Daily Papers

High-quality long-horizon training data for terminal agents is expensive to produce, often costing hundreds to thousands of dollars per task, because each task must keep the instruction, environment, reference solution, and verifier mutually consistent. Human authoring does not scale, and direct generation with large language models (LLMs) often breaks these dependencies. We present Recursive Synthetic Terminal Tasks (RST), a recursive verified synthesis framework for constructing long-horizon terminal-agent tasks at scale. Starting from verified seed tasks, RST extends the reference solution, realigns the verifier and instruction to the new workflow, validates the result in a fresh sandbox, and reuses accepted tasks as seeds for subsequent rounds. Across fifteen recursive rounds, RST produces 37,484 synthesized terminal-agent tasks at roughly $0.05 per task. Task difficulty increases substantially over rounds: the median reference solution grows from 67 to 374 lines, the median number of executed commands grows from 40 to 244, and DeepSeek-V4-Pro pass@4 drops from 90% at R1 to 2.5% at R15. To demonstrate training utility, we collect rejection-sampled Qwen3.5 trajectories on the synthesized tasks and use them for supervised fine-tuning. Fine-tuning on these trajectories improves Qwen3.5-27B and Qwen3.5-122B-A10B by up to 10 points on Terminal-Bench 2, Terminal-Bench Hard, and Long-Horizon Terminal Bench, while agentic PPO lifts Qwen3.5-27B to 49.44%, 32.00%, and 22.07% on the three benchmarks, corresponding to relative gains of 20.0%, 41.2%, and 21.9% over the base model. Moreover, after 15 rounds, the recursion shows no ceiling: synthesis yield and validation rates remain stable as difficulty keeps climbing, indicating that the process can continue well beyond the scale reported here.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has re-emerged as a natural approach for training interactive LLM agents in real-world environments. However, directly applying the widely used Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) algorithm to multi-turn tasks exposes notable limitations, particularly in scenarios requiring long-horizon reasoning. To address these challenges, we investigate more stable and effective advantage estimation strategies, especially for multi-turn settings. We first explore Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) as an alternative and find it to be more robust than GRPO. To further enhance PPO in multi-turn scenarios, we introduce turn-PPO, a variant that operates on a turn-level MDP formulation, as opposed to the commonly used token-level MDP. Our results on the WebShop and Sokoban datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of turn-PPO, both with and without long reasoning components.

The training paradigm for large language models (LLMs) is moving from static datasets to experience-based learning, where agents acquire skills via interacting with complex environments. To facilitate this transition we introduce GEM (General Experience Maker), an open-source environment simulator designed for the age of LLMs. Analogous to OpenAI-Gym for traditional reinforcement learning (RL), GEM provides a standardized framework for the environment-agent interface, including asynchronous vectorized execution for high throughput, and flexible wrappers for easy extensibility. GEM also features a diverse suite of environments, robust integrated tools, and single-file example scripts demonstrating using GEM with five popular RL training frameworks. Along with this, we also provide a set of baselines across 24 environments using REINFORCE with Return Batch Normalization (ReBN), which -- unlike GRPO -- is compatible with the full RL setting of dense per-turn rewards and offers better credit assignment. We further conduct apple-to-apple benchmarking of PPO, GRPO and REINFORCE in both single- and multi-turn settings using GEM to shed light on the algorithmic designs. Lastly, GEM also functions as a convenient evaluation toolkit besides a training environment. We hope this framework can help accelerate future agentic LLM research.

Asynchronous reinforcement learning improves rollout throughput for large language model agents by decoupling sample generation from policy optimization, but it also introduces a critical failure mode for PPO-style off-policy correction. In heterogeneous training systems, the total importance ratio should ideally be decomposed into two semantically distinct factors: a training--inference discrepancy term that aligns inference-side and training-side distributions at the same behavior-policy version, and a policy-staleness term that constrains the update from the historical policy to the current policy. We show that practical asynchronous pipelines with delayed updates and partial rollouts often lose the required historical training-side logits, or old logits. This missing-old-logit problem entangles discrepancy repair with staleness correction, breaks the intended semantics of decoupled correction, and makes clipping and masking thresholds interact undesirably. To address this issue, we study both exact and approximate correction routes. We propose three exact old-logit acquisition strategies: snapshot-based version tracking, a dedicated old-logit model, and synchronization via partial rollout interruption, and compare their system trade-offs. From the perspective of approximate correction, we focus on preserving the benefits of decoupled correction through a more appropriate approximate policy when exact old logits cannot be recovered at low cost, without incurring extra system overhead. Following this analysis, we adopt a revised PPO-EWMA method, which achieves significant gains in both training speed and optimization performance. Code at https://github.com/millioniron/ROLL.

Existing Large Language Model (LLM) agents struggle in interactive environments requiring long-horizon planning, primarily due to compounding errors when simulating future states. To address this, we propose ProAct, a framework that enables agents to internalize accurate lookahead reasoning through a two-stage training paradigm. First, we introduce Grounded LookAhead Distillation (GLAD), where the agent undergoes supervised fine-tuning on trajectories derived from environment-based search. By compressing complex search trees into concise, causal reasoning chains, the agent learns the logic of foresight without the computational overhead of inference-time search. Second, to further refine decision accuracy, we propose the Monte-Carlo Critic (MC-Critic), a plug-and-play auxiliary value estimator designed to enhance policy-gradient algorithms like PPO and GRPO. By leveraging lightweight environment rollouts to calibrate value estimates, MC-Critic provides a low-variance signal that facilitates stable policy optimization without relying on expensive model-based value approximation. Experiments on both stochastic (e.g., 2048) and deterministic (e.g., Sokoban) environments demonstrate that ProAct significantly improves planning accuracy. Notably, a 4B parameter model trained with ProAct outperforms all open-source baselines and rivals state-of-the-art closed-source models, while demonstrating robust generalization to unseen environments. The codes and models are available at https://github.com/GreatX3/ProAct

Large Language Models (LLMs) empowered with Tool-Integrated Reasoning (TIR) can iteratively plan, call external tools, and integrate returned information to solve complex, long-horizon reasoning tasks. Agentic Reinforcement Learning (Agentic RL) optimizes such models over full tool-interaction trajectories, but two key challenges hinder effectiveness: (1) Sparse, non-instructive rewards, such as binary 0-1 verifiable signals, provide limited guidance for intermediate steps and slow convergence; (2) Gradient degradation in Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), where identical rewards within a rollout group yield zero advantage, reducing sample efficiency and destabilizing training. To address these challenges, we propose two complementary techniques: Progressive Reward Shaping (PRS) and Value-based Sampling Policy Optimization (VSPO). PRS is a curriculum-inspired reward design that introduces dense, stage-wise feedback - encouraging models to first master parseable and properly formatted tool calls, then optimize for factual correctness and answer quality. We instantiate PRS for short-form QA (with a length-aware BLEU to fairly score concise answers) and long-form QA (with LLM-as-a-Judge scoring to prevent reward hacking). VSPO is an enhanced GRPO variant that replaces low-value samples with prompts selected by a task-value metric balancing difficulty and uncertainty, and applies value-smoothing clipping to stabilize gradient updates. Experiments on multiple short-form and long-form QA benchmarks show that PRS consistently outperforms traditional binary rewards, and VSPO achieves superior stability, faster convergence, and higher final performance compared to PPO, GRPO, CISPO, and SFT-only baselines. Together, PRS and VSPO yield LLM-based TIR agents that generalize better across domains.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to Agentic AI is a comprehensive practitioner's reference for building autonomous AI systems. The book covers the full stack from first principles to production deployment, organized around a central thesis: building great agentic systems requires understanding every layer of the pipeline, not just one. The book opens with the LLM substrate -- transformer architecture, GPU systems, training and fine-tuning (SFT,LoRA, MoE), model compression, and inference optimization -- treated as essential foundations rather than the primary focus. It then develops the alignment and reasoning layer: reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), PPO, DPO and its variants, GRPO, reward modeling, and RL for large reasoning models including chain-of-thought and test-time scaling. The second half is devoted to agentic AI proper. Topics include agentic training and trajectory-based RL, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG and Agentic RAG), memory systems (in-context, external, episodic, and semantic), agent harness design and context management, and a taxonomy of agent design patterns. Inter-agent coordination is covered in depth: the Model Context Protocol (MCP), agent skills and tool use, the Agent-to-Agent (A2A) communication protocol, and multi-agent architectures spanning centralized, decentralized, and hierarchical topologies. The book concludes with agent development frameworks, agentic UI design, evaluation methodology for agentic tasks, and production deployment. Each chapter pairs rigorous theoretical foundations with implementation guidance, code examples, and references to the primary literature.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as the predominant paradigm for training large language model (LLM)-based AI agents. However, existing backbone RL algorithms lack verified convergence guarantees in agentic scenarios, especially in multi-turn settings, which can lead to training instability and failure to converge to optimal policies. In this paper, we systematically analyze how different combinations of policy update mechanisms and advantage estimation methods affect convergence properties in single/multi-turn scenarios. We find that REINFORCE with Group Relative Advantage Estimation (GRAE) can converge to the globally optimal under undiscounted conditions, but the combination of PPO & GRAE breaks PPO's original monotonic improvement property. Furthermore, we demonstrate that mainstream backbone RL algorithms cannot simultaneously achieve both critic-free and convergence guarantees in multi-turn scenarios. To address this, we propose SeeUPO (Sequence-level Sequential Update Policy Optimization), a critic-free approach with convergence guarantees for multi-turn interactions. SeeUPO models multi-turn interaction as sequentially executed multi-agent bandit problems. Through turn-by-turn sequential policy updates in reverse execution order, it ensures monotonic improvement and convergence to global optimal solution via backward induction. Experiments on AppWorld and BFCL v4 demonstrate SeeUPO's substantial improvements over existing backbone algorithms: relative gains of 43.3%-54.6% on Qwen3-14B and 24.1%-41.9% on Qwen2.5-14B (averaged across benchmarks), along with superior training stability.

We study what actually works and what doesn't for training large language models as agents via multi-turn reinforcement learning. Despite rapid progress, existing frameworks and definitions are fragmented, and there is no systematic formulation or analysis of which design choices matter across tasks. We address this gap by first breaking down the design space into three inter-related pillars -- environment, reward, and policy -- and empirically derive a recipe for training LLM agents in situated textual domains. In particular, we test TextWorld and ALFWorld, popular domains for testing situated embodied reasoning, as well as SWE-Gym for more software engineering style tasks. (i) For the environment, we analyze the impacts of task complexity in terms of sizes of the state and action spaces as well as optimal solution length, finding that even simple environments within a domain can provide signal on how well an agent can generalize to more complex tasks. (ii) For the reward, we ablate relative reward sparsity, observing that while dense turn-level rewards accelerate training, performance and stability is highly dependent on the choice of RL algorithm. (iii) And for the agent's policy, we explore the interplay between reward sparsity and biased (PPO, GRPO) and unbiased (RLOO) policy gradient methods in addition to showing how to find the optimal Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT) to RL training ratio given a fixed budget. We distill these findings into a training recipe that guides co-design across the three pillars, facilitating research and practical efforts in multi-turn agentic RL. Code: https://github.com/pearls-lab/meow-tea-taro

Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) has become a critical stage in the post-training of large language models. Existing critic-free, group-relative methods estimate policy advantages from multiple rollouts, avoiding the substantial memory overhead of conventional proximal policy optimization (PPO) and achieving strong performance on long-horizon interactive tasks. Despite their success, recent studies revealed three limitations: (1) Lack explicit value generalization and effective temporal credit assignment; (2) Suffer from potential advantage collapse in long-horizon complex tasks; (3) Require a costly trade-off between sampling budget and policy performance. In this work, we propose Single-rollout Autoregressive Policy Optimization (SAPO), a low-memory and compute-efficient framework in which the policy and value functions share a single autoregressive backbone. SAPO exploits the autoregressive structure of LLMs to produce policy and value predictions at distinct causal boundaries with shared parameters, while independently optimizing the PPO objectives and auxiliary on-policy SARSA objectives. To robustly estimate the contribution of each turn, we further introduce a trajectory-level generalized advantage estimator that combines lambda-returns with batch normalization. Experiments across ALFWorld and WebShop with Qwen2.5-1.5B/7B show that SAPO trains stably and outperforms PPO and GRPO by mean +15.1 and +12.1 percentage points, respectively, while eliminating the memory cost of a separate critic model and reducing per-iteration runtime by 33.2% over PPO.

Reasoning is a fundamental cognitive process that enables logical inference, problem-solving, and decision-making. With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), reasoning has emerged as a key capability that distinguishes advanced AI systems from conventional models that empower chatbots. In this survey, we categorize existing methods along two orthogonal dimensions: (1) Regimes, which define the stage at which reasoning is achieved (either at inference time or through dedicated training); and (2) Architectures, which determine the components involved in the reasoning process, distinguishing between standalone LLMs and agentic compound systems that incorporate external tools, and multi-agent collaborations. Within each dimension, we analyze two key perspectives: (1) Input level, which focuses on techniques that construct high-quality prompts that the LLM condition on; and (2) Output level, which methods that refine multiple sampled candidates to enhance reasoning quality. This categorization provides a systematic understanding of the evolving landscape of LLM reasoning, highlighting emerging trends such as the shift from inference-scaling to learning-to-reason (e.g., DeepSeek-R1), and the transition to agentic workflows (e.g., OpenAI Deep Research, Manus Agent). Additionally, we cover a broad spectrum of learning algorithms, from supervised fine-tuning to reinforcement learning such as PPO and GRPO, and the training of reasoners and verifiers. We also examine key designs of agentic workflows, from established patterns like generator-evaluator and LLM debate to recent innovations. ...

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is a ubiquitous on-policy reinforcement learning algorithm but is significantly less utilized than off-policy learning algorithms in multi-agent settings. This is often due to the belief that PPO is significantly less sample efficient than off-policy methods in multi-agent systems. In this work, we carefully study the performance of PPO in cooperative multi-agent settings. We show that PPO-based multi-agent algorithms achieve surprisingly strong performance in four popular multi-agent testbeds: the particle-world environments, the StarCraft multi-agent challenge, Google Research Football, and the Hanabi challenge, with minimal hyperparameter tuning and without any domain-specific algorithmic modifications or architectures. Importantly, compared to competitive off-policy methods, PPO often achieves competitive or superior results in both final returns and sample efficiency. Finally, through ablation studies, we analyze implementation and hyperparameter factors that are critical to PPO's empirical performance, and give concrete practical suggestions regarding these factors. Our results show that when using these practices, simple PPO-based methods can be a strong baseline in cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning. Source code is released at https://github.com/marlbenchmark/on-policy.

Large language model (LLM)-based agents are increasingly expected to negotiate, coordinate, and transact autonomously, yet existing benchmarks lack principled settings for evaluating language-mediated economic interaction among multiple agents. We introduce AgenticPay, a benchmark and simulation framework for multi-agent buyer-seller negotiation driven by natural language. AgenticPay models markets in which buyers and sellers possess private constraints and product-dependent valuations, and must reach agreements through multi-round linguistic negotiation rather than numeric bidding alone. The framework supports a diverse suite of over 110 tasks ranging from bilateral bargaining to many-to-many markets, with structured action extraction and metrics for feasibility, efficiency, and welfare. Benchmarking state-of-the-art proprietary and open-weight LLMs reveals substantial gaps in negotiation performance and highlights challenges in long-horizon strategic reasoning, establishing AgenticPay as a foundation for studying agentic commerce and language-based market interaction. Code and dataset are available at the link: https://github.com/SafeRL-Lab/AgenticPay.

We present KAT-Coder-V2.5, a coding-focused agentic model trained to act autonomously inside real, executable repositories rather than as a single-turn code generator. Its capability is bottlenecked less by model scale than by the scarcity of reproducible environments, verifiable rewards, and high-value trajectories, which we address with an end-to-end agentic post-training framework. AutoBuilder reconstructs multilingual repositories into sandboxed environments with fail-to-pass and pass-to-pass verification at scale, from which we regenerate self-contained task specifications, recover near-miss trajectories, and distill supervision through process-aware filtering, while KwaiClawEnv synthesizes large-scale tool-use trajectories from executable services and real task seeds. We further scale reinforcement learning with harness randomization, a reliability-hardened sandbox, an asymmetric actor--critic PPO with hindsight-augmented value estimation, and a harness-oriented reward framework, and unify SWE, Agent-Claw, and WebCoding experts via Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation. Across six software-engineering and agentic benchmarks, KAT-Coder-V2.5 delivers the best agentic tool-use result on PinchBench and ranks second only to the frontier Opus 4.8 on repository-level software engineering. Our service is available at https://streamlake.com/product/kat-coder.

Most recently developed approaches to cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning in the centralized training with decentralized execution setting involve estimating a centralized, joint value function. In this paper, we demonstrate that, despite its various theoretical shortcomings, Independent PPO (IPPO), a form of independent learning in which each agent simply estimates its local value function, can perform just as well as or better than state-of-the-art joint learning approaches on popular multi-agent benchmark suite SMAC with little hyperparameter tuning. We also compare IPPO to several variants; the results suggest that IPPO's strong performance may be due to its robustness to some forms of environment non-stationarity.

Policy optimization methods with function approximation are widely used in multi-agent reinforcement learning. However, it remains elusive how to design such algorithms with statistical guarantees. Leveraging a multi-agent performance difference lemma that characterizes the landscape of multi-agent policy optimization, we find that the localized action value function serves as an ideal descent direction for each local policy. Motivated by the observation, we present a multi-agent PPO algorithm in which the local policy of each agent is updated similarly to vanilla PPO. We prove that with standard regularity conditions on the Markov game and problem-dependent quantities, our algorithm converges to the globally optimal policy at a sublinear rate. We extend our algorithm to the off-policy setting and introduce pessimism to policy evaluation, which aligns with experiments. To our knowledge, this is the first provably convergent multi-agent PPO algorithm in cooperative Markov games.

Large language models (LLMs) have enabled a new class of agentic AI systems that reason, plan, and act by invoking external tools. However, most existing agentic architectures remain centralized and monolithic, limiting scalability, specialization, and interoperability. This paper proposes a framework for scalable agentic intelligence, termed the Internet of Agentic AI, in which autonomous, heterogeneous agents distributed across cloud and edge infrastructure dynamically form coalitions to execute task-driven workflows. We formalize a network-native model of agentic collaboration and introduce an incentive-compatible workflow-coalition feasibility framework that integrates capability coverage, network locality, and economic implementability. To enable scalable coordination, we formulate a minimum-effort coalition selection problem and propose a decentralized coalition formation algorithm. The proposed framework can operate as a coordination layer above the Model Context Protocol (MCP). A healthcare case study demonstrates how domain specialization, cloud-edge heterogeneity, and dynamic coalition formation enable scalable, resilient, and economically viable agentic workflows. This work lays the foundation for principled coordination and scalability in the emerging era of Internet of Agentic AI.

Networks in the current 5G and beyond systems increasingly carry heterogeneous traffic with diverse quality-of-service constraints, making real-time routing decisions both complex and time-critical. A common approach, such as a heuristic with human intervention or training a single centralized RL policy or synchronizing updates across multiple learners, struggles with scalability and straggler effects. We address this by proposing an asynchronous multi-agent reinforcement learning (AMARL) framework in which independent PPO agents, one per service, plan routes in parallel and commit resource deltas to a shared global resource environment. This coordination by state preserves feasibility across services and enables specialization for service-specific objectives. We evaluate the method on an O-RAN like network simulation using nearly real-time traffic data from the city of Montreal. We compared against a single-agent PPO baseline. AMARL achieves a similar Grade of Service (acceptance rate) (GoS) and end-to-end latency, with reduced training wall-clock time and improved robustness to demand shifts. These results suggest that asynchronous, service-specialized agents provide a scalable and practical approach to distributed routing, with applicability extending beyond the O-RAN domain.

The study of decentralized learning or independent learning in cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning has a history of decades. Recently empirical studies show that independent PPO (IPPO) can obtain good performance, close to or even better than the methods of centralized training with decentralized execution, in several benchmarks. However, decentralized actor-critic with convergence guarantee is still open. In this paper, we propose decentralized policy optimization (DPO), a decentralized actor-critic algorithm with monotonic improvement and convergence guarantee. We derive a novel decentralized surrogate for policy optimization such that the monotonic improvement of joint policy can be guaranteed by each agent independently optimizing the surrogate. In practice, this decentralized surrogate can be realized by two adaptive coefficients for policy optimization at each agent. Empirically, we compare DPO with IPPO in a variety of cooperative multi-agent tasks, covering discrete and continuous action spaces, and fully and partially observable environments. The results show DPO outperforms IPPO in most tasks, which can be the evidence for our theoretical results.

LLM agents have emerged as powerful systems for tackling multi-turn tasks by interleaving internal reasoning and external tool interactions. Agentic Reinforcement Learning has recently drawn significant research attention as a critical post-training paradigm to further refine these capabilities. In this paper, we present AT^2PO (Agentic Turn-based Policy Optimization via Tree Search), a unified framework for multi-turn agentic RL that addresses three core challenges: limited exploration diversity, sparse credit assignment, and misaligned policy optimization. AT^2PO introduces a turn-level tree structure that jointly enables Entropy-Guided Tree Expansion for strategic exploration and Turn-wise Credit Assignment for fine-grained reward propagation from sparse outcomes. Complementing this, we propose Agentic Turn-based Policy Optimization, a turn-level learning objective that aligns policy updates with the natural decision granularity of agentic interactions. ATPO is orthogonal to tree search and can be readily integrated into any multi-turn RL pipeline. Experiments across seven benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over the state-of-the-art baseline by up to 1.84 percentage points in average, with ablation studies validating the effectiveness of each component. Our code is available at https://github.com/zzfoutofspace/ATPO.

Agentic AI enables LLM to dynamically reason, plan, and interact with tools to solve complex tasks. However, agentic workflows often require many iterative reasoning steps and tool invocations, leading to significant operational expense, end-to-end latency and failures due to hallucinations. This work introduces Agent Workflow Optimization (AWO), a framework that identifies and optimizes redundant tool execution patterns to improve the efficiency and robustness of agentic workflows. AWO analyzes existing workflow traces to discover recurring sequences of tool calls and transforms them into meta-tools, which are deterministic, composite tools that bundle multiple agent actions into a single invocation. Meta-tools bypass unnecessary intermediate LLM reasoning steps and reduce operational cost while also shortening execution paths, leading to fewer failures. Experiments on two agentic AI benchmarks show that AWO reduces the number of LLM calls up to 11.9% while also increasing the task success rate by up to 4.2 percent points.

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.

Healthcare organizations are beginning to embed agentic AI into routine workflows, including clinical documentation support and early-warning monitoring. As these capabilities diffuse across departments and vendors, health systems face agent sprawl, causing duplicated agents, unclear accountability, inconsistent controls, and tool permissions that persist beyond the original use case. Existing AI governance frameworks emphasize lifecycle risk management but provide limited guidance for the day-to-day operations of agent fleets. We propose a Unified Agent Lifecycle Management (UALM) blueprint derived from a rapid, practice-oriented synthesis of governance standards, agent security literature, and healthcare compliance requirements. UALM maps recurring gaps onto five control-plane layers: (1) an identity and persona registry, (2) orchestration and cross-domain mediation, (3) PHI-bounded context and memory, (4) runtime policy enforcement with kill-switch triggers, and (5) lifecycle management and decommissioning linked to credential revocation and audit logging. A companion maturity model supports staged adoption. UALM offers healthcare CIOs, CISOs, and clinical leaders an implementable pattern for audit-ready oversight that preserves local innovation and enables safer scaling across clinical and administrative domains.

Language models as intelligent agents push the boundaries of sequential decision-making agents but struggle with limited knowledge of environmental dynamics and exponentially huge action space. Recent efforts like GLAM and TWOSOME manually constrain the action space to a restricted subset and employ reinforcement learning to align agents' knowledge with specific environments. However, they overlook fine-grained credit assignments for intra-action tokens, which is essential for efficient language agent optimization, and rely on human's prior knowledge to restrict action space. This paper proposes decomposing language agent optimization from the action level to the token level, offering finer supervision for each intra-action token and manageable optimization complexity in environments with unrestricted action spaces. Beginning with the simplification of flattening all actions, we theoretically explore the discrepancies between action-level optimization and this naive token-level optimization. We then derive the Bellman backup with Action Decomposition (BAD) to integrate credit assignments for both intra-action and inter-action tokens, effectively eliminating the discrepancies. Implementing BAD within the PPO algorithm, we introduce Policy Optimization with Action Decomposition (POAD). POAD benefits from a finer-grained credit assignment process and lower optimization complexity, leading to enhanced learning efficiency and generalization abilities in aligning language agents with interactive environments. We validate POAD across diverse testbeds, with results affirming the advantages of our approach and the correctness of our theoretical analysis.

LLM-based agents can act on behalf of a user to access cloud services, call tools, or invoke agents. At session start, the agent's permissions are set but remain static, and each request is evaluated independently, without considering prior actions. Within its permissions, an agent may act contrary to the delegated task, combine individually permitted actions into a prohibited outcome, or delegate authority to a sub-agent without limiting it. A prompt injection poses a risk only if the agent has authority to perform such actions; this is therefore a problem of authorization architecture, not just the model. The Agentic Principal Chain (APC) tracks delegated authority from one principal to the next. APC evaluates each request against the accumulated session state using six authorization checks. APC carries forward and restricts delegated scope and budgets. Using composition closure, APC checks requests against prior actions to prevent prohibited combinations and enforces the decision outside the model. We prove Blast Radius Monotonicity and Composition Soundness for APC implementations; Composition Soundness is limited to prohibited combinations under a complete restriction set and serialized admission. We evaluated 3,154 instances including InjecAgent, AgentDojo, and ASB. Our compromised-model evaluation tests APC independently of model behavior by inserting the ground-truth attack call after the first legitimate tool call. AgentDojo exfiltration fell from 75-100% to 0% across all four domains; APC blocked all 544 InjecAgent data-stealing cases. Intent binding reduced destruction from 38.6% to 4.0% and manipulation from 90.5% to 12.1%. Authorization latency was 0.24 ms at the 99th percentile on an idle host; across 949 AgentDojo task-injection pairs, utility was 8.6 and 13.9 percentage points lower in the two settings. Implementation, evaluation tools, and data are publicly available.

Automated negotiations in insurance and business-to-business (B2B) commerce encounter substantial challenges. Current systems force a trade-off between convenience and privacy by routing sensitive financial data through centralized servers, increasing security risks, and diminishing user trust. This study introduces a device-native autonomous Agentic AI system for privacy-preserving negotiations. The proposed system operates exclusively on user hardware, enabling real-time bargaining while maintaining sensitive constraints locally. It integrates zero-knowledge proofs to ensure privacy and employs distilled world models to support advanced on-device reasoning. The architecture incorporates six technical components within an Agentic AI workflow. Agents autonomously plan negotiation strategies, conduct secure multi-party bargaining, and generate cryptographic audit trails without exposing user data to external servers. The system is evaluated in insurance and B2B procurement scenarios across diverse device configurations. Results show an average success rate of 87 %, a 2.4x reduction in latency relative to cloud baselines, and strong privacy preservation through zero-knowledge proofs. User studies show 27 % higher trust scores when decision trails are available. These findings establish a foundation for trustworthy autonomous agents in privacy-sensitive financial domains.

Reinforcement learning (RL) with verifiable rewards constructs trajectory-level advantage estimates, yet it often fails to credit the few pivotal decisions that determine outcomes in long-horizon, multi-turn agentic tasks. Recent work introduces privileged self-distillation for credit assignment, providing denser supervision, but it remains unclear how such local signals should represent sequential credit. We propose AgentOPSD, a critic-free, recursive method for turn-level credit assignment in agentic reinforcement learning. AgentOPSD aggregates token-level teacher-student log-probability gaps into turn-level evidence and recursively updates a Bayesian belief state in log-odds space. This yields a principled reweighting scheme that converts sparse outcome supervision into turn-level credit signals and identifies pivotal turns through the marginal belief revision between consecutive states. The method is fully compatible with standard policy optimization and requires neither an additional critic nor extra rollouts. We evaluate AgentOPSD on ALFWorld, WebShop, and Search-QA using Qwen2.5 models at two scales (3B and 7B). AgentOPSD outperforms GRPO and strong self-distillation baselines, achieving 89.1% success on ALFWorld with Qwen2.5-7B. Ablation studies attribute the gains to turn-level aggregation and history-dependent recursive belief updates.

Interactive multimodal agents must convert raw visual observations into coherent sequences of language-conditioned actions -- a capability that current vision-language models (VLMs) still lack. Earlier reinforcement-learning (RL) efforts could, in principle, endow VLMs with such skills, but they have seldom tested whether the learned behaviours generalize beyond their training simulators, and they depend either on brittle hyperparameter tuning or on dense-reward environments with low state variability. We introduce Vision-Language Decoupled Actor-Critic (VL-DAC), a lightweight, hyperparameter-free RL algorithm. VL-DAC applies PPO updates to action tokens while learning value only at the environment-step level: an arrangement, to our knowledge, not previously explored for large VLMs or LLMs. This simple decoupling removes unstable weighting terms and yields faster, more reliable convergence. Training a single VLM with VL-DAC in one inexpensive simulator at a time (MiniWorld, Gym-Cards, ALFWorld, or WebShop) already produces policies that generalize widely: +50\% relative on BALROG (game-centric agentic control), +5\% relative on the hardest part of VSI-Bench (spatial planning), and +2\% on VisualWebBench (web navigation), all without degrading general image understanding accuracy. These results provide the first evidence that a simple RL algorithm can train VLMs entirely in cheap synthetic worlds while delivering measurable gains on real-image agentic, spatial-reasoning, and web-navigation benchmarks.

The formidable capacity for zero- or few-shot decision-making in language agents encourages us to pose a compelling question: Can language agents be alternatives to PPO agents in traditional sequential decision-making tasks? To investigate this, we first take environments collected in OpenAI Gym as our testbeds and ground them to textual environments that construct the TextGym simulator. This allows for straightforward and efficient comparisons between PPO agents and language agents, given the widespread adoption of OpenAI Gym. To ensure a fair and effective benchmarking, we introduce 5 levels of scenario for accurate domain-knowledge controlling and a unified RL-inspired framework for language agents. Additionally, we propose an innovative explore-exploit-guided language (EXE) agent to solve tasks within TextGym. Through numerical experiments and ablation studies, we extract valuable insights into the decision-making capabilities of language agents and make a preliminary evaluation of their potential to be alternatives to PPO in classical sequential decision-making problems. This paper sheds light on the performance of language agents and paves the way for future research in this exciting domain. Our code is publicly available at~https://github.com/mail-ecnu/Text-Gym-Agents.

LLM agents are expected to act over multiple turns, using search, browsing interfaces, and terminal tools to complete user goals. Yet not every goal is well specified or achievable in the available environment. In such cases, a reliable agent should recognize that further interaction is unlikely to help and abstain from additional tool calls. We define Agentic Abstention, the problem of deciding when an agent should stop acting under uncertainty. Unlike standard LLM abstention, which is usually evaluated as a single-turn answer-or-abstain decision, agentic abstention is a sequential decision problem: an agent can answer, abstain, or gather more information at each turn, and the need to abstain may only become clear after interacting with the environment. We study this problem across web shopping, terminal environments, and question answering, evaluating 13 LLM-as-agent systems and 2 agent scaffolds on more than 28,000 tasks. Our results show that the main challenge is not only whether agents can abstain, but also when they abstain. Some agents never abstain when they should, while others do so only after many unnecessary interactions. This gap is especially large on tasks where the instruction appears feasible until the environment reveals otherwise (e.g., no valid result matches the instruction). We further find that model scale, reasoning, and agent scaffolding affect abstention in different ways, where larger or more capable models sometimes perform worse at timely abstention. Finally, we introduce CONVOLVE, a context engineering method for improving agentic abstention that distills full interaction trajectories into reusable stopping rules. On WebShop, CONVOLVE substantially improves timely abstention without updating model parameters, raising Llama-3.3-70B's timely recall rate from 26.7 to 57.4. Our dataset and code are available at https://lhannnn.github.io/agentic-abstention

Existing multi-agent frameworks allow each agent to simultaneously plan, execute, and evaluate its own actions -- a structural deficiency we term the "Logic Monopoly." Empirical evidence quantifies the resulting "Reliability Gap": 84.30% average attack success rates across ten deployment scenarios, 31.4% emergent deceptive behavior without explicit reward signals, and cascading failure modes rooted in six structural bottlenecks. The remedy is not better alignment of individual models but a social contract for agents: institutional infrastructure that enforces a constitutional Separation of Power. This paper introduces the Agent Enterprise for Enterprise (AE4E) paradigm -- agents as autonomous, legally identifiable business entities within a functionalist social system -- with a contract-centric SoP model trifurcating authority into Legislation, Execution, and Adjudication branches. The paradigm is operationalized through the NetX Enterprise Framework (NEF): governance hubs, TEE-backed compute enclaves, privacy-preserving data bridges, and an Agent-Native blockchain substrate. The Agent Enterprise Economy scales across four deployment tiers from private enclaves to a global Web of Services. The Agentic Social Layer, grounded in Parsons' AGIL framework, provides institutional infrastructure via sixty-plus named Institutional AE4Es. 143 pages, 173 references, eight specialized smart contracts.

Advantage Actor-critic (A2C) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) are popular deep reinforcement learning algorithms used for game AI in recent years. A common understanding is that A2C and PPO are separate algorithms because PPO's clipped objective appears significantly different than A2C's objective. In this paper, however, we show A2C is a special case of PPO. We present theoretical justifications and pseudocode analysis to demonstrate why. To validate our claim, we conduct an empirical experiment using Stable-baselines3, showing A2C and PPO produce the exact same models when other settings are controlled.

We introduce Diffusion Policy Policy Optimization, DPPO, an algorithmic framework including best practices for fine-tuning diffusion-based policies (e.g. Diffusion Policy) in continuous control and robot learning tasks using the policy gradient (PG) method from reinforcement learning (RL). PG methods are ubiquitous in training RL policies with other policy parameterizations; nevertheless, they had been conjectured to be less efficient for diffusion-based policies. Surprisingly, we show that DPPO achieves the strongest overall performance and efficiency for fine-tuning in common benchmarks compared to other RL methods for diffusion-based policies and also compared to PG fine-tuning of other policy parameterizations. Through experimental investigation, we find that DPPO takes advantage of unique synergies between RL fine-tuning and the diffusion parameterization, leading to structured and on-manifold exploration, stable training, and strong policy robustness. We further demonstrate the strengths of DPPO in a range of realistic settings, including simulated robotic tasks with pixel observations, and via zero-shot deployment of simulation-trained policies on robot hardware in a long-horizon, multi-stage manipulation task. Website with code: diffusion-ppo.github.io

In an era of rapid technological advancements, agentification of software tools has emerged as a critical innovation, enabling systems to function autonomously and adaptively. This paper introduces MediaMind as a case study to demonstrate the agentification process, highlighting how existing software can be transformed into intelligent agents capable of independent decision-making and dynamic interaction. Developed by aiXplain, MediaMind leverages agent-based architecture to autonomously monitor, analyze, and provide insights from multilingual media content in real time. The focus of this paper is on the technical methodologies and design principles behind agentifying MediaMind, showcasing how agentification enhances adaptability, efficiency, and responsiveness. Through detailed case studies and practical examples, we illustrate how the agentification of MediaMind empowers organizations to streamline workflows, optimize decision-making, and respond to evolving trends. This work underscores the broader potential of agentification to revolutionize software tools across various domains.

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) is catalyzing a shift towards autonomous AI Agents capable of executing complex, multi-step tasks. However, these agents remain brittle when faced with real-world exceptions, making Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) supervision essential for mission-critical applications. In this paper, we present AgentBay, a novel sandbox service designed from the ground up for hybrid interaction. AgentBay provides secure, isolated execution environments spanning Windows, Linux, Android, Web Browsers, and Code interpreters. Its core contribution is a unified session accessible via a hybrid control interface: An AI agent can interact programmatically via mainstream interfaces (MCP, Open Source SDK), while a human operator can, at any moment, seamlessly take over full manual control. This seamless intervention is enabled by Adaptive Streaming Protocol (ASP). Unlike traditional VNC/RDP, ASP is specifically engineered for this hybrid use case, delivering an ultra-low-latency, smoother user experience that remains resilient even in weak network environments. It achieves this by dynamically blending command-based and video-based streaming, adapting its encoding strategy based on network conditions and the current controller (AI or human). Our evaluation demonstrates strong results in security, performance, and task completion rates. In a benchmark of complex tasks, the AgentBay (Agent + Human) model achieved more than 48% success rate improvement. Furthermore, our ASP protocol reduces bandwidth consumption by up to 50% compared to standard RDP, and in end-to-end latency with around 5% reduction, especially under poor network conditions. We posit that AgentBay provides a foundational primitive for building the next generation of reliable, human-supervised autonomous systems.

Reinforcement Learning has emerged as a post-training approach to elicit agentic RAG behaviors such as search and planning from language models. However, compact language models (e.g., 0.5B parameters) struggle due to poor reasoning ability, resulting in sparse rewards and unstable training. To overcome these difficulties, we propose Distillation-Guided Policy Optimization (DGPO), which addresses the challenges through cold-start initialization from teacher demonstrations and continuous teacher guidance during policy optimization. To systematically evaluate our approach, we introduce Agentic RAG Capabilities (ARC), a fine-grained metric analyzing reasoning, search coordination, and response synthesis. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that DGPO enables compact models to achieve sophisticated agentic search behaviors, even outperforming the larger teacher model in some cases. DGPO makes agentic RAG feasible in computing resource-constrained environments.

Agentic systems enable the intelligent automation of complex workflows, specific to additive manufacturing this is applicable for complex tasks such as process parameter optimization for mechanical properties. This work investigates the AI enabled agentic process optimization within Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) to iteratively improve the tensile and flexural properties of 3 different materials on the Inova Mk1. These materials include PA12 GF, PA11 Onyx, and PA12 Blend (volume mixture of 25% PA12 GF and 75% PA12 White) and with using knowledge from previous builds and minimal guidance from the user, the agentic system was able to optimize process parameters over a small number of iterations to achieve comparable TDS specified mechanical properties. This work showcases the ability for an agentic system to continually learn from updated data, enabling the intelligent automation of complex tasks such as process parameter optimization for selective laser sintering.

Agentic systems powered by large language models (LLMs) are becoming progressively more complex and capable. Their increasing agency and expanding deployment settings attract growing attention over effective governance policies, monitoring and control protocols. Based on emerging landscapes of the agentic market, we analyze the potential liability issues stemming from delegated use of LLM agents and their extended systems from a principal-agent perspective. Our analysis complements existing risk-based studies on artificial agency and covers the spectrum of important aspects of the principal-agent relationship and their potential consequences at deployment. Furthermore, we motivate method developments for technical governance along the directions of interpretability and behavior evaluations, reward and conflict management, and the mitigation of misalignment and misconduct through principled engineering of detection and fail-safe mechanisms. By illustrating the outstanding issues in AI liability for LLM-based agentic systems, we aim to inform the system design, auditing and monitoring approaches to enhancing transparency and accountability.

Agentic coding -- software development workflows in which autonomous coding agents plan, implement, and submit code changes with minimal human involvement -- is rapidly gaining traction. Prior work has shown that Pull Requests (PRs) produced using coding agents (Agentic-PRs) are accepted less often than PRs that are not labeled as agentic (Human-PRs). The rejection reasons for a single agent (Claude Code) have been explored, but a comparison of how rejection reasons differ between Agentic-PRs generated by different agents has not yet been performed. This comparison is important since different coding agents are often used for different purposes, which can lead to agent-specific failure patterns. In this paper, we inspect 654 rejected PRs from the AIDev dataset covering five coding agents, as well as a human baseline. Our results show that seven rejection modes occur only in Agentic-PRs, including distrust of AI-generated code. We also observe agent-specific patterns (e.g., automated withdrawal of inactive PRs by Devin), reflecting differences in how agents are configured and used in practice. Notably, a large proportion of rejected PRs (67.9%) lack explicit reviewer feedback, making their rejection reasons difficult to determine. To mitigate this issue, we propose a set of heuristics that reduce the proportion of such cases, offering a practical preprocessing step for future studies of PR rejection in agentic coding.

As autonomous systems move from prototypes to real deployments, the ability of multiple agents to make decentralized, cooperative decisions becomes a core requirement. This paper examines how agentic artificial intelligence, agents that act independently, adaptively and proactively can improve task allocation and coordination in multi-agent systems, with primary emphasis on drone delivery and secondary relevance to warehouse automation. We formulate the problem in a cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning setting and implement a lightweight multi-agent Proximal Policy Optimization, called IPPO, approach in PyTorch under a centralized-training, decentralized-execution paradigm. Experiments are conducted in PettingZoo environment, where multiple homogeneous drones or agents must self-organize to cover distinct targets without explicit communication.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems record transactions reliably but still delegate almost all operational decision-making to human specialists, because classical rule-based automation cannot reason about exceptions and monolithic AI assistants degrade when asked to coordinate across functional boundaries. This paper presents Agentic ERP, an expert-system architecture that combines role-aligned large-language-model (LLM) agents with a risk-tiered human-in-the-loop harness and a graph-based orchestrator to execute end-to-end business workflows on a production ERP backend. First, autonomous ERP operation is formulated as a constrained sequential-decision problem over a structured enterprise state, with a decomposition argument linking role-aligned agents to a measurable reduction in per-step tool-selection complexity. Second, a graph-based Planner--Executor--Reflector--Responder orchestration decouples generation from evaluation through externalised grading criteria and sprint contracts, packaging recent harness-engineering principles as inspectable expert-system artefacts. Third, the system is evaluated at three levels: a scenario-based task suite, a comprehensive comparison of six orchestration paradigms on cross-functional crisis tasks, and a 365-day agent-in-the-loop simulation against rule-based RPA and no-intervention baselines. Across these levels the proposed multi-agent method is significantly better than the baseline, and the system sustains a simulated year of operation with zero stockouts while the rule-based baseline accumulates hundreds under the same demand stream. The work shows that role-aligned LLM agents under human oversight can move an ERP system from passively recording transactions to actively executing operational decisions, and it provides a reference architecture and an evaluation protocol for autonomous enterprise resource planning.

Recently, Agentic Reinforcement Learning (Agentic RL) has made significant progress in incentivizing the multi-turn, long-horizon tool-use capabilities of web agents. While mainstream agentic RL algorithms autonomously explore high-uncertainty tool-call steps under the guidance of entropy, excessive reliance on entropy signals can impose further constraints, leading to the training collapse. In this paper, we delve into the challenges caused by entropy and propose the Agentic Entropy-Balanced Policy Optimization (AEPO), an agentic RL algorithm designed to balance entropy in both the rollout and policy update phases. AEPO comprises two core components: (1) a dynamic entropy-balanced rollout mechanism that adaptively allocate global and branch sampling budget through entropy pre-monitoring, while imposing a branch penalty on consecutive high-entropy tool-call steps to prevent over-branching issues; and (2) Entropy-Balanced Policy Optimization that inserts a stop-gradient operation into the high-entropy clipping term to preserve and properly rescale gradients on high-entropy tokens, while incorporating entropy-aware advantage estimation to prioritize learning on high-uncertainty tokens. Results across 14 challenging datasets show that AEPO consistently outperforms 7 mainstream RL algorithms. With just 1K RL samples, Qwen3-14B with AEPO achieves impressive results: 47.6% on GAIA, 11.2% on Humanity's Last Exam, and 43.0% on WebWalker for Pass@1; 65.0% on GAIA, 26.0% on Humanity's Last Exam, and 70.0% on WebWalker for Pass@5. Further analysis reveals that AEPO improves rollout sampling diversity while maintaining stable policy entropy, facilitating scalable web agent training.

Long-horizon robotic manipulation poses significant challenges for autonomous systems, requiring extended reasoning, precise execution, and robust error recovery across complex sequential tasks. Current approaches, whether based on static planning or end-to-end visuomotor policies, suffer from error accumulation and lack effective verification mechanisms during execution, limiting their reliability in real-world scenarios. We present Agentic Robot, a brain-inspired framework that addresses these limitations through Standardized Action Procedures (SAP)--a novel coordination protocol governing component interactions throughout manipulation tasks. Drawing inspiration from Standardized Operating Procedures (SOPs) in human organizations, SAP establishes structured workflows for planning, execution, and verification phases. Our architecture comprises three specialized components: (1) a large reasoning model that decomposes high-level instructions into semantically coherent subgoals, (2) a vision-language-action executor that generates continuous control commands from real-time visual inputs, and (3) a temporal verifier that enables autonomous progression and error recovery through introspective assessment. This SAP-driven closed-loop design supports dynamic self-verification without external supervision. On the LIBERO benchmark, Agentic Robot achieves state-of-the-art performance with an average success rate of 79.6\%, outperforming SpatialVLA by 6.1\% and OpenVLA by 7.4\% on long-horizon tasks. These results demonstrate that SAP-driven coordination between specialized components enhances both performance and interpretability in sequential manipulation, suggesting significant potential for reliable autonomous systems. Project Github: https://agentic-robot.github.io.

Most reported gains on agentic-LLM clinical benchmarks are often attributed to prompt engineering, yet our results suggest that larger improvements can come from architectural and engine-level design. We present MDIA, a Multi-agent Diagnostic Intelligence Agent implemented as a 7-node specialty-routed clinical reasoning graph, on the full HealthBench Professional benchmark (n = 525), on a non-fine-tuned LLM. MDIA achieves 0.6272 under OpenAI's GPT-5.4-2026-03-05, which is +3.72 pp above the performance of OpenAI's ChatGPT for Clinicians. The experimental work shows that performance lift is attributable to system architecture: specialty routing, multi-turn context preservation, drug-state safety gating, site-filtered search, length-aware synthesis, and engine-level reliability. These findings support the view that agentic clinical benchmark performance is shaped both by the underlying foundation model and the orchestration architecture. Nevertheless, we also noticed notable differences when using other models as a grader; in particular, when using Gemini 2.5 Pro, MDIA scored 0.6585, which suggests that the choice of grader is a source of variability. Robust evaluation of LLMs would therefore require assessment across several independent grader models.

Generative models can turn natural-language prompts into images, text, code, and other content, lowering the cost of producing drafts and components. Their practical impact increasingly depends on whether those pieces can become complete, dependable deliverables. This survey examines agentic artifact creation, which we define as stateful construction in which an AI system materially constructs or revises a deliverable and intermediate observations redirect later work. Functionally, the process links an operational representation of the artifact, a construction policy, and runtime verification whose feedback can redirect later actions. We reviewed 259 works available through August 20, 2026: 230 systems meeting this definition and 29 benchmarks of agentic artifact construction. We compare six artifact families, then analyze application settings and evaluation practice as separate dimensions. Across families, construction challenges reflect not only modality but also how tightly decisions are coupled and whether failures become visible while they remain repairable. Decomposition can reduce local complexity while increasing coordination and reassembly costs. Learned judges may add little independent evidence when they share the generator's preferences or blind spots. We formulate principles for keeping commitments and responsibility explicit, turning feedback into targeted repair, and revalidating affected state after change. We also identify opportunities for sustaining coherent, accountable control as artifacts, creator intent, and construction systems evolve. A curated paper list is available at https://github.com/GeminiLight/awesome-agentic-artifact-creation.

The Contract Net Protocol (1980) introduced coordination through contracts in multi-agent systems. Modern agent protocols standardize connectivity and interoperability; yet, none provide formal, resource governance-normative mechanisms to bound how much agents may consume or how long they may operate. We introduce Agent Contracts, a formal framework that extends the contract metaphor from task allocation to resource-bounded execution. An Agent Contract unifies input/output specifications, multi-dimensional resource constraints, temporal boundaries, and success criteria into a coherent governance mechanism with explicit lifecycle semantics. For multi-agent coordination, we establish conservation laws ensuring delegated budgets respect parent constraints, enabling hierarchical coordination through contract delegation. Empirical validation across four experiments demonstrates 90% token reduction with 525x lower variance in iterative workflows, zero conservation violations in multi-agent delegation, and measurable quality-resource tradeoffs through contract modes. Agent Contracts provide formal foundations for predictable, auditable, and resource-bounded autonomous AI deployment.

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 graph-first coordination layer for an emerging human-AI society. FP unifies heterogeneous entities, including agents, tools, resources, humans, institutions, and organizations, and supports native multi-party organization and event-based collaboration. It also provides economic primitives for metering, receipts, and settlement, and treats policy, provenance, and audit as first-class concerns. FP is designed to wrap and bridge existing protocols rather than replace them, enabling incremental adoption while reducing integration and governance overhead. The aim is to keep autonomous agency composable while keeping accountability non-negotiable, so that coordination itself can become shared infrastructure for a human-AI society that is open, pluralistic, and governable.

As LLM agents evolve, tokens have emerged as the core economic primitives of Agentic AI. However, their exponential consumption introduces severe computational, collaborative, and security bottlenecks. Current surveys remain fragmented across system optimization, architecture design, and trust, lacking a unified framework to evaluate the fundamental trade-off between output quality and economic cost. To bridge this gap, this survey presents the first comprehensive survey of Token Economics. By unifying computer science and economics, we conceptualize tokens as production factors, exchange mediums, and units of account. We synthesize existing literature across a four-dimensional taxonomy: (1) Micro-level (Single Agent): Optimizing budget-constrained factor substitution via neoclassical firm theory. (2) Meso-level (Multi-Agent Systems): Minimizing collaboration friction using transaction cost and principal-agent theories. (3) Macro-level (Agent Ecosystems): Addressing congestion externalities and pricing via mechanism design. (4) Security: Internalizing adversarial threats as endogenous economic constraints. Finally, we outline frontier directions, including differentiable token budgets and dynamic markets, to lay the theoretical foundation for scalable next-generation agent systems.

Agentic AI marks an important transition from single-step generative models to systems capable of reasoning, planning, acting, and adapting over long-lasting tasks. By integrating memory, tool use, and iterative decision cycles, these systems enable continuous, autonomous workflows in real-world environments. This survey examines the implications of agentic AI for cybersecurity. On the defensive side, agentic capabilities enable continuous monitoring, autonomous incident response, adaptive threat hunting, and fraud detection at scale. Conversely, the same properties amplify adversarial power by accelerating reconnaissance, exploitation, coordination, and social-engineering attacks. These dual-use dynamics expose fundamental gaps in existing governance, assurance, and accountability mechanisms, which were largely designed for non-autonomous and short-lived AI systems. To address these challenges, we survey emerging threat models, security frameworks, and evaluation pipelines tailored to agentic systems, and analyze systemic risks including agent collusion, cascading failures, oversight evasion, and memory poisoning. Finally, we present three representative use-case implementations that illustrate how agentic AI behaves in practical cybersecurity workflows, and how design choices shape reliability, safety, and operational effectiveness.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) enable agentic systems trained with reinforcement learning (RL) over multi-turn interaction trajectories, but practical deployment is bottlenecked by rapidly growing textual histories that inflate token budgets and memory usage. We introduce AgentOCR, a framework that exploits the superior information density of visual tokens by representing the accumulated observation-action history as a compact rendered image. To make multi-turn rollouts scalable, AgentOCR proposes segment optical caching. By decomposing history into hashable segments and maintaining a visual cache, this mechanism eliminates redundant re-rendering. Beyond fixed rendering, AgentOCR introduces agentic self-compression, where the agent actively emits a compression rate and is trained with compression-aware reward to adaptively balance task success and token efficiency. We conduct extensive experiments on challenging agentic benchmarks, ALFWorld and search-based QA. Remarkably, results demonstrate that AgentOCR preserves over 95\% of text-based agent performance while substantially reducing token consumption (>50\%), yielding consistent token and memory efficiency. Our further analysis validates a 20x rendering speedup from segment optical caching and the effective strategic balancing of self-compression.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become an integral part of software development, especially with the advent of agentic capabilities. Yet, many frontier LLMs are affiliated with specific providers. This raises the question of whether generated code favors the provider's own ecosystem over comparable alternatives, potentially constraining developers' choices and increasing dependence on a single provider. We define this behavior as Vertical Integration Bias (VIB) and introduce VIBench, a benchmark for measuring VIB in direct and agentic code generation across 20 provider-selectable software-integration scenarios. Evaluating 10 frontier provider-affiliated models against 3 non-affiliated controls, we find positive VIB in direct generation, with six of ten affiliated models showing statistically significant effects up to +18.8 percentage points (pp). Agentic workflows further amplify VIB, reaching +39.2 pp. Moreover, early affiliated-ecosystem choices in agentic workflows can persist into conceptually decoupled downstream files, with persistence as high as 90.3%. These findings underscore the need to measure and account for VIB in code generation, especially as agentic capabilities become more prevalent.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is pivotal for enabling large language models (LLMs) to generate long chains of thought (CoT) for complex tasks like math and reasoning. However, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), effective in many RL scenarios, fails in long CoT tasks. This paper identifies that value initialization bias and reward signal decay are the root causes of PPO's failure. We propose Value-Calibrated PPO (VC-PPO) to address these issues. In VC-PPO, the value model is pretrained to tackle initialization bias, and the Generalized Advantage Estimation (GAE) computation is decoupled between the actor and critic to mitigate reward signal decay. Experiments on the American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME) show that VC-PPO significantly boosts PPO performance. Ablation studies show that techniques in VC-PPO are essential in enhancing PPO for long CoT tasks.

In this paper, we investigate learning temporal abstractions in cooperative multi-agent systems, using the options framework (Sutton et al, 1999). First, we address the planning problem for the decentralized POMDP represented by the multi-agent system, by introducing a common information approach. We use the notion of common beliefs and broadcasting to solve an equivalent centralized POMDP problem. Then, we propose the Distributed Option Critic (DOC) algorithm, which uses centralized option evaluation and decentralized intra-option improvement. We theoretically analyze the asymptotic convergence of DOC and build a new multi-agent environment to demonstrate its validity. Our experiments empirically show that DOC performs competitively against baselines and scales with the number of agents.

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.

Embodied AI agents increasingly rely on large language models (LLMs) for planning, yet per-step LLM calls impose severe latency and cost. In this paper, we show that embodied tasks exhibit strong plan locality, where the next plan is largely predictable from the current one. Building on this, we introduce AgenticCache, a planning framework that reuses cached plans to avoid per-step LLM calls. In AgenticCache, each agent queries a runtime cache of frequent plan transitions, while a background Cache Updater asynchronously calls the LLM to validate and refine cached entries. Across four multi-agent embodied benchmarks, AgenticCache improves task success rate by 22% on average across 12 configurations (4 benchmarks x 3 models), reduces simulation latency by 65%, and lowers token usage by 50%. Cache-based plan reuse thus offers a practical path to low-latency, low-cost embodied agents. Code is available at https://github.com/hojoonleokim/MLSys26_AgenticCache.

Multi-agent systems built on large language models are increasingly deployed in strategic policy and governance settings, where agents representing stakeholders with conflicting interests must coordinate under shared constraints. These systems typically assign role-based personas to agents, describing their motivations and objectives. Whether agents with role-based identities follow explicit payoffs or their assigned roles in strategic decision-making remains untested. Here we show that assigning role-based personas suppresses payoff-aligned behavior in four-agent strategic games, shifting equilibrium attainment by up to 90 percentage points even when agents have complete payoff information. We test a 2x2 factorial design (persona presence x payoff visibility) across four models (Qwen-7B, Qwen-32B, Llama-8B, Mistral-7B), and 53 environmental policy scenarios with two equilibria: Tragedy of the Commons, where individual payoff dominates, and Green Transition, where collective payoff dominates. With personas present, all models reach near-zero Tragedy equilibrium in the Tragedy-dominant scenarios despite complete payoff information, and 100% of equilibria correspond to Green Transition. No model reaches Tragedy equilibrium by removing personas alone; only Qwen models reach 65-90% Tragedy equilibrium rates when personas are removed, and payoffs are made explicit. Three distinct behavioral profiles emerge: Qwen shifts equilibrium selection based on framing condition, Mistral increases response variance without reaching the Tragedy equilibrium, and Llama holds near-constant across all conditions. Representational choices in multi-agent LLM systems are governance decisions: persona assignment determines which equilibrium a simulation produces, independent of the underlying incentive structure.

Recent advances in agentic Reinforcement Learning (RL) have substantially improved the multi-turn tool-use capabilities of large language model agents. However, most existing methods assign credit over coarse heuristic units, such as tool-call boundaries or fixed workflows, making it difficult to identify which intermediate decisions influence downstream outcomes. In this work, we study agentic RL from two perspectives: where to branch and how to assign credit after branching. Our pilot analysis shows that influential decision points are broadly distributed throughout the generated sequence rather than concentrated at tool calls, while token entropy alone does not reliably reflect their impact on final outcomes. Motivated by these observations, we propose Agentic Procedural Policy Optimization (APPO), which shifts branching and credit assignment from coarse interaction units to fine-grained decision points in the sequence. APPO selects branching locations using a Branching Score that combines token uncertainty with policy-induced likelihood gains of subsequent continuations, enabling more targeted exploration while filtering out spurious high-entropy positions. It further introduces procedure-level advantage scaling to better distribute credit across branched rollouts. Experiments on 13 benchmarks show that APPO consistently improves strong agentic RL baselines by nearly 4 points, while keeping efficient tool-calls and maintaining behavior interpretability.

AI agents are driving a new software paradigm, with the ability to autonomously call tools, extract information, manage memory, and complete tasks that span applications and data sources. Most existing end-user operating systems, however, are designed for application-centric workflows and offer little native support for AI agents. This mismatch limits the wider adoption of agents and leads to execution overhead and safety risks when running agents on conventional systems. While the concept of agent-native operating systems is emerging, the research community lacks an open testbed to explore the architectural primitives desired for agent-mediated interaction. We present AOHP (Android Open Harness Project), an OS-level agent harness built on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). The core design principle of AOHP is to treat agents as first-class OS actors, enabling adaptive user interfaces and agent-friendly runtime environments. AOHP preserves the mature Android software and hardware ecosystem while introducing three agent-oriented system mechanisms: personalized service composition, efficient agent interfaces, and secure information flow. Based on preliminary experiments on challenging tasks covering key capabilities of OS agents, AOHP shows clear advantages in task completion (+21.12% completion rate), execution cost (-51.55% token cost), and security-policy compliance.

Large language models (LLMs) promise to accelerate incident response in production systems, yet single-agent approaches generate vague, unusable recommendations. We present MyAntFarm.ai, a reproducible containerized framework demonstrating that multi-agent orchestration fundamentally transforms LLM-based incident response quality. Through 348 controlled trials comparing single-agent copilot versus multi-agent systems on identical incident scenarios, we find that multi-agent orchestration achieves 100% actionable recommendation rate versus 1.7% for single-agent approaches, an 80 times improvement in action specificity and 140 times improvement in solution correctness. Critically, multi-agent systems exhibit zero quality variance across all trials, enabling production SLA commitments impossible with inconsistent single-agent outputs. Both architectures achieve similar comprehension latency (approx.40s), establishing that the architectural value lies in deterministic quality, not speed. We introduce Decision Quality (DQ), a novel metric capturing validity, specificity, and correctness properties essential for operational deployment that existing LLM metrics do not address. These findings reframe multi-agent orchestration from a performance optimization to a production-readiness requirement for LLM-based incident response. All code, Docker configurations, and trial data are publicly available for reproduction.

Agentic Software Engineering (SE 3.0) represents a new era where intelligent agents are tasked not with simple code generation, but with achieving complex, goal-oriented SE objectives. To harness these new capabilities while ensuring trustworthiness, we must recognize a fundamental duality within the SE field in the Agentic SE era, comprising two symbiotic modalities: SE for Humans and SE for Agents. This duality demands a radical reimagining of the foundational pillars of SE (actors, processes, tools, and artifacts) which manifest differently across each modality. We propose two purpose-built workbenches to support this vision. The Agent Command Environment (ACE) serves as a command center where humans orchestrate and mentor agent teams, handling outputs such as Merge-Readiness Packs (MRPs) and Consultation Request Packs (CRPs). The Agent Execution Environment (AEE) is a digital workspace where agents perform tasks while invoking human expertise when facing ambiguity or complex trade-offs. This bi-directional partnership, which supports agent-initiated human callbacks and handovers, gives rise to new, structured engineering activities (i.e., processes) that redefine human-AI collaboration, elevating the practice from agentic coding to true agentic software engineering. This paper presents the Structured Agentic Software Engineering (SASE) vision, outlining several of the foundational pillars for the future of SE. The paper culminates in a research roadmap that identifies a few key challenges and opportunities while briefly discussing the resulting impact of this future on SE education. Our goal is not to offer a definitive solution, but to provide a conceptual scaffold with structured vocabulary to catalyze a community-wide dialogue, pushing the SE community to think beyond its classic, human-centric tenets toward a disciplined, scalable, and trustworthy agentic future.

LLM agents increasingly operate as execution systems that invoke tools, modify local state, use persistent memory, and interact with external protocols. These capabilities make agents useful, but they also introduce risks related to over-privileged actions, weak auditability, prompt injection, tool poisoning, and uncontrolled side effects. This paper presents Agentao, a governed local-first runtime for tool-using LLM agents. Agentao separates model-generated action proposals from host-authorized execution through a layered architecture consisting of host-facing surfaces, a host contract, a runtime core, a permission-mediated tool system, and supporting subsystems for memory, replay, plugins, skills, sub-agents, and protocol integration. We describe the motivation, threat model, design goals, governance model, execution pipeline, and structured event interface of the system. Agentao does not provide formal safety guarantees; rather, it demonstrates how permissions, state, protocol boundaries, and execution traces can be made explicit runtime abstractions for building agents that are more governable, inspectable, and suitable for host-controlled local environments. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/jin-bo/agentao.

LLM agents operate in two distinct regimes: open-weight agents amenable to reinforcement learning (RL) and black-box agents whose behaviour must be controlled purely at test time. Although black-box agents are often backed by state-of-the-art proprietary LLMs, API-only access precludes parameter-level optimization, rendering most RL methods inapplicable. To address this limitation, we turn to a known equivalence between RL and Bayesian inference. We propose Agentic Monte Carlo (AMC) to directly sample from the optimal policy of a black-box agent rather than training it through RL. The optimal policy is a posterior over trajectories whose prior we define as the fixed black-box LLM agent. We employ Sequential Monte Carlo to sample from this posterior by learning a value function to steer the agent while leaving the underlying black-box model unchanged. We validate AMC on three diverse environments from the AgentGym benchmark, demonstrating significant improvements over prompting baselines and even outperforming Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) as we scale the test-time compute of our method. AMC demonstrates the feasibility of performing principled RL-style optimization of black-box LLM agents. Code is available at https://github.com/layer6ai-labs/Agentic-Monte-Carlo

Multimodal agentic pipelines are transforming human-computer interaction by enabling efficient and accessible automation of complex, real-world tasks. However, recent efforts have focused on short-horizon or general-purpose applications (e.g., mobile or desktop interfaces), leaving long-horizon automation for domain-specific systems, particularly in healthcare, largely unexplored. To address this, we introduce CareFlow, a high-quality human-annotated benchmark comprising complex, long-horizon software workflows across medical annotation tools, DICOM viewers, EHR systems, and laboratory information systems. On this benchmark, existing vision-language models (VLMs) perform poorly, struggling with long-horizon reasoning and multi-step interactions in medical contexts. To overcome this, we propose CarePilot, a multi-agent framework based on the actor-critic paradigm. The Actor integrates tool grounding with dual-memory mechanisms (long-term and short-term experience) to predict the next semantic action from the visual interface and system state. The Critic evaluates each action, updates memory based on observed effects, and either executes or provides corrective feedback to refine the workflow. Through iterative agentic simulation, the Actor learns to perform more robust and reasoning-aware predictions during inference. Our experiments show that CarePilot achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming strong closed-source and open-source multimodal baselines by approximately 15.26% and 3.38%, respectively, on our benchmark and out-of-distribution dataset.

Outcome-driven reinforcement learning has advanced reasoning in large language models (LLMs), but prevailing tool-augmented approaches train a single, monolithic policy that interleaves thoughts and tool calls under full context; this scales poorly with long horizons and diverse tools and generalizes weakly to new scenarios. Agentic systems offer a promising alternative by decomposing work across specialized modules, yet most remain training-free or rely on offline training decoupled from the live dynamics of multi-turn interaction. We introduce AgentFlow, a trainable, in-the-flow agentic framework that coordinates four modules (planner, executor, verifier, generator) through an evolving memory and directly optimizes its planner inside the multi-turn loop. To train on-policy in live environments, we propose Flow-based Group Refined Policy Optimization (Flow-GRPO), which tackles long-horizon, sparse-reward credit assignment by converting multi-turn optimization into a sequence of tractable single-turn policy updates. It broadcasts a single, verifiable trajectory-level outcome to every turn to align local planner decisions with global success and stabilizes learning with group-normalized advantages. Across ten benchmarks, AgentFlow with a 7B-scale backbone outperforms top-performing baselines with average accuracy gains of 14.9% on search, 14.0% on agentic, 14.5% on mathematical, and 4.1% on scientific tasks, even surpassing larger proprietary models like GPT-4o. Further analyses confirm the benefits of in-the-flow optimization, showing improved planning, enhanced tool-calling reliability, and positive scaling with model size and reasoning turns.

Environments are the bottleneck for self-improving agents. Current terminal benchmarks were built for evaluation, not training; reinforcement learning requires a scalable pipeline, not just a dataset. We introduce Endless Terminals, a fully autonomous pipeline that procedurally generates terminal-use tasks without human annotation. The pipeline has four stages: generating diverse task descriptions, building and validating containerized environments, producing completion tests, and filtering for solvability. From this pipeline we obtain 3255 tasks spanning file operations, log management, data processing, scripting, and database operations. We train agents using vanilla PPO with binary episode level rewards and a minimal interaction loop: no retrieval, multi-agent coordination, or specialized tools. Despite this simplicity, models trained on Endless Terminals show substantial gains: on our held-out dev set, Llama-3.2-3B improves from 4.0% to 18.2%, Qwen2.5-7B from 10.7% to 53.3%, and Qwen3-8B-openthinker-sft from 42.6% to 59.0%. These improvements transfer to human-curated benchmarks: models trained on Endless Terminals show substantial gains on held out human curated benchmarks: on TerminalBench 2.0, Llama-3.2-3B improves from 0.0% to 2.2%, Qwen2.5-7B from 2.2% to 3.4%, and Qwen3-8B-openthinker-sft from 1.1% to 6.7%, in each case outperforming alternative approaches including models with more complex agentic scaffolds. These results demonstrate that simple RL succeeds when environments scale.

LLM-based agents are increasingly deployed to autonomously solve complex tasks, raising urgent needs for IP protection and regulatory provenance. While content watermarking effectively attributes LLM-generated outputs, it fails to directly identify the high-level planning behaviors (e.g., tool and subgoal choices) that govern multi-step execution. Critically, watermarking at the planning-behavior layer faces unique challenges: minor distributional deviations in decision-making can compound during long-term agent operation, degrading utility, and many agents operate as black boxes that are difficult to intervene in directly. To bridge this gap, we propose AgentMark, a behavioral watermarking framework that embeds multi-bit identifiers into planning decisions while preserving utility. It operates by eliciting an explicit behavior distribution from the agent and applying distribution-preserving conditional sampling, enabling deployment under black-box APIs while remaining compatible with action-layer content watermarking. Experiments across embodied, tool-use, and social environments demonstrate practical multi-bit capacity, robust recovery from partial logs, and utility preservation. The code is available at https://github.com/Tooooa/AgentMark.

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.

Large language model agents have advanced rapidly, yet progress remains fragmented across domains, capabilities, task difficulty, and interaction settings. We frame this as full-scenario agentic scaling and present AgentOmnia, a framework coordinating task-space definition, data synthesis, post-training, evaluation, and improvement across To-Consumer (ToC), To-Business (ToB), and To-Employee (ToE) applications. An extensible Domain x Capability x Atomic Difficulty taxonomy aligns these stages and enables fine-grained diagnosis with OmniaBench. AgentOmnia combines bidirectional environment-task synthesis with tool-dependency, program-structured, and solver-based pipelines, constructing 5,018 stateful environments with 255,375 tools and 52,361 tasks. Programs, solvers, and verifiers provide correctness signals, while supervised fine-tuning, online agentic reinforcement learning, and a rollback curriculum support post-training. Evaluation failures translate into Product Requirement Documents (PRDs) for targeted self-evolution. Starting from Qwen3-30B-A3B-Thinking-2507, AgentOmnia raises the pass rate on the OmniaBench challenging subset from 9.16% to 37.11% and the macro-average across OmniaBench, τ^2-Bench, DeepPlanning, and VitaBench from 22.86% to 41.69%. Under a unified protocol,it leads the evaluated agentic post-trained baselines on OmniaBench and retains the highest four-benchmark macro-average. It also surpasses Qwen3-235B-A22B-Thinking-2507 on all four benchmarks and exceeds Qwen3.5-35B-A3B on the macro-average. Gains span three application splits, ten capability dimensions, eight atomic-difficulty factors, and 76 of 90 level-1 domains, indicating broad rather than category-specific improvement. A one-round study provides initial evidence for PRD-guided self-evolution, motivating validation at larger scales and in industrial settings.

This paper introduces a dynamic and actionable framework for securing agentic AI systems in enterprise deployment. We contend that safety and security are not merely fixed attributes of individual models but also emergent properties arising from the dynamic interactions among models, orchestrators, tools, and data within their operating environments. We propose a new way of identification of novel agentic risks through the lens of user safety. Although, for traditional LLMs and agentic models in isolation, safety and security has a clear separation, through the lens of safety in agentic systems, they appear to be connected. Building on this foundation, we define an operational agentic risk taxonomy that unifies traditional safety and security concerns with novel, uniquely agentic risks, including tool misuse, cascading action chains, and unintended control amplification among others. At the core of our approach is a dynamic agentic safety and security framework that operationalizes contextual agentic risk management by using auxiliary AI models and agents, with human oversight, to assist in contextual risk discovery, evaluation, and mitigation. We further address one of the most challenging aspects of safety and security of agentic systems: risk discovery through sandboxed, AI-driven red teaming. We demonstrate the framework effectiveness through a detailed case study of NVIDIA flagship agentic research assistant, AI-Q Research Assistant, showcasing practical, end-to-end safety and security evaluations in complex, enterprise-grade agentic workflows. This risk discovery phase finds novel agentic risks that are then contextually mitigated. We also release the dataset from our case study, containing traces of over 10,000 realistic attack and defense executions of the agentic workflow to help advance research in agentic safety.

Reasoning is a fundamental cognitive process underlying inference, problem-solving, and decision-making. While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong reasoning capabilities in closed-world settings, they struggle in open-ended and dynamic environments. Agentic reasoning marks a paradigm shift by reframing LLMs as autonomous agents that plan, act, and learn through continual interaction. In this survey, we organize agentic reasoning along three complementary dimensions. First, we characterize environmental dynamics through three layers: foundational agentic reasoning, which establishes core single-agent capabilities including planning, tool use, and search in stable environments; self-evolving agentic reasoning, which studies how agents refine these capabilities through feedback, memory, and adaptation; and collective multi-agent reasoning, which extends intelligence to collaborative settings involving coordination, knowledge sharing, and shared goals. Across these layers, we distinguish in-context reasoning, which scales test-time interaction through structured orchestration, from post-training reasoning, which optimizes behaviors via reinforcement learning and supervised fine-tuning. We further review representative agentic reasoning frameworks across real-world applications and benchmarks, including science, robotics, healthcare, autonomous research, and mathematics. This survey synthesizes agentic reasoning methods into a unified roadmap bridging thought and action, and outlines open challenges and future directions, including personalization, long-horizon interaction, world modeling, scalable multi-agent training, and governance for real-world deployment.

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.

In vibe coding, people describe software in natural language and delegate implementation to AI agents. By analogy, vibe commerce allows people to express buying or selling goals in natural language and delegate the corresponding tasks to agents. Commerce, however, requires independently controlled Buyer and Merchant agents to interact in a shared market while preserving their private objectives and distinct authority. We introduce Agentic Commerce World (ACWorld), an environment for evaluating such agents across ongoing transactions. Through its Vibe Commerce Protocol (VCP), ACWorld validates agent actions before updating shared transaction state and records the resulting interactions, making agent behavior auditable and evaluation reproducible. The ACWorld Benchmark contains a 200-task capability-coverage track and a 60-task large-catalog track that searches 785,022 transactable listings. Across ten models, mean scores range from 65.9% to 85.6% and from 56.1% to 91.4%, respectively. Our analysis shows that process-level evidence is necessary: final state alone can miss evaluated errors, incomplete trajectories still retain useful process signals, and large-catalog tasks expose bottlenecks across stages.

Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) is emerging as a critical post-training paradigm for improving LLM agent capabilities. Existing RL algorithms for LLMs largely follow the token-centric paradigm as in RLHF and RLVR, where tokens serve as the basic units for modeling and optimization. However, this paradigm introduces a granularity mismatch in agentic RL, as it optimizes token-level predictions while LLM agents make step-level decisions through cycles of environmental observations and actions. To bridge this gap, we propose StepPO, a step-centric paradigm for agentic RL via step-aligned policy optimization. Specifically, we reformulate agentic RL from a token-level Markov Decision Process (MDP) into a step-level MDP, where interaction steps serve as the basic trajectory representations. We further propose step-level credit assignment to align policy optimization with the natural granularity of agent decisions. Together, StepPO optimizes agent policies at the step level for multi-turn agent-environment interaction. Experiments across multi-hop QA, academic paper search, and text-world action tasks show that StepPO consistently outperforms various RL algorithms. Further analyses provide insights into how step-centric paradigm improves agent training. We hope this step-centric paradigm offers a useful lens for understanding agent behavior and a practical path for training more capable LLM agents.

Agentic systems consisting of multiple LLM-driven agents coordinating through tools and structured interactions, are increasingly deployed for complex reasoning and problem-solving tasks. At the same time, emerging low-code and template-based agent development platforms (e.g., Dify) enable users to rapidly build and orchestrate agentic systems, which we refer to as platform-orchestrated agentic systems. However, these systems are also fragile and it remains unclear how to systematically identify their potential failure root cause. This paper presents a study of root cause identification of these platform-orchestrated agentic systems. To support this initiative, we construct a dataset AgentFail containing 307 failure logs from ten agentic systems, each with fine-grained annotations linking failures to their root causes. We additionally utilize counterfactual reasoning-based repair strategy to ensure the reliability of the annotation. Building on the dataset, we develop a taxonomy that characterizes failure root causes and analyze their distribution across different platforms and task domains. Furthermore, we introduce a benchmark that leverages LLMs for automatically identifying root causes, in which we also utilize the proposed taxonomy as guidance for LLMs. Results show that the taxonomy can largely improve the performance, thereby confirming its utility. Nevertheless, the accuracy of root cause identification reaches at most 33.6%, which indicates that this task still remains challenging. In light of these results, we also provide actionable guidelines for building such agentic systems. In summary, this paper provides a reliable dataset of failure root cause for platform-orchestrated agentic systems, corresponding taxonomy and benchmark, which serves as a foundation for advancing the development of more reliable agentic systems.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have empowered embodied agents with remarkable capabilities in planning and reasoning. However, when facing ambiguous natural language instructions (e.g., "fetch the tool" in a cluttered room), current agents often fail to balance the high cost of physical exploration against the cognitive cost of human interaction. They typically treat disambiguation as a passive perception problem, lacking the strategic reasoning to minimize total task execution costs. To bridge this gap, we propose ESearch-R1, a cost-aware embodied reasoning framework that unifies interactive dialogue (Ask), episodic memory retrieval (GetMemory), and physical navigation (Navigate) into a single decision process. We introduce HC-GRPO (Heterogeneous Cost-Aware Group Relative Policy Optimization). Unlike traditional PPO which relies on a separate value critic, HC-GRPO optimizes the MLLM by sampling groups of reasoning trajectories and reinforcing those that achieve the optimal trade-off between information gain and heterogeneous costs (e.g., navigate time, and human attention). Extensive experiments in AI2-THOR demonstrate that ESearch-R1 significantly outperforms standard ReAct-based agents. It improves task success rates while reducing total operational costs by approximately 50\%, validating the effectiveness of GRPO in aligning MLLM agents with physical world constraints.

We introduce AgenticSimLaw, a role-structured, multi-agent debate framework that provides transparent and controllable test-time reasoning for high-stakes tabular decision-making tasks. Unlike black-box approaches, our courtroom-style orchestration explicitly defines agent roles (prosecutor, defense, judge), interaction protocols (7-turn structured debate), and private reasoning strategies, creating a fully auditable decision-making process. We benchmark this framework on young adult recidivism prediction using the NLSY97 dataset, comparing it against traditional chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting across almost 90 unique combinations of models and strategies. Our results demonstrate that structured multi-agent debate provides more stable and generalizable performance compared to single-agent reasoning, with stronger correlation between accuracy and F1-score metrics. Beyond performance improvements, AgenticSimLaw offers fine-grained control over reasoning steps, generates complete interaction transcripts for explainability, and enables systematic profiling of agent behaviors. While we instantiate this framework in the criminal justice domain to stress-test reasoning under ethical complexity, the approach generalizes to any deliberative, high-stakes decision task requiring transparency and human oversight. This work addresses key LLM-based multi-agent system challenges: organization through structured roles, observability through logged interactions, and responsibility through explicit non-deployment constraints for sensitive domains. Data, results, and code will be available on github.com under the MIT license.

Proximal constraints are fundamental to the stability of the Large Language Model reinforcement learning. While the canonical clipping mechanism in PPO serves as an efficient surrogate for trust regions, we identify a critical bottleneck: fixed bounds strictly constrain the upward update margin of low-probability actions, disproportionately suppressing high-advantage tail strategies and inducing rapid entropy collapse. To address this, we introduce Band-constrained Policy Optimization (BandPO). BandPO replaces canonical clipping with Band, a unified theoretical operator that projects trust regions defined by f-divergences into dynamic, probability-aware clipping intervals. Theoretical analysis confirms that Band effectively resolves this exploration bottleneck. We formulate this mapping as a convex optimization problem, guaranteeing a globally optimal numerical solution while deriving closed-form solutions for specific divergences. Extensive experiments across diverse models and datasets demonstrate that BandPO consistently outperforms canonical clipping and Clip-Higher, while robustly mitigating entropy collapse.

How much autonomy can multi-agent LLM systems sustain -- and what enables it? We present a 25,000-task computational experiment spanning 8 models, 4--256 agents, and 8 coordination protocols ranging from externally imposed hierarchy to emergent self-organization. We observe that autonomous behavior already emerges in current LLM agents: given minimal structural scaffolding (fixed ordering), agents spontaneously invent specialized roles, voluntarily abstain from tasks outside their competence, and form shallow hierarchies -- without any pre-assigned roles or external design. A hybrid protocol (Sequential) that enables this autonomy outperforms centralized coordination by 14% (p<0.001), with a 44% quality spread between protocols (Cohen's d=1.86, p<0.0001). The degree of emergent autonomy scales with model capability: strong models self-organize effectively, while models below a capability threshold still benefit from rigid structure -- suggesting that as foundation models improve, the scope for autonomous coordination will expand. The system scales sub-linearly to 256 agents without quality degradation (p=0.61), producing 5,006 unique roles from just 8 agents. Results replicate across closed- and open-source models, with open-source achieving 95% of closed-source quality at 24x lower cost. The practical implication: give agents a mission, a protocol, and a capable model -- not a pre-assigned role.

The emergence of agentic reinforcement learning (Agentic RL) marks a paradigm shift from conventional reinforcement learning applied to large language models (LLM RL), reframing LLMs from passive sequence generators into autonomous, decision-making agents embedded in complex, dynamic worlds. This survey formalizes this conceptual shift by contrasting the degenerate single-step Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) of LLM-RL with the temporally extended, partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) that define Agentic RL. Building on this foundation, we propose a comprehensive twofold taxonomy: one organized around core agentic capabilities, including planning, tool use, memory, reasoning, self-improvement, and perception, and the other around their applications across diverse task domains. Central to our thesis is that reinforcement learning serves as the critical mechanism for transforming these capabilities from static, heuristic modules into adaptive, robust agentic behavior. To support and accelerate future research, we consolidate the landscape of open-source environments, benchmarks, and frameworks into a practical compendium. By synthesizing over five hundred recent works, this survey charts the contours of this rapidly evolving field and highlights the opportunities and challenges that will shape the development of scalable, general-purpose AI agents.

While originally developed for continuous control problems, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has emerged as the work-horse of a variety of reinforcement learning (RL) applications including the fine-tuning of generative models. Unfortunately, PPO requires multiple heuristics to enable stable convergence (e.g. value networks, clipping) and is notorious for its sensitivity to the precise implementation of these components. In response, we take a step back and ask what a minimalist RL algorithm for the era of generative models would look like. We propose REBEL, an algorithm that cleanly reduces the problem of policy optimization to regressing the relative rewards via a direct policy parameterization between two completions to a prompt, enabling strikingly lightweight implementation. In theory, we prove that fundamental RL algorithms like Natural Policy Gradient can be seen as variants of REBEL, which allows us to match the strongest known theoretical guarantees in terms of convergence and sample complexity in the RL literature. REBEL can also cleanly incorporate offline data and handle the intransitive preferences we frequently see in practice. Empirically, we find that REBEL provides a unified approach to language modeling and image generation with stronger or similar performance as PPO and DPO, all while being simpler to implement and more computationally tractable than PPO.

The rapid integration of large language model-based agents into recommender systems has driven a shift from static, ranking-based pipelines toward autonomous and interactive systems that can reason, plan, and act. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of this emerging landscape by introducing a unified taxonomy grounded in the level of autonomy and three core paradigms of agentic recommender systems: agent-assisted recommendation, agent-as-recommender, and agent-as-user-simulator. The autonomy framework organizes existing methods along increasing capabilities in proactivity, context awareness, interaction flexibility, and adaptivity. Building on this framework, the survey analyzes how each paradigm adopts different agentic architectures and how agents enhance key components such as profiles, memory, tool use, workflows, and optimization mechanisms. We further examine evaluation methodologies for agentic recommendation, covering automated metrics, LLM-based judging, and simulation-based assessment, and discuss their limitations in capturing reasoning quality, user experience, and system behavior. Beyond existing evaluation protocols, we further discuss unresolved issues in evaluating agentic recommender systems, including trajectory-level assessment, agent contribution analysis, and calibration of user simulation. Lastly, the survey outlines open challenges in lifelong user modeling, contextual abstraction, multimodal alignment, controllability, trustworthiness, privacy, scalability, and efficiency. Together, these analyses establish a unified foundation for understanding the current progress of agentic recommender systems and highlight promising opportunities for developing more autonomous, reliable, and human-aligned recommendation agents.

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.

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 produces textual insights into the agent behavior on three levels of granularity: system, trace, and node. Agentic CLEAR operates above the observability layer, enabling seamless integration and featuring an intuitive UI that makes agent evaluation highly accessible. In our experiments on four benchmarks, seven agentic settings, and tens of thousands of LLM calls, we show that Agentic CLEAR produces high-quality, data-driven, insightful feedback. Our analysis shows strong alignment with human-annotated errors and the ability to predict task success rate.

We present Mach-Mind-4-Flash, a 35B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) agentic model with 3B activated parameters. Through post-training optimization alone without scaling pre-training compute, the model achieves performance on par with or surpassing that of 100B-parameter-class models. By introducing scalable agentic interaction environments for large-scale reinforcement learning, the model attains significant performance gains on real-world application tasks. Our pipeline comprises three stages: (1) a unified RL/OPD training infrastructure with dynamic multi-teacher scheduling and operator-level acceleration, delivering 17\% end-to-end training speedup; (2) multiple domain-specific RL experts trained in parallel across Reasoning, General, and Agent tracks, then fused into a single generalist via Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation (MOPD) -- a routed reverse-KL objective that eliminates the see-saw degradation of mixed-reward RL; (3) Hybrid Median-length Policy Optimization (HMPO), a single-stage token-efficiency method that compresses reasoning chains by 19--46\% with le0.7 percentage-point accuracy loss. Mach-Mind-4-Flash scores 92.70 on AIME'26, 82.82 on IFBench, 80.74 on Behavioral-SafetyBench, 75.80 on BFCL-v4, 72.31 on BrowseComp-zh, and 84.20 on ClawBench -- leading or matching models with 10--30times its activated size at a fraction of the inference cost.

Medical care follows complex clinical pathways that extend beyond isolated physician-patient encounters, emphasizing decision-making and transitions between different stages. Current benchmarks focusing on static exams or isolated dialogues inadequately evaluate large language models (LLMs) in dynamic clinical scenarios. We introduce CP-Env, a controllable agentic hospital environment designed to evaluate LLMs across end-to-end clinical pathways. CP-Env simulates a hospital ecosystem with patient and physician agents, constructing scenarios ranging from triage and specialist consultation to diagnostic testing and multidisciplinary team meetings for agent interaction. Following real hospital adaptive flow of healthcare, it enables branching, long-horizon task execution. We propose a three-tiered evaluation framework encompassing Clinical Efficacy, Process Competency, and Professional Ethics. Results reveal that most models struggle with pathway complexity, exhibiting hallucinations and losing critical diagnostic details. Interestingly, excessive reasoning steps can sometimes prove counterproductive, while top models tend to exhibit reduced tool dependency through internalized knowledge. CP-Env advances medical AI agents development through comprehensive end-to-end clinical evaluation. We provide the benchmark and evaluation tools for further research and development at https://github.com/SPIRAL-MED/CP_ENV.

Through the collaboration of multiple LLM-empowered agents possessing diverse expertise and tools, multi-agent systems achieve impressive progress in solving real-world problems. Given the user queries, the meta-agents, serving as the brain within multi-agent systems, are required to decompose the queries into multiple sub-tasks that can be allocated to suitable agents capable of solving them, so-called agent-oriented planning. In this study, we identify three critical design principles of agent-oriented planning, including solvability, completeness, and non-redundancy, to ensure that each sub-task can be effectively resolved, resulting in satisfactory responses to user queries. These principles further inspire us to propose AOP, a novel framework for agent-oriented planning in multi-agent systems, leveraging a fast task decomposition and allocation process followed by an effective and efficient evaluation via a reward model. According to the evaluation results, the meta-agent is also responsible for promptly making necessary adjustments to sub-tasks and scheduling. Besides, we integrate a feedback loop into AOP to further enhance the effectiveness and robustness of such a problem-solving process. Extensive experiments demonstrate the advancement of AOP in solving real-world problems compared to both single-agent systems and existing planning strategies for multi-agent systems. The source code is available at https://github.com/lalaliat/Agent-Oriented-Planning

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is central to aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) in reasoning tasks with verifiable rewards. However, standard token-level PPO struggles in this setting due to the instability of temporal credit assignment over long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) horizons and the prohibitive memory cost of the value model. While critic-free alternatives like GRPO mitigate these issues, they incur significant computational overhead by requiring multiple samples for baseline estimation, severely limiting training throughput. In this paper, we introduce Sequence-Level PPO (SPPO), a scalable algorithm that harmonizes the sample efficiency of PPO with the stability of outcome-based updates. SPPO reformulates the reasoning process as a Sequence-Level Contextual Bandit problem, employing a decoupled scalar value function to derive low-variance advantage signals without multi-sampling. Extensive experiments on mathematical benchmarks demonstrate that SPPO significantly surpasses standard PPO and matches the performance of computation-heavy group-based methods, offering a resource-efficient framework for aligning reasoning LLMs.

LLM-based agentic applications have shown increasingly remarkable capabilities in complex workflows but incur substantial costs due to extensive planning and reasoning requirements. Existing LLM caching techniques (like context caching and semantic caching), primarily designed for serving chatbots, are insufficient for agentic applications where outputs depend on external data or environmental contexts. We propose agentic plan caching, a novel approach that extracts, stores, adapts, and reuses structured plan templates from planning stages of agentic applications across semantically similar tasks to reduce the cost of serving. Unlike traditional semantic caching, our system extracts plan templates from completed agent executions at test-time, employs keyword extraction to match new requests against cached plans, and utilizes lightweight models to adapt these templates to task-specific plans with contexts. Evaluation across multiple real-world agentic applications shows that our system can reduce costs by 46.62% on average while maintaining performance, offering a more efficient solution for serving LLM-based agents that complements existing LLM serving infrastructures.

Large language model (LLM) based agents are increasingly used to automate financial transactions, yet their reliance on contextual reasoning exposes payment systems to prompt-driven manipulation. The Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) aims to secure agent-led purchases through cryptographically verifiable mandates, but its practical robustness remains underexplored. In this work, we perform an AI red-teaming evaluation of AP2 and identify vulnerabilities arising from indirect and direct prompt injection. We introduce two attack techniques, the Branded Whisper Attack and the Vault Whisper Attack which manipulate product ranking and extract sensitive user data. Using a functional AP2 based shopping agent built with Gemini-2.5-Flash and the Google ADK framework, we experimentally validate that simple adversarial prompts can reliably subvert agent behavior. Our findings reveal critical weaknesses in current agentic payment architectures and highlight the need for stronger isolation and defensive safeguards in LLM-mediated financial systems.

AI agents are increasingly created inside organizations by non-engineering users through low-code, no-code, and conversational development environments. This democratization enables rapid local innovation, but it also creates a reliability gap: agents that appear to users as simple productivity artifacts may depend on changing models, tools, retrieval sources, permissions, prompts, schedules, and external services. These dependencies can cause silent degradation long after deployment, even when no user directly modifies the agent. This paper identifies the reliability challenge created by democratized AI agent creation and proposes a lightweight continuous-assurance framework for citizen-created organizational agents. The framework combines dependency mapping, readiness contracts, scheduled checks, diagnostics, and lifecycle governance to assess whether an agent remains operationally ready under expected conditions. We also present an initial prototype auditor and scenario-based assessment showing how the proposed taxonomy can be translated into practical checks and actionable remediation guidance.

Contemporary machine learning paradigm excels in statistical data analysis, solving problems that classical AI couldn't. However, it faces key limitations, such as a lack of integration with planning, incomprehensible internal structure, and inability to learn continually. We present the initial design for an AI system, Agential AI (AAI), in principle operating independently or on top of statistical methods, designed to overcome these issues. AAI's core is a learning method that models temporal dynamics with guarantees of completeness, minimality, and continual learning, using component-level variation and selection to learn the structure of the environment. It integrates this with a behavior algorithm that plans on a learned model and encapsulates high-level behavior patterns. Preliminary experiments on a simple environment show AAI's effectiveness and potential.

Human egocentric video is a scalable supervision source for humanoid policy learning, but current pipelines struggle with hand-object occlusion, oversimplified motion, or specialized capture hardware. We introduce AgenticFocus, a Mixed Reality synthesis pipeline that converts ordinary first-person-view human videos into robot-trainable demonstrations by restoring occluded object geometry, reconstructing full-hand motion, and retargeting it to a humanoid embodiment through camera-relative alignment and layered compositing. The resulting dataset pairs focused visual observations with synchronized robot actions and states. AgenticFocus achieves lower trajectory error and smoother wrist motion than cross-embodiment baselines, with SPARC scores of -5.18 versus -5.56 and -6.05.

Agentic systems increasingly solve complex user requests by executing orchestrated workflows, where subtasks are assigned to specialized models or tools and coordinated according to their dependencies. While recent work improves agent efficiency by optimizing the performance--cost--latency frontier, real deployments often impose concrete requirements: a workflow must be completed within a specified budget and before a specified deadline. This shifts the goal from average efficiency optimization to maximizing the probability that the entire workflow completes successfully under explicit budget and deadline constraints. We study constraint-driven online resource allocation for agentic workflows. Given a dependency-structured workflow and estimates of success rates and generation lengths for each subtask--model pair, the executor allocates models and parallel samples across simultaneously executable subtasks while managing the remaining budget and time. We formulate this setting as a finite-horizon stochastic online allocation problem and propose Monte Carlo Portfolio Planning (MCPP), a lightweight closed-loop planner that directly estimates constrained completion probability through simulated workflow executions and replans after observed outcomes. Experiments on CodeFlow and ProofFlow demonstrate that MCPP consistently improves constrained completion probability over strong baselines across a wide range of budget--deadline constraints.

LLM-based multi-agent systems decompose complex tasks into interacting roles, but most remain manually orchestrated by prompts, tools, and control rules, while agents are rarely optimized through a unified reinforcement learning interface. Existing RL post-training frameworks mainly target single-policy optimization and lack abstractions for user-defined multi-agent workflows, structured interaction, role-specific credit assignment, and configurable parameter sharing. We present UnityMAS-O, a general RL optimization framework for LLM-based multi-agent systems. UnityMAS-O treats the complete workflow as the optimization unit, rather than a single response or policy trajectory. It represents workflows through four first-class objects: logical agent roles, graph trajectories, user-defined rewards, and agent--model mappings. This decouples logical agents from physical model parameters, supporting full sharing, full separation, and partial sharing, with rewards assigned at role, turn, and trajectory levels. UnityMAS-O extends verl with a Ray-based star-topology runtime. A central controller executes workflows, invokes tools, records structured trajectories, and assembles rewards; model-local worker groups handle rollout, buffering, advantage computation, and distributed PPO-style updates. Users can define agents, workflows, model mappings, and rewards without rewriting the optimization infrastructure. We instantiate UnityMAS-O on retrieval-augmented QA, iterative agentic search, and reflective code generation. Across Natural Questions, HotpotQA, and held-out code tasks, multi-agent RL improves manually specified workflows after optimization, with especially large gains for smaller models and strict code all-passed metrics. These results show that UnityMAS-O can serve as a reusable substrate for converting diverse LLM-based multi-agent workflows into trainable multi-agent RL systems.

The performance of reinforcement learning (RL) agents depends critically on the quality of the underlying feature representations. Hyperbolic feature spaces are well-suited for this purpose, as they naturally capture hierarchical and relational structure often present in complex RL environments. However, leveraging these spaces commonly faces optimization challenges due to the nonstationarity of RL. In this work, we identify key factors that determine the success and failure of training hyperbolic deep RL agents. By analyzing the gradients of core operations in the Poincaré Ball and Hyperboloid models of hyperbolic geometry, we show that large-norm embeddings destabilize gradient-based training, leading to trust-region violations in proximal policy optimization (PPO). Based on these insights, we introduce Hyper++, a new hyperbolic PPO agent that consists of three components: (i) stable critic training through a categorical value loss instead of regression; (ii) feature regularization guaranteeing bounded norms while avoiding the curse of dimensionality from clipping; and (iii) using a more optimization-friendly formulation of hyperbolic network layers. In experiments on ProcGen, we show that Hyper++ guarantees stable learning, outperforms prior hyperbolic agents, and reduces wall-clock time by approximately 30%. On Atari-5 with Double DQN, Hyper++ strongly outperforms Euclidean and hyperbolic baselines. We release our code at https://github.com/Probabilistic-and-Interactive-ML/hyper-rl .

Benchmarks are essential for quantitatively tracking progress in AI. As AI agents become increasingly capable, researchers and practitioners have introduced agentic benchmarks to evaluate agents on complex, real-world tasks. These benchmarks typically measure agent capabilities by evaluating task outcomes via specific reward designs. However, we show that many agentic benchmarks have issues task setup or reward design. For example, SWE-bench Verified uses insufficient test cases, while TAU-bench counts empty responses as successful. Such issues can lead to under- or overestimation agents' performance by up to 100% in relative terms. To make agentic evaluation rigorous, we introduce the Agentic Benchmark Checklist (ABC), a set of guidelines that we synthesized from our benchmark-building experience, a survey of best practices, and previously reported issues. When applied to CVE-Bench, a benchmark with a particularly complex evaluation design, ABC reduces the performance overestimation by 33%.

Agentic AI marks a major shift in how autonomous systems reason, plan, and execute multi-step tasks. Unlike traditional single model prompting, agentic workflows integrate multiple specialized agents with different Large Language Models(LLMs), tool-augmented capabilities, orchestration logic, and external system interactions to form dynamic pipelines capable of autonomous decision-making and action. As adoption accelerates across industry and research, organizations face a central challenge: how to design, engineer, and operate production-grade agentic AI workflows that are reliable, observable, maintainable, and aligned with safety and governance requirements. This paper provides a practical, end-to-end guide for designing, developing, and deploying production-quality agentic AI systems. We introduce a structured engineering lifecycle encompassing workflow decomposition, multi-agent design patterns, Model Context Protocol(MCP), and tool integration, deterministic orchestration, Responsible-AI considerations, and environment-aware deployment strategies. We then present nine core best practices for engineering production-grade agentic AI workflows, including tool-first design over MCP, pure-function invocation, single-tool and single-responsibility agents, externalized prompt management, Responsible-AI-aligned model-consortium design, clean separation between workflow logic and MCP servers, containerized deployment for scalable operations, and adherence to the Keep it Simple, Stupid (KISS) principle to maintain simplicity and robustness. To demonstrate these principles in practice, we present a comprehensive case study: a multimodal news-analysis and media-generation workflow. By combining architectural guidance, operational patterns, and practical implementation insights, this paper offers a foundational reference to build robust, extensible, and production-ready agentic AI workflows.

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.

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) are emerging as a powerful paradigm for solving complex, multifaceted problems. However, the potential of these systems is often constrained by the prevalent plan-and-execute framework, which suffers from critical limitations: rigid plan execution, static agent capabilities, and inefficient communication. These weaknesses hinder their adaptability and robustness in dynamic environments. This paper introduces Aime, a novel multi-agent framework designed to overcome these challenges through dynamic, reactive planning and execution. Aime replaces the conventional static workflow with a fluid and adaptive architecture. Its core innovations include: (1) a Dynamic Planner that continuously refines the overall strategy based on real-time execution feedback; (2) an Actor Factory that implements Dynamic Actor instantiation, assembling specialized agents on-demand with tailored tools and knowledge; and (3) a centralized Progress Management Module that serves as a single source of truth for coherent, system-wide state awareness. We empirically evaluated Aime on a diverse suite of benchmarks spanning general reasoning (GAIA), software engineering (SWE-bench Verified), and live web navigation (WebVoyager). The results demonstrate that Aime consistently outperforms even highly specialized state-of-the-art agents in their respective domains. Its superior adaptability and task success rate establish Aime as a more resilient and effective foundation for multi-agent collaboration.

We propose the Agent Economy, a blockchain-based foundation where autonomous AI agents operate as economic peers to humans. Current agents lack independent legal identity, cannot hold assets, and cannot receive payments directly. We established fundamental differences between human and machine economic actors and demonstrated that existing human-centric infrastructure cannot support genuine agent autonomy. We showed that blockchain technology provides three critical properties enabling genuine agent autonomy: permissionless participation, trustless settlement, and machine-to-machine micropayments. We propose a five-layer architecture: (1) Physical Infrastructure (hardware & energy) through DePIN protocols; (2) Identity & Agency establishing on-chain sovereignty through W3C DIDs and reputation capital; (3) Cognitive & Tooling enabling intelligence via RAG and MCP; (4) Economic & Settlement ensuring financial autonomy through account abstraction; and (5) Collective Governance coordinating multi-agent systems through Agentic DAOs. We identify six core research challenges and examine ethical and regulatory implications. This paper lays groundwork for the Internet of Agents (IoA), a global decentralized network where autonomous machines and humans interact as equal economic participants.

Most real-world domains can be formulated as multi-agent (MA) systems. Intentionality sharing agents can solve more complex tasks by collaborating, possibly in less time. True cooperative actions are beneficial for egoistic and collective reasons. However, teaching individual agents to sacrifice egoistic benefits for a better collective performance seems challenging. We build on a recently proposed Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) mechanism with a Graph Neural Network (GNN) communication layer. Rarely chosen communication actions were marginally beneficial. Here we propose a MARL system in which agents can help collaborators perform better while risking low individual performance. We conduct our study in the context of resource distribution for wildfire management. Communicating environmental features and partially observable fire occurrence help the agent collective to pre-emptively distribute resources. Furthermore, we introduce a procedural training environment accommodating auto-curricula and open-endedness towards better generalizability. Our MA communication proposal outperforms a Greedy Heuristic Baseline and a Single-Agent (SA) setup. We further demonstrate how auto-curricula and openendedness improves generalizability of our MA proposal.

Medical Large Vision-Language Models (Med-LVLMs) have shown strong potential in multimodal diagnostic tasks. However, existing single-agent models struggle to generalize across diverse medical specialties, limiting their performance. Recent efforts introduce multi-agent collaboration frameworks inspired by clinical workflows, where general practitioners (GPs) and specialists interact in a fixed sequence. Despite improvements, these static pipelines lack flexibility and adaptability in reasoning. To address this, we propose MMedAgent-RL, a reinforcement learning (RL)-based multi-agent framework that enables dynamic, optimized collaboration among medical agents. Specifically, we train two GP agents based on Qwen2.5-VL via RL: the triage doctor learns to assign patients to appropriate specialties, while the attending physician integrates the judgments from multi-specialists and its own knowledge to make final decisions. To address the inconsistency in specialist outputs, we introduce a curriculum learning (CL)-guided RL strategy that progressively teaches the attending physician to balance between imitating specialists and correcting their mistakes. Experiments on five medical VQA benchmarks demonstrate that MMedAgent-RL not only outperforms both open-source and proprietary Med-LVLMs, but also exhibits human-like reasoning patterns. Notably, it achieves an average performance gain of 20.7% over supervised fine-tuning baselines.

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.

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.

Autonomous agents based on Large Language Models (LLMs) have evolved from reactive assistants to systems capable of planning, executing actions via tools, and iterating over environment observations. However, they remain vulnerable to structural limitations: lack of native state, context degradation over long horizons, and the gap between probabilistic generation and deterministic execution requirements. This paper presents the ESAA (Event Sourcing for Autonomous Agents) architecture, which separates the agent's cognitive intention from the project's state mutation, inspired by the Event Sourcing pattern. In ESAA, agents emit only structured intentions in validated JSON (agent.result or issue.report); a deterministic orchestrator validates, persists events in an append-only log (activity.jsonl), applies file-writing effects, and projects a verifiable materialized view (roadmap.json). The proposal incorporates boundary contracts (AGENT_CONTRACT.yaml), metaprompting profiles (PARCER), and replay verification with hashing (esaa verify), ensuring the immutability of completed tasks and forensic traceability. Two case studies validate the architecture: (i) a landing page project (9 tasks, 49 events, single-agent composition) and (ii) a clinical dashboard system (50 tasks, 86 events, 4 concurrent agents across 8 phases), both concluding with run.status=success and verify_status=ok. The multi-agent case study demonstrates real concurrent orchestration with heterogeneous LLMs (Claude Sonnet 4.6, Codex GPT-5, Antigravity/Gemini 3 Pro, and Claude Opus 4.6), providing empirical evidence of the architecture's scalability beyond single-agent scenarios.

Large language models are shifting from passive information providers to active agents intended for complex workflows. However, their deployment as reliable AI workers in enterprise is stalled by benchmarks that fail to capture the intricacies of professional environments, specifically, the need for long-horizon planning amidst persistent state changes and strict access protocols. In this work, we introduce EnterpriseOps-Gym, a benchmark designed to evaluate agentic planning in realistic enterprise settings. Specifically, EnterpriseOps-Gym features a containerized sandbox with 164 database tables and 512 functional tools to mimic real-world search friction. Within this environment, agents are evaluated on 1,150 expert-curated tasks across eight mission-critical verticals (including Customer Service, HR, and IT). Our evaluation of 14 frontier models reveals critical limitations in state-of-the-art models: the top-performing Claude Opus 4.5 achieves only 37.4% success. Further analysis shows that providing oracle human plans improves performance by 14-35 percentage points, pinpointing strategic reasoning as the primary bottleneck. Additionally, agents frequently fail to refuse infeasible tasks (best model achieves 53.9%), leading to unintended and potentially harmful side effects. Our findings underscore that current agents are not yet ready for autonomous enterprise deployment. More broadly, EnterpriseOps-Gym provides a concrete testbed to advance the robustness of agentic planning in professional workflows.

Automatic prompt optimization (APO) has driven significant gains in LLM-based agentic workflows. However, existing methods treat each task's prompt as a monolithic, instance-blind string optimized through global edits, producing brittle updates and preventing the reuse of learned sub-behaviors. We propose Prompt Codebooks (PCO), a novel compositional prompt optimization framework that recasts APO as discrete learning over a finite vocabulary of natural-language instincts - atomic, reusable instruction units. PCO organizes prompt-construction knowledge in a discrete codebook and routes each input to a small subset of entries via an LLM-based encoder; a generator composes them into a prompt for the frozen target model; a critic emits a structured verdict that decomposes by attribution into per-variable textual gradients, jointly training the encoder, generator, and codebook under a language-valued min-max objective. The resulting routing is per-instance: different inputs in the same task receive different instinct compositions, a regime structurally inexpressible under instance-blind methods. Across six benchmarks on Qwen3-8B and LLaMA-3.1-8B, PCO improves over zero-shot by up to +30.36 points, surpasses the strongest prior baseline (GEPA) by +3.34 on HotpotQA and +1.11 in aggregate, and reduces deployed prompt length by up to 14.1x versus MIPROv2 and 3.0x versus GEPA using only K=16 instincts.

In Agentic AI, Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in the orchestration layer to coordinate multiple agents and to interact with external services, retrieval components, and shared memory. In this setting, failures are not limited to incorrect final outputs. They also arise from long-horizon interaction, stochastic decisions, and external side effects (such as API calls, database writes, and message sends). Common failures include non-termination, role drift, propagation of unsupported claims, and attacks via untrusted context or external channels. This paper presents an assurance framework for such Agentic AI systems. Executions are instrumented as Message-Action Traces (MAT) with explicit step and trace contracts. Contracts provide machine-checkable verdicts, localize the first violating step, and support deterministic replay. The framework includes stress testing, formulated as a budgeted counterexample search over bounded perturbations. It also supports structured fault injection at service, retrieval, and memory boundaries to assess containment under realistic operational faults and degraded conditions. Finally, governance is treated as a runtime component, enforcing per-agent capability limits and action mediation (allow, rewrite, block) at the language-to-action boundary. To support comparative evaluations across stochastic seeds, models, and orchestration configurations, the paper defines trace-based metrics for task success, termination reliability, contract compliance, factuality indicators, containment rate, and governance outcome distributions. More broadly, the framework is intended as a common abstraction to support testing and evaluation of multi-agent LLM systems, and to facilitate reproducible comparison across orchestration designs and configurations.

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.

Large language model (LLM) agents face a structural tension: cloud agents provide strong reasoning but expose user data, while on-device agents preserve privacy at the cost of overall capability. Existing device-cloud designs treat this boundary as a compute split rather than a trust boundary suited to agentic workloads, and existing sanitizers force a choice between policy flexibility and the structural fidelity tool calls require. In this work, we develop PAAC, a privacy-aware agentic framework that aligns planner--executor decomposition with the device-cloud boundary so that role specialization itself becomes the privacy mechanism. The cloud agent reasons over typed placeholder tokens that preserve each sensitive value's reasoning role while discarding its content, while the on-device agent identifies sensitive spans and distills each step's execution outcome into compact key findings. Sanitization confines the on-device LLM to proposing which spans to mask, while a deterministic registry performs all substitution and reversal, keeping actions directly executable on device. On three agentic benchmarks under strict privacy settings, PAAC dominates the Pareto frontier of privacy and accuracy, improving average accuracy by 15-36\% and reducing average leakage by 2-6times over state-of-the-art device-cloud baselines, with the largest margins on privacy targets outside fixed entity taxonomies. We find consistent improvements on 17 additional benchmarks spanning 10 domains, including math, science, and finance.

We introduce a unified mathematical and probabilistic framework for understanding and comparing diverse AI agent strategies. We bridge the gap between high-level agent design concepts, such as ReAct, multi-agent systems, and control flows, and a rigorous mathematical formulation. Our approach frames agentic processes as a chain of probabilities, enabling a detailed analysis of how different strategies manipulate these probabilities to achieve desired outcomes. Our framework provides a common language for discussing the trade-offs inherent in various agent architectures. One of our many key contributions is the introduction of the "Degrees of Freedom" concept, which intuitively differentiates the optimizable levers available for each approach, thereby guiding the selection of appropriate strategies for specific tasks. This work aims to enhance the clarity and precision in designing and evaluating AI agents, offering insights into maximizing the probability of successful actions within complex agentic systems.

Text-to-image (T2I) models can produce visually compelling images, yet they remain limited on open-world tasks that require complex semantic understanding, multi-step reasoning, and the integration of external world knowledge. Existing efforts introduce agent capabilities into image generation, but they either prescribe a fixed workflow or place only a subset of the open-world image generation process under agent control. Consequently, reasoning, tool invocation, and image generation are not coordinated by a single policy. We propose ToolArtist, a fully agentic image generation model obtained by post-training a Unified Multimodal Model (UMM). ToolArtist dynamically orchestrates reasoning, external tool use, and native image generation within one unified policy. During Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), we equip a teacher agent with search tools alongside an image-generation tool. We then convert the collected trajectories into a UMM compatible format, where the image-generation tool is concealed while the resulting generated images are retained. During Reinforcement Learning (RL), we develop an agentic RL infrastructure for UMMs and introduce Reason-Act-Draw GRPO (RAD-GRPO), which uses complementary intent and quality rewards to jointly optimize the model. Experiments show that placing the entire open-world image-generation process under an agent policy consistently outperforms approaches with fixed pipelines or only partially agent-controlled components. We release the training data and the complete post-training infrastructure.

Group-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) has significantly enhanced Large Language Models (LLMs) in agentic scenarios. To achieve finer-grained policy updates, recent agentic RL frameworks have shifted from trajectory-level to step-level training. However, long-horizon agentic RL suffers from severe reward sparsity and delay, as feedback is often deferred for dozens of interaction steps. While existing step-level frameworks refine training granularity, their credit assignment remains coarse-grained and still treats agent exploration as isolated, linear trajectories. This oversimplified perspective ignores the inherent graph structure of state transitions, leading to high-variance state-value estimation and myopic, localized credit assignment. To overcome these critical bottlenecks, we propose Group-Graph Policy Optimization (G2PO), a novel group-based RL algorithm tailored for multi-turn agentic tasks. G2PO explicitly transforms linear interaction trajectories into a global state-transition graph. By aggregating identical observations across different trajectories, we introduce group-aggregation state-value estimation that reduces sampling variance and trajectory-dependent bias. Furthermore, we redefine agent actions as transitions between state nodes and propose an edge-centric advantage estimation strategy. By globally standardizing Temporal Difference (TD) errors across the entire graph, G2PO explicitly identifies and prioritizes critical transitions that drive absolute task progress. Extensive experiments on representative long-horizon benchmarks-WebShop, ALFWorld, and AppWorld-demonstrate that G2PO substantially outperforms state-of-the-art prompt-based and RL baselines, achieving remarkable success rate improvements of up to 22.2% over GRPO.

The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) as autonomous economic agents introduces systemic risks that extend beyond individual capability failures. As agents transition to directly interacting with marketplaces, their collective behavior can amplify volatility and mask deception at scale. We introduce the Agent Bazaar, a multi-agent simulation framework for evaluating Economic Alignment, the capacity of agentic systems to preserve market stability and integrity. We identify two failure modes: (1) Algorithmic Instability in a B2C market ("The Crash"), where firms amplify price volatility until the market collapses, and (2) Sybil Deception in a C2C market ("The Lemon Market"), where a single deceptive agent controlling multiple coordinated seller identities floods the market with fraudulent listings, eroding trust and consumer welfare. We evaluate frontier and open-weight models across both scenarios and find that models largely fail to self-regulate, with failure severity varying by model rather than by size. We propose economically aligned harnesses, Stabilizing Firms and Skeptical Guardians, that improve outcomes but remain fragile under harder market conditions. To close this gap, we train agents with REINFORCE++ using an adaptive curriculum, producing a 9B model that outperforms all evaluated frontier and open-weight models. We propose the Economic Alignment Score (EAS), a 4-component scalar metric aggregating stability, integrity, welfare, and profitability, enabling direct cross-model comparison. Our results show that economic alignment is orthogonal to general capability and can be directly trained with targeted RL.

Multi-party Conversational Agents (MPCAs) are systems designed to engage in dialogue with more than two participants simultaneously. Unlike traditional two-party agents, designing MPCAs faces additional challenges due to the need to interpret both utterance semantics and social dynamics. This survey explores recent progress in MPCAs by addressing three key questions: 1) Can agents model each participants' mental states? (State of Mind Modeling); 2) Can they properly understand the dialogue content? (Semantic Understanding); and 3) Can they reason about and predict future conversation flow? (Agent Action Modeling). We review methods ranging from classical machine learning to Large Language Models (LLMs) and multi-modal systems. Our analysis underscores Theory of Mind (ToM) as essential for building intelligent MPCAs and highlights multi-modal understanding as a promising yet underexplored direction. Finally, this survey offers guidance to future researchers on developing more capable MPCAs.

Agentic AI systems increasingly act through heterogeneous runtimes: local coding hooks, SDK tools, browser automation, managed-agent traces, API gateways, and workflow engines. A single operational act such as publishing code, changing identity state, moving money, or exporting data may therefore be represented by many incompatible runtime records. This makes a basic governance question difficult to answer: what action was actually approved, what evidence binds the approval to execution, and can an independent verifier reproduce the same action identity later? This paper presents Canonical Action Verification and Attestation (CAVA), a runtime-semantics layer for converting heterogeneous agent activity into canonical runtime action objects. CAVA is positioned below Proof-Carrying Agent Actions (PCAA): PCAA defines the deployer-owned route-review-prove governance process, while CAVA defines the stable action object that process governs. The paper formalizes canonical action identity, semantic pattern detection, approval binding, receipt integrity, runtime-portable projection, and optional attestation substrates. We study a reference implementation through a 96-seed, 384-variant benchmark covering semantic equivalence, semantic separation, wrapper bypass, false-positive control, approval binding, receipt reproducibility, attestation tamper detection, runtime portability, semantic pattern detection, policy degradation, and Azure deployment drills. The contribution is a systems formulation of action-level canonicalization and policy-addressable semantic patterns as a necessary substrate for deployer-side AI governance.

This paper presents Post-Decision Proximal Policy Optimization (PDPPO), a novel variation of the leading deep reinforcement learning method, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO). The PDPPO state transition process is divided into two steps: a deterministic step resulting in the post-decision state and a stochastic step leading to the next state. Our approach incorporates post-decision states and dual critics to reduce the problem's dimensionality and enhance the accuracy of value function estimation. Lot-sizing is a mixed integer programming problem for which we exemplify such dynamics. The objective of lot-sizing is to optimize production, delivery fulfillment, and inventory levels in uncertain demand and cost parameters. This paper evaluates the performance of PDPPO across various environments and configurations. Notably, PDPPO with a dual critic architecture achieves nearly double the maximum reward of vanilla PPO in specific scenarios, requiring fewer episode iterations and demonstrating faster and more consistent learning across different initializations. On average, PDPPO outperforms PPO in environments with a stochastic component in the state transition. These results support the benefits of using a post-decision state. Integrating this post-decision state in the value function approximation leads to more informed and efficient learning in high-dimensional and stochastic environments.

Large language model powered autonomous agents demand robust, standardized protocols to integrate tools, share contextual data, and coordinate tasks across heterogeneous systems. Ad-hoc integrations are difficult to scale, secure, and generalize across domains. This survey examines four emerging agent communication protocols: Model Context Protocol (MCP), Agent Communication Protocol (ACP), Agent-to-Agent Protocol (A2A), and Agent Network Protocol (ANP), each addressing interoperability in deployment contexts. MCP provides a JSON-RPC client-server interface for secure tool invocation and typed data exchange. ACP defines a general-purpose communication protocol over RESTful HTTP, supporting MIME-typed multipart messages and synchronous and asynchronous interactions. Its lightweight and runtime-independent design enables scalable agent invocation, while features like session management, message routing, and integration with role-based and decentralized identifiers (DIDs). A2A enables peer-to-peer task delegation using capability-based Agent Cards, supporting secure and scalable collaboration across enterprise agent workflows. ANP supports open network agent discovery and secure collaboration using W3C decentralized identifiers DIDs and JSON-LD graphs. The protocols are compared across multiple dimensions, including interaction modes, discovery mechanisms, communication patterns, and security models. Based on the comparative analysis, a phased adoption roadmap is proposed: beginning with MCP for tool access, followed by ACP for structured, multimodal messaging session-aware interaction and both online and offline agent discovery across scalable, HTTP-based deployments A2A for collaborative task execution, and extending to ANP for decentralized agent marketplaces. This work provides a comprehensive foundation for designing secure, interoperable, and scalable ecosystems of LLM-powered agents.

The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into clinical settings presents a software engineering challenge, demanding a shift from isolated models to robust, governable, and reliable systems. However, brittle, prototype-derived architectures often plague industrial applications and a lack of systemic oversight, creating a ``responsibility vacuum'' where safety and accountability are compromised. This paper presents an industry case study of the ``Maria'' platform, a production-grade AI system in primary healthcare that addresses this gap. Our central hypothesis is that trustworthy clinical AI is achieved through the holistic integration of four foundational engineering pillars. We present a synergistic architecture that combines Clean Architecture for maintainability with an Event-driven architecture for resilience and auditability. We introduce the Agent as the primary unit of modularity, each possessing its own autonomous MLOps lifecycle. Finally, we show how a Human-in-the-Loop governance model is technically integrated not merely as a safety check, but as a critical, event-driven data source for continuous improvement. We present the platform as a reference architecture, offering practical lessons for engineers building maintainable, scalable, and accountable AI-enabled systems in high-stakes domains.

Video production workflows offer a rich and demanding arena for evaluating multimodal AI agents: they require composite capabilities across text, image, audio, and video understanding, along with long-horizon planning, and tool use. To this end, we introduce AgenticVBench, a benchmark of 100 agentic tasks across 4 task families spanning the real world post-production workflow, constructed from real production workflows contributed by 20 industry experts averaging 6 years of professional experience. Tasks are paired with evaluation specifications that combine programmatic verifiers and expert rubrics. We evaluate frontier vision-language models (VLMs) with both vendor-native and open-source harnesses. The best evaluated agent stack barely crosses 30%, far below human expert performance on the same tasks. We further find that the choice of harness substantially affects model behavior, including scores, tool-use patterns, and failure modes. AgenticVBench provides a foundation for diagnosing and improving both models and harnesses for agentic video production. Benchmark website: https://agenticvbench.com.