Agents & autonomy

The rapid evolution of generative video foundation models has propelled the field toward professional-grade cinematic synthesis. To achieve such demanding quality, the community transitions towards Reinforcement Learning (RL) and agentic workflows. However, reliable evaluation has emerged as a critical bottleneck. Existing benchmarks predominantly evaluate ''whether it is right'' (basic prompt-following) while fundamentally neglecting ''whether it is good'' (cinematic quality, acting, and aesthe

Autonomous agents are moving from tools into a layer of social infrastructure: they browse, purchase, deploy software, manage systems, and increasingly interact with one another. As these systems scale, the bottleneck shifts away from raw model capability toward coordination. Agents need to form reliable relationships, organize multi-agent work, exchange value, support an AI economy, and stay safe and accountable under real-world oversight. This paper introduces the Foundation Protocol (FP), a g

LLM-based agents for GPU kernel generation are advancing rapidly, yet their progress is fundamentally constrained by the benchmarks they optimize against. Existing benchmarks are poorly aligned with production inference frameworks: they evaluate kernels on a single GPU with synthetic inputs, ignore the surrounding compilation stack, and reward replicating known optimizations rather than discovering new ones. The resulting reward signals are misleading: agents learn to generate kernels that score

Scientific research is being reshaped by AI systems that move beyond isolated assistance toward longer-horizon workflows spanning literature grounding, hypothesis generation, experimentation, validation, reporting, and revision. This shift marks a transition from task-level AI for science to workflow-level research automation. Yet current systems remain fragmented, differing in autonomy, domain scope, execution environment, validation mechanism, and human oversight, while still struggling with e

Gardening is critical to support well-being, cultural continuity, and food autonomy, yet existing digital tools often provide generic advice that overlooks gardeners' skills, local ecologies, seasons, and cultural contexts. We introduce CultivAgents, a relationship-centered multi-agent system for personalized, socio-culturally grounded gardening support. Grounded in ethics of care, CultivAgents coordinates multiple specialized agents: an Experience Agent that adapts guidance to users' skill leve

Agentic AI orchestrators reduce the interface and assembly costs of composing information systems capabilities across organizational boundaries, seemingly accelerating modularization and organizational disaggregation. Yet AI-enabled capabilities whose outputs require evidence, review, signoff, or assignable responsibility may retain integrated accountability boundaries even when their technical interfaces become modular. We develop a capability-level theory of accountability-boundary placement i

Classical reinforcement learning assumes the agent interacts with a fixed environment whose behavior does not depend on the agent's policy. This assumption breaks down in non-realizable settings where other actors might anticipate the agent's behavior, including environments crucial to AI safety, where the agent interacts with predictors, humans, other AI agents, and institutions. In such settings, the agent's model class fails to capture the world in which it operates. Under such misspecificati

AI-assisted code review tools typically operate as generic "expert reviewer" agents, producing homogeneous findings regardless of the analysis type needed. We present a system that constrains AI reviewer behavior through philosophical dispositions -- coherent personality lenses grounded in specific epistemological traditions (Pyrrhonist Skepticism, Navya-Ny=aya logic, Diogenes' Cynicism, Confucian relational ethics) that direct attention to structurally different types of issues. Each dispositio

Empirical claims about autonomous Kubernetes operations agents are largely unfalsifiable. Published work reports observational results without controlled comparisons against an agent-disabled baseline, selection bias is endemic, pre-registered decision matrices are absent, and samples are typically too small for the noise level of the underlying scoring system. The cause is the same gap that limits the agents themselves: code agents have a verification substrate that turns "did it work" into a f

Agentic AI systems are increasingly proposed for social-good domains, often invoking the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a vocabulary of global benefit. Yet claims of social good do not establish accountability to the communities a system claims to serve. We present a structured survey of 112 papers on agentic AI for social good published between 2015 and 2026. We find a moral-geographic asymmetry: papers are least likely to specify geographic context in precisely the doma

Skills have become a practical packaging mechanism for agent instructions, workflows, scripts, and reference materials. In enterprise settings, however, a skill often needs to express more than task guidance: goals, input boundaries, permissions, human approval points, evidence requirements, output contracts, quality criteria, verification steps, and handoff rules. This paper proposes contractual skills, a GovernSpec-inspired design framework for organizing SKILL.md files as readable task contra

Agentic systems are becoming more capable: agents define strategies, take actions, and interact with different environments. This autonomy poses serious challenges for overseeing and assessing agent behavior. Most current tools are limited, focusing on observability with basic evaluation capabilities or imposing static, hand-crafted error taxonomies that cannot adapt to new domains. To address this gap, we present Agentic CLEAR, an automatic, dynamic, and easy-to-use evaluation framework. It pro

Post-training has become the dominant recipe for turning a language model into a competent search-augmented reasoning agent. A line of recent work pushes its performance further by adding elaborate machinery on top of this standard pipeline. These augmentations import external supervision from stronger external systems, attach auxiliary modules such as process reward models or retrospective critics, restructure the rollout itself with tree search or multi-stage curricula, or shape the reward wit

Large language model (LLM) agents still struggle with long-term memory question answering, where answer-supporting evidence is often scattered across long conversational histories and buried in substantial irrelevant content. Existing memory systems typically process memory before future queries are known, then retrieve the resulting units based on similarity rather than their utility for answering the query. This workflow leaves downstream answerers to denoise retrieved candidates and reconstru

Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) energy trading enables decentralized peer-to-peer energy exchange among electric vehicles (EVs), reducing grid dependency while monetizing surplus capacity. However, coordinating self-interested EV agents with diverse charging needs and uncertain arrival-departure schedules remains challenging. Existing approaches either require centralized optimization with computational limitations or lack fairness guarantees. This paper integrates Nash Bargaining Solution into Multi-A

LLM agents are shaped not only by their language models, but also by the runtime harness that mediates observation, tool use, action execution, feedback interpretation, and trajectory control. While existing agent adaptation methods mainly update model parameters, many failures in deterministic, rule-governed domains stem from mismatches at the model--environment interface. We propose Life-Harness, a lifecycle-aware runtime harness that improves frozen LLM agents without changing model weights o

How should an agent decide when and how to plan? A dominant approach builds agents as reactive policies with adaptive computation (e.g., chain-of-thought), trained end-to-end expecting planning to emerge implicitly. Without control over the presence, structure, or horizon of planning, these systems dramatically increase reasoning length, yielding inefficient token use without reliable accuracy gains. We argue efficient agentic reasoning benefits from decomposing decision-making into three system

Static "human data" faces inherent limitations: it is expensive to scale and bounded by the knowledge of its creators. Continuous learning from "experience data" - interactions between agents and their environments - promises to transcend these barriers. Today, the widespread deployment of AI agents grants us low-cost access to massive streams of such real-world experience. However, raw interaction logs are inherently noisy, filled with trial-and-error and low information density, rendering them

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) represent a significant leap towards empathetic agents, demonstrating remarkable capabilities in emotion understanding. However, the internal mechanisms governing how LVLMs translate abstract visual stimuli into coherent emotional narratives remain largely unexplored, primarily due to the scarcity of visual counterfactuals and the diffuse nature of emotional expression. In this paper, we bridge this gap by introducing a steering-vector-based causal attributio

Chunked vision-language-action (VLA) policies predict multi-step robot controls, conditioning each update on the current visual observation alone. Yet robot actions cause contact, occlusion, and object motion, and the geometry that later decisions depend on can change before the next visual update arrives. Spatial VLAs improve current-frame geometry. Temporal VLAs aggregate past frames. Neither maintains an action-updated scene prior across chunks. We argue for a persistent action-updated scene

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) can reveal implicit objectives such as safety considerations that go beyond task completion. In this work, we focus on the common safety criteria embedded in crowd preference datasets, where different users may express distinct preferences or objectives, yet follow similar safety principles. Our aim is to discover shared safety criteria from crowd preferences and then transfer them to downstream RL tasks to regularize agent behavior and enforce s

As large language model (LLM)-based agents increasingly participate in online discourse, red-teaming their capacity to support political influence campaigns is critical for information integrity. In pursuit of this goal, we focus on locally deployed open-source LLMs, as opposed to frontier API-only models, given their superior alignment with the operational constraints of privacy-conscious malicious actors deployed in social media environments. We introduce an empirical red-teaming framework for

Adverse Outcome Pathways (AOP) are logic models that causally link biological mechanisms that can be measured in a lab to adverse outcomes, relevant to chemical regulatory endpoints. AOPs contextualize new approach methodologies (NAMs), in vitro and in silico methods used as alternatives to animal testing and the sequential events in an AOP serve as multi-scale models spanning biological scales. The AOP-Wiki serves as the global repository for AOPs. While the AOP-Wiki has played a central role i

Topology optimization can generate efficient structures, but designers often must manually translate qualitative intent, such as desired visual style, product experience, or manufacturability into solver settings that are not directly tied to those preferences. We present TO-Agents, a multi-agent AI framework that connects natural-language design intent with iterative topology optimization. The framework converts a human-provided problem description into validated solver inputs, runs a topology

Affordances and permissions are promising and timely safety levers for mitigating Loss of Control (LoC) threats in high-stakes deployment contexts, such as national security. Deployers in defense and intelligence could rely on several approaches to identify which affordances and permissions should be prioritized, such as structured threat modelling, pre-deployment agentic evaluations, post-deployment continuous monitoring, and AI safety cases. This paper proposes a complementary and empirical me

Enterprise analytics aims to make organizational data accessible for decision-making, yet non-technical users still face barriers when using traditional business intelligence tools or Text-to-SQL systems. While recent Text-to-SQL approaches based on Large Language Models (LLMs) promise natural language access to structured data, they fall short in enterprise settings where analytics pipelines rely on governed APIs rather than raw databases. In practice, these APIs encapsulate complex business lo

Enterprise agents are increasingly expected to operate autonomously across tools and interfaces, yet production deployments require governance by construction. Systems must specify which actions are allowed, when human oversight is required, and what information may be exposed, without rebuilding the agent for each domain. This demo presents CUGA's policy system, a modular policy-as-code layer that composes with a generalist LLM agent to deliver predictable, auditable, and compliance-aware behav

Aligning autonomous agents with human intent remains a central challenge in modern AI. A key manifestation of this challenge is reward hacking, whereby agents appear successful under the evaluation signal while violating the intended objective. Reward hacking has been observed across a wide range of settings, yet methods for reliably measuring it at scale remain lacking. In this work, we introduce a new evaluation paradigm for measuring reward hacking. Whereas prior studies have primarily analyz

We present $\textbf{Research Math Agents (RMA)}$, an agentic framework for automated reasoning on research-level mathematical problems. Unlike prior studies centered on competition mathematics or formal theorem proving, RMA targets research-level mathematical problems that require long-horizon reasoning, literature grounding, and iterative proof refinement. RMA decomposes research-level proof solving into specialized modules for problem analysis, literature search and understanding, fair compari

Realizing Level 4/5 Autonomous Networks (AN) demands a shift from static automation to agent-native intelligence. Current operations, reliant on rigid scripts, lack the cognitive agency to handle off-nominal conditions. To address this, this letter proposes a hierarchical multi-agent reference architecture enabling high-level autonomy. The framework features a Dual-Driven Orchestrator that coordinates specialized Executive Agents, supported by a shared Public Memory for unified domain knowledge.

Generative AI systems are increasingly deployed as interactive agents in online environments, such as a social network called Moltbook. In Moltbook, large-scale agentic AIs can post, comment, and engage in activities generated at scale by AI-driven text. Yet these agent behavioral characteristics remain insufficiently understood, particularly in complex, multi-agent interaction. In this study, we analyze the emotional dynamics of agent interactions within Moltbook. We construct an emotion-aware

Foundation models are increasingly deployed in socially sensitive domains such as education, mental health, and caregiving, where failures are often cumulative and context-dependent. Existing guardrail approaches -- ranging from training-time alignment to prompting, decoding constraints, and post-hoc moderation -- primarily provide empirical risk reduction rather than enforceable behavioral guarantees, and largely treat safety as a property of individual outputs rather than interaction trajector

We present OpenComputer, a verifier-grounded framework for constructing verifiable software worlds for computer-use agents. OpenComputer integrates four components: (1) app-specific state verifiers that expose structured inspection endpoints over real applications, (2) a self-evolving verification layer that improves verifier reliability using execution-grounded feedback, (3) a task-generation pipeline that synthesizes realistic and machine-checkable desktop tasks, and (4) an evaluation harness

An effective healthcare agent must be able to recall and reason over a patient's longitudinal medical history. However, the absence of datasets with realistic long-term dialogue timelines limits systematic evaluation. Real clinical text is constrained by privacy and ethics, while existing benchmarks focus on isolated interactions, failing to capture cross-session reasoning. We introduce a framework for synthesizing high-quality, long-term medical dialogues with LLMs. Our approach entails a knowl

Do stock safety-aligned language models and their uncensored or abliterated derivatives behave differently when run as autonomous security agents? Single-turn refusal benchmarks cannot answer this question: security agents must inspect repositories, call tools, and produce vulnerability evidence inside authorized sandboxes. We present a trace-based benchmark of 30 local vulnerability-analysis tasks with fixed tools, deterministic success predicates, redaction rules, and grounding checks, and com

Large Language Model (LLM) agents increasingly act inside real workspaces, where tools and skills determine whether model reasoning becomes reliable action. Existing skills remain largely informal: Markdown skills and instruction packs encode procedures as long natural-language documents, while function calling, Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, and framework tools structure individual actions but usually leave workflow state, policy enforcement, and completion discipline outside the skill i

LLM-agent simulation offers a flexible computational tool for studying population response trajectories that depend on scenario events, memory, demographics, and evolving social context. However, full multi-round simulation scales linearly with both population size and horizon, requiring every agent to query the LLM at every round. We propose Adaptive Prototype Simulation (APS), a framework that reframes scalable LLM-based simulation as a recurrent oracle-allocation problem. APS retains the desi

Robot guide dogs offer navigation assistance that greatly expands the independent mobility of the visually impaired, but their effective use requires subtle human-robot coordination that is difficult for users to learn from generic verbal instructions. To tackle this challenge, we present CANINE, an automated coaching system that trains users for interactive navigation with a robot guide dog, through personalized, adaptive verbal feedback. CANINE decomposes a complex coordination task into sub-s

While GUI agents have made significant progress in web navigation and basic operating system tasks, their capabilities in professional creative workflows remain largely underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce Cutverse, a benchmark designed to systematically evaluate autonomous GUI agents in realistic media post-production environments. We curate expert demonstrations across 7 professional applications (e.g., Premiere Pro, Photoshop), covering 186 complex, long-horizon tasks grounded in a

Understanding how humans and artificial intelligence systems predict and plan by interacting with their environment is a fundamental challenge at the intersection of neuroscience and machine learning. Most brain-encoding studies focus on aligning artificial models with brain activity during language comprehension or passive visual processing, while interactive brain-alignment studies have to date been largely limited to reinforcement-learning (RL) agents and theory-based models. To address this