Multiagent Systems Papers

ALT LLMs excel at language tasks, but long-meeting QFS remains difficult due to complex speaker dynamics, sparse key information, and limited data. Meetings involve disfluencies, long transcripts and complex discourse. QFS have high risk of information omission, hallucination, even for advanced models such as GPT-4-mini and Gemini. Existing end-to-end methods compress retrieval, evidence extraction, and summary generation into a single pass, failing to handle the complex reasoning required for targeted meeting summaries. We propose ReSUM, a modular multi-LLM framework coordinated by a planner that orchestrates retrieval and summarization agents. By distilling teacher reasoning into query- and plan-conditioned retrievers and summarizers, ReSUM enhances long-context robustness, minimizes irrelevant exploration, and generates more faithful and comprehensive query-focused summaries. Experiments show consistent gains on query-focused meeting summarization benchmarks.

ALT Electromagnetic spectrum agents (ESAs) must contend with changing environments and task requirements during sustained autonomous operation, yet their existing capabilities may not remain suitable for new operating conditions. This article proposes recursively self-improving electromagnetic spectrum agents (RSI-ESAs) that use operational feedback to update their capabilities and build on prior improvements. We present their architecture and editable components, and describe a self-improvement process encompassing problem diagnosis, candidate generation, validation, and inheritance. By retaining effective task versions and using modification records and diagnostic knowledge to guide subsequent updates, RSI-ESAs can accumulate task capabilities and improvement experience across successive rounds. A shared-spectrum scheduling case study illustrates improved task performance and capability accumulation over multiple improvement rounds under the tested conditions. Finally, we discuss open ch

ALT Multi-agent systems become capable through institutional mechanisms, such as rules that route information to agents that act on it. These mechanisms are also natural places to restrict the system. Yet as agents learn, share memory, delegate, and repair failures, the collective can find other paths to the same effects: a restriction on the original mechanism still operates but no longer stops them, while routine performance and compliance checks pass. We propose Reversible Multi-agent Systems as a research agenda: collectives that grow while an authorized supervisor can still restrict specified effects, keep them restricted as agents adapt, and reconstitute useful cooperation under renewed authority. What is reversed is the ability to produce a specified effect; restrictions must hold even if learned knowledge persists. The goal is to preserve effective intervention, not a particular mechanism: at every step of growth, some authorized intervention must keep a specified prohibited effect

ALT Mixed-autonomy traffic involves heterogeneous driving populations competing for shared road space. Previous studies have shown the existence and emergence of collective rationality using game-theoretic and reinforcement learning approaches, which rely on explicitly specified behavioral assumptions or reward functions for driving agents. However, how bargaining behaviors between driving agents evolve and lead to collective outcomes based on richer agent characteristics and language-based reasoning remains less understood. To fill this gap, we develop a bargaining framework based on large language models (LLMs) in which population-level autonomous vehicle (AV) and human-driven vehicle (HV) agents negotiate road-space allocations under heterogeneous objectives and private information. Through controlled experiments varying traffic composition, agent objectives, and traffic-domain knowledge, we examine bargaining behavior, coordination, and resource utilization. Results show that negotiate

ALT Multi-agent LLM systems increasingly aggregate judgments across model instances, but reasoning about other agents can itself introduce failure. We study a setting in which LLMs shift their public decisions after observing ambiguous social signals while reporting inaccurate estimates of what other agents privately judged, even when the group's recorded private judgments do not support the apparent consensus. We call this failure phantom consensus and study it as a pluralistic-ignorance-style pattern in controlled LLM collectives. To measure this phenomenon, we introduce PHANTOM-Bench, a benchmark that separates isolated private judgments, public decisions after ambiguous social signals, elicited estimates of the group's private judgment, transparency-based recovery, and controls for neutral public text and explicit vote-following. Across nine closed- and open-weight models, ambiguous public signals consistently degrade decision quality and can turn correct private group judgments into i

ALT Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) improves reasoning on multimodal tasks, but its accuracy and token efficiency depend on how agents interact during debate. A largely overlooked design choice is which interaction modalities agents use to exchange evidence. Existing methods rely on fixed text- or graph-based interaction, which fails to convey fine-grained multimodal evidence and thus degrades accuracy while inflating token cost due to verbose descriptions. To address this, we propose Adaptive Interaction in Multi-Agent Debate (AIM), an adaptive routing framework that dynamically selects the optimal modality combination for inter-agent interaction in multimodal MAD. Beyond text and graph, AIM introduces task-dependent modality interaction, where agents exchange targeted regions of interest from the task-specific multimodal input, such as image regions, audio segments, or spatio-temporal video clips. To determine the best combination for each instance, AIM first generates a structured baseline res

ALT The ODD protocol is the de facto standard for describing agent-based models, but it lacks vocabulary for the components that determine LLM-agent behavior: prompt assembly, memory serialization, parsing, and retry logic. We propose ODD+LLM, a backward-compatible extension adding five documentation blocks grounded in the CoALA cognitive-architecture framework. To show that the gap matters, we conduct a multiverse analysis [Steegen et al., 2016] of a published LLM naming-game simulation, varying six specification choices a reimplementer must make. Variants that are defensible readings of the paper stay within statistical noise of our baseline reconstruction. Missing one instruction that the paper states but is easy to overlook (that the model answers as an outside observer rather than as a player) raises the share of runs settling on the convention agents individually favor from 0.35 to 1.00 and makes convergence three times faster, in a reimplementation that uses a different model from t

ALT Building agentic pipelines that achieve high task performance while keeping cost and latency low requires jointly optimizing heterogeneous and coupled design choices, including prompts, topology, model selection, and tool policies. Manually searching this combinatorial design space is expensive and time-consuming, while existing automated optimizers typically operate within a predefined subset of this space, modify the pipeline monolithically, or provide little structured evidence for pipeline changes. To mitigate these challenges, we introduce the Decomposed Credit-Assignment Framework (DeCAF), which adapts the design space to the given benchmark and pipeline, optimizes each dimension separately, and generates reasoning traces for every decision. Given a task specification, benchmark examples, and a seed pipeline, DeCAF identifies relevant optimization dimensions and generates diverse experimental hypotheses for each. Independent coding-agent sessions then optimize each dimension unde

ALT Groups can achieve more than individuals in the same amount of time, but only if their members coordinate: they must decide who works on what and what to share. However, this organization in multi-agent systems today usually comes from arbitrary, static harnesses designed a priori without adapting to agent behaviors or task specifications. We ask whether agents can instead learn to organize themselves. We introduce s³, the first multi-agent reinforcement learning method in which agents decide for themselves how long to work alone and when to share findings or read teammates' messages, with no predefined organization or roles. Our s³ agents learn to take different approaches, read each other's work, exhibit emergent roles that complement each other in the swarm, and generalize to bigger teams. We study both coordination, where agents must combine private information, and parallel exploration, where sharing discoveries can make search more efficient. With matched training and inference b

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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