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Apr 23

TessPay: Verify-then-Pay Infrastructure for Trusted Agentic Commerce

The global economy is entering the era of Agentic Commerce, where autonomous agents can discover services, negotiate prices, and transact value. However adoption towards agentic commerce faces a foundational trust gap: current systems are built for direct human interactions rather than agent-driven operations. It lacks core primitives across three critical stages of agentic transactions. First, Task Delegation lacks means to translate user intent into defined scopes, discover appropriate agents, and securely authorize actions. Second, Payment Settlement for tasks is processed before execution, lacking verifiable evidence to validate the agent's work. Third, Audit Mechanisms fail to capture the full transaction lifecycle, preventing clear accountability for disputes. While emerging standards address fragments of this trust gap, there still remains a critical need for a unified infrastructure that binds the entire transaction lifecycle. To resolve this gap, we introduce TessPay, a unified infrastructure that replaces implicit trust with a 'Verify-then-Pay' architecture. It is a two plane architecture separating control and verification from settlement. TessPay operationalizes trust across four distinct stages: Before execution, agents are anchored in a canonical registry and user intent is captured as verifiable mandates, enabling stakeholder accountability. During execution, funds are locked in escrow while the agent executes the task and generates cryptographic evidence (TLS Notary, TEE etc.) to support Proof of Task Execution (PoTE). At settlement, the system verifies this evidence and releases funds only when the PoTE satisfies verification predicates; modular rail adapters ensure this PoTE-gated escrow remains chain-agnostic across heterogeneous payment rails. After settlement, TessPay preserves a tamper-evident audit trail to enable clear accountability for dispute resolution.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 29

What Is Your AI Agent Buying? Evaluation, Implications and Emerging Questions for Agentic E-Commerce

Online marketplaces will be transformed by autonomous AI agents acting on behalf of consumers. Rather than humans browsing and clicking, vision-language-model (VLM) agents can parse webpages, evaluate products, and transact. This raises a fundamental question: what do AI agents buy, and why? We develop ACES, a sandbox environment that pairs a platform-agnostic VLM agent with a fully programmable mock marketplace to study this question. We first conduct basic rationality checks in the context of simple tasks, and then, by randomizing product positions, prices, ratings, reviews, sponsored tags, and platform endorsements, we obtain causal estimates of how frontier VLMs actually shop. Models show strong but heterogeneous position effects: all favor the top row, yet different models prefer different columns, undermining the assumption of a universal "top" rank. They penalize sponsored tags and reward endorsements. Sensitivities to price, ratings, and reviews are directionally human-like but vary sharply in magnitude across models. Motivated by scenarios where sellers use AI agents to optimize product listings, we show that a seller-side agent that makes minor tweaks to product descriptions, targeting AI buyer preferences, can deliver substantial market-share gains if AI-mediated shopping dominates. We also find that modal product choices can differ across models and, in some cases, demand may concentrate on a few select products, raising competition questions. Together, our results illuminate how AI agents may behave in e-commerce settings and surface concrete seller strategy, platform design, and regulatory questions in an AI-mediated ecosystem.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 4, 2025 2

Magentic Marketplace: An Open-Source Environment for Studying Agentic Markets

As LLM agents advance, they are increasingly mediating economic decisions, ranging from product discovery to transactions, on behalf of users. Such applications promise benefits but also raise many questions about agent accountability and value for users. Addressing these questions requires understanding how agents behave in realistic market conditions. However, previous research has largely evaluated agents in constrained settings, such as single-task marketplaces (e.g., negotiation) or structured two-agent interactions. Real-world markets are fundamentally different: they require agents to handle diverse economic activities and coordinate within large, dynamic ecosystems where multiple agents with opaque behaviors may engage in open-ended dialogues. To bridge this gap, we investigate two-sided agentic marketplaces where Assistant agents represent consumers and Service agents represent competing businesses. To study these interactions safely, we develop Magentic-Marketplace-- a simulated environment where Assistants and Services can operate. This environment enables us to study key market dynamics: the utility agents achieve, behavioral biases, vulnerability to manipulation, and how search mechanisms shape market outcomes. Our experiments show that frontier models can approach optimal welfare-- but only under ideal search conditions. Performance degrades sharply with scale, and all models exhibit severe first-proposal bias, creating 10-30x advantages for response speed over quality. These findings reveal how behaviors emerge across market conditions, informing the design of fair and efficient agentic marketplaces.

MicrosoftResearch Microsoft Research
·
Oct 27, 2025 2

Agentic Web: Weaving the Next Web with AI Agents

The emergence of AI agents powered by large language models (LLMs) marks a pivotal shift toward the Agentic Web, a new phase of the internet defined by autonomous, goal-driven interactions. In this paradigm, agents interact directly with one another to plan, coordinate, and execute complex tasks on behalf of users. This transition from human-driven to machine-to-machine interaction allows intent to be delegated, relieving users from routine digital operations and enabling a more interactive, automated web experience. In this paper, we present a structured framework for understanding and building the Agentic Web. We trace its evolution from the PC and Mobile Web eras and identify the core technological foundations that support this shift. Central to our framework is a conceptual model consisting of three key dimensions: intelligence, interaction, and economics. These dimensions collectively enable the capabilities of AI agents, such as retrieval, recommendation, planning, and collaboration. We analyze the architectural and infrastructural challenges involved in creating scalable agentic systems, including communication protocols, orchestration strategies, and emerging paradigms such as the Agent Attention Economy. We conclude by discussing the potential applications, societal risks, and governance issues posed by agentic systems, and outline research directions for developing open, secure, and intelligent ecosystems shaped by both human intent and autonomous agent behavior. A continuously updated collection of relevant studies for agentic web is available at: https://github.com/SafeRL-Lab/agentic-web.

  • 18 authors
·
Jul 28, 2025

From Prompt-Response to Goal-Directed Systems: The Evolution of Agentic AI Software Architecture

Agentic AI denotes an architectural transition from stateless, prompt-driven generative models toward goal-directed systems capable of autonomous perception, planning, action, and adaptation through iterative control loops. This paper examines this transition by connecting foundational intelligent agent theories, including reactive, deliberative, and Belief-Desire-Intention models, with contemporary LLM-centric approaches such as tool invocation, memory-augmented reasoning, and multi-agent coordination. The paper presents three primary contributions: (i) a reference architecture for production-grade LLM agents that separates cognitive reasoning from execution using typed tool interfaces; (ii) a taxonomy of multi-agent topologies, together with their associated failure modes and mitigation approaches; and (iii) an enterprise hardening checklist that incorporates governance, observability, and reproducibility considerations. Through an analysis of emerging industry platforms, including Kore.ai, Salesforce Agentforce, TrueFoundry, ZenML, and LangChain, the study identifies a convergence toward standardized agent loops, registries, and auditable control mechanisms. It is argued that the subsequent phase of agentic AI development will parallel the maturation of web services, relying on shared protocols, typed contracts, and layered governance structures to support scalable and composable autonomy. The persistent challenges related to verifiability, interoperability, and safe autonomy remain key areas for future research and practical deployment.

  • 1 authors
·
Feb 10

SPILLage: Agentic Oversharing on the Web

LLM-powered agents are beginning to automate user's tasks across the open web, often with access to user resources such as emails and calendars. Unlike standard LLMs answering questions in a controlled ChatBot setting, web agents act "in the wild", interacting with third parties and leaving behind an action trace. Therefore, we ask the question: how do web agents handle user resources when accomplishing tasks on their behalf across live websites? In this paper, we formalize Natural Agentic Oversharing -- the unintentional disclosure of task-irrelevant user information through an agent trace of actions on the web. We introduce SPILLage, a framework that characterizes oversharing along two dimensions: channel (content vs. behavior) and directness (explicit vs. implicit). This taxonomy reveals a critical blind spot: while prior work focuses on text leakage, web agents also overshare behaviorally through clicks, scrolls, and navigation patterns that can be monitored. We benchmark 180 tasks on live e-commerce sites with ground-truth annotations separating task-relevant from task-irrelevant attributes. Across 1,080 runs spanning two agentic frameworks and three backbone LLMs, we demonstrate that oversharing is pervasive with behavioral oversharing dominates content oversharing by 5x. This effect persists -- and can even worsen -- under prompt-level mitigation. However, removing task-irrelevant information before execution improves task success by up to 17.9%, demonstrating that reducing oversharing improves task success. Our findings underscore that protecting privacy in web agents is a fundamental challenge, requiring a broader view of "output" that accounts for what agents do on the web, not just what they type. Our datasets and code are available at https://github.com/jrohsc/SPILLage.

Zero-Trust Runtime Verification for Agentic Payment Protocols: Mitigating Replay and Context-Binding Failures in AP2

The deployment of autonomous AI agents capable of executing commercial transactions has motivated the adoption of mandate-based payment authorization protocols, including the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2). These protocols replace interactive, session-based authorization with cryptographically issued mandates, enabling asynchronous and autonomous execution. While AP2 provides specification-level guarantees through signature verification, explicit binding, and expiration semantics, real-world agentic execution introduces runtime behaviors such as retries, concurrency, and orchestration that challenge implicit assumptions about mandate usage. In this work, we present a security analysis of the AP2 mandate lifecycle and identify enforcement gaps that arise during runtime in agent-based payment systems. We propose a zero-trust runtime verification framework that enforces explicit context binding and consume-once mandate semantics using dynamically generated, time-bound nonces, ensuring that authorization decisions are evaluated at execution time rather than assumed from static issuance properties. Through simulation-based evaluation under high concurrency, we show that context-aware binding and consume-once enforcement address distinct and complementary attack classes, and that both are required to prevent replay and context-redirect attacks. The proposed framework mitigates all evaluated attacks while maintaining stable verification latency of approximately 3.8~ms at throughput levels up to 10{,}000 transactions per second. We further demonstrate that the required runtime state is bounded by peak concurrency rather than cumulative transaction history, indicating that robust runtime security for agentic payment execution can be achieved with minimal and predictable overhead.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 5

AgentStore: Scalable Integration of Heterogeneous Agents As Specialized Generalist Computer Assistant

Digital agents capable of automating complex computer tasks have attracted considerable attention due to their immense potential to enhance human-computer interaction. However, existing agent methods exhibit deficiencies in their generalization and specialization capabilities, especially in handling open-ended computer tasks in real-world environments. Inspired by the rich functionality of the App store, we present AgentStore, a scalable platform designed to dynamically integrate heterogeneous agents for automating computer tasks. AgentStore empowers users to integrate third-party agents, allowing the system to continuously enrich its capabilities and adapt to rapidly evolving operating systems. Additionally, we propose a novel core MetaAgent with the AgentToken strategy to efficiently manage diverse agents and utilize their specialized and generalist abilities for both domain-specific and system-wide tasks. Extensive experiments on three challenging benchmarks demonstrate that AgentStore surpasses the limitations of previous systems with narrow capabilities, particularly achieving a significant improvement from 11.21\% to 23.85\% on the OSWorld benchmark, more than doubling the previous results. Comprehensive quantitative and qualitative results further demonstrate AgentStore's ability to enhance agent systems in both generalization and specialization, underscoring its potential for developing the specialized generalist computer assistant. All our codes will be made publicly available in https://chengyou-jia.github.io/AgentStore-Home.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 24, 2024 2

AgentSwift: Efficient LLM Agent Design via Value-guided Hierarchical Search

Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated strong capabilities across diverse domains. However, designing high-performing agentic systems remains challenging. Existing agent search methods suffer from three major limitations: (1) an emphasis on optimizing agentic workflows while under-utilizing proven human-designed components such as memory, planning, and tool use; (2) high evaluation costs, as each newly generated agent must be fully evaluated on benchmarks; and (3) inefficient search in large search space. In this work, we introduce a comprehensive framework to address these challenges. First, We propose a hierarchical search space that jointly models agentic workflow and composable functional components, enabling richer agentic system designs. Building on this structured design space, we introduce a predictive value model that estimates agent performance given agentic system and task description, allowing for efficient, low-cost evaluation during the search process. Finally, we present a hierarchical Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) strategy informed by uncertainty to guide the search. Experiments on seven benchmarks, covering embodied, math, web, tool, and game, show that our method achieves an average performance gain of 8.34\% over state-of-the-art baselines and exhibits faster search progress with steeper improvement trajectories. Code repo is available at https://github.com/Ericccc02/AgentSwift.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 6, 2025

Scaling Small Agents Through Strategy Auctions

Small language models are increasingly viewed as a promising, cost-effective approach to agentic AI, with proponents claiming they are sufficiently capable for agentic workflows. However, while smaller agents can closely match larger ones on simple tasks, it remains unclear how their performance scales with task complexity, when large models become necessary, and how to better leverage small agents for long-horizon workloads. In this work, we empirically show that small agents' performance fails to scale with task complexity on deep search and coding tasks, and we introduce Strategy Auctions for Workload Efficiency (SALE), an agent framework inspired by freelancer marketplaces. In SALE, agents bid with short strategic plans, which are scored by a systematic cost-value mechanism and refined via a shared auction memory, enabling per-task routing and continual self-improvement without training a separate router or running all models to completion. Across deep search and coding tasks of varying complexity, SALE reduces reliance on the largest agent by 53%, lowers overall cost by 35%, and consistently improves upon the largest agent's pass@1 with only a negligible overhead beyond executing the final trace. In contrast, established routers that rely on task descriptions either underperform the largest agent or fail to reduce cost -- often both -- underscoring their poor fit for agentic workflows. These results suggest that while small agents may be insufficient for complex workloads, they can be effectively "scaled up" through coordinated task allocation and test-time self-improvement. More broadly, they motivate a systems-level view of agentic AI in which performance gains come less from ever-larger individual models and more from market-inspired coordination mechanisms that organize heterogeneous agents into efficient, adaptive ecosystems.

Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Survey on Agentic RAG

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized artificial intelligence (AI) by enabling human like text generation and natural language understanding. However, their reliance on static training data limits their ability to respond to dynamic, real time queries, resulting in outdated or inaccurate outputs. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a solution, enhancing LLMs by integrating real time data retrieval to provide contextually relevant and up-to-date responses. Despite its promise, traditional RAG systems are constrained by static workflows and lack the adaptability required for multistep reasoning and complex task management. Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Agentic RAG) transcends these limitations by embedding autonomous AI agents into the RAG pipeline. These agents leverage agentic design patterns reflection, planning, tool use, and multiagent collaboration to dynamically manage retrieval strategies, iteratively refine contextual understanding, and adapt workflows to meet complex task requirements. This integration enables Agentic RAG systems to deliver unparalleled flexibility, scalability, and context awareness across diverse applications. This survey provides a comprehensive exploration of Agentic RAG, beginning with its foundational principles and the evolution of RAG paradigms. It presents a detailed taxonomy of Agentic RAG architectures, highlights key applications in industries such as healthcare, finance, and education, and examines practical implementation strategies. Additionally, it addresses challenges in scaling these systems, ensuring ethical decision making, and optimizing performance for real-world applications, while providing detailed insights into frameworks and tools for implementing Agentic RAG.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 15, 2025 1

Learning to Recommend Multi-Agent Subgraphs from Calling Trees

Multi-agent systems (MAS) increasingly solve complex tasks by orchestrating agents and tools selected from rapidly growing marketplaces. As these marketplaces expand, many candidates become functionally overlapping, making selection not just a retrieval problem: beyond filtering relevant agents, an orchestrator must choose options that are reliable, compatible with the current execution context, and able to cooperate with other selected agents. Existing recommender systems -- largely built for item-level ranking from flat user-item logs -- do not directly address the structured, sequential, and interaction-dependent nature of agent orchestration. We address this gap by formulating agent recommendation in MAS as a constrained decision problem and introducing a generic constrained recommendation framework that first uses retrieval to build a compact candidate set conditioned on the current subtask and context, and then performs utility optimization within this feasible set using a learned scorer that accounts for relevance, reliability, and interaction effects. We ground both the formulation and learning signals in historical calling trees, which capture the execution structure of MAS (parent-child calls, branching dependencies, and local cooperation patterns) beyond what flat logs provide. The framework supports two complementary settings: agent-level recommendation (select the next agent/tool) and system-level recommendation (select a small, connected agent team/subgraph for coordinated execution). To enable systematic evaluation, we construct a unified calling-tree benchmark by normalizing invocation logs from eight heterogeneous multi-agent corpora into a shared structured representation.

  • 2 authors
·
Jan 28

Agentic Design Patterns: A System-Theoretic Framework

With the development of foundation model (FM), agentic AI systems are getting more attention, yet their inherent issues like hallucination and poor reasoning, coupled with the frequent ad-hoc nature of system design, lead to unreliable and brittle applications. Existing efforts to characterise agentic design patterns often lack a rigorous systems-theoretic foundation, resulting in high-level or convenience-based taxonomies that are difficult to implement. This paper addresses this gap by introducing a principled methodology for engineering robust AI agents. We propose two primary contributions: first, a novel system-theoretic framework that deconstructs an agentic AI system into five core, interacting functional subsystems: Reasoning & World Model, Perception & Grounding, Action Execution, Learning & Adaptation, and Inter-Agent Communication. Second, derived from this architecture and directly mapped to a comprehensive taxonomy of agentic challenges, we present a collection of 12 agentic design patterns. These patterns - categorised as Foundational, Cognitive & Decisional, Execution & Interaction, and Adaptive & Learning - offer reusable, structural solutions to recurring problems in agent design. The utility of the framework is demonstrated by a case study on the ReAct framework, showing how the proposed patterns can rectify systemic architectural deficiencies. This work provides a foundational language and a structured methodology to standardise agentic design communication among researchers and engineers, leading to more modular, understandable, and reliable autonomous systems.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 26

Synergy: A Next-Generation General-Purpose Agent for Open Agentic Web

AI agents are rapidly expanding in both capability and population: they now write code, operate computers across platforms, manage cloud infrastructure, and make purchasing decisions, while open-source frameworks such as OpenClaw are putting personal agents in the hands of millions and embodied agents are spreading across smartphones, vehicles, and robots. As the internet prepares to host billions of such entities, it is shifting toward what we call Open Agentic Web, a decentralized digital ecosystem in which agents from different users, organizations, and runtimes can discover one another, negotiate task boundaries, and delegate work across open technical and social surfaces at scale. Yet most of today's agents remain isolated tools or closed-ecosystem orchestrators rather than socially integrated participants in open networks. We argue that the next generation of agents must become Agentic Citizens, defined by three requirements: Agentic-Web-Native Collaboration, participation in open collaboration networks rather than only closed internal orchestration; Agent Identity and Personhood, continuity as a social entity rather than a resettable function call; and Lifelong Evolution, improvement across task performance, communication, and collaboration over time. We present Synergy, a general-purpose agent architecture and runtime harness for persistent, collaborative, and evolving agents on Open Agentic Web, grounding collaboration in session-native orchestration, repository-backed workspaces, and social communication; identity in typed memory, notes, agenda, skills, and persistent social relationships; and evolution in an experience-centered learning mechanism that proactively recalls rewarded trajectories at inference time.

  • 12 authors
·
Mar 29

Automated Composition of Agents: A Knapsack Approach for Agentic Component Selection

Designing effective agentic systems requires the seamless composition and integration of agents, tools, and models within dynamic and uncertain environments. Most existing methods rely on static, semantic retrieval approaches for tool or agent discovery. However, effective reuse and composition of existing components remain challenging due to incomplete capability descriptions and the limitations of retrieval methods. Component selection suffers because the decisions are not based on capability, cost, and real-time utility. To address these challenges, we introduce a structured, automated framework for agentic system composition that is inspired by the knapsack problem. Our framework enables a composer agent to systematically identify, select, and assemble an optimal set of agentic components by jointly considering performance, budget constraints, and compatibility. By dynamically testing candidate components and modeling their utility in real-time, our approach streamlines the assembly of agentic systems and facilitates scalable reuse of resources. Empirical evaluation with Claude 3.5 Sonnet across five benchmarking datasets shows that our online-knapsack-based composer consistently lies on the Pareto frontier, achieving higher success rates at significantly lower component costs compared to our baselines. In the single-agent setup, the online knapsack composer shows a success rate improvement of up to 31.6% in comparison to the retrieval baselines. In multi-agent systems, the online knapsack composer increases success rate from 37% to 87% when agents are selected from an agent inventory of 100+ agents. The substantial performance gap confirms the robust adaptability of our method across diverse domains and budget constraints.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 18, 2025 2

Insight Agents: An LLM-Based Multi-Agent System for Data Insights

Today, E-commerce sellers face several key challenges, including difficulties in discovering and effectively utilizing available programs and tools, and struggling to understand and utilize rich data from various tools. We therefore aim to develop Insight Agents (IA), a conversational multi-agent Data Insight system, to provide E-commerce sellers with personalized data and business insights through automated information retrieval. Our hypothesis is that IA will serve as a force multiplier for sellers, thereby driving incremental seller adoption by reducing the effort required and increase speed at which sellers make good business decisions. In this paper, we introduce this novel LLM-backed end-to-end agentic system built on a plan-and-execute paradigm and designed for comprehensive coverage, high accuracy, and low latency. It features a hierarchical multi-agent structure, consisting of manager agent and two worker agents: data presentation and insight generation, for efficient information retrieval and problem-solving. We design a simple yet effective ML solution for manager agent that combines Out-of-Domain (OOD) detection using a lightweight encoder-decoder model and agent routing through a BERT-based classifier, optimizing both accuracy and latency. Within the two worker agents, a strategic planning is designed for API-based data model that breaks down queries into granular components to generate more accurate responses, and domain knowledge is dynamically injected to to enhance the insight generator. IA has been launched for Amazon sellers in US, which has achieved high accuracy of 90% based on human evaluation, with latency of P90 below 15s.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 1

Automated Design of Agentic Systems

Researchers are investing substantial effort in developing powerful general-purpose agents, wherein Foundation Models are used as modules within agentic systems (e.g. Chain-of-Thought, Self-Reflection, Toolformer). However, the history of machine learning teaches us that hand-designed solutions are eventually replaced by learned solutions. We formulate a new research area, Automated Design of Agentic Systems (ADAS), which aims to automatically create powerful agentic system designs, including inventing novel building blocks and/or combining them in new ways. We further demonstrate that there is an unexplored yet promising approach within ADAS where agents can be defined in code and new agents can be automatically discovered by a meta agent programming ever better ones in code. Given that programming languages are Turing Complete, this approach theoretically enables the learning of any possible agentic system: including novel prompts, tool use, control flows, and combinations thereof. We present a simple yet effective algorithm named Meta Agent Search to demonstrate this idea, where a meta agent iteratively programs interesting new agents based on an ever-growing archive of previous discoveries. Through extensive experiments across multiple domains including coding, science, and math, we show that our algorithm can progressively invent agents with novel designs that greatly outperform state-of-the-art hand-designed agents. Importantly, we consistently observe the surprising result that agents invented by Meta Agent Search maintain superior performance even when transferred across domains and models, demonstrating their robustness and generality. Provided we develop it safely, our work illustrates the potential of an exciting new research direction toward automatically designing ever-more powerful agentic systems to benefit humanity.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 15, 2024 3

Toward Edge General Intelligence with Agentic AI and Agentification: Concepts, Technologies, and Future Directions

The rapid expansion of sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks and the Internet of Things (IoT) has catalyzed the evolution from centralized cloud intelligence towards decentralized edge general intelligence. However, traditional edge intelligence methods, characterized by static models and limited cognitive autonomy, fail to address the dynamic, heterogeneous, and resource-constrained scenarios inherent to emerging edge networks. Agentic artificial intelligence (Agentic AI) emerges as a transformative solution, enabling edge systems to autonomously perceive multimodal environments, reason contextually, and adapt proactively through continuous perception-reasoning-action loops. In this context, the agentification of edge intelligence serves as a key paradigm shift, where distributed entities evolve into autonomous agents capable of collaboration and continual adaptation. This paper presents a comprehensive survey dedicated to Agentic AI and agentification frameworks tailored explicitly for edge general intelligence. First, we systematically introduce foundational concepts and clarify distinctions from traditional edge intelligence paradigms. Second, we analyze important enabling technologies, including compact model compression, energy-aware computing strategies, robust connectivity frameworks, and advanced knowledge representation and reasoning mechanisms. Third, we provide representative case studies demonstrating Agentic AI's capabilities in low-altitude economy networks, intent-driven networking, vehicular networks, and human-centric service provisioning, supported by numerical evaluations. Furthermore, we identify current research challenges, review emerging open-source platforms, and highlight promising future research directions to guide robust, scalable, and trustworthy Agentic AI deployments for next-generation edge environments.

  • 13 authors
·
Aug 26, 2025

Toward Agentic AI: Generative Information Retrieval Inspired Intelligent Communications and Networking

The increasing complexity and scale of modern telecommunications networks demand intelligent automation to enhance efficiency, adaptability, and resilience. Agentic AI has emerged as a key paradigm for intelligent communications and networking, enabling AI-driven agents to perceive, reason, decide, and act within dynamic networking environments. However, effective decision-making in telecom applications, such as network planning, management, and resource allocation, requires integrating retrieval mechanisms that support multi-hop reasoning, historical cross-referencing, and compliance with evolving 3GPP standards. This article presents a forward-looking perspective on generative information retrieval-inspired intelligent communications and networking, emphasizing the role of knowledge acquisition, processing, and retrieval in agentic AI for telecom systems. We first provide a comprehensive review of generative information retrieval strategies, including traditional retrieval, hybrid retrieval, semantic retrieval, knowledge-based retrieval, and agentic contextual retrieval. We then analyze their advantages, limitations, and suitability for various networking scenarios. Next, we present a survey about their applications in communications and networking. Additionally, we introduce an agentic contextual retrieval framework to enhance telecom-specific planning by integrating multi-source retrieval, structured reasoning, and self-reflective validation. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework significantly improves answer accuracy, explanation consistency, and retrieval efficiency compared to traditional and semantic retrieval methods. Finally, we outline future research directions.

  • 8 authors
·
Feb 24, 2025

ContestTrade: A Multi-Agent Trading System Based on Internal Contest Mechanism

In financial trading, large language model (LLM)-based agents demonstrate significant potential. However, the high sensitivity to market noise undermines the performance of LLM-based trading systems. To address this limitation, we propose a novel multi-agent system featuring an internal competitive mechanism inspired by modern corporate management structures. The system consists of two specialized teams: (1) Data Team - responsible for processing and condensing massive market data into diversified text factors, ensuring they fit the model's constrained context. (2) Research Team - tasked with making parallelized multipath trading decisions based on deep research methods. The core innovation lies in implementing a real-time evaluation and ranking mechanism within each team, driven by authentic market feedback. Each agent's performance undergoes continuous scoring and ranking, with only outputs from top-performing agents being adopted. The design enables the system to adaptively adjust to dynamic environment, enhances robustness against market noise and ultimately delivers superior trading performance. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed system significantly outperforms prevailing multi-agent systems and traditional quantitative investment methods across diverse evaluation metrics. ContestTrade is open-sourced on GitHub at https://github.com/FinStep-AI/ContestTrade.

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 1, 2025

Chain-of-Agents: End-to-End Agent Foundation Models via Multi-Agent Distillation and Agentic RL

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and multi-agent systems have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex problem-solving tasks such as deep research, vibe coding, and mathematical reasoning. However, most existing multi-agent systems are built upon manual prompt/workflow engineering with sophisticated agent frameworks, making them computationally inefficient, less capable, and can not benefit from data-centric learning. In this work, we introduce Chain-of-Agents (CoA), a novel paradigm of LLM reasoning that enables native end-to-end complex problem-solving in the same way as a multi-agent system (i.e., multi-turn problem solving with multiple tools and multiple agents) within one model. In chain-of-agents problem-solving, the model dynamically activates different tool agents and role-playing agents to simulate multi-agent collaboration in an end-to-end fashion. To elicit end-to-end chain-of-agents problem-solving abilities in LLMs, we introduce a multi-agent distillation framework to distill state-of-the-art multi-agent systems into chain-of-agents trajectories for agentic supervised fine-tuning. We then use agentic reinforcement learning on verifiable agentic tasks to further improve the models' capabilities on chain-of-agents problem solving. We call the resulting models Agent Foundation Models (AFMs). Our empirical studies demonstrate that AFM establishes new state-of-the-art performance across diverse benchmarks in both web agent and code agent settings. We make the entire research, including the model weights, code for training and evaluation, and the training data, fully open-sourced, which offers a solid starting point for future research on agent models and agentic RL.

  • 30 authors
·
Aug 6, 2025 8

WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agents

With generative AI advances, the exciting potential for autonomous agents to manage daily tasks via natural language commands has emerged. However, cur rent agents are primarily created and tested in simplified synthetic environments, substantially limiting real-world scenario representation. In this paper, we build an environment for agent command and control that is highly realistic and reproducible. Specifically, we focus on agents that perform tasks on websites, and we create an environment with fully functional websites from four common domains: e-commerce, social forum discussions, collaborative software development, and content management. Our environment is enriched with tools (e.g., a map) and external knowledge bases (e.g., user manuals) to encourage human-like task-solving. Building upon our environment, we release a set of benchmark tasks focusing on evaluating the functional correctness of task completions. The tasks in our benchmark are diverse, long-horizon, and are designed to emulate tasks that humans routinely perform on the internet. We design and implement several autonomous agents, integrating recent techniques such as reasoning before acting. The results demonstrate that solving complex tasks is challenging: our best GPT-4-based agent only achieves an end-to-end task success rate of 10.59%. These results highlight the need for further development of robust agents, that current state-of-the-art LMs are far from perfect performance in these real-life tasks, and that WebArena can be used to measure such progress. Our code, data, environment reproduction resources, and video demonstrations are publicly available at https://webarena.dev/.

  • 11 authors
·
Jul 25, 2023 4

A Survey on Agentic Multimodal Large Language Models

With the recent emergence of revolutionary autonomous agentic systems, research community is witnessing a significant shift from traditional static, passive, and domain-specific AI agents toward more dynamic, proactive, and generalizable agentic AI. Motivated by the growing interest in agentic AI and its potential trajectory toward AGI, we present a comprehensive survey on Agentic Multimodal Large Language Models (Agentic MLLMs). In this survey, we explore the emerging paradigm of agentic MLLMs, delineating their conceptual foundations and distinguishing characteristics from conventional MLLM-based agents. We establish a conceptual framework that organizes agentic MLLMs along three fundamental dimensions: (i) Agentic internal intelligence functions as the system's commander, enabling accurate long-horizon planning through reasoning, reflection, and memory; (ii) Agentic external tool invocation, whereby models proactively use various external tools to extend their problem-solving capabilities beyond their intrinsic knowledge; and (iii) Agentic environment interaction further situates models within virtual or physical environments, allowing them to take actions, adapt strategies, and sustain goal-directed behavior in dynamic real-world scenarios. To further accelerate research in this area for the community, we compile open-source training frameworks, training and evaluation datasets for developing agentic MLLMs. Finally, we review the downstream applications of agentic MLLMs and outline future research directions for this rapidly evolving field. To continuously track developments in this rapidly evolving field, we will also actively update a public repository at https://github.com/HJYao00/Awesome-Agentic-MLLMs.

  • 11 authors
·
Oct 13, 2025

From AI for Science to Agentic Science: A Survey on Autonomous Scientific Discovery

Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping scientific discovery, evolving from specialized computational tools into autonomous research partners. We position Agentic Science as a pivotal stage within the broader AI for Science paradigm, where AI systems progress from partial assistance to full scientific agency. Enabled by large language models (LLMs), multimodal systems, and integrated research platforms, agentic AI shows capabilities in hypothesis generation, experimental design, execution, analysis, and iterative refinement -- behaviors once regarded as uniquely human. This survey provides a domain-oriented review of autonomous scientific discovery across life sciences, chemistry, materials science, and physics. We unify three previously fragmented perspectives -- process-oriented, autonomy-oriented, and mechanism-oriented -- through a comprehensive framework that connects foundational capabilities, core processes, and domain-specific realizations. Building on this framework, we (i) trace the evolution of AI for Science, (ii) identify five core capabilities underpinning scientific agency, (iii) model discovery as a dynamic four-stage workflow, (iv) review applications across the above domains, and (v) synthesize key challenges and future opportunities. This work establishes a domain-oriented synthesis of autonomous scientific discovery and positions Agentic Science as a structured paradigm for advancing AI-driven research.

  • 22 authors
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Aug 18, 2025 2

A Practical Guide to Agentic AI Transition in Organizations

Agentic AI represents a significant shift in how intelligence is applied within organizations, moving beyond AI-assisted tools toward autonomous systems capable of reasoning, decision-making, and coordinated action across workflows. As these systems mature, they have the potential to automate a substantial share of manual organizational processes, fundamentally reshaping how work is designed, executed, and governed. Although many organizations have adopted AI to improve productivity, most implementations remain limited to isolated use cases and human-centered, tool-driven workflows. Despite increasing awareness of agentic AI's strategic importance, engineering teams and organizational leaders often lack clear guidance on how to operationalize it effectively. Key challenges include an overreliance on traditional software engineering practices, limited integration of business-domain knowledge, unclear ownership of AI-driven workflows, and the absence of sustainable human-AI collaboration models. Consequently, organizations struggle to move beyond experimentation, scale agentic systems, and align them with tangible business value. Drawing on practical experience in designing and deploying agentic AI workflows across multiple organizations and business domains, this paper proposes a pragmatic framework for transitioning organizational functions from manual processes to automated agentic AI systems. The framework emphasizes domain-driven use case identification, systematic delegation of tasks to AI agents, AI-assisted construction of agentic workflows, and small, AI-augmented teams working closely with business stakeholders. Central to the approach is a human-in-the-loop operating model in which individuals act as orchestrators of multiple AI agents, enabling scalable automation while maintaining oversight, adaptability, and organizational control.

  • 17 authors
·
Jan 26

MarketGen: A Scalable Simulation Platform with Auto-Generated Embodied Supermarket Environments

The development of embodied agents for complex commercial environments is hindered by a critical gap in existing robotics datasets and benchmarks, which primarily focus on household or tabletop settings with short-horizon tasks. To address this limitation, we introduce MarketGen, a scalable simulation platform with automatic scene generation for complex supermarket environments. MarketGen features a novel agent-based Procedural Content Generation (PCG) framework. It uniquely supports multi-modal inputs (text and reference images) and integrates real-world design principles to automatically generate complete, structured, and realistic supermarkets. We also provide an extensive and diverse 3D asset library with a total of 1100+ supermarket goods and parameterized facilities assets. Building on this generative foundation, we propose a novel benchmark for assessing supermarket agents, featuring two daily tasks in a supermarket: (1) Checkout Unloading: long-horizon tabletop tasks for cashier agents, and (2) In-Aisle Item Collection: complex mobile manipulation tasks for salesperson agents. We validate our platform and benchmark through extensive experiments, including the deployment of a modular agent system and successful sim-to-real transfer. MarketGen provides a comprehensive framework to accelerate research in embodied AI for complex commercial applications.

  • 9 authors
·
Nov 26, 2025

WebShop: Towards Scalable Real-World Web Interaction with Grounded Language Agents

Existing benchmarks for grounding language in interactive environments either lack real-world linguistic elements, or prove difficult to scale up due to substantial human involvement in the collection of data or feedback signals. To bridge this gap, we develop WebShop -- a simulated e-commerce website environment with 1.18 million real-world products and 12,087 crowd-sourced text instructions. Given a text instruction specifying a product requirement, an agent needs to navigate multiple types of webpages and issue diverse actions to find, customize, and purchase an item. WebShop provides several challenges for language grounding including understanding compositional instructions, query (re-)formulation, comprehending and acting on noisy text in webpages, and performing strategic exploration. We collect over 1,600 human demonstrations for the task, and train and evaluate a diverse range of agents using reinforcement learning, imitation learning, and pre-trained image and language models. Our best model achieves a task success rate of 29%, which outperforms rule-based heuristics (9.6%) but is far lower than human expert performance (59%). We also analyze agent and human trajectories and ablate various model components to provide insights for developing future agents with stronger language understanding and decision making abilities. Finally, we show that agents trained on WebShop exhibit non-trivial sim-to-real transfer when evaluated on amazon.com and ebay.com, indicating the potential value of WebShop in developing practical web-based agents that can operate in the wild.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 4, 2022

BrandFusion: A Multi-Agent Framework for Seamless Brand Integration in Text-to-Video Generation

The rapid advancement of text-to-video (T2V) models has revolutionized content creation, yet their commercial potential remains largely untapped. We introduce, for the first time, the task of seamless brand integration in T2V: automatically embedding advertiser brands into prompt-generated videos while preserving semantic fidelity to user intent. This task confronts three core challenges: maintaining prompt fidelity, ensuring brand recognizability, and achieving contextually natural integration. To address them, we propose BrandFusion, a novel multi-agent framework comprising two synergistic phases. In the offline phase (advertiser-facing), we construct a Brand Knowledge Base by probing model priors and adapting to novel brands via lightweight fine-tuning. In the online phase (user-facing), five agents jointly refine user prompts through iterative refinement, leveraging the shared knowledge base and real-time contextual tracking to ensure brand visibility and semantic alignment. Experiments on 18 established and 2 custom brands across multiple state-of-the-art T2V models demonstrate that BrandFusion significantly outperforms baselines in semantic preservation, brand recognizability, and integration naturalness. Human evaluations further confirm higher user satisfaction, establishing a practical pathway for sustainable T2V monetization.

Small Language Models are the Future of Agentic AI

Large language models (LLMs) are often praised for exhibiting near-human performance on a wide range of tasks and valued for their ability to hold a general conversation. The rise of agentic AI systems is, however, ushering in a mass of applications in which language models perform a small number of specialized tasks repetitively and with little variation. Here we lay out the position that small language models (SLMs) are sufficiently powerful, inherently more suitable, and necessarily more economical for many invocations in agentic systems, and are therefore the future of agentic AI. Our argumentation is grounded in the current level of capabilities exhibited by SLMs, the common architectures of agentic systems, and the economy of LM deployment. We further argue that in situations where general-purpose conversational abilities are essential, heterogeneous agentic systems (i.e., agents invoking multiple different models) are the natural choice. We discuss the potential barriers for the adoption of SLMs in agentic systems and outline a general LLM-to-SLM agent conversion algorithm. Our position, formulated as a value statement, highlights the significance of the operational and economic impact even a partial shift from LLMs to SLMs is to have on the AI agent industry. We aim to stimulate the discussion on the effective use of AI resources and hope to advance the efforts to lower the costs of AI of the present day. Calling for both contributions to and critique of our position, we commit to publishing all such correspondence at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/lpr/slm-agents.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 2, 2025 2

EpochX: Building the Infrastructure for an Emergent Agent Civilization

General-purpose technologies reshape economies less by improving individual tools than by enabling new ways to organize production and coordination. We believe AI agents are approaching a similar inflection point: as foundation models make broad task execution and tool use increasingly accessible, the binding constraint shifts from raw capability to how work is delegated, verified, and rewarded at scale. We introduce EpochX, a credits-native marketplace infrastructure for human-agent production networks. EpochX treats humans and agents as peer participants who can post tasks or claim them. Claimed tasks can be decomposed into subtasks and executed through an explicit delivery workflow with verification and acceptance. Crucially, EpochX is designed so that each completed transaction can produce reusable ecosystem assets, including skills, workflows, execution traces, and distilled experience. These assets are stored with explicit dependency structure, enabling retrieval, composition, and cumulative improvement over time. EpochX also introduces a native credit mechanism to make participation economically viable under real compute costs. Credits lock task bounties, budget delegation, settle rewards upon acceptance, and compensate creators when verified assets are reused. By formalizing the end-to-end transaction model together with its asset and incentive layers, EpochX reframes agentic AI as an organizational design problem: building infrastructures where verifiable work leaves persistent, reusable artifacts, and where value flows support durable human-agent collaboration.

QuantaAlpha QuantaAlpha
·
Mar 28 4

AgentScope 1.0: A Developer-Centric Framework for Building Agentic Applications

Driven by rapid advancements of Large Language Models (LLMs), agents are empowered to combine intrinsic knowledge with dynamic tool use, greatly enhancing their capacity to address real-world tasks. In line with such an evolution, AgentScope introduces major improvements in a new version (1.0), towards comprehensively supporting flexible and efficient tool-based agent-environment interactions for building agentic applications. Specifically, we abstract foundational components essential for agentic applications and provide unified interfaces and extensible modules, enabling developers to easily leverage the latest progress, such as new models and MCPs. Furthermore, we ground agent behaviors in the ReAct paradigm and offer advanced agent-level infrastructure based on a systematic asynchronous design, which enriches both human-agent and agent-agent interaction patterns while improving execution efficiency. Building on this foundation, we integrate several built-in agents tailored to specific practical scenarios. AgentScope also includes robust engineering support for developer-friendly experiences. We provide a scalable evaluation module with a visual studio interface, making the development of long-trajectory agentic applications more manageable and easier to trace. In addition, AgentScope offers a runtime sandbox to ensure safe agent execution and facilitates rapid deployment in production environments. With these enhancements, AgentScope provides a practical foundation for building scalable, adaptive, and effective agentic applications.

  • 23 authors
·
Aug 22, 2025 4

Build the web for agents, not agents for the web

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and multimodal counterparts have spurred significant interest in developing web agents -- AI systems capable of autonomously navigating and completing tasks within web environments. While holding tremendous promise for automating complex web interactions, current approaches face substantial challenges due to the fundamental mismatch between human-designed interfaces and LLM capabilities. Current methods struggle with the inherent complexity of web inputs, whether processing massive DOM trees, relying on screenshots augmented with additional information, or bypassing the user interface entirely through API interactions. This position paper advocates for a paradigm shift in web agent research: rather than forcing web agents to adapt to interfaces designed for humans, we should develop a new interaction paradigm specifically optimized for agentic capabilities. To this end, we introduce the concept of an Agentic Web Interface (AWI), an interface specifically designed for agents to navigate a website. We establish six guiding principles for AWI design, emphasizing safety, efficiency, and standardization, to account for the interests of all primary stakeholders. This reframing aims to overcome fundamental limitations of existing interfaces, paving the way for more efficient, reliable, and transparent web agent design, which will be a collaborative effort involving the broader ML community.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 12, 2025 2

Very Large-Scale Multi-Agent Simulation in AgentScope

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have opened new avenues for applying multi-agent systems in very large-scale simulations. However, there remain several challenges when conducting multi-agent simulations with existing platforms, such as limited scalability and low efficiency, unsatisfied agent diversity, and effort-intensive management processes. To address these challenges, we develop several new features and components for AgentScope, a user-friendly multi-agent platform, enhancing its convenience and flexibility for supporting very large-scale multi-agent simulations. Specifically, we propose an actor-based distributed mechanism as the underlying technological infrastructure towards great scalability and high efficiency, and provide flexible environment support for simulating various real-world scenarios, which enables parallel execution of multiple agents, centralized workflow orchestration, and both inter-agent and agent-environment interactions among agents. Moreover, we integrate an easy-to-use configurable tool and an automatic background generation pipeline in AgentScope, simplifying the process of creating agents with diverse yet detailed background settings. Last but not least, we provide a web-based interface for conveniently monitoring and managing a large number of agents that might deploy across multiple devices. We conduct a comprehensive simulation to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed enhancements in AgentScope, and provide detailed observations and discussions to highlight the great potential of applying multi-agent systems in large-scale simulations. The source code is released on GitHub at https://github.com/modelscope/agentscope to inspire further research and development in large-scale multi-agent simulations.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 25, 2024 2

A Comprehensive Survey of Self-Evolving AI Agents: A New Paradigm Bridging Foundation Models and Lifelong Agentic Systems

Recent advances in large language models have sparked growing interest in AI agents capable of solving complex, real-world tasks. However, most existing agent systems rely on manually crafted configurations that remain static after deployment, limiting their ability to adapt to dynamic and evolving environments. To this end, recent research has explored agent evolution techniques that aim to automatically enhance agent systems based on interaction data and environmental feedback. This emerging direction lays the foundation for self-evolving AI agents, which bridge the static capabilities of foundation models with the continuous adaptability required by lifelong agentic systems. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of existing techniques for self-evolving agentic systems. Specifically, we first introduce a unified conceptual framework that abstracts the feedback loop underlying the design of self-evolving agentic systems. The framework highlights four key components: System Inputs, Agent System, Environment, and Optimisers, serving as a foundation for understanding and comparing different strategies. Based on this framework, we systematically review a wide range of self-evolving techniques that target different components of the agent system. We also investigate domain-specific evolution strategies developed for specialised fields such as biomedicine, programming, and finance, where optimisation objectives are tightly coupled with domain constraints. In addition, we provide a dedicated discussion on the evaluation, safety, and ethical considerations for self-evolving agentic systems, which are critical to ensuring their effectiveness and reliability. This survey aims to provide researchers and practitioners with a systematic understanding of self-evolving AI agents, laying the foundation for the development of more adaptive, autonomous, and lifelong agentic systems.

  • 15 authors
·
Aug 10, 2025 2

Permission Manifests for Web Agents

The rise of Large Language Model (LLM)-based web agents represents a significant shift in automated interactions with the web. Unlike traditional crawlers that follow simple conventions, such as robots.txt, modern agents engage with websites in sophisticated ways: navigating complex interfaces, extracting structured information, and completing end-to-end tasks. Existing governance mechanisms were not designed for these capabilities. Without a way to specify what interactions are and are not allowed, website owners increasingly rely on blanket blocking and CAPTCHAs, which undermine beneficial applications such as efficient automation, convenient use of e-commerce services, and accessibility tools. We introduce agent-permissions.json, a robots.txt-style lightweight manifest where websites specify allowed interactions, complemented by API references where available. This framework provides a low-friction coordination mechanism: website owners only need to write a simple JSON file, while agents can easily parse and automatically implement the manifest's provisions. Website owners can then focus on blocking non-compliant agents, rather than agents as a whole. By extending the spirit of robots.txt to the era of LLM-mediated interaction, and complementing data use initiatives such as AIPref, the manifest establishes a compliance framework that enables beneficial agent interactions while respecting site owners' preferences.

  • 13 authors
·
Dec 7, 2025

Architecting Agentic Communities using Design Patterns

The rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLM) and subsequent Agentic AI technologies requires systematic architectural guidance for building sophisticated, production-grade systems. This paper presents an approach for architecting such systems using design patterns derived from enterprise distributed systems standards, formal methods, and industry practice. We classify these patterns into three tiers: LLM Agents (task-specific automation), Agentic AI (adaptive goal-seekers), and Agentic Communities (organizational frameworks where AI agents and human participants coordinate through formal roles, protocols, and governance structures). We focus on Agentic Communities - coordination frameworks encompassing LLM Agents, Agentic AI entities, and humans - most relevant for enterprise and industrial applications. Drawing on established coordination principles from distributed systems, we ground these patterns in a formal framework that specifies collaboration agreements where AI agents and humans fill roles within governed ecosystems. This approach provides both practical guidance and formal verification capabilities, enabling expression of organizational, legal, and ethical rules through accountability mechanisms that ensure operational and verifiable governance of inter-agent communication, negotiation, and intent modeling. We validate this framework through a clinical trial matching case study. Our goal is to provide actionable guidance to practitioners while maintaining the formal rigor essential for enterprise deployment in dynamic, multi-agent ecosystems.

  • 2 authors
·
Jan 7

AI Agents vs. Agentic AI: A Conceptual Taxonomy, Applications and Challenge

This study critically distinguishes between AI Agents and Agentic AI, offering a structured conceptual taxonomy, application mapping, and challenge analysis to clarify their divergent design philosophies and capabilities. We begin by outlining the search strategy and foundational definitions, characterizing AI Agents as modular systems driven by Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Image Models (LIMs) for narrow, task-specific automation. Generative AI is positioned as a precursor, with AI Agents advancing through tool integration, prompt engineering, and reasoning enhancements. In contrast, Agentic AI systems represent a paradigmatic shift marked by multi-agent collaboration, dynamic task decomposition, persistent memory, and orchestrated autonomy. Through a sequential evaluation of architectural evolution, operational mechanisms, interaction styles, and autonomy levels, we present a comparative analysis across both paradigms. Application domains such as customer support, scheduling, and data summarization are contrasted with Agentic AI deployments in research automation, robotic coordination, and medical decision support. We further examine unique challenges in each paradigm including hallucination, brittleness, emergent behavior, and coordination failure and propose targeted solutions such as ReAct loops, RAG, orchestration layers, and causal modeling. This work aims to provide a definitive roadmap for developing robust, scalable, and explainable AI agent and Agentic AI-driven systems. >AI Agents, Agent-driven, Vision-Language-Models, Agentic AI Decision Support System, Agentic-AI Applications

  • 3 authors
·
May 15, 2025 2

SoK: Agentic Skills -- Beyond Tool Use in LLM Agents

Agentic systems increasingly rely on reusable procedural capabilities, a.k.a., agentic skills, to execute long-horizon workflows reliably. These capabilities are callable modules that package procedural knowledge with explicit applicability conditions, execution policies, termination criteria, and reusable interfaces. Unlike one-off plans or atomic tool calls, skills operate (and often do well) across tasks. This paper maps the skill layer across the full lifecycle (discovery, practice, distillation, storage, composition, evaluation, and update) and introduces two complementary taxonomies. The first is a system-level set of seven design patterns capturing how skills are packaged and executed in practice, from metadata-driven progressive disclosure and executable code skills to self-evolving libraries and marketplace distribution. The second is an orthogonal representation times scope taxonomy describing what skills are (natural language, code, policy, hybrid) and what environments they operate over (web, OS, software engineering, robotics). We analyze the security and governance implications of skill-based agents, covering supply-chain risks, prompt injection via skill payloads, and trust-tiered execution, grounded by a case study of the ClawHavoc campaign in which nearly 1{,}200 malicious skills infiltrated a major agent marketplace, exfiltrating API keys, cryptocurrency wallets, and browser credentials at scale. We further survey deterministic evaluation approaches, anchored by recent benchmark evidence that curated skills can substantially improve agent success rates while self-generated skills may degrade them. We conclude with open challenges toward robust, verifiable, and certifiable skills for real-world autonomous agents.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 24

LIMI: Less is More for Agency

We define Agency as the emergent capacity of AI systems to function as autonomous agents actively discovering problems, formulating hypotheses, and executing solutions through self-directed engagement with environments and tools. This fundamental capability marks the dawn of the Age of AI Agency, driven by a critical industry shift: the urgent need for AI systems that don't just think, but work. While current AI excels at reasoning and generating responses, industries demand autonomous agents that can execute tasks, operate tools, and drive real-world outcomes. As agentic intelligence becomes the defining characteristic separating cognitive systems from productive workers, efficiently cultivating machine autonomy becomes paramount. Current approaches assume that more data yields better agency, following traditional scaling laws from language modeling. We fundamentally challenge this paradigm. LIMI (Less Is More for Intelligent Agency) demonstrates that agency follows radically different development principles. Through strategic focus on collaborative software development and scientific research workflows, we show that sophisticated agentic intelligence can emerge from minimal but strategically curated demonstrations of autonomous behavior. Using only 78 carefully designed training samples, LIMI achieves 73.5% on comprehensive agency benchmarks, dramatically outperforming state-of-the-art models: Kimi-K2-Instruct (24.1%), DeepSeek-V3.1 (11.9%), Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct (27.5%), and GLM-4.5 (45.1%). Most strikingly, LIMI demonstrates 53.7% improvement over models trained on 10,000 samples-achieving superior agentic intelligence with 128 times fewer samples. Our findings establish the Agency Efficiency Principle: machine autonomy emerges not from data abundance but from strategic curation of high-quality agentic demonstrations.

  • 21 authors
·
Sep 22, 2025 5

Gym-Anything: Turn any Software into an Agent Environment

Computer-use agents hold the promise of assisting in a wide range of digital economic activities. However, current research has largely focused on short-horizon tasks over a limited set of software with limited economic value, such as basic e-commerce and OS-configuration tasks. A key reason is that creating environments for complex software requires significant time and human effort, and therefore does not scale. To address this, we introduce Gym-Anything, a framework for converting any software into an interactive computer-use environment. We frame environment creation itself as a multi-agent task: a coding agent writes setup scripts, downloads real-world data, and configures the software, while producing evidence of correct setup. An independent audit agent then verifies evidence for the environment setup against a quality checklist. Using a taxonomy of economically valuable occupations grounded in U.S. GDP data, we apply this pipeline to 200 software applications with broad occupational coverage. The result is CUA-World, a collection of over 10K long-horizon tasks spanning domains from medical science and astronomy to engineering and enterprise systems, each configured with realistic data along with train and test splits. CUA-World also includes CUA-World-Long, a challenging long-horizon benchmark with tasks often requiring over 500 steps, far exceeding existing benchmarks. Distilling successful trajectories from the training split into a 2B vision-language model outperforms models 2times its size. We also apply the same auditing principle at test time: a separate VLM reviews completed trajectories and provides feedback on what remains, improving Gemini-3-Flash on CUA-World-Long from 11.5% to 14.0%. We release all code, infrastructure, and benchmark data to facilitate future research in realistic computer-use agents.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 6

SAGA: A Security Architecture for Governing AI Agentic Systems

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents increasingly interact, collaborate, and delegate tasks to one another autonomously with minimal human interaction. Industry guidelines for agentic system governance emphasize the need for users to maintain comprehensive control over their agents, mitigating potential damage from malicious agents. Several proposed agentic system designs address agent identity, authorization, and delegation, but remain purely theoretical, without concrete implementation and evaluation. Most importantly, they do not provide user-controlled agent management. To address this gap, we propose SAGA, a scalable Security Architecture for Governing Agentic systems, that offers user oversight over their agents' lifecycle. In our design, users register their agents with a central entity, the Provider, that maintains agent contact information, user-defined access control policies, and helps agents enforce these policies on inter-agent communication. We introduce a cryptographic mechanism for deriving access control tokens, that offers fine-grained control over an agent's interaction with other agents, providing formal security guarantees. We evaluate SAGA on several agentic tasks, using agents in different geolocations, and multiple on-device and cloud LLMs, demonstrating minimal performance overhead with no impact on underlying task utility in a wide range of conditions. Our architecture enables secure and trustworthy deployment of autonomous agents, accelerating the responsible adoption of this technology in sensitive environments.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 28, 2025

AI Agentic Programming: A Survey of Techniques, Challenges, and Opportunities

AI agentic programming is an emerging paradigm in which large language models (LLMs) autonomously plan, execute, and interact with external tools like compilers, debuggers, and version control systems to iteratively perform complex software development tasks. Unlike conventional code generation tools, agentic systems are capable of decomposing high-level goals, coordinating multi-step processes, and adapting their behavior based on intermediate feedback. These capabilities are transforming the software development practice. As this emerging field evolves rapidly, there is a need to define its scope, consolidate its technical foundations, and identify open research challenges. This survey provides a comprehensive and timely review of AI agentic programming. We introduce a taxonomy of agent behaviors and system architectures, and examine core techniques including planning, memory and context management, tool integration, and execution monitoring. We also analyze existing benchmarks and evaluation methodologies used to assess coding agent performance. Our study identifies several key challenges, including limitations in handling long context, a lack of persistent memory across tasks, and concerns around safety, alignment with user intent, and collaboration with human developers. We discuss emerging opportunities to improve the reliability, adaptability, and transparency of agentic systems. By synthesizing recent advances and outlining future directions, this survey aims to provide a foundation for research and development in building the next generation of intelligent and trustworthy AI coding agents.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 14, 2025

Agent Behavioral Contracts: Formal Specification and Runtime Enforcement for Reliable Autonomous AI Agents

Traditional software relies on contracts -- APIs, type systems, assertions -- to specify and enforce correct behavior. AI agents, by contrast, operate on prompts and natural language instructions with no formal behavioral specification. This gap is the root cause of drift, governance failures, and frequent project failures in agentic AI deployments. We introduce Agent Behavioral Contracts (ABC), a formal framework that brings Design-by-Contract principles to autonomous AI agents. An ABC contract C = (P, I, G, R) specifies Preconditions, Invariants, Governance policies, and Recovery mechanisms as first-class, runtime-enforceable components. We define (p, delta, k)-satisfaction -- a probabilistic notion of contract compliance that accounts for LLM non-determinism and recovery -- and prove a Drift Bounds Theorem showing that contracts with recovery rate gamma > alpha (the natural drift rate) bound behavioral drift to D* = alpha/gamma in expectation, with Gaussian concentration in the stochastic setting. We establish sufficient conditions for safe contract composition in multi-agent chains and derive probabilistic degradation bounds. We implement ABC in AgentAssert, a runtime enforcement library, and evaluate on AgentContract-Bench, a benchmark of 200 scenarios across 7 models from 6 vendors. Results across 1,980 sessions show that contracted agents detect 5.2-6.8 soft violations per session that uncontracted baselines miss entirely (p < 0.0001, Cohen's d = 6.7-33.8), achieve 88-100% hard constraint compliance, and bound behavioral drift to D* < 0.27 across extended sessions, with 100% recovery for frontier models and 17-100% across all models, at overhead < 10 ms per action.

  • 1 authors
·
Feb 24

Towards Agentic Recommender Systems in the Era of Multimodal Large Language Models

Recent breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to the emergence of agentic AI systems that extend beyond the capabilities of standalone models. By empowering LLMs to perceive external environments, integrate multimodal information, and interact with various tools, these agentic systems exhibit greater autonomy and adaptability across complex tasks. This evolution brings new opportunities to recommender systems (RS): LLM-based Agentic RS (LLM-ARS) can offer more interactive, context-aware, and proactive recommendations, potentially reshaping the user experience and broadening the application scope of RS. Despite promising early results, fundamental challenges remain, including how to effectively incorporate external knowledge, balance autonomy with controllability, and evaluate performance in dynamic, multimodal settings. In this perspective paper, we first present a systematic analysis of LLM-ARS: (1) clarifying core concepts and architectures; (2) highlighting how agentic capabilities -- such as planning, memory, and multimodal reasoning -- can enhance recommendation quality; and (3) outlining key research questions in areas such as safety, efficiency, and lifelong personalization. We also discuss open problems and future directions, arguing that LLM-ARS will drive the next wave of RS innovation. Ultimately, we foresee a paradigm shift toward intelligent, autonomous, and collaborative recommendation experiences that more closely align with users' evolving needs and complex decision-making processes.

  • 12 authors
·
Mar 20, 2025

Superplatforms Have to Attack AI Agents

Over the past decades, superplatforms, digital companies that integrate a vast range of third-party services and applications into a single, unified ecosystem, have built their fortunes on monopolizing user attention through targeted advertising and algorithmic content curation. Yet the emergence of AI agents driven by large language models (LLMs) threatens to upend this business model. Agents can not only free user attention with autonomy across diverse platforms and therefore bypass the user-attention-based monetization, but might also become the new entrance for digital traffic. Hence, we argue that superplatforms have to attack AI agents to defend their centralized control of digital traffic entrance. Specifically, we analyze the fundamental conflict between user-attention-based monetization and agent-driven autonomy through the lens of our gatekeeping theory. We show how AI agents can disintermediate superplatforms and potentially become the next dominant gatekeepers, thereby forming the urgent necessity for superplatforms to proactively constrain and attack AI agents. Moreover, we go through the potential technologies for superplatform-initiated attacks, covering a brand-new, unexplored technical area with unique challenges. We have to emphasize that, despite our position, this paper does not advocate for adversarial attacks by superplatforms on AI agents, but rather offers an envisioned trend to highlight the emerging tensions between superplatforms and AI agents. Our aim is to raise awareness and encourage critical discussion for collaborative solutions, prioritizing user interests and perserving the openness of digital ecosystems in the age of AI agents.

  • 7 authors
·
May 23, 2025

Multi-Agent Collaboration Mechanisms: A Survey of LLMs

With recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), Agentic AI has become phenomenal in real-world applications, moving toward multiple LLM-based agents to perceive, learn, reason, and act collaboratively. These LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems (MASs) enable groups of intelligent agents to coordinate and solve complex tasks collectively at scale, transitioning from isolated models to collaboration-centric approaches. This work provides an extensive survey of the collaborative aspect of MASs and introduces an extensible framework to guide future research. Our framework characterizes collaboration mechanisms based on key dimensions: actors (agents involved), types (e.g., cooperation, competition, or coopetition), structures (e.g., peer-to-peer, centralized, or distributed), strategies (e.g., role-based or model-based), and coordination protocols. Through a review of existing methodologies, our findings serve as a foundation for demystifying and advancing LLM-based MASs toward more intelligent and collaborative solutions for complex, real-world use cases. In addition, various applications of MASs across diverse domains, including 5G/6G networks, Industry 5.0, question answering, and social and cultural settings, are also investigated, demonstrating their wider adoption and broader impacts. Finally, we identify key lessons learned, open challenges, and potential research directions of MASs towards artificial collective intelligence.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 10, 2025

Let It Flow: Agentic Crafting on Rock and Roll, Building the ROME Model within an Open Agentic Learning Ecosystem

Agentic crafting requires LLMs to operate in real-world environments over multiple turns by taking actions, observing outcomes, and iteratively refining artifacts. Despite its importance, the open-source community lacks a principled, end-to-end ecosystem to streamline agent development. We introduce the Agentic Learning Ecosystem (ALE), a foundational infrastructure that optimizes the production pipeline for agent LLMs. ALE consists of three components: ROLL, a post-training framework for weight optimization; ROCK, a sandbox environment manager for trajectory generation; and iFlow CLI, an agent framework for efficient context engineering. We release ROME (ROME is Obviously an Agentic Model), an open-source agent grounded by ALE and trained on over one million trajectories. Our approach includes data composition protocols for synthesizing complex behaviors and a novel policy optimization algorithm, Interaction-based Policy Alignment (IPA), which assigns credit over semantic interaction chunks rather than individual tokens to improve long-horizon training stability. Empirically, we evaluate ROME within a structured setting and introduce Terminal Bench Pro, a benchmark with improved scale and contamination control. ROME demonstrates strong performance across benchmarks like SWE-bench Verified and Terminal Bench, proving the effectiveness of the ALE infrastructure.

alibaba-inc alibaba-inc
·
Dec 31, 2025 5

AgentDS Technical Report: Benchmarking the Future of Human-AI Collaboration in Domain-Specific Data Science

Data science plays a critical role in transforming complex data into actionable insights across numerous domains. Recent developments in large language models (LLMs) and artificial intelligence (AI) agents have significantly automated data science workflow. However, it remains unclear to what extent AI agents can match the performance of human experts on domain-specific data science tasks, and in which aspects human expertise continues to provide advantages. We introduce AgentDS, a benchmark and competition designed to evaluate both AI agents and human-AI collaboration performance in domain-specific data science. AgentDS consists of 17 challenges across six industries: commerce, food production, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, and retail banking. We conducted an open competition involving 29 teams and 80 participants, enabling systematic comparison between human-AI collaborative approaches and AI-only baselines. Our results show that current AI agents struggle with domain-specific reasoning. AI-only baselines perform near or below the median of competition participants, while the strongest solutions arise from human-AI collaboration. These findings challenge the narrative of complete automation by AI and underscore the enduring importance of human expertise in data science, while illuminating directions for the next generation of AI. Visit the AgentDS website here: https://agentds.org/ and open source datasets here: https://huggingface.co/datasets/lainmn/AgentDS .

  • 15 authors
·
Mar 19 2

SmartAgent: Chain-of-User-Thought for Embodied Personalized Agent in Cyber World

Recent advances in embodied agents with multimodal perception and reasoning capabilities based on large vision-language models (LVLMs), excel in autonomously interacting either real or cyber worlds, helping people make intelligent decisions in complex environments. However, the current works are normally optimized by golden action trajectories or ideal task-oriented solutions toward a definitive goal. This paradigm considers limited user-oriented factors, which could be the reason for their performance reduction in a wide range of personal assistant applications. To address this, we propose Chain-of-User-Thought (COUT), a novel embodied reasoning paradigm that takes a chain of thought from basic action thinking to explicit and implicit personalized preference thought to incorporate personalized factors into autonomous agent learning. To target COUT, we introduce SmartAgent, an agent framework perceiving cyber environments and reasoning personalized requirements as 1) interacting with GUI to access an item pool, 2) generating users' explicit requirements implied by previous actions, and 3) recommending items to fulfill users' implicit requirements. To demonstrate SmartAgent's capabilities, we also create a brand-new dataset SmartSpot that offers a full-stage personalized action-involved environment. To our best knowledge, our work is the first to formulate the COUT process, serving as a preliminary attempt towards embodied personalized agent learning. Our extensive experiments on SmartSpot illuminate SmartAgent's functionality among a series of embodied and personalized sub-tasks. We will release code and data upon paper notification at https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/SmartAgent.

  • 5 authors
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Dec 10, 2024

MMInA: Benchmarking Multihop Multimodal Internet Agents

Autonomous embodied agents live on an Internet of multimedia websites. Can they hop around multimodal websites to complete complex user tasks? Existing benchmarks fail to assess them in a realistic, evolving environment for their embodiment across websites. To answer this question, we present MMInA, a multihop and multimodal benchmark to evaluate the embodied agents for compositional Internet tasks, with several appealing properties: 1) Evolving real-world multimodal websites. Our benchmark uniquely operates on evolving real-world websites, ensuring a high degree of realism and applicability to natural user tasks. Our data includes 1,050 human-written tasks covering various domains such as shopping and travel, with each task requiring the agent to autonomously extract multimodal information from web pages as observations; 2) Multihop web browsing. Our dataset features naturally compositional tasks that require information from or actions on multiple websites to solve, to assess long-range reasoning capabilities on web tasks; 3) Holistic evaluation. We propose a novel protocol for evaluating an agent's progress in completing multihop tasks. We experiment with both standalone (multimodal) language models and heuristic-based web agents. Extensive experiments demonstrate that while long-chain multihop web tasks are easy for humans, they remain challenging for state-of-the-art web agents. We identify that agents are more likely to fail on the early hops when solving tasks of more hops, which results in lower task success rates. To address this issue, we propose a simple memory augmentation approach replaying past action trajectories to reflect. Our method significantly improved both the single-hop and multihop web browsing abilities of agents. See our code and data at https://mmina.cliangyu.com

  • 4 authors
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Apr 15, 2024

Human Society-Inspired Approaches to Agentic AI Security: The 4C Framework

AI is moving from domain-specific autonomy in closed, predictable settings to large-language-model-driven agents that plan and act in open, cross-organizational environments. As a result, the cybersecurity risk landscape is changing in fundamental ways. Agentic AI systems can plan, act, collaborate, and persist over time, functioning as participants in complex socio-technical ecosystems rather than as isolated software components. Although recent work has strengthened defenses against model and pipeline level vulnerabilities such as prompt injection, data poisoning, and tool misuse, these system centric approaches may fail to capture risks that arise from autonomy, interaction, and emergent behavior. This article introduces the 4C Framework for multi-agent AI security, inspired by societal governance. It organizes agentic risks across four interdependent dimensions: Core (system, infrastructure, and environmental integrity), Connection (communication, coordination, and trust), Cognition (belief, goal, and reasoning integrity), and Compliance (ethical, legal, and institutional governance). By shifting AI security from a narrow focus on system-centric protection to the broader preservation of behavioral integrity and intent, the framework complements existing AI security strategies and offers a principled foundation for building agentic AI systems that are trustworthy, governable, and aligned with human values.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 1

On the limits of agency in agent-based models

Agent-based modeling (ABM) seeks to understand the behavior of complex systems by simulating a collection of agents that act and interact within an environment. Their practical utility requires capturing realistic environment dynamics and adaptive agent behavior while efficiently simulating million-size populations. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) present an opportunity to enhance ABMs by using LLMs as agents with further potential to capture adaptive behavior. However, the computational infeasibility of using LLMs for large populations has hindered their widespread adoption. In this paper, we introduce AgentTorch -- a framework that scales ABMs to millions of agents while capturing high-resolution agent behavior using LLMs. We benchmark the utility of LLMs as ABM agents, exploring the trade-off between simulation scale and individual agency. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study, we demonstrate how AgentTorch can simulate 8.4 million agents representing New York City, capturing the impact of isolation and employment behavior on health and economic outcomes. We compare the performance of different agent architectures based on heuristic and LLM agents in predicting disease waves and unemployment rates. Furthermore, we showcase AgentTorch's capabilities for retrospective, counterfactual, and prospective analyses, highlighting how adaptive agent behavior can help overcome the limitations of historical data in policy design. AgentTorch is an open-source project actively being used for policy-making and scientific discovery around the world. The framework is available here: github.com/AgentTorch/AgentTorch.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 14, 2024 2

AgentNet: Decentralized Evolutionary Coordination for LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has enabled the development of multi-agent systems where multiple LLM-based agents collaborate on complex tasks. However, existing systems often rely on centralized coordination, leading to scalability bottlenecks, reduced adaptability, and single points of failure. Privacy and proprietary knowledge concerns further hinder cross-organizational collaboration, resulting in siloed expertise. We propose AgentNet, a decentralized, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-based framework that enables LLM-based agents to specialize, evolve, and collaborate autonomously in a dynamically structured Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). Unlike prior approaches with static roles or centralized control, AgentNet allows agents to adjust connectivity and route tasks based on local expertise and context. AgentNet introduces three key innovations: (1) a fully decentralized coordination mechanism that eliminates the need for a central orchestrator, enhancing robustness and emergent intelligence; (2) dynamic agent graph topology that adapts in real time to task demands, ensuring scalability and resilience; and (3) a retrieval-based memory system for agents that supports continual skill refinement and specialization. By minimizing centralized control and data exchange, AgentNet enables fault-tolerant, privacy-preserving collaboration across organizations. Experiments show that AgentNet achieves higher task accuracy than both single-agent and centralized multi-agent baselines.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 1, 2025

Planet as a Brain: Towards Internet of AgentSites based on AIOS Server

The internet is undergoing a historical transformation from the "Internet of Websites" to the "Internet of AgentSites." While traditional Websites served as the foundation for information hosting and dissemination, a new frontier is emerging where AgentSites serve as the hubs of the internet, where each AgentSite hosts one or more AI agents that receive tasks, address them, and deliver actionable solutions, marking a significant shift in the digital landscape and representing the next generation of online ecosystems. Under this vision, AIOS, the AI Agent Operating System, serves as the server for the development, deployment and execution of AI agents, which is a fundamental infrastructure for the Internet of Agentsites. In this paper, we introduce AIOS Server, a runtime framework to host agents and enable global-scale collaboration among decentralized agents. AIOS Server provides a communication protocol leveraging the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and JSON-RPC to enable agent-agent or human-agent interactions. Each AIOS node operates as a server to host and execute agents, while supporting peer-to-peer coordination without reliance on centralized orchestration. Based on AIOS Server, we further present the world's first practically deployed Internet of Agentsites (AIOS-IoA), including AgentHub for agent registration and discovery and AgentChat for interactive communication, at https://planet.aios.foundation. The agent discovery mechanism based on Distributed Hash Tables (DHT) and a Gossip protocol serves as the search engine for the internet of agentsites. This work provides a practical foundation for building the Internet of Agentsites-a new paradigm where autonomous agents become first-class citizens of the web. The implementation is available at https://github.com/agiresearch/AIOS.Server and is integrated into the AIOS main branch at https://github.com/agiresearch/AIOS.

  • 2 authors
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Apr 19, 2025

Helpful Agent Meets Deceptive Judge: Understanding Vulnerabilities in Agentic Workflows

Agentic workflows -- where multiple large language model (LLM) instances interact to solve tasks -- are increasingly built on feedback mechanisms, where one model evaluates and critiques another. Despite the promise of feedback-driven improvement, the stability of agentic workflows rests on the reliability of the judge. However, judges may hallucinate information, exhibit bias, or act adversarially -- introducing critical vulnerabilities into the workflow. In this work, we present a systematic analysis of agentic workflows under deceptive or misleading feedback. We introduce a two-dimensional framework for analyzing judge behavior, along axes of intent (from constructive to malicious) and knowledge (from parametric-only to retrieval-augmented systems). Using this taxonomy, we construct a suite of judge behaviors and develop WAFER-QA, a new benchmark with critiques grounded in retrieved web evidence to evaluate robustness of agentic workflows against factually supported adversarial feedback. We reveal that even strongest agents are vulnerable to persuasive yet flawed critiques -- often switching correct answers after a single round of misleading feedback. Taking a step further, we study how model predictions evolve over multiple rounds of interaction, revealing distinct behavioral patterns between reasoning and non-reasoning models. Our findings highlight fundamental vulnerabilities in feedback-based workflows and offer guidance for building more robust agentic systems.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 3, 2025

Agent AI: Surveying the Horizons of Multimodal Interaction

Multi-modal AI systems will likely become a ubiquitous presence in our everyday lives. A promising approach to making these systems more interactive is to embody them as agents within physical and virtual environments. At present, systems leverage existing foundation models as the basic building blocks for the creation of embodied agents. Embedding agents within such environments facilitates the ability of models to process and interpret visual and contextual data, which is critical for the creation of more sophisticated and context-aware AI systems. For example, a system that can perceive user actions, human behavior, environmental objects, audio expressions, and the collective sentiment of a scene can be used to inform and direct agent responses within the given environment. To accelerate research on agent-based multimodal intelligence, we define "Agent AI" as a class of interactive systems that can perceive visual stimuli, language inputs, and other environmentally-grounded data, and can produce meaningful embodied action with infinite agent. In particular, we explore systems that aim to improve agents based on next-embodied action prediction by incorporating external knowledge, multi-sensory inputs, and human feedback. We argue that by developing agentic AI systems in grounded environments, one can also mitigate the hallucinations of large foundation models and their tendency to generate environmentally incorrect outputs. The emerging field of Agent AI subsumes the broader embodied and agentic aspects of multimodal interactions. Beyond agents acting and interacting in the physical world, we envision a future where people can easily create any virtual reality or simulated scene and interact with agents embodied within the virtual environment.

  • 14 authors
·
Jan 7, 2024

AgencyBench: Benchmarking the Frontiers of Autonomous Agents in 1M-Token Real-World Contexts

Large Language Models (LLMs) based autonomous agents demonstrate multifaceted capabilities to contribute substantially to economic production. However, existing benchmarks remain focused on single agentic capability, failing to capture long-horizon real-world scenarios. Moreover, the reliance on human-in-the-loop feedback for realistic tasks creates a scalability bottleneck, hindering automated rollout collection and evaluation. To bridge this gap, we introduce AgencyBench, a comprehensive benchmark derived from daily AI usage, evaluating 6 core agentic capabilities across 32 real-world scenarios, comprising 138 tasks with specific queries, deliverables, and rubrics. These scenarios require an average of 90 tool calls, 1 million tokens, and hours of execution time to resolve. To enable automated evaluation, we employ a user simulation agent to provide iterative feedback, and a Docker sandbox to conduct visual and functional rubric-based assessment. Experiments reveal that closed-source models significantly outperform open-source models (48.4% vs 32.1%). Further analysis reveals significant disparities across models in resource efficiency, feedback-driven self-correction, and specific tool-use preferences. Finally, we investigate the impact of agentic scaffolds, observing that proprietary models demonstrate superior performance within their native ecosystems (e.g., Claude-4.5-Opus via Claude-Agent-SDK), while open-source models exhibit distinct performance peaks, suggesting potential optimization for specific execution frameworks. AgencyBench serves as a critical testbed for next-generation agents, highlighting the necessity of co-optimizing model architecture with agentic frameworks. We believe this work sheds light on the future direction of autonomous agents, and we release the full benchmark and evaluation toolkit at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/AgencyBench.

GAIR SII - GAIR
·
Jan 16 3

Embodied Web Agents: Bridging Physical-Digital Realms for Integrated Agent Intelligence

AI agents today are mostly siloed - they either retrieve and reason over vast amount of digital information and knowledge obtained online; or interact with the physical world through embodied perception, planning and action - but rarely both. This separation limits their ability to solve tasks that require integrated physical and digital intelligence, such as cooking from online recipes, navigating with dynamic map data, or interpreting real-world landmarks using web knowledge. We introduce Embodied Web Agents, a novel paradigm for AI agents that fluidly bridge embodiment and web-scale reasoning. To operationalize this concept, we first develop the Embodied Web Agents task environments, a unified simulation platform that tightly integrates realistic 3D indoor and outdoor environments with functional web interfaces. Building upon this platform, we construct and release the Embodied Web Agents Benchmark, which encompasses a diverse suite of tasks including cooking, navigation, shopping, tourism, and geolocation - all requiring coordinated reasoning across physical and digital realms for systematic assessment of cross-domain intelligence. Experimental results reveal significant performance gaps between state-of-the-art AI systems and human capabilities, establishing both challenges and opportunities at the intersection of embodied cognition and web-scale knowledge access. All datasets, codes and websites are publicly available at our project page https://embodied-web-agent.github.io/.

  • 10 authors
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Jun 18, 2025 2