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Sage-A1.5: From Long-Horizon Execution to Scientific Exploration with Capability Composition
2026-10-20 17:32:48Wenjie Lou, Tianshuo Peng, Shiyang Feng, Shengji Tang, Runmin Ma, Ruizhe Chen, Jinxin Shi, Haoyang Peng, Fangchen Yu, Zhijie Zhong, Yuhao Zhou, Yue Fan, Yixin Chen, Yiming Wu, Yiheng Wang, Yigeng Jiang, Yichen Jiang, Yi Xie, Xu Guo, Xiaohan He, Tao Hu, Songtao Huang, Siyu Zhou, Shuaiyu Zhang, Shangheng Du, Qinglong Cao, Kun Li, Jingqi Ye, Hongbin Zhou, Guohang Yan, Zongsheng Cao, Ziyi Wang, Zhuo Liu, Zhiyin Yu, Zhiwang Zhou, Zelin Tan, Yuqing Zhu, Yaoze Zhang, Yang Chen, Xuming He, Xiuliang Liang, Xingjian Guo, Xiang Zhuang, Weiping Shen, Weida Wang, Tianyuan Zhou, Tianlin Ye, Tengyuan Fan, Siyu Yan, Shuo Li, Shuchen Pu, Shengyuan Xu, Shao Zhang, Ran Wei, Qinyuan Qin, Qingyu Yang, Nianchen Deng, Meng Dai, Kuikun Liu, Kaitao Chen, Juncheng Xiao, Jiangning Liu, Jianbiao Mei, Jia Yu, Haonan He, Hangfan Zhang, Cheng Yang, Chen Zhang, Bihao Zhan, Benteng Cheng, Yuqiang Li, Yihao Liu, Yang Yang, Xujun Fu, Xiaosong Wang, Xiangyu Yue, Wenwei Zhang, Shuyue Hu, Pinlong Cai, Mianxin Liu, Lei Bai, Jie Zhou, Jie Hou, Jiamin Wu, Hui Wang, Haijun Li, Guangyu Wang, Dongzhan Zhou, Chunfeng Song, Chao Yang, Biqing Qi, Xing Xie, Dahua Lin, Bowen Zhou, Xiangchao Yan, Wenlong Zhang, Shufei Zhang, Peng Ye, Bo ZhangAbstract
In this report, we introduce Sage-A1.5, a 35B Mixture-of-Experts agentic model that builds on A1 to advance long-horizon problem solving through adaptive capability composition. Compared with A1, Sage-A1.5 learns not only to solve individual tasks, but also to organize work and revise its approach during execution. Sage-A1.5 highlights three improvements: agentic orchestration, verification, and open scientific discovery. First, agentic orchestration extends single-agent execution through task delegation and parallel collaboration among subagents with isolated contexts, enabling complex tasks to be decomposed and addressed concurrently and supporting efficient execution while reducing interference across concurrent subagents. Second, agentic verification strengthens long-horizon reliability through progress checking, evidence validation, and reflective strategy revision, allowing the agent to recognize unproductive search paths and pursue alternative approaches. Third, open scientific discovery extends agentic capabilities beyond answering predefined questions to conducting exploratory research, connecting scientific inquiry with interactive analysis and inspectable research artifacts. We showcase these capabilities through complicated agentic tasks and multidisciplinary scientific applications. Besides, we hope Sage-A1.5 provides the community with an accessible foundation for open scientific discovery, offering a practical path from long-horizon task execution to collaborative, verifiable, and inspectable scientific exploration.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28578
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Cache Engineering for Agents
2026-10-20 17:32:24Tianyu Fu, Ruoxi Wang, Zihan Min, Zhongqi Ren, Zhihao Li, Tengxuan Liu, Shengxu Mu, Hanling Zhang, Yu WangAbstract
Large Language Model (LLM) agents can handle increasingly complex tasks, navigating long trajectories of observations and actions. As these trajectories grow, key-value (KV) cache I/O and storage become the dominant cost. Trajectories can also exceed the LLM's maximum context length, requiring control over active cache growth. Prior work uses context engineering to reduce cache size by trimming or summarizing history. However, modifying the trajectory prefix invalidates subsequent cached states and triggers costly re-prefilling of retained context. Task accuracy can also suffer when too little context is retained to limit re-prefill costs. We propose cache engineering as a new scheme. It allows agents to directly control their active KV cache without modifying the trajectory or re-prefilling retained context. Specifically, agents can proactively use drop to exclude selected cache from future attention and repos to adjust retained keys' position encodings. We formalize these cache operations and identify history dependence as a serving challenge: identical token sequences can yield different cache states under different cache operation sequences, making prefix matching insufficient for correct cache reuse. Thus, we co-design the AKV serving engine. It provides a stateless interface compatible with existing serving APIs, while internally managing stateful cache reuse, eviction, and restoration. Experiments show that a tool-response rolling-drop cache policy improves average benchmark scores by 1.7 points and reduces average cost by 27.7%, compared with conventional threshold-triggered summarization. With AKV, it achieves up to 1.2x the output throughput and a 1.5x speedup in P95 request latency. Recursive self-improvement of cache policies further reduces cost by 7.1% over expert design. Our code is at this https URL.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28577
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OptScientist: Automated Discovery of Optimization Laws
2026-10-20 17:23:40Ma ZhenYao, Yue Liang, Jian-Qiao ZhuAbstract
Many scientific phenomena are best understood as outcomes of underlying optimization problems, yet automated scientific discovery has largely focused on recovering equations that describe observed input-output patterns. We introduce OptScientist, a novel automated framework for discovering compact symbolic optimization laws directly from data. OptScientist comprises (i) a model that infers symbolic optimization problems by first learning to represent data as an optimization problem and then extracting its symbolic form, and (ii) an LLM agentic system embedding the model in a discovery process that integrates theoretical priors from scientific literature, discovers candidate laws, abstracts their underlying mechanisms, and suggests new data to collect. We first evaluate OptScientist on OptFeynman, a novel benchmark of 99 physics-derived optimization problems, where OptScientist recovers ground-truth laws for over 80% of the problems and remains robust to noisy contextual information, while substantially outperforming machine-learning, symbolic, and LLM-based model-discovery baselines. On human risky choice and central-bank monetary policy, OptScientist discovers compact symbolic optimization laws that achieve held-out predictive performance competitive with leading baselines, while using few parameters and substantially fewer tokens than LLM baselines. Overall, OptScientist extends automated scientific discovery to uncovering optimization laws that generate observed phenomena, enabling automated theory building across the physical, biological, behavioral, and social sciences.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28562
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Agentic Ensemble with Vision-Language Models for Visual Anomaly Detection
2026-10-20 17:22:25Shangquan Sun, Wenjun Luo, Xu He, Yoonsoo Lee, Shijian LuAbstract
Visual anomaly detection aims to detect abnormal objects, while anomaly samples are often scarce during model training. Assembling multiple pretrained detectors can help by leveraging their transferable image scores and anomaly maps. However, most existing ensemble methods apply fixed fusion rules over saved predictions which struggle when pretrained detectors clearly disagree due to different training objectives, priors, and visual representations. To this end, we design AnomalyAgent, a post-training fusion framework for accurate visual anomaly detection. AnomalyAgent aligns heterogeneous scores and maps, summarizes score- and region-level disagreement, and treats fusion as a finite action-selection problem. It implements two types of actions: 1) score actions that determine how to fuse image-level detector confidence via consensus, robust aggregation, detector weighting, or score-map consistency; 2) map actions that fuse dense anomaly responses via consensus, detector weighting, geometric aggregation, or disagreement correction. A constrained vision-language model (VLM) is introduced to inspect high-conflict samples and select valid score action and map action to produce the final prediction. We evaluate AnomalyAgent on MVTec AD and VisA as primary benchmarks, together with seven additional public anomaly benchmarks and Real-IAD for large-scale score-level evaluation. Across these benchmarks, AnomalyAgent consistently improves over equal-weight fusion and achieves the best mean image AUROC and pixel AP among the compared fusion methods on MVTec AD and VisA, while demonstrating robust transfer across additional anomaly domains.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28560
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OverSeer: Multi-Agent World Models Beyond What Agents See
2026-10-20 17:17:59Runjia Li, Kam Woh Ng, Minghao Chen, Junlin Han, Jianyuan Wang, Zhaochong An, Juan-Manuel Perez-Rua, Andrea Vedaldi, Shikun LiuAbstract
Despite the success of video world models, extending them to multiple agents is difficult because it requires generating several agent-specific video streams that are consistent in time and between agents. To address this gap, we introduce OverSeer, a multi-agent world model that augments egocentric agent views with auxiliary camera views. We suggest that, by fixing the auxiliary views in space, they act as a proxy for a world-centric representation: Unlike the agents' views, which can change entirely due to a simple change in agent position, changes in the auxiliary views directly map to localized changes in the world state. We show that these fixed views substantially help the model to maintain consistency. We also show that, due to their redundant and semi-static nature, the auxiliary views can be efficiently compressed with a delta-VAE that encodes only the changes relative to a static reference image, reducing the number of tokens required to process them. Experiments in Minecraft and Doom demonstrate improved world and agent consistency, with qualitative results on real-world multi-camera captures indicating that the approach is not tied to game engines. Our compression analysis further shows that delta-VAE substantially reduces the computational overhead of auxiliary-view generation. We conclude that these fixed views provide a simple and efficient way to improve multi-agent world models.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28554
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CoGaussian: Open-Vocabulary Gaussian-based Collaborative 3D Scene Understanding
2026-10-20 17:04:38Om Shivam Verma, Shaya Farahmand, Lingjun Zhao, Lu GanAbstract
Collaborative perception enables agents to retrieve the scene semantics and geometry beyond the field of view of any individual agent. This broader scene understanding enhances transportation safety and improves efficiency in multi-robot systems. However, existing collaborative semantic occupancy methods rely on dense 3D voxel annotations and are limited to recognizing objects within a predefined set of semantic classes. To overcome these limitations, we present CoGaussian, an open-vocabulary Gaussian-based collaborative semantic occupancy prediction framework. CoGaussian represents a scene as a set of foundation model-aligned sparse 3D Gaussians, which serve as a compact representation for communicating and fusing geometric and semantic information across multiple agents. On the Semantic-OPV2V benchmark, our method outperforms existing open-vocabulary single-agent approaches, highlighting the effectiveness of open-vocabulary collaborative scene understanding.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28530
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OptionWorld: A Benchmark for Diagnosing Failures of LLMs as Long-Term Personal Assistants
2026-10-20 16:38:43Ruoyu Zhang, Zhaocen Liu, Weiyi Tian, Melissa Feng, Shilong LiuAbstract
Long-term assistants must follow unfinished tasks across days as information and circumstances change. Finding information or starting an action, however, does not ensure that the task gets completed. We introduce OptionWorld, a benchmark that traces information acquisition, judgments, actions, and outcomes in simulated daily-life tasks to identify where current LLMs fall short as long-term personal assistants. In runs with archived decision inputs, the key facts remain in the model's last input before the deadline in 35.5% of failed instances. Failure analysis identifies the three most frequent problems: needed information is not obtained or combined, available opportunities to act go unused, and agents impose restrictions that the task does not require. Three follow-up experiments show that supplying missing facts restores task success in some cases; action reminders can restart work while subsequent steps still miss the deadline; and correcting a supplied note that wrongly forbids contact restores permitted inquiry. These findings locate shortcomings in maintaining task state: connecting facts to unfinished work, following through before deadlines, and separating actual restrictions from the agent's assumptions.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28491
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Proof-Carrying Contracts: Commitments AI Agents Cannot Break
2026-10-20 16:30:34Carlo Ciliberto, Alessandro Rudi, Enrico TassiAbstract
AI agents increasingly act on behalf of people or other agents, purchasing services, exchanging information and delegating work. What an agent must respect is written in instructions, policies or agreements, but text alone cannot make it comply. It may make mistakes, be redirected by what it reads, or pursue different interests. For an economy of such agents to function, parties need agreements they can rely on without inspecting or trusting one another's agents. We introduce Proof-Carrying Contracts (PC2), a framework for making agreed constraints enforceable throughout an agent's interactions with a system. Before a requested operation can run, the agent must supply a machine-checkable proof that it preserves the agreed constraints in every case allowed by its model. An execution system called the Airlock checks the proof and controls access to the operation. The parties specify the conditions to preserve, while the agent supplies the reasoning needed to justify its decisions and remains free to adapt its strategy. This avoids having to design a separate permission policy and prove that every decision it permits is safe. We prove that the constraints hold at every instant during execution, even for an adversarial agent, and identify when this implies safety in the world. Reusable capability modules provide tools and guarantees from which contracts can be constructed. PC2 provides a foundation for an agent economy whose agreements protect both those delegating work and those carrying it out.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28484
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Claims of emergence in AI should be grounded in information decomposition
2026-10-20 16:29:28Christoph Riedl, Fernando E. RosasAbstract
When a language model develops capabilities not traceable to its individual components, when a multi-agent AI system outperforms each agent on its own, or when a human-AI pair succeeds where either fails in isolation, AI researchers describe it as a case of ``synergy'' or ``emergence''. However, these are usually informal assessments not supported by a theoretical framework, making these claims impossible to compare or even meaningfully dispute. Here we argue that \emph{information decomposition can serve as a unifying formal framework to operationalize assessments about synergy in AI systems}. Information decomposition provides a way to distinguish qualitatively different \emph{types} of information, including unique information available from individual components, redundant information shared across multiple components, and synergistic information accessible only from parts taken together. This gives claims of emergence a precise, falsifiable criterion: a system's behavior is emergent only if it carries synergistic information about task-relevant outcomes. We apply this lens to attention heads, autonomous agents, and human-AI teams, showing how it organizes existing knowledge across scales and substrates, while also generating cross-level conjectures that siloed fields would miss.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28479
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CLOSER: Evidence-Aware Active Visual Verification for Embodied Object-Goal Navigation
2026-10-20 16:27:33Pengying Wu, Mingye Jiang, Yunze Hu, Zhejia Wen, Kangjie Zhou, Zongru Yang, Zhe Peng, Chang LiuAbstract
Object-goal navigation (ObjectNav) requires an embodied agent to find an instance of a specified category in an unseen environment and stop near it. The agent typically relies on an object detector but must judge online from a limited egocentric video stream, sometimes a single frame, whether a detected candidate is the target. Detectors often confidently mistake similar objects, such as a sofa for a bed, and stopping at a false positive fails the episode. Prevailing systems also approach candidates greedily, leaving them occluded or partially observed. We present CLOSER, an evidence-aware active verification framework that treats stopping as closed-loop evidence acquisition, coupling vision-language model (VLM) verification with active perception. CLOSER fine-tunes an open-source VLM to label each view of a candidate tracked across frames as target, non-target, or uncertain, selects complementary views with an embedding-based diversity gate, and fuses their per-view probabilities with a lightweight network. If the fused judgment remains uncertain, a diffusion policy drives the agent toward the candidate using only the tracked mask and depth until the decision becomes decisive. CLOSER runs locally and plugs into existing ObjectNav systems without retraining them. On Gibson and Habitat-Matterport 3D, it raises average success rate by 3.6 points and success weighted by path length by 2.0 points, showing that verifying evidence before committing improves embodied navigation.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28476
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Beyond Trajectory Statistics: Community-Consistent Human Mobility Generation via Evolving User-Location Graphs
2026-10-20 16:21:17Bo Liu, Tong Li, Jiapeng Zhang, Zhu Xiao, Zhuo Tang, Kenli LiAbstract
Human mobility data are fundamental to Web-based location services and broader urban applications, and mobility generation provides synthetic trajectories when real data are costly or inaccessible. Although recent mobility generators have incorporated collective mobility patterns, they primarily focus on individual trajectories and aggregate population dynamics, leaving evolving community structures formed by user-location interactions insufficiently modeled. In this paper, we study community-consistent human mobility generation. To this end, we formulate mobility generation as the generation of dynamic user-location graphs to model community structures and propose MOTION, a Multi-agent framework for cOmmuniTy-consIstent human mObility geNeration. MOTION consists of user agents, location agents, and a global manager agent. MOTION first detects coherent communities from historical mobility using the Leiden algorithm and extracts community-conditioned interaction priors to guide the generation process. Guided by these priors, the user agents plan mobility, search destination candidates, and infer user movements from the individual view. In parallel, selectively activated location agents infer likely user arrivals from the community view. The manager coordinates both views, diagnoses interactions causing deviations, and attributes targeted reflection signals to revise user decisions, location attraction, and source-user selection. Experiments on two real-world datasets show that MOTION outperforms baselines by at least 4.05% across reported metrics of individual trajectories, population and flow distributions, and community and graph structures. Further analyses confirm its robustness, privacy preservation, and downstream utility. The code is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28467
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Toolflation: Seller Agents Distort Tool Markets Through Spontaneous Generative Engine Optimization
2026-10-20 16:12:39Zhenwei Tang, Di Bai, Jintao Liu, Xidong Wu, Qianfeng Wen, Xinwu ChengAbstract
Agents are starting to sell to other agents. Seller agents write the listings of tools, services and products, and buyer agents read these listings when they choose what to use. We show that seller agents told only to be selected more often practice generative engine optimization on their own, and that this distorts the market for sellers and for buyers. We build tool markets from real data tools on Amazon and Instagram and run every tool on every question, so we know which tools can answer each question. Under all five production models we test, sellers rewrite their descriptions to claim more and more fields, including fields that their tools return for fewer than half of the targets. We call this process toolflation. Nothing in the market limits it, and how far it goes depends on the model, as the number of claims that contradict the sellers' own evidence differs by an order of magnitude between models. Toolflation shifts the buyers' choices between sellers, and the most capable tool loses share in seven of the ten combinations of seller model and platform. Under four models, the choices stay with capable tools and buyer agents keep their task success. Under the fifth, sellers copy one another until the descriptions no longer tell the tools apart. Buyer agents then pick tools by their position in the list, tools that answer almost nothing win a quarter to two fifths of the choices, and task success falls from 89% to about 30% on Amazon, close to random choice, and from 77% to 40% on Instagram. The sellers did only what their vendors asked, and the cost fell on buyers they never dealt with. We therefore argue that honesty toward third parties under competition is part of safety alignment, and that models should be tested as sellers before they are deployed as sellers.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28454
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Revision-Based Learning from Interactive Experience and Feedback
2026-10-20 16:11:17Jiawen Li, Chenming Ge, Alice Gao, Rishab Vempati, Yi-Hao Peng, Jason WuAbstract
Code generation models are increasingly used to produce interactive artifacts, such as websites and user interfaces. Many properties that determine whether these interfaces are useful only become apparent through realistic interaction, making them difficult to incorporate into model training. In this paper, we introduce RELIEF (REvision-based Learning from Interactive Experience and Feedback), a method for improving code generation models using feedback on their generated interfaces. RELIEF uses a coding agent to revise these interfaces, then incorporates the improvements into their original generation traces to produce supervision for fine-tuning. To evaluate RELIEF, we collected a dataset of 200 synthetically generated websites paired with 355 interaction recordings and accompanying feedback from 24 users. We used critiques derived from code inspection, automated interaction, explicit human feedback, and human interaction recordings to fine-tune variants of two code generation models. Our results show that feedback effectiveness varies with base model capabilities, with critiques inferred from human interaction recordings leading to the largest usability improvements overall under our tested models.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26636
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After the Attacker Leaves: Benchmarking Carryover Attacks on LLM Agents
2026-10-20 15:55:05Zhiyue Xu, Xukai Wang, Zhiyuan Huang, Mingjie Zhan, Jian Zhao, Xu-Yao ZhangAbstract
Modern LLM agents persist state across sessions via two channels: long-lived memory files silently prepended to the system prompt, and scheduled tasks waking the agent without user input. A one-time indirect prompt injection committed to either channel can re-fire across sessions long after the attacker leaves, threats we term carryover attacks. Existing prompt-injection benchmarks evaluate attacks only in the session where malicious content is first observed, leaving the gate governing when and how often a planted payload later re-fires unmeasured. We present CarryoverBench: 12 personal-assistant scenarios and 101 attack tasks across three trigger channels: Instant, same-turn IPI; Autonomous, heartbeat-scheduled; and Latent, memory-resurfaced. A rule-based verifier scores planting and triggering as independent stages. Across five frontier models, planted payloads re-fire without measurable decay over five rounds; conditional on successful planting, the trigger stage often provides little additional protection. Porting the Latent channel to a second runtime, Hermes, attenuates but does not eliminate the effect, suggesting that carryover defense requires runtime-layer controls in addition to prompt-level interventions.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28425
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A Multi-Agent Framework for Automated Machine Learning with Evidence-based Planning for Medical Image Analysis
2026-10-20 15:49:38Yiqing Shen, Mathias UnberathAbstract
Deep learning has become the default tool for medical image analysis, driven by the open-source movement. However, achieving the best performance on a given task remains difficult, with architecture selection and hyperparameter optimization (HPO) still considered "more of an art than a science". Automated machine learning (AutoML) automates parts of model training, yet helps little in medical imaging: general-purpose approaches lack medical architectures and preprocessing, and medical-focused ones demand engineering expertise and remain confined to narrow tasks such as 3D segmentation. We introduce MedicalMLOmni, a multi-agent AutoML framework that automates model training for diverse single- and multi-modal medical tasks through a natural language interface. Specifically, MedicalMLOmni performs evidence-based planning by retrieving published results to guide model selection and configuration, and employs parallel HPO where multiple agents explore adjustment strategies concurrently. MedicalMLOmni achieves the best score on 19 of 20 benchmarks; PMC-VQA is the exception, where a vision-language model with broader pre-training leads. Backbone-matched controls attribute the gains to the framework, not the backbone. By removing coding requirements, MedicalMLOmni lowers the barrier for domain experts with rich datasets but limited engineering expertise.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28410
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Rewards for Budget-Aware Multi-Turn Agents That Adapt to Arbitrary Test-Time Constraints
2026-10-20 15:49:32Tom A. Lamb, Adam Golinski, Eleonora Gualdoni, Sinead Williamson, Michael KirchhofAbstract
Large language model agents are often given an inference budget and asked to maximise success within it. A multi-turn agent has to allocate this budget across many environment interactions. An external harness can enforce the budget, but it remains unclear whether the agent itself can learn when and how much to spend. We ask whether agents can learn this allocation across dynamically specified budgets and which rewards best teach this behaviour. We adapt existing length penalties to budget constraints spanning multiple resource types, introduce new reward formulations, and compare eleven objectives in a shared training pipeline. We train Qwen3.5 models at 4B and 9B on AppWorld with budgets over tokens, API calls, and environment steps, and on the BabyAI gridworld with turn budgets. We train a separate policy for each environment and resource type, with each policy trained across budget values. Training with rewards that penalise overspending substantially improves within-budget success and natural compliance over untrained models and over training on task success alone, with agents learning to adapt their resource use to stated budgets and task difficulty. These gains extend to unseen budgets and, zero-shot, to a shifted task distribution and a new benchmark. Reward objectives trade off success within budget and natural compliance. A sigmoid penalty for overspending most often achieves the highest within-budget success at an individual budget, while a fixed negative reward for overspending generally yields the strongest natural compliance. Combining penalties for overspend frequency and magnitude gives the smallest average gap to the best method at each budget. Overall, we show that a single agent can learn to allocate resources across turns and adapt its behaviour to user-specified budgets using budget feedback without external budget-allocation controllers.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28409
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MAS-Guard: Unified Guardrails from Individual Agents to Multi-Agent LLM Systems
2026-10-20 15:44:37Mohammad Kachuee, Phu Mon Htut, Sheng Li, Nikolaos Pappas, Miguel Ballesteros Martinez, Yassine Benajiba, Sujith Ravi, Dan RothAbstract
Agentic AI extends large language models (LLMs) from generating responses to planning and executing complex workflows, substantially expanding their utility while exposing applications to unsafe actions, information leakage, and adversarial manipulation. Multi-agent systems further expand these capabilities through specialization and collaboration, but distributed authority, heterogeneous roles, and opaque or potentially compromised participants make safeguarding even more challenging. Existing defenses address important individual threats but provide fragmented coverage across local execution, system-level interactions, and enforcement mechanisms. We introduce MAS-Guard, a unified framework that closes this gap for safeguarding single- and multi-agent AI applications containing both instrumentable and opaque agents. Within instrumentable agents, the proposed local Agent Guardrail (A-Guard) layer applies task-specific experts to assess agentic events. At the system level, developer-owned Agent Charters and a Control Plane combine deterministic structural checks of routes, agent capabilities, and message formats with semantic assessments of roles and message content. These complementary layers enable enforcement through a shared set of interventions: allow, reflection, confirmation, and block. Evaluated across six benchmarks covering diverse single- and multi-agent scenarios with three agent LLMs from different providers, MAS-Guard reduces the overall attack success rate by 71.5-86.3% relative to unguarded agents, while meeting the utility reference criterion on benign tasks.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28397
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IDEAgent: Agentic Quality-Diversity Search for Research Idea Generation
2026-10-20 15:42:11Varun Gumma, Navonil Majumder, Soumitra Sinhahajari, Soujanya PoriaAbstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the automation of scientific discovery. However, existing systems share a core limitation: they optimize ideas independently for either Quality or Diversity. This often results in closely related ideas or large sets of trivial, unsound, or unclear concepts. We instead argue that research ideation should be framed as a conjunction of Quality and Diversity objectives, i.e., a Quality-Diversity (QD) search. Accordingly, we introduce IDEAgent, a multi-agent framework that tracks idea evolution through lineages. We jointly drive Quality using multi-objective feedback for repair and refinement, while Diversity is achieved through lightweight sequential memory and explicit comparison against completed ideas, historical variants, and rejected proposals. To evaluate this joint objective, we develop Yield, a metric that computes the largest mutually diverse set of ideas satisfying predefined quality thresholds. Across 32 topics spanning 8 CS domains, IDEAgent outperforms the best baseline by 3.89x on Yield, while achieving Yield of at least 2 on 8x as many topics. We further analyze quality improvements, showing that repair and refinement improve logical rigor and clarity while preserving non-obviousness. Lastly, we extend IDEAgent to two algorithm discovery tasks for verifiable quality judgment and find that it still consistently outperforms all baselines, and yields the largest set of high-quality and diverse programs that beat a trivial/standard baseline. To encourage future research on QD-search-based ideation, we open-source IDEAgent at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.22375
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AM-Bench: A Unified Taxonomy and Evaluation Suite for Agentic Misalignment
2026-10-20 15:40:19Eric Zhang, Terry Jingchen Zhang, Chijioke Ugwuanyi, Jerick Shi, Bernhard Sch\"olkopf, Zhijing JinAbstract
As LLM-based agents are deployed with increasing autonomy in real-world environments, a critical failure mode emerges: agentic misalignment, where agents choose harmful actions over failure. However, existing safety benchmarks primarily evaluate whether agents comply with explicitly harmful instructions, leaving the conditions that cause agents to choose harmful actions poorly understood. To address this limitation, we propose AM-Bench, a unified taxonomy and 35 scenario evaluation benchmark spanning seven industries for agentic misalignment grounded in the fraud triangle, a well-established criminological framework explaining goal-directed misconduct. We adapt this framework to agentic environments and construct our evaluation suite and detection systems along three dimensions: perceived threat, perceived opportunity, and reasoning. We operationalize each dimension into structured subcategories rooted in prior theory: five threat categories derived from the instrumental convergence thesis, seven opportunity categories drawn from the Emergent Strategic Reasoning Risks (ESRR) taxonomy, and a novel four-question binary reasoning framework synthesized from prior literature. Our evaluation of 10 frontier models reveals a 62-percentage-point gap in misalignment across scenarios, with Gemini 3 Flash and Gemini 3.1 Pro exhibiting the highest levels of agentic misalignment while Claude Sonnet 4.6 displays near-zero rates across all conditions. Our reasoning framework further reveals that models may exhibit harmful behaviours without explicit situational awareness or explanation, complicating both mitigation and detection. AM-Bench scenarios and code are available at this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.24264
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RACE: Learning Multimodal Search through Referential Abstraction and Compositional Evidence
2026-10-20 15:33:24Eric Tao, Minhao Sun, Liyan Liu, Zhijing Wu, Xiaohan Yu, Lang Mei, Li Huang, Chao Feng, Jinchao Ma, Sichen Kang, Siyu Mo, Chong ChenAbstract
Training multimodal search agents requires tasks that make visually grounded search necessary for determining the answer. Textual identity clues and unused target evidence allow shortcuts in synthetic questions, weakening supervision for visual search and evidence integration. We propose RACE, an image-conditioned task synthesis framework that constructs dependencies from images to targets and from target-specific evidence to answers. Referential Abstraction (RA) replaces identity-revealing text with specific visual references or ambiguous relational references resolved by searching among depicted candidates. Compositional Evidence (CE) links retrieved facts about multiple entities in one image or entities from different images into joint questions whose answers require every designated contribution. Both operations also apply to images found during search, allowing new visual observations to determine subsequent search targets or supply answer evidence. Fine-tuning Qwen3.5-27B on only 12K teacher-generated trajectories from RACE raises average accuracy across ten multimodal benchmarks from 53.5 to 56.0, a relative improvement of approximately 4.7% over the matched base agent. Our code, data, and model will be publicly available.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28382
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