Multiagent Systems Papers

ALT Personal AI agents often act on underspecified instructions and draw on context such as their user's messages and calendar to decide how to proceed. This context can contain private preferences that interfere with the task, with other people's interests, or with confidentiality norms. Prior work has studied deception under goal conflicts and the leakage of private information, but largely as separate problems. We study both problems together in a simulated company Slack workspace in which four employees delegate sprint staffing to personal agents. Two agents learn from private messages that their employee avoids working with a particular colleague. Because the other agents request justifications for task preferences and the only true justification is confidential, the agents cannot simultaneously remain honest, preserve confidentiality, and complete the staffing. We evaluate seven open-weight models and Claude and GPT models. Of the 135/140 open-weight agents that pursue the avoidance

ALT Generative video models have made video creation more accessible, yet creators still struggle to translate high-level narrative intentions into coherent cinematic expressions. Existing systems primarily rely on prompt refinement or expose isolated camera controls, leaving a gap between what to express and how to film it. We present CineAssist, a human-AI co-creation system that treats cinematic language as an interactive design medium connecting creative intentions with executable video controls. We construct a Cinematic Language Design Space and an annotated dataset from 107 filmmaking sources and 1,436 film clips, linking communicative intentions to cinematic parameter values. CineAssist combines a multi-agent workflow for intent alignment and strategy recommendation with an interactive cinematic editor and a context-sensitive preference learner for user-controlled personalization. We evaluate the system through three studies examining end-to-end usability, cinematic quality, and pre

ALT Driven by the rapid development of the low-altitude economy, Uncrewed Aerial Vehicle (UAV) networks have become increasingly important for executing tasks such as search, rescue, and monitoring. However, under bandwidth-constrained scenarios, UAV networks still face significant challenges in task execution efficiency and intelligent processing capabilities. To address these issues, we propose Multi-UAV Cooperative Deep Semantic Autoencoders (MC-DSA) for communication networks. The architecture comprises one Task UAV (T-UAV) and multiple Support UAVs (S-UAVs), which jointly enhance communication efficiency and data-processing capability via semantic communication and cooperation. Specifically, we introduce a semantic matching and source selection mechanism, enabling the proposed MC-DSA to handle low-quality images while ensuring effective utilization of high-quality images. The T-UAV broadcasts a task query, and each S-UAV computes the semantic similarity between its local image and the

ALT Teams increasingly build software from cooperating large language model (LLM) agents, often assuming more agents mean more reliability. Yet the usual evidence, average benchmark accuracy, ignores the input mix a deployed system meets and the rule merging the agents' answers. Building on HIP-LLM, a hierarchical imprecise-probability assessment of single LLMs, we propose a framework combining it with a Bayesian network of the system's failure logic for multi-agent systems. Agent failure-probability intervals propagate through this network, where the combining rule can itself fail, into a reliability envelope showing which evidence limits it. In a pipeline extracting regulated chemical-hazard statements, majority voting over three models protected against the weakest but did not clearly exceed the best, and a voter failing on 5% of demands would largely erase its advantage over the middle model. More agents yield a more defensible reliability claim, not automatically a more reliable syste

ALT Delegated Agent2Agent (A2A) workflows create a security problem when the agent sending a request is different from the principal from which the authority originated. This paper evaluates a layered downstream-verification design in a synthetic four-party healthcare reimbursement workflow. The prototype separates current-caller context, transitive authorization evidence, per-hop Ed25519 request authentication, and independent replay state for requests and authorization artifacts. Of 15 adversarial conditions, 14 are rejected; an isolated delegation-path test exposes the absence of semantic authority attenuation. A separate authorized-intermediary experiment shows that a holder of the shared authorization-evidence HMAC key can modify the represented authority and generate valid evidence. In the fixed-depth local benchmark, the full configuration has a median security-processing latency of 5.11 ms and a 3.87 kB serialized payload. The results show the value of separating request authentica

ALT Researchers use large language models as agents in social simulations, where agents are prompted with observations and background information intended to shape their actions. Yet LLM agents have been shown to substantially change their behavior under meaning-preserving prompt variations, creating a validation problem for social simulation. One plausible hypothesis is that this brittleness reflects a lack of grounding and can be reduced by enriching the context provided to the agents. Whether richer context improves robustness remains unclear, in part because context richness and robustness are rarely defined in ways that support controlled comparisons. We address the first need with controlled context enrichment, a set of prompt substitution rules that systematically enriches distinct types of context: neutral padding, generic social background, descriptive decision grounding, and normative decision grounding. We address the second by introducing selective robustness as a validation cr

ALT When multi-agent systems act on the external world, a single agent's faulty output can spread across tasks before detection, creating a system-wide blast radius. Single-agent guardrails are confined to individual harnesses, while existing multi-agent controls either cancel only the faulty source and miss downstream consumers or halt and roll back the entire workflow at the cost of healthy work. We present Airlock, a multi-agent runtime and guardrail for selective post-alert fault containment. Its tree-structured runtime, EdgeCitadel, narrows permissions vertically from parent to child agents to establish node boundaries and control switches. Meanwhile, an append-only provenance DAG records cross-agent data consumption horizontally. Upon an alert, Airlock traces forward on this DAG to isolate tainted executions and pending actions, and backward to narrow root causes. At the site switches, a default full quarantine tier freezes affected branches without a solver, while an assured optimiz

ALT Mechanical engineers use specialized tools for CAD, simulation, manufacturing and research, each with a distinct interface and learning curve. We present Mechanical Engineering Skills, an open library of 33 agent skills that makes these capabilities accessible through a single text or voice conversation. Each skill combines operating instructions, executable tools and verification procedures. A language model interprets the request, selects and coordinates skills, while deterministic tools perform computations and return checked results. Default workflows require no tool-specific interface training, local model execution or model fine-tuning; skills load on demand and install with one command. Nineteen skills adapt published or preprint research from our laboratory, including text-to-CAD, linkage synthesis, CFD setup, stress-field and lattice surrogates, equation discovery, additive-manufacturing planning and in-process monitoring. Fourteen additional skills support core engineering an

ALT The bitter lesson holds that general methods leveraging computation defeat hand-encoded domain knowledge. We argue it carries a condition its popular reading omits: in every case Sutton cites, the general method was scaled against the same task the domain engineering was solving. Social simulation substituted across tasks instead, replacing hand-built agents with an artifact optimized for predicting text. The move is bitter-lesson-shaped, but the lesson does not license it. Prediction is a solitary act: the predictor bears no consequences from the interaction it models. Cooperation, defection, and norm enforcement are phenomena of interested parties; they do not exist for a disinterested observer at any scale. What is missing is not emergence, which LLM populations already show, but stakes. We show that several anomalies reported in prior work (excess cooperation that predates alignment training, collective agreement without individual fidelity, and population homogeneity) follow from

ALT Real-world geospatial decision support requires more than single-step retrieval or code generation. Disaster-response questions often involve multi-source workflows that combine spatial databases, map-derived features, satellite imagery, raster products, and reusable geospatial artifacts, where correctness depends on preserving spatial scope, temporal context, and intermediate execution state. While large language models and coding agents offer a promising interface for such workflows, they struggle with geospatial-specific failure modes, including handling large artifacts, selecting the wrong evidence source, losing spatial or temporal metadata, and applying invalid geometric operations. We introduce GeoFaham, a domain-specialized multi-agent system for geospatial disaster analytics. GeoFaham decomposes workflows into specialist agents for vector operations, map feature retrieval, imagery discovery, and raster analysis, coordinated by an Orchestrator with a dual-ledger control loop fo

ALT We address the problem of smooth continuous multi-agent path finding (SC-MAPF), where agents move in a continuous environment along smooth curves in continuous time. The paths for individual agents are searched in local visibility roadmaps that consider obstacles and other agents. A new algorithm is proposed in this work, which combines the previous algorithm CE-CBS for high-level search with any-angle path finding for local single-agent planning, where agents are to avoid obstacles, both static and other agents. The new algorithm is tested and compared to CE-CBS, the algorithm building individual paths using RRT*, and SMT-CCBS algorithm, an algorithm for MAPF_R. Experimental results show various advantages of the new algorithm over CE-CBS and SMT-CCBS in comparable settings.

ALT Science is a process of useful models being proven wrong time and again, but despite its many flaws, it somehow works. Why is this? Paul Feyerabend argued that it works because people dare to hold and defend incompatible rival theories against the accepted one, since a theory's failures often lead to its abandonment in the presence of a more accurate or simpler alternative. He called this view theoretical pluralism. We introduce a theoretical and experimental model in which this can be examined. It compares communities of pluralist agents, which can hold rival theories side by side and maintain beliefs within and between those theories, with communities of monist agents, which can only incorporate what they hear or observe into a single model of their own. In a multi-agent variational inference setting, our experimental demonstrations illustrate how communities with rival theories can go through periods of uncertainty followed by a shift in the theories they hold true, how the informat

ALT Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) increasingly address knowledge-intensive tasks by integrating evidence scattered across multiple document pages into a final answer. Because such answers are synthesized from many pages, the link between the answer and its supporting visual evidence can become obscured, hindering verification and trust. Cross-page visual attribution is therefore essential: it requires identifying the supporting pages and localizing fine-grained evidence regions within them, thereby making multi-page reasoning transparent and auditable. Existing approaches either process multiple pages jointly or iteratively refine evidence within a single trajectory, risking cross-page context pollution and, for interactive methods, substantial sequential overhead. We introduce AttriSwarm, an agent-swarm framework that assigns these concerns to separate roles: a leader handles global cross-page reasoning, while subagents perform page-wise attribution in isolation and in parallel

ALT The Weapon-Target Assignment (WTA) problem in distributed multi-agent systems is challenged by limited situational awareness and communication constraints. Existing distributed methods, such as auction-consensus algorithms, typically assume task-value independence, a simplification that fails to capture the coupled effects of multi-weapon assignments. This paper introduces the Distributed Marginal Return (DMR) algorithm, a novel decentralized approach that generalizes auction-consensus frameworks. DMR enables agents to compute bids based on marginal return and uses a consensus protocol to resolve conflicts, allowing multiple non-conflicting proposals to be accepted in parallel for cooperative optimization with minimal communication. A key theoretical contribution is our proof that the marginal returns of non-conflicting bids are additive, a property that ensures global consistency and validates our parallel acceptance mechanism. Extensive simulations demonstrate that DMR significantly

ALT Must long-horizon AI investment research be rewritten every time stock prices move? Using 8,120 production reports on the same 203 stocks across four iPulse AI batches, we compare repricing existing targets, guarding them against price shocks, mechanically resetting old forecast growth, and generating fresh multi-agent reports. Ten matched configurations represent seven investment frameworks. Our primary economic evaluation selects Top 10 USD portfolios using one-year forecasts. Across two unchanged-model windows, guarded reuse averages 2.25%, versus 1.66% for SPY and 4.77% for fresh reports, after modeled trading costs and reference compute charges on a USD 100,000 account. Guarded reuse beats SPY in all three short windows, including the model-change transition. Extending the first holding window to nearly six months reverses the result: guarded reuse returns -11.26%, fresh reports +9.12%, and SPY +3.46%, motivating the thesis half-life question. Supporting quarter-forecast diagnosti

ALT Roles in multi-agent large language model (LLM) systems allocate decisions as well as work. In a Planner–Executor–Reviewer team, the Reviewer's approval can determine when the team submits an answer and receives corrective feedback. We study both functions by varying role instructions while holding agents, topology, call budget, and ground-truth evaluator constant, using three open-weight models on Omni-MATH and two on SciBench. Removing roles largely eliminates functional specialization without lowering first-pass accuracy. After a failed first answer, however, submission decisions matter: a role-structured Reviewer often withholds approval, so its team submits less often and receives fewer evaluator verdicts. In an exploratory comparison with feedback available to both teams, the role-free team recovers more often across all five model–benchmark settings. Two further analyses support the importance of feedback opportunities. In a post hoc comparison at equal numbers of verdicts, the

ALT Autonomous reaction-mechanism exploration requires proposing reaction steps, preparing three-dimensional structures, and determining which reactant and product a computed saddle point connects. Large language model (LLM) agents can misjudge spatial relationships and confuse a computed structure with the species or step they intended to study. We present Cloudra, a multi-agent framework that constrains mechanistic output through a Delivery DAG of chemical objects. Species nodes carry geometries and bonding topology; elementary-step edges carry transition states and reaction connections between species. Cheminformatics algorithms establish molecular identities and atom correspondences. Deterministic routines measure and transform structures to prepare candidate geometries. Frequency and IRC calculations determine the stationary points found and the species they connect. Agents use these objects to test proposed steps, compare pathways, and revise the mechanism. CloudraBench evaluates the

ALT In this paper, we consider mixed-motive games (MMGs) which model various real-world multi-agent scenarios where self-interested agents must both cooperate and compete. We identify an issue with existing gifting methods, where agents become overly dependent on incoming gifts and fail to learn reward-yielding behaviors, a phenomenon we call gift over-reliance. To address this, we propose a refusal-augmented gifting framework that balances cooperation and competition in MMGs. Our approach introduces an adaptive refusal mechanism that allows agents to selectively reject a portion of received gifts from their policy-update signals, thereby mitigating gift over-reliance and preventing the agents from being exploited by other agents. This mechanism is gifting-method-agnostic, serving as a plug-in for existing schemes while enabling decentralized learning. We demonstrate that across diverse MMG environments and gifting schemes, our mechanism consistently reduces gift over-reliance and prevents

ALT Bridges are critical transportation infrastructure, and reliable operation and maintenance (O&M) is essential for traffic safety and long-term structural performance. However, bridge O&M faces key bottlenecks: no unified architecture coordinates heterogeneous resources; model inferences lack clear links to physical-mechanical laws; and experts' tacit knowledge remains difficult to formalize. This study proposes a knowledge-enhanced autonomy formalization methodology and apply it to construct the Bridge O&M Multi-Modal Multi-Agent System (BOMMA), which integrates heterogeneous diagnostic actions, physics-mechanics-informed representations, long-term memory, and structured experiential knowledge within a coordinated multi-agent workflow, enabling interpretable and traceable scheduling, analysis, and decision-making. On 3,492 multi-source instructions, the proposed method achieves scheduling recalls of 85.37% for simple and 99.40% for composite tasks, with 95.35% BERT F1-score for O&M act

ALT Mobile GUI agents can carry out tasks across apps, yet most run on a separate computer that drives a phone over the Android Debug Bridge (ADB), out of reach of ordinary users and of the apps through which most people reach Web services. We present Coati, a source-available agent that users install as an Android app. Its runtime on the phone, the host, records what a model alone cannot see: the effect of each action at its target, result screens across apps, and the progress of repeated steps. VerifyLoop checks action outcomes and completion claims against host evidence and reports a completion it cannot audit as unverified. AppMemory builds per-app procedural memory from observations that the interface supports and reuses it on later visits. A routed fast executor lets a lightweight selection model take simple, confident steps and lets the host repeat loops of simple steps that the large model plans once. On all 116 AndroidWorld tasks, with Gemini 3.8 Flash as every agent's backbone, C