LLM-planning - 2026-05-03

Exploring Interaction Paradigms for LLM Agents in Scientific Visualization

Authors:Jackson Vonderhorst, Kuangshi Ai, Haichao Miao, Shusen Liu, Chaoli Wang
Date:2026-04-30 15:22:28

This paper examines how different types of large language model (LLM) agents perform on scientific visualization (SciVis) tasks, where users generate visualization workflows from natural-language instructions. We compare three primary interaction paradigms, including domain-specific agents with structured tool use, computer-use agents, and general-purpose coding agents, by evaluating eight representative agents across 15 benchmark tasks and measuring visualization quality, efficiency, robustness, and computational cost. We further analyze interaction modalities, including code scripts and model context protocol (MCP) or API calls for structured tool use, as well as command-line interfaces (CLI) and graphical user interfaces (GUI) for more general interaction, while additionally studying the effect of persistent memory in selected agents. The results reveal clear tradeoffs across paradigms and modalities. General-purpose coding agents achieve the highest task success rates but are computationally expensive, while domain-specific agents are more efficient and stable but less flexible. Computer-use agents perform well on individual steps but struggle with longer multi-step workflows, indicating that long-horizon planning is their primary limitation. Across both CLI- and GUI-based settings, persistent memory improves performance over repeated trials, although its benefits depend on the underlying interaction mode and the quality of feedback. These findings suggest that no single approach is sufficient, and future SciVis systems should combine structured tool use, interactive capabilities, and adaptive memory mechanisms to balance performance, robustness, and flexibility.

Rethinking Agentic Reinforcement Learning In Large Language Models

Authors:Fangming Cui, Ruixiao Zhu, Cheng Fang, Sunan Li, Jiahong Li
Date:2026-04-30 13:43:25

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has traditionally focused on training specialized agents to optimize predefined reward functions within narrowly defined environments. However, the advent of powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) and increasingly complex, open-ended tasks has catalyzed a paradigm shift towards agentic paradigms within RL. This emerging framework extends beyond traditional RL by emphasizing the development of autonomous agents capable of goal-setting, long-term planning, dynamic strategy adaptation, and interactive reasoning in uncertain, real-world environments. Unlike conventional approaches that rely heavily on static objectives and episodic interactions, LLM-based Agentic RL incorporates cognitive-like capabilities such as meta-reasoning, self-reflection, and multi-step decision-making directly into the learning loop. In this paper, we provide a deep insight for looking the conceptual foundations, methodological innovations, and effective designs underlying this trend. Furthermore, we identify critical challenges and outline promising future directions for building LLM-based Agentic RL.

CastFlow: Learning Role-Specialized Agentic Workflows for Time Series Forecasting

Authors:Bokai Pan, Mingyue Cheng, Zhiding Liu, Shuo Yu, Xiaoyu Tao, Yuchong Wu, Qi Liu, Defu Lian, Enhong Chen
Date:2026-04-30 13:24:42

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown great promise in time series forecasting. However, most existing LLM-based forecasting methods still follow a static generative paradigm that directly maps historical observations to future values in a single pass. Under this paradigm, forecasting is constrained by limited temporal pattern extraction, single-round acquisition of contextual features, one-shot forecast generation, and lack of support from ensemble forecasts. To address these limitations, in this work, we propose CastFlow, a dynamic agentic forecasting framework that enables multi-view temporal pattern extraction, multi-round contextual features acquisition, iterative forecast refinement, and forecasting with ensemble forecasts. First, CastFlow organizes the forecasting process into planning, action, forecasting, and reflection, establishing an agentic workflow. Second, this workflow is supported by a memory module that retrieves prior experience and a multi-view toolkit that constructs diagnostic evidence and provides a reliable ensemble forecast baseline. Third, CastFlow adopts a role-specialized design that combines general-purpose reasoning with specialized numerical forecasting. Under this design, a frozen LLM preserves general-purpose reasoning, while a fine-tuned domain-specific LLM performs evidence-guided numerical forecasting based on the ensemble forecast baseline, rather than from scratch. To optimize a fine-tuned domain-specific LLM, we further develop a two-stage workflow-oriented training that combines supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). To evaluate the effectiveness of CastFlow, we conduct extensive experiments on diverse datasets and show that it achieves superior overall results against strong baselines. We hope that this work can serve as a step toward more adaptive and accurate time series forecasting.

Intent2Tx: Benchmarking LLMs for Translating Natural Language Intents into Ethereum Transactions

Authors:Zhuoran Pan, Yue Li, Zhi Guan, Jianbin Hu, Zhong Chen
Date:2026-04-30 11:52:50

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) offers a transformative interface for Web3, yet existing benchmarks fail to capture the complexity of translating high-level user intents into functionally correct, state-dependent on-chain transactions. We present \textsc{Intent2Tx}, a high-fidelity benchmark featuring 29,921 single-step and 1,575 multi-step instances meticulously derived from 300 days of real-world Ethereum mainnet traces. Unlike prior works that rely on synthetic instructions, \textsc{Intent2Tx} grounds natural language intents in real-world protocol interactions across 11 categories, including diverse long-tail Decentralized Finance (DeFi) primitives. To enable rigorous evaluation, we propose an execution-aware framework that transcends surface-level text matching by employing differential state analysis on forked mainnet environments. Our extensive evaluation of 16 state-of-the-art LLMs reveals that while scaling and retrieval-augmentation enhance logical consistency and parameter precision, current models struggle with out-of-distribution generalization and multi-step planning. Crucially, our execution-based analysis demonstrates that syntactically valid outputs often fail to achieve intended state transitions, highlighting a significant gap in current "reasoning-to-execution" capabilities. \textsc{Intent2Tx} serves as a critical foundation for developing autonomous, reliable agents in intent-centric Web3 ecosystems. Code and data: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Intent2Tx_Bench-97FF .

Bridging Values and Behavior: A Hierarchical Framework for Proactive Embodied Agents

Authors:Chunhui Zhang, Yuxuan Wang, Aoyang Qin, Yi-Long Lu, Kunlun Wu, Yizhou Wang, Wei Wang
Date:2026-04-30 10:43:55

Current embodied agents are often limited to passive instruction-following or reactive need-satisfaction, lacking a stable, high-order value framework essential for long-term, self-directed behavior and resolving motivational conflicts. We introduce \textit{ValuePlanner}, a hierarchical cognitive architecture that decouples high-level value scheduling from low-level action execution. \textit{ValuePlanner} employs an LLM-based cognitive module to generate symbolic subgoals by reasoning through abstract value trade-offs, which are then translated into executable action plans by a classical PDDL planner. This process is refined via a closed-loop feedback mechanism. Evaluating such autonomy requires methods beyond task-success rates, and we therefore propose a value-centric evaluation suite measuring cumulative value gain, preference alignment, and behavioral diversity. Experiments in the TongSim household environment demonstrate that \textit{ValuePlanner} arbitrates competing values to generate coherent, long-horizon, self-directed behavior absent from instruction-following and needs-driven baselines. Our work offers a structured approach to bridging intrinsic values and grounded behavior for autonomous agents.

HAVEN: Hybrid Automated Verification ENgine for UVM Testbench Synthesis with LLMs

Authors:Chang-Chih Meng, Yu-Ren Lu, Guan-Yu Lin, Tsung Tai Yeh, Kai-Chiang Wu, I-Chen Wu
Date:2026-04-30 09:35:32

Integrated Circuit (IC) verification consumes nearly 70% of the IC development cycle, and recent research leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically generate testbenches and reduce verification overhead. However, LLMs have difficulty generating testbenches correctly. Unlike high-level programming languages, Hardware Description Languages (HDLs) are extremely rare in LLMs training data, leading LLMs to produce incorrect code. To overcome challenges when using LLMs to generate Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) testbenches and sequences, wepropose HAVEN (Hybrid Automated Verification ENgine) to prevent LLMs from writing HDL directly. For UVM testbench generation, HAVEN utilizes LLM agents to analyze design specifications to produce a structured architectural plan. The HAVEN Template Engine then combines with predefined and protocol-specific templates to generate all UVM components with correct bus-handshake timing. For UVM sequence generation, HAVEN introduces a Protocol-Aware Sequence Domain-Specific Language (DSL) that decomposes sequences into fine-grained step types. A set of predefined DSL patterns first establishes sequences that achieve a high coverage rate without LLM involvement. HAVEN continues to improve the coverage rate by iteratively leveraging LLM agents to analyze coverage gap reports and compose additional targeted DSL sequences. Unlike previous works, HAVEN is the first system that utilizes pre-defined, protocol-specific Jinja2 templates to generate all UVM components and UVM sequences using our proposed Protocol-Aware DSL and rule-based code generator. Our experimental results on 19 open-source IP designs spanning three interface protocols (Direct, Wishbone, AXI4-Lite) show that HAVEN achieves 100% compilation success, 90.6% code coverage, and 87.9% functional coverage on average, and is SOTA among LLM-assisted testbench generation systems.

ChipLingo: A Systematic Training Framework for Large Language Models in EDA

Authors:Lei Li, Xingwen Yu, Jianguo Ni, Junxuan Zhu, Jieqiong Zhang, Jian Zhao, Zhi Liu
Date:2026-04-30 04:35:43

With the rapid advancement of semiconductor technology, Electronic Design Automation (EDA) has become an increasingly knowledge-intensive and document-driven engineering domain. Although large language models (LLMs) have shown strong general capabilities, applying them directly to EDA remains challenging due to limited domain expertise, cross-tool knowledge confusion, and degraded retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) performance after domain training. To address these issues, this paper presents ChipLingo, a systematic training pipeline for domain-adapted LLMs tailored to EDA scenarios. ChipLingo consists of three stages: domain corpus construction with multi-source data curation and QA augmentation, domain-adaptive pretraining with comparisons of different parameter training strategies, and instruction alignment with RAG scenario training under diverse retrieval conditions. We also curate an internal benchmark, EDA-Bench, covering representative EDA tool scenarios, with plans for public release. Experiments show that ChipLingo-8B achieves 59.7% accuracy on EDA-Bench, outperforming the same-scale base model and some larger general-purpose models. ChipLingo-32B reaches 70.02%, approaching leading closed-source commercial models. Further analysis shows that QA augmentation improves domain performance, Partial FT offers a better balance between adaptation and general capability retention than LoRA, and explicit RAG scenario training mitigates the decline in retrieval utilization after domain training. These results demonstrate the practical value of systematic domain training for knowledge-intensive EDA tasks and provide a foundation for future EDA agents and external-knowledge-driven systems.

CasLayout: Cascaded 3D Layout Diffusion for Indoor Scene Synthesis with Implicit Relation Modeling

Authors:Yingrui Wu, Youkang Kong, Mingyang Zhao, Weize Quan, Dong-Ming Yan, Yang Liu
Date:2026-04-30 03:18:26

Synthesizing realistic 3D indoor scenes remains challenging due to data scarcity and the difficulty of simultaneously enforcing global architectural constraints and local semantic consistency. Existing approaches often overlook structural boundaries or rely on fully connected relation graphs that introduce redundant generation errors. Inspired by human design cognition, we present CasLayout, a cascaded diffusion framework that decomposes the joint scene generation task into four conditional sub-stages with explicit physical and semantic roles: (1) predicting furniture quantity and categories, (2) refining object sizes and feature embeddings, (3) modeling spatial relationships in a latent space, and (4) generating Oriented Bounding Boxes (OBBs). This decoupled architecture reduces data requirements and enables flexible integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) for zero-shot tasks such as image-to-scene generation. To maintain physical validity within complex floor plans, we explicitly model building elements (e.g., walls, doors, and windows) as conditional constraints. Furthermore, to address the high entropy of dense relation graphs, we introduce a sparse relation graph formulation aligned with human spatial descriptions. By encoding these sparse graphs into a compact latent space using a bidirectional Variational Autoencoder (VAE), the proposed framework provides enhanced relational controllability, allowing generated layouts to better respect functional organization. Experiments demonstrate that CasLayout achieves state-of-the-art performance in fidelity and diversity while enabling improved controllability in practical applications.

Safe Bilevel Delegation (SBD): A Formal Framework for Runtime Delegation Safety in Multi-Agent Systems

Authors:Yuan Sun
Date:2026-04-30 03:15:05

As large language model (LLM) agents are deployed in high-stakes environments, the question of how safely to delegate subtasks to specialized sub-agents becomes critical. Existing work addresses multi-agent architecture selection at design time or provides broad empirical guidelines, but neither provides a runtime mechanism that dynamically adjusts the safety-efficiency trade-off as task context changes during execution. We propose Safe Bilevel Delegation (SBD), a formal framework for runtime delegation safety in hierarchical multi-agent systems. SBD formulates task delegation as a bilevel optimization problem: an outer meta-weight network phi learns context-dependent safety-efficiency weights lambda(s) in [0,1]; an inner loop optimizes the delegation policy pi subject to a probabilistic safety constraint P(safe) >= 1-delta. The continuous delegation degree alpha in [0, 1] controls how much decision authority is transferred to each sub-agent, interpolating smoothly between full human override (alpha=0) and fully autonomous execution (alpha=1). We establish three theoretical results: (1) Safety Monotonicity--higher outer safety weight produces a weakly safer inner policy; (2) Inner Policy Convergence--projected gradient descent on the inner problem converges linearly under standard smoothness assumptions; (3) an Accountability Propagation bound that distributes responsibility across multi-hop delegation chains with a provable per-agent ceiling. We instantiate SBD in three high-stakes domains--medical AI (MIMIC-III), financial risk control (S and P 500), and educational agent supervision (ASSISTments)--specifying datasets, safety constraint sets, baselines, and evaluation protocols. This manuscript presents the formal framework and theoretical results in full; empirical validation following the protocols described herein is planned and will be reported in a forthcoming revision.

From Prompt to Physical Actuation: Holistic Threat Modeling of LLM-Enabled Robotic Systems

Authors:Neha Nagaraja, Hayretdin Bahsi, Carlo R. da Cunha
Date:2026-04-29 23:44:07

As large language models are integrated into autonomous robotic systems for task planning and control, compromised inputs or unsafe model outputs can propagate through the planning pipeline to physical-world consequences. Although prior work has studied robotic cybersecurity, adversarial perception attacks, and LLM safety independently, no existing study traces how these threat categories interact and propagate across trust boundaries in a unified architectural model. We address this gap by modeling an LLM-enabled autonomous robot in an edge-cloud architecture as a hierarchical Data Flow Diagram and applying STRIDE-per-interaction analysis across six boundary-crossing interaction points using a three-category taxonomy of Conventional Cyber Threats, Adversarial Threats, and Conversational Threats. The analysis reveals that these categories converge at the same boundary crossings, and we trace three cross-boundary attack chains from external entry points to unsafe physical actuation, each exposing a distinct architectural property: the absence of independent semantic validation between user input and actuator dispatch, cross-modal translation from visual perception to language-model instruction, and unmediated boundary crossing through provider-side tool use. To our knowledge, this is the first DFD-based threat analysis integrating all three threat categories across the full perception-planning-actuation pipeline of an LLM-enabled robotic system.

Exploring the Efficiency of 3D-Stacked AI Chip Architecture for LLM Inference with Voxel

Authors:Yiqi Liu, Noelle Crawford, Michael Wang, Jilong Xue, Jian Huang
Date:2026-04-29 15:48:46

To overcome the well-known memory bottleneck of AI chips, 3D stacked architectures that employ advanced packaging technology with high-density through-silicon vias (TSVs) pins have proven to be a promising solution. The 3D-stacked AI chip enables ultra-high memory bandwidth between compute and memory by stacking numerous DRAM banks atop many AI cores in a distributed manner. However, it is not easy to explore the efficiency of the 3D-stacked AI chip, due to its unique distributed nature. And we need to carefully consider multiple intertwined factors that range from upper-level computing paradigm to machine learning (ML) compiler optimizations, and to the underlying hardware architecture. In this paper, we develop Voxel, a fast and compiler-aware end-to-end simulation framework to facilitate exploring the efficiency of 3D-stacked AI chips for large language model (LLM) inference. Voxel enables the software/hardware co-exploration by employing a programming interface that allows ML compilers to customize the model execution plans. After validating the results of Voxel with an emulator on real silicon, we thoroughly examine the impact and correlation of different aspects of 3D-stacked AI chips, including state-of-the-art compute paradigms, tile-to-core mapping, tensor-to-bank mapping, NoC topologies and link bandwidth, DRAM bank bandwidth, per-core SRAM capacity, and energy/thermal constraints. Our findings disclose that the end-to-end efficiency of a 3D stacked AI chip not only is determined by the cooperative function of these factors, but also significantly depends on the mappings from tiles to AI core and DRAM banks. We report our findings throughout the paper, with the expectation that they will shed light on the development of the 3D-stacked AI chip ecosystem. We will open source Voxel and our study results for public research.

SAGE: A Strategy-Aware Graph-Enhanced Generation Framework For Online Counseling

Authors:Eliya Naomi Aharon, Meytal Grimland, Avi Segal, Loona Ben Dayan, Inbar Shenfeld, Yossi Levi Belz, Kobi Gal
Date:2026-04-29 12:56:44

Effective mental health counseling is a complex, theory-driven process requiring the simultaneous integration of psychological frameworks, real-time distress signals, and strategic intervention planning. This level of clinical reasoning is critical for safety and therapeutic effectiveness but is often missing in general-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs). We introduce SAGE (Strategy-Aware Graph-Enhanced), a novel framework designed to bridge the gap between structured clinical knowledge and generative AI. SAGE constructs a heterogeneous graph that unifies conversational dynamics with a psychologically grounded layer, explicitly anchoring interactions in a theory-driven lexicon. Our architecture first employs a Next Strategy Classifier to identify the optimal therapeutic intervention. Subsequently, a Graph-Aware Attention mechanism projects graph-derived structural signals into soft prompts, conditioning the LLM to generate responses that maintain clinical depth. Validated through both automated metrics and expert human evaluation, SAGE outperforms baselines in strategy prediction and recommended response quality. By providing actionable intervention recommendations, SAGE serves as a cutting-edge decision-support tool designed to augment human expertise in high-stakes crisis counseling.

TDD Governance for Multi-Agent Code Generation via Prompt Engineering

Authors:Tarlan Hasanli, Shahbaz Siddeeq, Bishwash Khanal, Pyry Kotilainen, Tommi Mikkonen, Pekka Abrahamsson
Date:2026-04-29 12:43:22

Large language models (LLMs) accelerate software development but often exhibit instability, non-determinism, and weak adherence to development discipline in unconstrained workflows. While test-driven development (TDD) provides a structured Red-Green-Refactor process, existing LLM-based approaches typically use tests as auxiliary inputs rather than enforceable process constraints. We present an AI-native TDD framework that operationalizes classical TDD principles as structured prompt-level and workflow-level governance mechanisms. Extracted principles are formalized in a machine-readable manifesto and distributed across planning, generation, repair, and validation stages within a layered architecture that separates model proposal from deterministic engine authority. The system enforces phase ordering, bounded repair loops, validation gates, and atomic mutation control to improve stability and reproducibility. We describe architecture and discuss encoding software engineering discipline directly into prompt orchestration, which we think offers a promising direction for reliable LLM-assisted development.

LLM-Flax : Generalizable Robotic Task Planning via Neuro-Symbolic Approaches with Large Language Models

Authors:Seongmin Kim, Daegyu Lee
Date:2026-04-29 11:53:12

Deploying a neuro-symbolic task planner on a new domain today requires significant manual effort: a domain expert must author relaxation and complementary rules, and hundreds of training problems must be solved to supervise a Graph Neural Network (GNN) object scorer. We propose LLM-Flax, a three-stage framework that eliminates all three sources of manual effort using a locally hosted LLM given only a PDDL domain file. Stage 1 automatically generates relaxation and complementary rules via structured prompting with format validation and self-correction. Stage 2 introduces LLM-guided failure recovery with a feasibility-gated budget policy that explicitly reserves API latency cost before each LLM call, preventing the downstream relaxation fallback from being starved. Stage 3 replaces the domain-trained GNN entirely with zero-shot LLM object importance scoring, requiring no training data. We evaluate all three stages on the MazeNamo benchmark across 10x10, 12x12, and 15x15 grids (8 benchmarks total). LLM-Flax achieves average SR 0.945 versus the manual baseline's 0.828 (+0.117), matching or outperforming manual rules on every one of the eight benchmarks. On 12x12 Expert, LLM-Flax attains SR 0.733 where the manual planner fails entirely (SR 0.000); on 15x15 Hard, it achieves SR 1.000 versus Manual's 0.900. Stage 3 demonstrates feasibility (SR 0.720 on 12x12 Hard with no training data) but faces a context-window bottleneck at scale, pointing to the primary open challenge for future work.

AGEL-Comp: A Neuro-Symbolic Framework for Compositional Generalization in Interactive Agents

Authors:Mahnoor Shahid, Hannes Rothe
Date:2026-04-29 10:42:02

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents exhibit systemic failures in compositional generalization, limiting their robustness in interactive environments. This work introduces AGEL-Comp, a neuro-symbolic AI agent architecture designed to address this challenge by grounding actions of the agent. AGEL-Comp integrates three core innovations: (1) a dynamic Causal Program Graph (CPG) as a world model, representing procedural and causal knowledge as a directed hypergraph; (2) an Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) engine that synthesizes new Horn clauses from experiential feedback, grounding symbolic knowledge through interaction; and (3) a hybrid reasoning core where an LLM proposes a set of candidate sub-goals that are verified for logical consistency by a Neural Theorem Prover (NTP). Together, these components operationalize a deduction--abduction learning cycle: enabling the agent to deduce plans and abductively expand its symbolic world model, while a neural adaptation phase keeps its reasoning engine aligned with new knowledge. We propose an evaluation protocol within the \texttt{Retro Quest} simulation environment to probe for compositional generalization scenarios to evaluate our AGEL agent. Our findings clearly indicate the better performance of our AGEL model over pure LLM-based models. Our framework presents a principled path toward agents that build an explicit, interpretable, and compositionally structured understanding of their world.

Tree-of-Text: A Tree-based Prompting Framework for Table-to-Text Generation in the Sports Domain

Authors:Shang-Hsuan Chiang, Tsan-Tsung Yang, An-Zi Yen, Wen-Chih Peng
Date:2026-04-29 10:05:18

Generating sports game reports from structured tables is a complex table-to-text task that demands both precise data interpretation and fluent narrative generation. Traditional model-based approaches require large, annotated datasets, while prompt-based methods using large language models (LLMs) often struggle with hallucination due to weak table comprehension. To overcome these challenges, we propose Tree-of-Text, a tree-structured prompting framework that guides LLMs through a three-stage generation process: (1) Content Planning, where relevant operations and arguments are selected from the input tables; (2) Operation Execution, which breaks down large tables into manageable sub-tables; and (3) Content Generation, where short textual outputs are merged and rewritten into a cohesive report. Experiments show that our method outperforms existing methods on ShuttleSet+, leads in RG and CO metrics on RotoWire-FG, and excels in CS and CO on MLB with roughly 40% of the time and cost of Chain-of-Table. These results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of Tree-of-Text and suggest a promising direction for prompt-based table-to-text generation in the sports domain.

Agentic AI in the Software Development Lifecycle: Architecture, Empirical Evidence, and the Reshaping of Software Engineering

Authors:Happy Bhati
Date:2026-04-29 04:06:47

The arrival of large language models (LLMs) capable of multi-step reasoning, tool use, and long-horizon planning has produced a qualitative shift in software engineering. Where earlier code-completion tools such as GitHub Copilot operated at the granularity of a line or function, modern agentic systems -- Claude Code, OpenAI Codex CLI, Google Jules, Devin, OpenHands, SWE-agent, MetaGPT, ChatDev, and DeepMind's AlphaEvolve -- operate at the granularity of a repository, a feature, or an algorithm. We synthesize work from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Microsoft Research, Princeton, Stanford, and the broader academic community to characterize this transition. We propose a six-layer reference architecture for agentic software engineering systems, contrast a traditional Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) with an emerging Agentic SDLC (A-SDLC), and consolidate empirical evidence on performance (a rise from 1.96% to 78.4% on SWE-bench Verified between October 2023 and April 2026), productivity (13.6%-55.8% time savings across controlled studies), and labor-market impact (49% of jobs sampled by Anthropic in 2026 saw AI used for at least a quarter of their tasks). We argue that the central object of inquiry has shifted from code generation to delegated execution under human supervision, and we identify five open problems -- evaluation, governance, technical debt, skill redistribution, and the economics of attention -- that will determine whether the agentic transition is net-positive for the discipline.

CacheRAG: A Semantic Caching System for Retrieval-Augmented Generation in Knowledge Graph Question Answering

Authors:Yushi Sun, Lei Chen
Date:2026-04-28 23:46:47

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has significantly advanced Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA). However, existing LLM-driven KGQA systems act as stateless planners, generating retrieval plans in isolation without exploiting historical query patterns: analogous to a database system that optimizes every query from scratch without a plan cache. This fundamental design flaw leads to schema hallucinations and limited retrieval coverage. We propose CacheRAG, a systematic cache-augmented architecture for LLM-based KGQA that transforms stateless planners into continual learners. Unlike traditional database plan caching (which optimizes for frequency), CacheRAG introduces three novel design principles tailored for LLM contexts: (1) Schema-agnostic user interface: A two-stage semantic parsing framework via Intermediate Semantic Representation (ISR) enables non-expert users to interact purely in natural language, while a Backend Adapter grounds the LLM with local schema context to compile executable physical queries safely. (2) Diversity-optimized cache retrieval: A two-layer hierarchical index (Domain $\rightarrow$ Aspect) coupled with Maximal Marginal Relevance (MMR) maximizes structural variety in cached examples, effectively mitigating reasoning homogeneity. (3) Bounded heuristic expansion: Deterministic depth and breadth subgraph operators with strict complexity guarantees significantly enhance retrieval recall without risking unbounded API execution. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that CacheRAG significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines (e.g., +13.2% accuracy and +17.5% truthfulness on the CRAG dataset).

From Threads to Trajectories: A Multi-LLM Pipeline for Community Knowledge Extraction from GitHub Issue Discussions

Authors:Nazia Shehnaz Joynab, Soneya Binta Hossain
Date:2026-04-28 17:21:46

Resolution of complex post-production issues in large-scale open-source software (OSS) projects requires significant cognitive effort, as developers need to go through long, unstructured and fragmented issue discussion threads before that. In this paper, we present SWE-MIMIC-Bench, an issue trajectory dataset generated from raw GitHub discussions using an automated multi-LLM pipeline. Unlike simple summarization, this pipeline utilizes a group of closed-source LLMs to perform granular tasks: analyzing individual comments with awareness of externally-linked resources, classifying comment analyses into label-specific fields (e.g., root cause, solution plan, implementation progress), and synthesizing label-aware trajectories which capture a structured and coherent narrative of the entire discussion thread. Our pipeline uses five closed-source LLM configurations for distinct purposes: label classification, inline code block and external link summarization, comment analysis, label-specific field classification and trajectory synthesis. By generating concise and reliable trajectories from complex conversation threads, this system can assist developers and researchers of broader software engineering community to understand the experience-driven collaborative approach for issue diagnosis. Furthermore, the generated trajectories can be used to train modern LLM agents to think and act like an expert developer. We evaluated our system on 800 real-world GitHub issues drawn from the SWE-Bench-Pro, SWE-Bench-Multilingual and SWE-Bench-Verified dataset, achieving a 91.7% success rate in extracting 734 high-fidelity reasoning trajectories.

Towards Agentic Investigation of Security Alerts

Authors:Even Eilertsen, Vasileios Mavroeidis, Gudmund Grov
Date:2026-04-28 16:52:12

Security analysts are overwhelmed by the volume of alerts and the low context provided by many detection systems. Early-stage investigations typically require manual correlation across multiple log sources, a task that is usually time-consuming. In this paper, we present an experimental, agentic workflow that leverages large language models (LLMs) augmented with predefined queries and constrained tool access (structured SQL over Suricata logs and grep-based text search) to automate the first stages of alert investigation. The proposed workflow integrates queries to provide an overview of the available data, and LLM components that selects which queries to use based on the overview results, extracts raw evidence from the query results, and delivers a final verdict of the alert. Our results demonstrate that the LLM-powered workflow can investigate log sources, plan an investigation, and produce a final verdict that has a significantly higher accuracy than a verdict produced by the same LLM without the proposed workflow. By recognizing the inherent limitations of directly applying LLMs to high-volume and unstructured data, we propose combining existing investigation practices of real-world analysts with a structured approach to leverage LLMs as virtual security analysts, thereby assisting and reducing the manual workload.

SAFEdit: Does Multi-Agent Decomposition Resolve the Reliability Challenges of Instructed Code Editing?

Authors:Noam Tarshish, Nofar Selouk, Daniel Hodisan, Bar Ezra Gafniel, Yuval Elovici, Asaf Shabtai, Eliya Nachmani
Date:2026-04-28 15:04:46

Instructed code editing is a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs). On the EditBench benchmark, 39 of 40 evaluated models obtain a task success rate (TSR) below 60 percent, highlighting a gap between general code generation and the ability to perform instruction-driven editing under executable test constraints. To address this, we propose SAFEdit, a multi-agent framework for instructed code editing that decomposes the editing process into specialized roles to improve reliability and reduce unintended code changes. A Planner Agent produces an explicit, visibility-aware edit plan, an Editor Agent applies minimal, literal code modifications, and a Verifier Agent executes real test runs. When tests fail, SAFEdit uses a Failure Abstraction Layer (FAL) to transform raw test logs into structured diagnostic feedback, which is fed back to the Editor to support iterative refinement. We compare SAFEdit against both prior single-model results reported for EditBench and an implemented ReAct single-agent baseline under the same evaluation conditions. We used EditBench to evaluate SAFEdit on 445 code editing instances in five languages (English, Polish, Spanish, Chinese, and Russian) under varying spatial context variants. SAFEdit achieved 68.6 percent TSR, outperforming the single-model baseline by 3.8 percentage points and the ReAct single-agent baseline by 8.6 percentage points. The iterative refinement loop was found to contribute 17.4 percentage points to SAFEdit's overall success rate. SAFEdit's automated error analysis further indicates a reduction in instruction-level hallucinations compared to single-agent approaches, providing an additional framework component for interpreting failures beyond pass or fail outcomes.

Using Large Language Models for Black-Box Testing of FMU-Based Simulations

Authors:Abdullah Mughees, Gaadha Sudheerbabu, Tanwir Ahmad, Dragos Truscan, Mikael Manngård, Kristian Klemets
Date:2026-04-28 13:48:24

We propose a human in the loop approach for black-box testing of Functional Mock-up Units (FMUs) using Large Language Models (LLMs). The goal is to reduce the manual effort in defining test scenarios for dynamic simulation models and to improve the interpretability of results. The approach takes the functional and interface specifications of an FMU as input, and prompts an LLM to generate structured scenario goals in Given-When-Then format that define the initial input conditions of the simulation, a possible change in those conditions, and the expected output behaviour of the system against those changes. The corresponding scenario plans specify input patterns and add assertion oracles that describe expected output patterns defined in scenario goals. The approach generates a complete input time series for the scenario plans, runs the FMU simulation, and evaluates assertions on the recorded outputs. It produces human-readable logs and plots that show statistics for each scenario with overlays, aggregate pass rates, and per-goal outcomes. The generated scenarios and results are stored for evaluation and later re-execution. We evaluate the approach on a Lube Oil Cooling system and discuss design choices that make the approach practical for everyday use. Results suggest that LLM-assisted scenario generation can facilitate automatic test design and verification of dynamic simulation models.

OxyGent: Making Multi-Agent Systems Modular, Observable, and Evolvable via Oxy Abstraction

Authors:Junxing Hu, Tianlong Li, Lei Yu, Ai Han
Date:2026-04-28 13:08:14

Deploying production-ready multi-agent systems (MAS) in complex industrial environments remains challenging due to limitations in scalability, observability, and autonomous evolution. We present OxyGent, an open-source framework driven by two core novelties: a unified Oxy abstraction and the OxyBank evolution engine. The unified abstraction encapsulates agents, tools, LLMs, and reasoning flows as pluggable atomic components, enabling Lego-like scalable system composition and non-intrusive monitoring. To enhance observability, OxyGent introduces permission-driven dynamic planning that replaces rigid workflows with execution graphs generated at runtime, providing adaptive visualizations. Furthermore, to support continuous evolution, OxyBank serves as an AI asset management platform that drives automated data backflow, annotation, and joint evolution. Empirical evaluations and real-world case studies show that OxyGent provides a robust and scalable foundation for MAS. OxyGent is fully open-sourced under the Apache License 2.0 at https://github.com/jd-opensource/OxyGent.

From World-Gen to Quest-Line: A Dependency-Driven Prompt Pipeline for Coherent RPG Generation

Authors:Dominik Borawski, Marta Szulc, Robert Chudy, Małgorzata Giedrowicz, Piotr Mironowicz
Date:2026-04-28 10:39:17

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong potential for narrative generation, but their use in complex, multi-layered role-playing game (RPG) worlds is still limited by issues of coherence, controllability, and structural consistency. This paper explores a dependency-aware, multi-stage prompt pipeline for procedural RPG content generation that models narrative dependencies through structured intermediate representations. The approach decomposes generation into sequential stages: world building, non-player character creation, player character creation, campaign-level quest planning, and quest expansion. Each stage conditions on structured JSON outputs from previous stages. By enforcing schemas and explicit data flow, the pipeline reduces narrative drift, limits hallucinations, and supports scalable creation of interconnected narrative elements. The system is evaluated qualitatively through human-centered analysis across multiple independent runs. Outputs are assessed using criteria such as structural completeness, internal consistency, narrative coherence, diversity, and actionability. Results show that the pipeline consistently generates logically sound and structurally valid RPG content, without quality degradation as complexity increases. Separating high-level campaign planning from detailed quest expansion improves both global structure and local storytelling. These findings suggest that dependency-aware prompt pipelines with structured intermediate representations are an effective design pattern for LLM-based procedural content generation. This approach may also generalize to other domains requiring sequential reasoning over evolving contextual states.

Diagnosis, Bad Planning & Reasoning. Treatment, SCOPE -- Planning for Hybrid Querying over Clinical Trial Data

Authors:Suparno Roy Chowdhury, Manan Roy Choudhury, Tejas Anvekar, Muhammad Ali Khan, Kaneez Zahra Rubab Khakwani, Mohamad Bassam Sonbol, Irbaz Bin Riaz, Vivek Gupta
Date:2026-04-28 01:54:55

We study clinical trial table reasoning, where answers are not directly stored in visible cells but must be reasoned from semantic understanding through normalization, classification, extraction, or lightweight domain reasoning. Motivated by the observation that current LLM approaches often suffer from "bad reasoning" under implicit planning assumptions, we focus on settings in which the model must recover implicit attributes such as therapy type, added agents, endpoint roles, or follow-up status from partially observed clinical-trial tables. We propose SCOPE (Structured Clinical hybrid Planning for Evidence retrieval in clinical trials), a multi-LLM planner-based framework that decomposes the task into row selection, structured planning, and execution. The planner makes the source field, reasoning rules, and output constraints explicit before answer generation, reducing ambiguity relative to direct prompting. We evaluate SCOPE on 1,500 hybrid reasoning questions over oncology clinical-trial tables against zero-shot, few-shot, chain-of-thought, TableGPT2, Blend-SQL, and EHRAgent. Results show that explicit multi-LLM planning improves accuracy for reasoning-based questions while offering a stronger accuracy-efficiency tradeoff than heavier agentic baselines. Our findings position clinical trial reasoning as a distinct table understanding problem and highlight hybrid planner-based decomposition as an effective solution

Odysseys: Benchmarking Web Agents on Realistic Long Horizon Tasks

Authors:Lawrence Keunho Jang, Jing Yu Koh, Daniel Fried, Ruslan Salakhutdinov
Date:2026-04-27 20:05:41

Existing web agent benchmarks have largely converged on short, single-site tasks that frontier models are approaching saturation on. However, real world web use consists of long-horizon, multi-site workflows. Common web navigation tasks, such as comparing products across different domains, planning trips across multiple services, or summarizing information from multiple search queries, require sustained context and cross-site reasoning over potentially hours of browsing. To capture and evaluate such behaviors, we introduce Odysseys: a benchmark of 200 long-horizon web tasks derived from real world browsing sessions evaluated on the live Internet. We find that binary pass/fail evaluation is inadequate for long-horizon settings and introduce a rubric-based evaluation, annotating each Odysseys task with an average of 6.1 graded rubrics. We demonstrate that this yields higher agreement with humans and provides a more fine-grained signal than commonly used trajectory-level LLM-as-a-judge evaluation metrics. We tested several leading frontier models and find that the strongest models achieve a success rate of 44.5%, which leaves substantial room for future improvements. Beyond task success, we argue that efficiency is a first-class concern for long-horizon agents. We introduce a Trajectory Efficiency metric (rubric score per step) and find that even frontier agents achieve only 1.15%, marking an evident need for agents that can succeed efficiently and not simply eventually. Odysseys isolates the critical evaluation of long-horizon proficiency in open-web environments, providing a realistic benchmark to measure progress towards computer-use agents that can potentially productively operate for hours. We release our tasks, evaluation scripts, and other results at https://odysseys-website.pages.dev

On the Trainability of Masked Diffusion Language Models via Blockwise Locality

Authors:Yuxiang Wang, Yu Xiang, Baojian Zhou, Qifang Zhao, Keyue Jiang, Yanghua Xiao, Xiaoxiao Xu
Date:2026-04-27 17:44:26

Masked diffusion language models (MDMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to standard autoregressive large language models (AR-LLMs), yet their optimization can be substantially less stable. We study blockwise MDMs and compare them with AR-LLMs on three controlled tasks that stress different aspects of structured generation: in-context linear regression, graph path-finding, and Sudoku solving. We find that standard random-masking MDMs fail to reliably learn linear regression, exhibit high variance training dynamics on graph path-finding, while outperforming AR-LLMs on Sudoku. To mitigate these instabilities, we propose two locality aware blockwise models, namely Jigsaw and Scatter, that inject left-to-right inductive bias by enforcing autoregressive locality within blocks while preserving iterative refinement at the block level. Empirically, Jigsaw matches AR-LLM stability on linear regression and remains strong on Sudoku, while Scatter retains diffusion's planning advantage on path-finding. Our results indicate that standard random-masking MDMs, even with blockwise variants, may be a suboptimal instantiation of diffusion LMs for ordered generation, motivating models beyond random masking.

Mono2Sls: Automated Monolith-to-Serverless Migration via Multi-Stage Pipeline with Static Analysis

Authors:Xingyan Chen, Yuxin Su, Zishan Su, Yang Yu, Zibin Zheng
Date:2026-04-27 14:44:07

Cloud computing platforms offer elastic scaling, managed infrastructure, and pay-per-use pricing, but moving existing monolithic backends to them remains a difficult software engineering task. In practice, the migration requires coordinated changes to program structure, source code, infrastructure configuration, and cloud-specific design decisions, and these changes are still largely carried out by hand. In this paper, we present Mono2Sls, an automated pipeline that converts monolithic web backends into deployable AWS SAM applications. The pipeline combines lightweight static analysis of entry points, call graphs, and asynchronous behavior with four sequential tool-using LLM agents: Architect, Code Developer, SAM Engineer, and Consistency Validator. These agents communicate through explicit intermediate artifacts and consult a curated SAM knowledge base. Evaluated on six benchmark applications totaling more than 10K lines of code and 76 business endpoints, Mono2Sls achieves 100% deployment success without manual fixes. It also reaches 66.1% end-to-end correctness and 98.7% API-coverage F1, whereas the commercial baselines achieve 53.7--61.2% and 88.4%, respectively. The migrated systems show more consistent use of AWS-native authentication and asynchronous patterns, and an ablation study indicates that static-analysis-guided architecture planning contributes 23.4 percentage points to end-to-end correctness.

Beyond the Attention Stability Boundary: Agentic Self-Synthesizing Reasoning Protocols

Authors:Dahlia Shehata, Ming Li
Date:2026-04-27 14:13:30

As LLM agents transition to autonomous digital coworkers, maintaining deterministic goal-directedness in non-linear multi-turn conversations emerged as an architectural bottleneck. We identify and formalize a systemic failure mode termed the Attention Latch in decoder-only autoregressive Transformers. This phenomenon, a behavioral manifestation of Information Over-squashing, occurs when the cumulative probabilistic weight of historical context overrides mid-task updates, causing agents to remain anchored to obsolete constraints despite explicit contradictory instructions. We propose Self-Synthesizing Reasoning Protocols (SSRP), a metacognitive framework that implements a discrete separation between high-level architectural planning (Architect) and turn-by-turn procedural execution (Executive). We evaluate SSRP across 9K trajectories using the MultiWOZ 2.2 dataset and the Aggregate Pivot Accuracy (APA), a novel metric we validate by mapping its scores to the U-shaped 'Lost in the Middle' curve. We present 3 experimental tiers: a shallow recency-based retrieval pilot, a high-entropy SOP, and a semantic hijacked 3-hop Multi-Fact Synthesis task. Our results empirically locate the Attention Stability Boundary, where stateless Vanilla ReAct baselines for GPT 5.4 collapse to 0.1% success while SSRP achieves a 715X Resilience Lift. We demonstrate statistically significant gains across Gemini 3.1 Pro, Claude Sonnet 4.6 and DeepSeek V3.2. Audits confirm SSRP necessity by proving attentional lapse via a recursive reflexion baseline (100% success); decoupling the latch from positional bias through equidistant stress testing (90% accuracy); and formalizing SSRP via the Information Bottleneck principle and granularity ablations. Procedural Integrity audit (98.8% adherence) reveals a Grounding Paradox where high-stability models fail by refusing to hallucinate under retrieval-reasoning contamination.

From Prototype to Classroom: An Intelligent Tutoring System for Quantum Education

Authors:Iizalaarab Elhaimeur, Nikos Chrisochoides
Date:2026-04-27 07:00:14

Quantum computing instructors face a compounding problem: the concepts are counterintuitive, the mathematical formalism is dense, and qualified faculty are scarce outside a small number of well-resourced institutions. Our prior work introduced a knowledge-graph-augmented tutoring prototype with two specialized LLM agents: a Teaching Agent for dynamic interaction and a Lesson Planning Agent for lesson generation. Validated on simulated runs rather than in a real course, that prototype left open whether more aggressive agent specialization would be needed to handle the full range of quantum education tasks under real student load. This paper answers the three questions that the prototype could not answer. Can agent specialization solve the reliability problem in a domain as technically demanding as quantum information science? Can the system run in a real course, not a demonstration? Does the instructor gain actionable intelligence from the deployment? We present ITAS (Intelligent Teaching Assistant System), a multi-agent tutoring system built around four contributions: a five-module QIS curriculum grounded in Watrous's information-first framework, a Spoke-and-Wheel teaching architecture with quantum-specialized agents, a cloud infrastructure designed for production use and regulatory compliance, and a conversational analytics layer for instructors and content developers. Piloted in a quantum computing course at Old Dominion University, the system supports all three answers: deployment evidence is consistent with specialization addressing the task-boundary failures observed in the prototype, cloud infrastructure supports classroom-scale concurrency at sub-textbook cost, and the analytics agent surfaces curriculum gaps the instructor could not otherwise see.