systems perspective and introduces Helium, a workflow-aware serving framework that models agentic workloads as query plans and treats LLM invocations as first-class operators. Helium integrates proactive caching and cache-aware scheduling to maximize reuse across prompts, KV states, and workflows. Through these techniques, Helium bridges classic query optimization principles with LLM serving, achieving up to 1.56x speedup over state-of-the-art agent serving systems on various workloads. Our results demonstrate that end-to-end optimization across workflows is essential for scalable and efficient LLM-based agents.

inference-fleet-sim: A Queueing-Theory-Grounded Fleet Capacity Planner for LLM Inference

Authors:Huamin Chen, Xunzhuo Liu, Yuhan Liu, Junchen Jiang, Bowei He, Xue Liu
Date:2026-03-17 01:44:04

Sizing a GPU fleet for LLM inference is harder than it looks. The obvious questions -- how many GPUs, which type, where to split a two-pool fleet -- have no closed-form answers. They depend on the full token-length distribution, the routing policy, and queueing dynamics that turn ugly under heavy-tailed workloads. Existing tools optimize per-engine configuration for a fixed GPU count; none of them address the upstream question of how many GPUs to buy and how to arrange them. inference-fleet-sim fills that gap. It combines analytical M/G/c queueing with discrete-event simulation (DES) to find the minimum-cost fleet configuration that empirically meets a P99 TTFT SLO. It includes a physics-informed GPU performance model covering A10G, A100, and H100 across monolithic, two-pool-routed, and disaggregated topologies, all without requiring access to real hardware. We run the tool on seven fleet-planning scenarios drawn from two public workload traces (LMSYS, Azure) and one synthetic agent-heavy trace. Each one surfaces a result that simple analysis gets wrong -- the right split threshold, the cheapest GPU type, whether an apparently idle fleet is actually broken -- and shows why joint simulation of queueing, routing, and hardware is necessary to find it.

Geometry-Aligned LLM Fine-Tuning for Sequential Narrow-Opening Planning

Authors:Al Jaber Mahmud, Xuan Wang
Date:2026-03-17 00:24:32

We study rigid-body motion planning through multiple sequential narrow openings, which requires long-horizon geometric reasoning because the configuration used to traverse an early opening constrains the set of reachable configurations for subsequent ones. To achieve this, we propose a geometry-aligned large language model (LLM) fine-tuning framework that generates fixed-length, machine-readable waypoint sequences that are both geometrically feasible and coordinated across openings. Our approach uses a bi-level training pipeline. First, we perform failure-driven LoRA supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on human demonstrations, which incorporates structured failure feedback to teach the model common failure modes and enforce the output format. Second, we refine the same LoRA adapters using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with geometric verification: each sampled waypoint sequence is densified by a model-based planner and scored with a deterministic geometry-derived reward to achieve continuous-motion feasibility. To validate the effectiveness of our proposed method, we provide both quantitative and qualitative results from simulations. Our method achieves the highest success rate in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution environments and qualitatively exhibits long-horizon geometric reasoning by selecting exit poses that facilitate entry into subsequent openings.

Don't Trust Stubborn Neighbors: A Security Framework for Agentic Networks

Authors:Samira Abedini, Sina Mavali, Lea Schönherr, Martin Pawelczyk, Rebekka Burkholz
Date:2026-03-16 18:41:21

Large Language Model (LLM)-based Multi-Agent Systems (MASs) are increasingly deployed for agentic tasks, such as web automation, itinerary planning, and collaborative problem solving. Yet, their interactive nature introduces new security risks: malicious or compromised agents can exploit communication channels to propagate misinformation and manipulate collective outcomes. In this paper, we study how such manipulation can arise and spread by borrowing the Friedkin-Johnsen opinion formation model from social sciences to propose a general theoretical framework to study LLM-MAS. Remarkably, this model closely captures LLM-MAS behavior, as we verify in extensive experiments across different network topologies and attack and defense scenarios. Theoretically and empirically, we find that a single highly stubborn and persuasive agent can take over MAS dynamics, underscoring the systems' high susceptibility to attacks by triggering a persuasion cascade that reshapes collective opinion. Our theoretical analysis reveals three mechanisms to increase system security: a) increasing the number of benign agents, b) increasing the innate stubbornness or peer-resistance of agents, or c) reducing trust in potential adversaries. Because scaling is computationally expensive and high stubbornness degrades the network's ability to reach consensus, we propose a new mechanism to mitigate threats by a trust-adaptive defense that dynamically adjusts inter-agent trust to limit adversarial influence while maintaining cooperative performance. Extensive experiments confirm that this mechanism effectively defends against manipulation.

The PokeAgent Challenge: Competitive and Long-Context Learning at Scale

Authors:Seth Karten, Jake Grigsby, Tersoo Upaa, Junik Bae, Seonghun Hong, Hyunyoung Jeong, Jaeyoon Jung, Kun Kerdthaisong, Gyungbo Kim, Hyeokgi Kim, Yujin Kim, Eunju Kwon, Dongyu Liu, Patrick Mariglia, Sangyeon Park, Benedikt Schink, Xianwei Shi, Anthony Sistilli, Joseph Twin, Arian Urdu, Matin Urdu, Qiao Wang, Ling Wu, Wenli Zhang, Kunsheng Zhou, Stephanie Milani, Kiran Vodrahalli, Amy Zhang, Fei Fang, Yuke Zhu, Chi Jin
Date:2026-03-16 17:25:42

We present the PokeAgent Challenge, a large-scale benchmark for decision-making research built on Pokemon's multi-agent battle system and expansive role-playing game (RPG) environment. Partial observability, game-theoretic reasoning, and long-horizon planning remain open problems for frontier AI, yet few benchmarks stress all three simultaneously under realistic conditions. PokeAgent targets these limitations at scale through two complementary tracks: our Battling Track, which calls for strategic reasoning and generalization under partial observability in competitive Pokemon battles, and our Speedrunning Track, which requires long-horizon planning and sequential decision-making in the Pokemon RPG. Our Battling Track supplies a dataset of 20M+ battle trajectories alongside a suite of heuristic, RL, and LLM-based baselines capable of high-level competitive play. Our Speedrunning Track provides the first standardized evaluation framework for RPG speedrunning, including an open-source multi-agent orchestration system for modular, reproducible comparisons of harness-based LLM approaches. Our NeurIPS 2025 competition validates both the quality of our resources and the research community's interest in Pokemon, with over 100 teams competing across both tracks and winning solutions detailed in our paper. Participant submissions and our baselines reveal considerable gaps between generalist (LLM), specialist (RL), and elite human performance. Analysis against the BenchPress evaluation matrix shows that Pokemon battling is nearly orthogonal to standard LLM benchmarks, measuring capabilities not captured by existing suites and positioning Pokemon as an unsolved benchmark that can drive RL and LLM research forward. We transition to a living benchmark with a live leaderboard for Battling and self-contained evaluation for Speedrunning at https://pokeagentchallenge.com.

CRASH: Cognitive Reasoning Agent for Safety Hazards in Autonomous Driving

Authors:Erick Silva, Rehana Yasmin, Ali Shoker
Date:2026-03-16 14:39:33

As AVs grow in complexity and diversity, identifying the root causes of operational failures has become increasingly complex. The heterogeneity of system architectures across manufacturers, ranging from end-to-end to modular designs, together with variations in algorithms and integration strategies, limits the standardization of incident investigations and hinders systematic safety analysis. This work examines real-world AV incidents reported in the NHTSA database. We curate a dataset of 2,168 cases reported between 2021 and 2025, representing more than 80 million miles driven. To process this data, we introduce CRASH, Cognitive Reasoning Agent for Safety Hazards, an LLM-based agent that automates reasoning over crash reports by leveraging both standardized fields and unstructured narrative descriptions. CRASH operates on a unified representation of each incident to generate concise summaries, attribute a primary cause, and assess whether the AV materially contributed to the event. Our findings show that (1) CRASH attributes 64% of incidents to perception or planning failures, underscoring the importance of reasoning-based analysis for accurate fault attribution; and (2) approximately 50% of reported incidents involve rear-end collisions, highlighting a persistent and unresolved challenge in autonomous driving deployment. We further validate CRASH with five domain experts, achieving 86% accuracy in attributing AV system failures. Overall, CRASH demonstrates strong potential as a scalable and interpretable tool for automated crash analysis, providing actionable insights to support safety research and the continued development of autonomous driving systems.

Intelligent Co-Design: An Interactive LLM Framework for Interior Spatial Design via Multi-Modal Agents

Authors:Ren Jian Lim, Rushi Dai
Date:2026-03-16 14:28:51

In architectural interior design, miscommunication frequently arises as clients lack design knowledge, while designers struggle to explain complex spatial relationships, leading to delayed timelines and financial losses. Recent advancements in generative layout tools narrow the gap by automating 3D visualizations. However, prevailing methodologies exhibit limitations: rule-based systems implement hard-coded spatial constraints that restrict participatory engagement, while data-driven models rely on extensive training datasets. Recent large language models (LLMs) bridge this gap by enabling intuitive reasoning about spatial relationships through natural language. This research presents an LLM-based, multimodal, multi-agent framework that dynamically converts natural language descriptions and imagery into 3D designs. Specialized agents (Reference, Spatial, Interactive, Grader), operating via prompt guidelines, collaboratively address core challenges: the agent system enables real-time user interaction for iterative spatial refinement, while Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) reduces data dependency without requiring task-specific model training. This framework accurately interprets spatial intent and generates optimized 3D indoor design, improving productivity, and encouraging nondesigner participation. Evaluations across diverse floor plans and user questionnaires demonstrate effectiveness. An independent LLM evaluator consistently rated participatory layouts higher in user intent alignment, aesthetic coherence, functionality, and circulation. Questionnaire results indicated 77% satisfaction and a clear preference over traditional design software. These findings suggest the framework enhances user-centric communication and fosters more inclusive, effective, and resilient design processes. Project page: https://rsigktyper.github.io/AICodesign/

Probe-then-Plan: Environment-Aware Planning for Industrial E-commerce Search

Authors:Mengxiang Chen, Zhouwei Zhai, Jin Li
Date:2026-03-16 13:28:01

Modern e-commerce search is evolving to resolve complex user intents. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer strong reasoning, existing LLM-based paradigms face a fundamental blindness-latency dilemma: query rewriting is agnostic to retrieval capabilities and real-time inventory, yielding invalid plans; conversely, deep search agents rely on iterative tool calls and reflection, incurring seconds of latency incompatible with industrial sub-second budgets. To resolve this conflict, we propose Environment-Aware Search Planning (EASP), reformulating search planning as a dynamic reasoning process grounded in environmental reality. EASP introduces a Probe-then-Plan mechanism: a lightweight Retrieval Probe exposes the retrieval snapshot, enabling the Planner to diagnose execution gaps and generate grounded search plans. The methodology comprises three stages: (1) Offline Data Synthesis: A Teacher Agent synthesizes diverse, execution-validated plans by diagnosing the probed environment. (2) Planner Training and Alignment: The Planner is initialized via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) to internalize diagnostic capabilities, then aligned with business outcomes (conversion rate) via Reinforcement Learning (RL). (3) Adaptive Online Serving: A complexity-aware routing mechanism selectively activates planning for complex queries, ensuring optimal resource allocation. Extensive offline evaluations and online A/B testing on JD.com demonstrate that EASP significantly improves relevant recall and achieves substantial lifts in UCVR and GMV. EASP has been successfully deployed in JD.com's AI-Search system.

SEMAG: Self-Evolutionary Multi-Agent Code Generation

Authors:Yulin Peng, Haowen Hou, Xinxin Zhu, Ying Tiffany He, F. Richard Yu
Date:2026-03-16 13:24:55

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant progress in handling complex programming tasks. However, current methods rely on manual model selection and fixed workflows, which limit their ability to adapt to changing task complexities. To address this, we propose SEMAG, a Self-Evolutionary Multi-Agent code Generation framework that mimics human coding practices. It decomposes programming tasks into stages, including planning, coding, debugging, and discussion, while adapting workflows to task difficulty. Its self-evolutionary agents can access the latest models in real time and automatically upgrade the backbone model. SEMAG sets new state-of-the-art Pass@1 accuracy across benchmarks. Using identical backbone models, SEMAG outperforms prior methods by 3.3% on CodeContests. When augmented with self-evolutionary model selection that automatically identifies optimal backbones, SEMAG reaches 52.6%, showcasing both framework effectiveness and adaptability to evolving LLM capabilities.

SAGE: Multi-Agent Self-Evolution for LLM Reasoning

Authors:Yulin Peng, Xinxin Zhu, Chenxing Wei, Nianbo Zeng, Leilei Wang, Ying Tiffany He, F. Richard Yu
Date:2026-03-16 13:24:20

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards improves reasoning in large language models (LLMs), but many methods still rely on large human-labeled datasets. While self-play reduces this dependency, it often lacks explicit planning and strong quality control, limiting stability in long-horizon multi-step reasoning. We present SAGE (Self-evolving Agents for Generalized reasoning Evolution), a closed-loop framework where four agents: Challenger, Planner, Solver, and Critic, co-evolve from a shared LLM backbone using only a small seed set. The Challenger continuously generates increasingly difficult tasks; the Planner converts each task into a structured multi-step plan; and the Solver follows the plan to produce an answer, whose correctness is determined by external verifiers. The Critic scores and filters both generated questions and plans to prevent curriculum drift and maintain training signal quality, enabling stable self-training. Across mathematics and code-generation benchmarks, SAGE delivers consistent gains across model scales, improving the Qwen-2.5-7B model by 8.9% on LiveCodeBench and 10.7% on OlympiadBench.

GNNVerifier: Graph-based Verifier for LLM Task Planning

Authors:Yu Hao, Qiuyu Wang, Cheng Yang, Yawen Li, Zhiqiang Zhang, Chuan Shi
Date:2026-03-16 02:05:21

Large language models (LLMs) facilitate the development of autonomous agents. As a core component of such agents, task planning aims to decompose complex natural language requests into concrete, solvable sub-tasks. Since LLM-generated plans are frequently prone to hallucinations and sensitive to long-context prom-pts, recent research has introduced plan verifiers to identify and correct potential flaws. However, most existing approaches still rely on an LLM as the verifier via additional prompting for plan review or self-reflection. LLM-based verifiers can be misled by plausible narration and struggle to detect failures caused by structural relations across steps, such as type mismatches, missing intermediates, or broken dependencies. To address these limitations, we propose a graph-based verifier for LLM task planning. Specifically, the proposed method has four major components: Firstly, we represent a plan as a directed graph with enriched attributes, where nodes denote sub-tasks and edges encode execution order and dependency constraints. Secondly, a graph neural network (GNN) then performs structural evaluation and diagnosis, producing a graph-level plausibility score for plan acceptance as well as node/edge-level risk scores to localize erroneous regions. Thirdly, we construct controllable perturbations from ground truth plan graphs, and automatically generate training data with fine-grained annotations. Finally, guided by the feedback from our GNN verifier, we enable an LLM to conduct local edits (e.g., tool replacement or insertion) to correct the plan when the graph-level score is insufficient. Extensive experiments across diverse datasets, backbone LLMs, and planners demonstrate that our GNNVerifier achieves significant gains in improving plan quality. Our data and code is available at https://github.com/BUPT-GAMMA/GNNVerifier.

LongVidSearch: An Agentic Benchmark for Multi-hop Evidence Retrieval Planning in Long Videos

Authors:Rongyi Yu, Chenyuan Duan, Wentao Zhang
Date:2026-03-15 16:20:23

Long video question answering (Long-Video QA) increasingly relies on agentic tool use to retrieve evidence from long videos. In realistic settings, this process often requires multi-hop retrieval, where agents must iteratively gather multiple discontinuous evidence clips. However, existing long-video benchmarks are largely static: they rarely enforce strict multi-hop retrieval and typically lack a standardized evidence-access interface, making it difficult to separate failures in retrieval planning from those in answer generation. To address this gap, we introduce LongVidSearch, a benchmark for evaluating agentic multi-hop evidence retrieval planning in long videos under standardized access constraints. LongVidSearch enforces retrieval necessity: a Hop-k question requires exactly k necessary evidence clips, and removing any single clip renders the question unsolvable. The benchmark contains 3,000 questions over 447 long videos (average length 26 minutes), covering four reasoning categories: State Mutation, Causal Inference, Global Summary, and Visual Tracking, with 2-hop, 3-hop, and 4-hop evidence requirements. To ensure fair and controlled evaluation, all agents interact with LongVidSearch through a unified tool interface, which fixes the retrieval backend and isolates the agent's ability to formulate queries and plan iterative retrieval. In addition to answer accuracy, we measure tool-call cost to analyze the accuracy-efficiency trade-off under identical access conditions. We evaluate VideoAgent-style QA agents with multiple backbone LLMs using three-judge majority voting. GPT-5 achieves the highest accuracy (42.43), outperforming Gemini 3 Pro (30.97) and GPT-4o (19.20), yet remaining below 50 %, highlighting the difficulty of multi-hop retrieval planning. With gold evidence clips, performance becomes near-perfect, confirming retrieval planning as the primary bottleneck.

Distilling Reasoning Without Knowledge: A Framework for Reliable LLMs

Authors:Auksarapak Kietkajornrit, Jad Tarifi, Nima Asgharbeygi
Date:2026-03-15 16:06:54

Fact-seeking question answering with large language models (LLMs) remains unreliable when answers depend on up-to-date or conflicting information. Although retrieval-augmented and tool-using LLMs reduce hallucinations, they often rely on implicit planning, leading to inefficient tool usage. We propose a modular framework that explicitly separates planning from factual retrieval and answer synthesis. A lightweight student planner is trained via a teacher-student framework to generate structured decompositions consisting of abstract reasoning steps and searchable fact requests. The supervision signals contain only planning traces and fact requests, without providing factual answers or retrieved evidence. At inference, the planner produces plans, while prompt-engineered modules perform retrieval and response synthesis. We evaluate the proposed framework on SEAL-0, an extremely challenging benchmark for search-augmented LLMs. Results show that supervised planning improves both accuracy and latency compared to monolithic reasoning models and prompt-based tool-augmented frameworks, demonstrating that explicitly learned planning structures are essential for reliable fact-seeking LLMs.

From Scanning Guidelines to Action: A Robotic Ultrasound Agent with LLM-Based Reasoning

Authors:Yuan Bi, Yiping Zhou, Pei Liu, Feng Li, Zhongliang Jiang, Nassir Navab
Date:2026-03-15 14:18:56

Robotic ultrasound offers advantages over free-hand scanning, including improved reproducibility and reduced operator dependency. In clinical practice, US acquisition relies heavily on the sonographer's experience and situational judgment. When transferring this process to robotic systems, such expertise is often encoded explicitly through fixed procedures and task-specific models, yielding pipelines that can be difficult to adapt to new scanning tasks. In this work, we propose a unified framework for autonomous robotic US scanning that leverages a LLM-based agent to interpret US scanning guidelines and execute scans by dynamically invoking a set of provided software tools. Instead of encoding fixed scanning procedures, the LLM agent retrieves and reasons over guideline steps from scanning handbooks and adapts its planning decisions based on observations and the current scanning state. This enables the system to handle variable and decision-dependent workflows, such as adjusting scanning strategies, repeating steps, or selecting the appropriate next tool call in response to image quality or anatomical findings. Because the reasoning underlying tool selection is also critical for transparent and trustworthy planning, we further fine tune the LLM agent using a RL based strategy to improve both its reasoning quality and the correctness of tool selection and parameterization, while maintaining robust generalization to unseen guidelines and related tasks. We first validate the approach via verbal execution on 10 US scanning guidelines, assessing reasoning as well as tool selection and parameterization, and showing the benefit of RL fine tuning. We then demonstrate real world feasibility on robotic scanning of the gallbladder, spine, and kidney. Overall, the framework follows diverse guidelines and enables reliable autonomous scanning across multiple anatomical targets within a unified system.

Why Do LLM-based Web Agents Fail? A Hierarchical Planning Perspective

Authors:Mohamed Aghzal, Gregory J. Stein, Ziyu Yao
Date:2026-03-15 06:52:06

Large language model (LLM) web agents are increasingly used for web navigation but remain far from human reliability on realistic, long-horizon tasks. Existing evaluations focus primarily on end-to-end success, offering limited insight into where failures arise. We propose a hierarchical planning framework to analyze web agents across three layers (i.e., high-level planning, low-level execution, and replanning), enabling process-based evaluation of reasoning, grounding, and recovery. Our experiments show that structured Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL) plans produce more concise and goal-directed strategies than natural language (NL) plans, but low-level execution remains the dominant bottleneck. These results indicate that improving perceptual grounding and adaptive control, not only high-level reasoning, is critical for achieving human-level reliability. This hierarchical perspective provides a principled foundation for diagnosing and advancing LLM web agents.

ATCC: Adaptive Concurrency Control for Unforeseen Agentic Transactions

Authors:Weixing Zhou, Zhiyou Wang, Zeshun Peng, Hetian Chen, Yanfeng Zhang, Ge Yu
Date:2026-03-14 11:39:17

Data agents, empowered by Large Language Models (LLMs), introduce a new paradigm in transaction processing. Unlike traditional applications with fixed patterns, data agents run online-generated workflows that repeatedly issue SQL statements, reason over intermediate results, and revise subsequent plans. To ensure data consistency, these SQL statements issued by an agent should be integrated into a transaction, referred to as agentic transactions. Agentic transactions exhibit unforeseen characteristics, including long execution times, irregular execution intervals, and non-deterministic access patterns, breaking the assumptions underlying concurrency control (CC) (e.g., short-lived, predefined). Traditional CC schemes, which rely on fixed policies, fail to capture such dynamic behavior, resulting in inadequate performance. This paper introduces ATCC, an adaptive Concurrency Control for Agentic Transactions. ATCC continuously monitors and interprets the runtime behavior of each agentic transaction, evaluates its interactive phases, and dynamically adapts optimistic or pessimistic execution for each transaction. To ensure precise timing for adaptive switches, ATCC employs a reinforcement learning-based policy to balance immediate blocking against future abort costs. Additionally, to mitigate contention-induced tail latency and wasted reasoning cost caused by abort, a cost-aware priority-based lock scheduling is integrated to prioritize expensive or latency-sensitive transactions. Experimental results under agentic-like YCSB and TPC-C workloads demonstrate that ATCC improves the throughput of agentic transactions by up to four orders of magnitude and reduces tail latency by up to 90% compared to state-of-the-art CC schemes.

When to Screen, When to Bypass: LLM-Judges in Resource-Scarce AI-Human Workflow

Authors:Ruihan Lin, Jiheng Zhang
Date:2026-03-14 10:00:22

AI systems can generate outputs at scale, but most outputs require human approval before release. This creates a bottleneck: humans cannot keep pace with AI-generated volume. A natural response is to insert an LLM-judge that screens outputs before they reach humans, filtering errors and amplifying effective review capacity. But judges are imperfect. False rejections send correct outputs back for unnecessary rework; false acceptances consume judge capacity without relieving humans. When should outputs be routed through the judge, and when should they bypass it directly to human review? We model this workflow as a queueing network with three resource pools and use a fluid approximation to characterize optimal judge allocation. The analysis reveals that optimal allocation depends critically on which resource is the current bottleneck: screening amplifies human capacity when reviewers are scarce, yet generates a rework trap that crowds out new production when workers are stretched thin. For heterogeneous task classes with different error profiles, optimal priority can reverse across operating regimes, and classes with complementary error structures can be mixed to achieve throughput that neither class attains alone. We propose a policy that uses the fluid-optimal allocation fractions for routing and the fluid-optimal service levels for admission control, and establish its asymptotic optimality as system scale grows. Extensions incorporate human feedback that improves rework quality and joint capacity planning under budget constraints. Numerical experiments confirm rapid convergence to the fluid optimum and demonstrate that the policy significantly outperforms benchmarks that either always screen or never screen.

APEX-Searcher: Augmenting LLMs' Search Capabilities through Agentic Planning and Execution

Authors:Kun Chen, Qingchao Kong, Zhao Feifei, Wenji Mao
Date:2026-03-14 09:17:12

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), based on large language models (LLMs), serves as a vital approach to retrieving and leveraging external knowledge in various domain applications. When confronted with complex multi-hop questions, single-round retrieval is often insufficient for accurate reasoning and problem solving. To enhance search capabilities for complex tasks, most existing works integrate multi-round iterative retrieval with reasoning processes via end-to-end training. While these approaches significantly improve problem-solving performance, they are still faced with challenges in task reasoning and model training, especially ambiguous retrieval execution paths and sparse rewards in end-to-end reinforcement learning (RL) process, leading to inaccurate retrieval results and performance degradation. To address these issues, in this paper, we proposes APEX-Searcher, a novel Agentic Planning and Execution framework to augment LLM search capabilities. Specifically, we introduce a two-stage agentic framework that decouples the retrieval process into planning and execution: It first employs RL with decomposition-specific rewards to optimize strategic planning; Built on the sub-task decomposition, it then applies supervised fine-tuning on high-quality multi-hop trajectories to equip the model with robust iterative sub-task execution capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves significant improvements in both multi-hop RAG and task planning performances across multiple benchmarks.

AgenticScholar: Agentic Data Management with Pipeline Orchestration for Scholarly Corpora

Authors:Hai Lan, Tingting Wang, Zhifeng Bao, Guoliang Li, Daomin Ji, Ge Lee, Feng Luo, Zi Huang, Hailang Qiu, Gang Hua
Date:2026-03-14 05:55:42

Managing the rapidly growing scholarly corpus poses significant challenges in representation, reasoning, and efficient analysis. An ideal system should unify structured knowledge management, agentic planning, and interpretable execution to support diverse scholarly queries - from retrieval to knowledge discovery and generation - at scale. Unfortunately, existing RAG and document analytics systems fail to achieve all query types simultaneously. To this end, we propose AgenticScholar, an agentic scholarly data management system that integrates a structure-aware knowledge representation layer, an LLM-centric hybrid query planning layer, and a unified execution layer with composable operators. AgenticScholar autonomously translates natural language queries into executable DAG plans, enabling end-to-end reasoning over multi-modal scholarly data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AgenticScholar significantly outperforms existing systems in effectiveness, efficiency, and interpretability, offering a practical foundation for future research on agentic scholarly data management.

Steve-Evolving: Open-World Embodied Self-Evolution via Fine-Grained Diagnosis and Dual-Track Knowledge Distillation

Authors:Zhengwei Xie, Zhisheng Chen, Ziyan Weng, Tingyu Wu, Chenglong Li, Vireo Zhang, Kun Wang
Date:2026-03-13 16:23:34

Open-world embodied agents must solve long-horizon tasks where the main bottleneck is not single-step planning quality but how interaction experience is organized and evolved. To this end, we present Steve-Evolving, a non-parametric self-evolving framework that tightly couples fine-grained execution diagnosis with dual-track knowledge distillation in a closed loop. The method follows three phases: Experience Anchoring, Experience Distillation, and Knowledge-Driven Closed-Loop Control. In detail, Experience Anchoring solidifies each subgoal attempt into a structured experience tuple with a fixed schema (pre-state, action, diagnosis-result, and post-state) and organizes it in a three-tier experience space with multi-dimensional indices (e.g., condition signatures, spatial hashing, and semantic tags) plus rolling summarization for efficient and auditable recall. To ensure sufficient information density for attribution, the execution layer provides compositional diagnosis signals beyond binary outcomes, including state-difference summaries, enumerated failure causes, continuous indicators, and stagnation/loop detection. Moreover, successful trajectories of Experience Distillation are generalized into reusable skills with explicit preconditions and verification criteria, while failures are distilled into executable guardrails that capture root causes and forbid risky operations at both subgoal and task granularities. Besides, Knowledge-Driven Closed-Loop Control retrieved skills and guardrails are injected into an LLM planner, and diagnosis-triggered local replanning updates the active constraints online, forming a continual evolution process without any model parameter updates. Experiments on the long-horizon suite of Minecraft MCU demonstrate consistent improvements over static-retrieval baselines.

NormCode Canvas: Making LLM Agentic Workflows Development Sustainable via Case-Based Reasoning

Authors:Xin Guan, Yunshan Li, Ze Wang
Date:2026-03-13 12:59:22

We present NormCode Canvas (v1.1.3), a deployed system realizing Case-Based Reasoning at two levels for multi-step LLM workflows. The foundation is NormCode, a semi-formal planning language whose compiler-verified scope rule ensures every execution checkpoint is a genuinely self-contained case -- eliminating the implicit shared state that makes retrieval unreliable and failure non-localizable in standard orchestration frameworks. Level 1 treats each checkpoint as a concrete case (suspended runtime); Fork implements retrieve-and-reuse, Value Override implements revision with automatic stale-boundary propagation. Level 2 treats each compiled plan as an abstract case; the compilation pipeline is itself a NormCode plan, enabling recursive case learning. Three structural properties follow: (C1) direct checkpoint inspection; (C2) pre-execution review via compiler-generated narrative; (C3) scope-bounded selective re-execution. Four deployed plans serve as structured evidence: PPT Generation produces presentation decks at ~40s per slide on commercial APIs; Code Assistant carries out multi-step software-engineering tasks spanning up to ten reasoning cycles; NC Compilations converts natural-language specifications into executable NormCode plans; and Canvas Assistant, when connected to an external AI code editor, automates plan debugging. Together these plans form a self-sustaining ecosystem in which plans produce, debug, and refine one another -- realizing cumulative case-based learning at system scale.

ToolTree: Efficient LLM Agent Tool Planning via Dual-Feedback Monte Carlo Tree Search and Bidirectional Pruning

Authors:Shuo Yang, Soyeon Caren Han, Yihao Ding, Shuhe Wang, Eduard Hoy
Date:2026-03-13 07:37:06

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly applied to complex, multi-step tasks that require interaction with diverse external tools across various domains. However, current LLM agent tool planning methods typically rely on greedy, reactive tool selection strategies that lack foresight and fail to account for inter-tool dependencies. In this paper, we present ToolTree, a novel Monte Carlo tree search-inspired planning paradigm for tool planning. ToolTree explores possible tool usage trajectories using a dual-stage LLM evaluation and bidirectional pruning mechanism that enables the agent to make informed, adaptive decisions over extended tool-use sequences while pruning less promising branches before and after the tool execution. Empirical evaluations across both open-set and closed-set tool planning tasks on 4 benchmarks demonstrate that ToolTree consistently improves performance while keeping the highest efficiency, achieving an average gain of around 10\% compared to the state-of-the-art planning paradigm.