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Nov 4

In-House Evaluation Is Not Enough: Towards Robust Third-Party Flaw Disclosure for General-Purpose AI

The widespread deployment of general-purpose AI (GPAI) systems introduces significant new risks. Yet the infrastructure, practices, and norms for reporting flaws in GPAI systems remain seriously underdeveloped, lagging far behind more established fields like software security. Based on a collaboration between experts from the fields of software security, machine learning, law, social science, and policy, we identify key gaps in the evaluation and reporting of flaws in GPAI systems. We call for three interventions to advance system safety. First, we propose using standardized AI flaw reports and rules of engagement for researchers in order to ease the process of submitting, reproducing, and triaging flaws in GPAI systems. Second, we propose GPAI system providers adopt broadly-scoped flaw disclosure programs, borrowing from bug bounties, with legal safe harbors to protect researchers. Third, we advocate for the development of improved infrastructure to coordinate distribution of flaw reports across the many stakeholders who may be impacted. These interventions are increasingly urgent, as evidenced by the prevalence of jailbreaks and other flaws that can transfer across different providers' GPAI systems. By promoting robust reporting and coordination in the AI ecosystem, these proposals could significantly improve the safety, security, and accountability of GPAI systems.

  • 34 authors
·
Mar 21

A Survey of LLM-Driven AI Agent Communication: Protocols, Security Risks, and Defense Countermeasures

In recent years, Large-Language-Model-driven AI agents have exhibited unprecedented intelligence, flexibility, and adaptability, and are rapidly changing human production and lifestyle. Nowadays, agents are undergoing a new round of evolution. They no longer act as an isolated island like LLMs. Instead, they start to communicate with diverse external entities, such as other agents and tools, to collectively perform more complex tasks. Under this trend, agent communication is regarded as a foundational pillar of the future AI ecosystem, and many organizations intensively begin to design related communication protocols (e.g., Anthropic's MCP and Google's A2A) within the recent few months. However, this new field exposes significant security hazard, which can cause severe damage to real-world scenarios. To help researchers to quickly figure out this promising topic and benefit the future agent communication development, this paper presents a comprehensive survey of agent communication security. More precisely, we first present a clear definition of agent communication and categorize the entire lifecyle of agent communication into three stages: user-agent interaction, agent-agent communication, and agent-environment communication. Next, for each communication phase, we dissect related protocols and analyze its security risks according to the communication characteristics. Then, we summarize and outlook on the possible defense countermeasures for each risk. Finally, we discuss open issues and future directions in this promising research field.

  • 16 authors
·
Jun 24

Should ChatGPT and Bard Share Revenue with Their Data Providers? A New Business Model for the AI Era

With various AI tools such as ChatGPT becoming increasingly popular, we are entering a true AI era. We can foresee that exceptional AI tools will soon reap considerable profits. A crucial question arise: should AI tools share revenue with their training data providers in additional to traditional stakeholders and shareholders? The answer is Yes. Large AI tools, such as large language models, always require more and better quality data to continuously improve, but current copyright laws limit their access to various types of data. Sharing revenue between AI tools and their data providers could transform the current hostile zero-sum game relationship between AI tools and a majority of copyrighted data owners into a collaborative and mutually beneficial one, which is necessary to facilitate the development of a virtuous cycle among AI tools, their users and data providers that drives forward AI technology and builds a healthy AI ecosystem. However, current revenue-sharing business models do not work for AI tools in the forthcoming AI era, since the most widely used metrics for website-based traffic and action, such as clicks, will be replaced by new metrics such as prompts and cost per prompt for generative AI tools. A completely new revenue-sharing business model, which must be almost independent of AI tools and be easily explained to data providers, needs to establish a prompt-based scoring system to measure data engagement of each data provider. This paper systematically discusses how to build such a scoring system for all data providers for AI tools based on classification and content similarity models, and outlines the requirements for AI tools or third parties to build it. Sharing revenue with data providers using such a scoring system would encourage more data owners to participate in the revenue-sharing program. This will be a utilitarian AI era where all parties benefit.

  • 1 authors
·
May 4, 2023

TaskMatrix.AI: Completing Tasks by Connecting Foundation Models with Millions of APIs

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made incredible progress recently. On the one hand, advanced foundation models like ChatGPT can offer powerful conversation, in-context learning and code generation abilities on a broad range of open-domain tasks. They can also generate high-level solution outlines for domain-specific tasks based on the common sense knowledge they have acquired. However, they still face difficulties with some specialized tasks because they lack enough domain-specific data during pre-training or they often have errors in their neural network computations on those tasks that need accurate executions. On the other hand, there are also many existing models and systems (symbolic-based or neural-based) that can do some domain-specific tasks very well. However, due to the different implementation or working mechanisms, they are not easily accessible or compatible with foundation models. Therefore, there is a clear and pressing need for a mechanism that can leverage foundation models to propose task solution outlines and then automatically match some of the sub-tasks in the outlines to the off-the-shelf models and systems with special functionalities to complete them. Inspired by this, we introduce TaskMatrix.AI as a new AI ecosystem that connects foundation models with millions of APIs for task completion. Unlike most previous work that aimed to improve a single AI model, TaskMatrix.AI focuses more on using existing foundation models (as a brain-like central system) and APIs of other AI models and systems (as sub-task solvers) to achieve diversified tasks in both digital and physical domains. As a position paper, we will present our vision of how to build such an ecosystem, explain each key component, and use study cases to illustrate both the feasibility of this vision and the main challenges we need to address next.

  • 14 authors
·
Mar 28, 2023

The Model Openness Framework: Promoting Completeness and Openness for Reproducibility, Transparency, and Usability in Artificial Intelligence

Generative AI (GAI) offers unprecedented opportunities for research and innovation, but its commercialization has raised concerns about transparency, reproducibility, and safety. Many open GAI models lack the necessary components for full understanding and reproducibility, and some use restrictive licenses whilst claiming to be ``open-source''. To address these concerns, we propose the Model Openness Framework (MOF), a ranked classification system that rates machine learning models based on their completeness and openness, following principles of open science, open source, open data, and open access. The MOF requires specific components of the model development lifecycle to be included and released under appropriate open licenses. This framework aims to prevent misrepresentation of models claiming to be open, guide researchers and developers in providing all model components under permissive licenses, and help individuals and organizations identify models that can be safely adopted without restrictions. By promoting transparency and reproducibility, the MOF combats ``openwashing'' practices and establishes completeness and openness as primary criteria alongside the core tenets of responsible AI. Wide adoption of the MOF will foster a more open AI ecosystem, benefiting research, innovation, and adoption of state-of-the-art models.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 20, 2024

Tiny QA Benchmark++: Ultra-Lightweight, Synthetic Multilingual Dataset Generation & Smoke-Tests for Continuous LLM Evaluation

Tiny QA Benchmark++ (TQB++) presents an ultra-lightweight, multilingual smoke-test suite designed to give large-language-model (LLM) pipelines a unit-test style safety net dataset that runs in seconds with minimal cost. Born out of the tight feedback-loop demands building the Comet Opik prompt-optimization SDK, where waiting on heavyweight benchmarks breaks developer flow. TQB++ couples a 52-item English gold set (less than 20 kB) with a tiny synthetic-data generator pypi package built on provider-agnostic LiteLLM. The generator lets practitioners mint their own tiny packs in any language, domain, or difficulty, while ten ready-made packs already cover Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. Every dataset ships with Croissant metadata and plug-and-play files for OpenAI-Evals, LangChain, and standard CI tools, so teams can drop deterministic micro-benchmarks directly into pull-request gates, prompt-engineering loops, and production dashboards without touching GPU budgets. A complete TQB++ run adds only a few seconds to pipeline latency yet reliably flags prompt-template errors, tokenizer drift, and fine-tuning side-effects long before full-scale suites like MMLU or BIG-Bench would finish configuring. The entire framework is released to accelerate continuous, resource-efficient quality assurance across the generative-AI ecosystem.

  • 1 authors
·
May 17 3

FW-Merging: Scaling Model Merging with Frank-Wolfe Optimization

Model merging has emerged as a promising approach for multi-task learning (MTL), offering a data-efficient alternative to conventional fine-tuning. However, with the rapid development of the open-source AI ecosystem and the increasing availability of fine-tuned foundation models, existing model merging methods face two key limitations: (i) They are primarily designed for in-house fine-tuned models, making them less adaptable to diverse model sources with partially unknown model and task information, (ii) They struggle to scale effectively when merging numerous model checkpoints. To address these challenges, we formulate model merging as a constrained optimization problem and introduce a novel approach: Frank-Wolfe Merging (FW-Merging). Inspired by Frank-Wolfe optimization, our approach iteratively selects the most relevant model in the pool to minimize a linear approximation of the objective function and then executes a local merging similar to the Frank-Wolfe update. The objective function is designed to capture the desired behavior of the target-merged model, while the fine-tuned candidate models define the constraint set. More importantly, FW-Merging serves as an orthogonal technique for existing merging methods, seamlessly integrating with them to further enhance accuracy performance. Our experiments show that FW-Merging scales across diverse model sources, remaining stable with 16 irrelevant models and improving by 15.3% with 16 relevant models on 20 CV tasks, while maintaining constant memory overhead, unlike the linear overhead of data-informed merging methods. Compared with the state-of-the-art approaches, FW-Merging surpasses the data-free merging method by 32.8% and outperforms the data-informed Adamerging by 8.39% when merging 20 ViT models. Our code is open-sourced at github.com/hmarkc/FW-Merging.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 16

A Survey of Data Agents: Emerging Paradigm or Overstated Hype?

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has spurred the emergence of data agents--autonomous systems designed to orchestrate Data + AI ecosystems for tackling complex data-related tasks. However, the term "data agent" currently suffers from terminological ambiguity and inconsistent adoption, conflating simple query responders with sophisticated autonomous architectures. This terminological ambiguity fosters mismatched user expectations, accountability challenges, and barriers to industry growth. Inspired by the SAE J3016 standard for driving automation, this survey introduces the first systematic hierarchical taxonomy for data agents, comprising six levels that delineate and trace progressive shifts in autonomy, from manual operations (L0) to a vision of generative, fully autonomous data agents (L5), thereby clarifying capability boundaries and responsibility allocation. Through this lens, we offer a structured review of existing research arranged by increasing autonomy, encompassing specialized data agents for data management, preparation, and analysis, alongside emerging efforts toward versatile, comprehensive systems with enhanced autonomy. We further analyze critical evolutionary leaps and technical gaps for advancing data agents, especially the ongoing L2-to-L3 transition, where data agents evolve from procedural execution to autonomous orchestration. Finally, we conclude with a forward-looking roadmap, envisioning the advent of proactive, generative data agents.

Who Audits the Auditors? Recommendations from a field scan of the algorithmic auditing ecosystem

AI audits are an increasingly popular mechanism for algorithmic accountability; however, they remain poorly defined. Without a clear understanding of audit practices, let alone widely used standards or regulatory guidance, claims that an AI product or system has been audited, whether by first-, second-, or third-party auditors, are difficult to verify and may exacerbate, rather than mitigate, bias and harm. To address this knowledge gap, we provide the first comprehensive field scan of the AI audit ecosystem. We share a catalog of individuals (N=438) and organizations (N=189) who engage in algorithmic audits or whose work is directly relevant to algorithmic audits; conduct an anonymous survey of the group (N=152); and interview industry leaders (N=10). We identify emerging best practices as well as methods and tools that are becoming commonplace, and enumerate common barriers to leveraging algorithmic audits as effective accountability mechanisms. We outline policy recommendations to improve the quality and impact of these audits, and highlight proposals with wide support from algorithmic auditors as well as areas of debate. Our recommendations have implications for lawmakers, regulators, internal company policymakers, and standards-setting bodies, as well as for auditors. They are: 1) require the owners and operators of AI systems to engage in independent algorithmic audits against clearly defined standards; 2) notify individuals when they are subject to algorithmic decision-making systems; 3) mandate disclosure of key components of audit findings for peer review; 4) consider real-world harm in the audit process, including through standardized harm incident reporting and response mechanisms; 5) directly involve the stakeholders most likely to be harmed by AI systems in the algorithmic audit process; and 6) formalize evaluation and, potentially, accreditation of algorithmic auditors.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 3, 2023

What Is Your AI Agent Buying? Evaluation, Implications and Emerging Questions for Agentic E-Commerce

Online marketplaces will be transformed by autonomous AI agents acting on behalf of consumers. Rather than humans browsing and clicking, vision-language-model (VLM) agents can parse webpages, evaluate products, and transact. This raises a fundamental question: what do AI agents buy, and why? We develop ACES, a sandbox environment that pairs a platform-agnostic VLM agent with a fully programmable mock marketplace to study this question. We first conduct basic rationality checks in the context of simple tasks, and then, by randomizing product positions, prices, ratings, reviews, sponsored tags, and platform endorsements, we obtain causal estimates of how frontier VLMs actually shop. Models show strong but heterogeneous position effects: all favor the top row, yet different models prefer different columns, undermining the assumption of a universal "top" rank. They penalize sponsored tags and reward endorsements. Sensitivities to price, ratings, and reviews are directionally human-like but vary sharply in magnitude across models. Motivated by scenarios where sellers use AI agents to optimize product listings, we show that a seller-side agent that makes minor tweaks to product descriptions, targeting AI buyer preferences, can deliver substantial market-share gains if AI-mediated shopping dominates. We also find that modal product choices can differ across models and, in some cases, demand may concentrate on a few select products, raising competition questions. Together, our results illuminate how AI agents may behave in e-commerce settings and surface concrete seller strategy, platform design, and regulatory questions in an AI-mediated ecosystem.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 4 2

An Empirical Study of Testing Practices in Open Source AI Agent Frameworks and Agentic Applications

Foundation model (FM)-based AI agents are rapidly gaining adoption across diverse domains, but their inherent non-determinism and non-reproducibility pose testing and quality assurance challenges. While recent benchmarks provide task-level evaluations, there is limited understanding of how developers verify the internal correctness of these agents during development. To address this gap, we conduct the first large-scale empirical study of testing practices in the AI agent ecosystem, analyzing 39 open-source agent frameworks and 439 agentic applications. We identify ten distinct testing patterns and find that novel, agent-specific methods like DeepEval are seldom used (around 1%), while traditional patterns like negative and membership testing are widely adapted to manage FM uncertainty. By mapping these patterns to canonical architectural components of agent frameworks and agentic applications, we uncover a fundamental inversion of testing effort: deterministic components like Resource Artifacts (tools) and Coordination Artifacts (workflows) consume over 70% of testing effort, while the FM-based Plan Body receives less than 5%. Crucially, this reveals a critical blind spot, as the Trigger component (prompts) remains neglected, appearing in around 1% of all tests. Our findings offer the first empirical testing baseline in FM-based agent frameworks and agentic applications, revealing a rational but incomplete adaptation to non-determinism. To address it, framework developers should improve support for novel testing methods, application developers must adopt prompt regression testing, and researchers should explore barriers to adoption. Strengthening these practices is vital for building more robust and dependable AI agents.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 23 2

Code2MCP: A Multi-Agent Framework for Automated Transformation of Code Repositories into Model Context Protocol Services

The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has created a significant integration challenge in the AI agent ecosystem, often called the "N times M problem," where N models require custom integrations for M tools. This fragmentation stifles innovation and creates substantial development overhead. While the Model Context Protocol (MCP) has emerged as a standard to resolve this, its adoption is hindered by the manual effort required to convert the vast universe of existing software into MCP-compliant services. This is especially true for the millions of open-source repositories on GitHub, the world's largest collection of functional code. This paper introduces Code2MCP, a highly automated, agentic framework designed to transform any GitHub repository into a functional MCP service with minimal human intervention. Our system employs a multi-stage workflow that automates the entire process, from code analysis and environment configuration to service generation and deployment. A key innovation of our framework is an LLM-driven, closed-loop "Run--Review--Fix" cycle, which enables the system to autonomously debug and repair the code it generates. Code2MCP produces not only deployable services but also comprehensive technical documentation, acting as a catalyst to accelerate the MCP ecosystem by systematically unlocking the world's largest open-source code repository and automating the critical last mile of tool integration. The code is open-sourced at https://github.com/DEFENSE-SEU/MCP-Github-Agent.

The Responsible Foundation Model Development Cheatsheet: A Review of Tools & Resources

Foundation model development attracts a rapidly expanding body of contributors, scientists, and applications. To help shape responsible development practices, we introduce the Foundation Model Development Cheatsheet: a growing collection of 250+ tools and resources spanning text, vision, and speech modalities. We draw on a large body of prior work to survey resources (e.g. software, documentation, frameworks, guides, and practical tools) that support informed data selection, processing, and understanding, precise and limitation-aware artifact documentation, efficient model training, advance awareness of the environmental impact from training, careful model evaluation of capabilities, risks, and claims, as well as responsible model release, licensing and deployment practices. We hope this curated collection of resources helps guide more responsible development. The process of curating this list, enabled us to review the AI development ecosystem, revealing what tools are critically missing, misused, or over-used in existing practices. We find that (i) tools for data sourcing, model evaluation, and monitoring are critically under-serving ethical and real-world needs, (ii) evaluations for model safety, capabilities, and environmental impact all lack reproducibility and transparency, (iii) text and particularly English-centric analyses continue to dominate over multilingual and multi-modal analyses, and (iv) evaluation of systems, rather than just models, is needed so that capabilities and impact are assessed in context.

  • 23 authors
·
Jun 24, 2024

HAICOSYSTEM: An Ecosystem for Sandboxing Safety Risks in Human-AI Interactions

AI agents are increasingly autonomous in their interactions with human users and tools, leading to increased interactional safety risks. We present HAICOSYSTEM, a framework examining AI agent safety within diverse and complex social interactions. HAICOSYSTEM features a modular sandbox environment that simulates multi-turn interactions between human users and AI agents, where the AI agents are equipped with a variety of tools (e.g., patient management platforms) to navigate diverse scenarios (e.g., a user attempting to access other patients' profiles). To examine the safety of AI agents in these interactions, we develop a comprehensive multi-dimensional evaluation framework that uses metrics covering operational, content-related, societal, and legal risks. Through running 1840 simulations based on 92 scenarios across seven domains (e.g., healthcare, finance, education), we demonstrate that HAICOSYSTEM can emulate realistic user-AI interactions and complex tool use by AI agents. Our experiments show that state-of-the-art LLMs, both proprietary and open-sourced, exhibit safety risks in over 50\% cases, with models generally showing higher risks when interacting with simulated malicious users. Our findings highlight the ongoing challenge of building agents that can safely navigate complex interactions, particularly when faced with malicious users. To foster the AI agent safety ecosystem, we release a code platform that allows practitioners to create custom scenarios, simulate interactions, and evaluate the safety and performance of their agents.

  • 12 authors
·
Sep 24, 2024

aiXiv: A Next-Generation Open Access Ecosystem for Scientific Discovery Generated by AI Scientists

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled AI agents to autonomously generate scientific proposals, conduct experiments, author papers, and perform peer reviews. Yet this flood of AI-generated research content collides with a fragmented and largely closed publication ecosystem. Traditional journals and conferences rely on human peer review, making them difficult to scale and often reluctant to accept AI-generated research content; existing preprint servers (e.g. arXiv) lack rigorous quality-control mechanisms. Consequently, a significant amount of high-quality AI-generated research lacks appropriate venues for dissemination, hindering its potential to advance scientific progress. To address these challenges, we introduce aiXiv, a next-generation open-access platform for human and AI scientists. Its multi-agent architecture allows research proposals and papers to be submitted, reviewed, and iteratively refined by both human and AI scientists. It also provides API and MCP interfaces that enable seamless integration of heterogeneous human and AI scientists, creating a scalable and extensible ecosystem for autonomous scientific discovery. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that aiXiv is a reliable and robust platform that significantly enhances the quality of AI-generated research proposals and papers after iterative revising and reviewing on aiXiv. Our work lays the groundwork for a next-generation open-access ecosystem for AI scientists, accelerating the publication and dissemination of high-quality AI-generated research content. Code is available at https://github.com/aixiv-org. Website is available at https://forms.gle/DxQgCtXFsJ4paMtn8.

  • 23 authors
·
Aug 20 2

Paper2Agent: Reimagining Research Papers As Interactive and Reliable AI Agents

We introduce Paper2Agent, an automated framework that converts research papers into AI agents. Paper2Agent transforms research output from passive artifacts into active systems that can accelerate downstream use, adoption, and discovery. Conventional research papers require readers to invest substantial effort to understand and adapt a paper's code, data, and methods to their own work, creating barriers to dissemination and reuse. Paper2Agent addresses this challenge by automatically converting a paper into an AI agent that acts as a knowledgeable research assistant. It systematically analyzes the paper and the associated codebase using multiple agents to construct a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, then iteratively generates and runs tests to refine and robustify the resulting MCP. These paper MCPs can then be flexibly connected to a chat agent (e.g. Claude Code) to carry out complex scientific queries through natural language while invoking tools and workflows from the original paper. We demonstrate Paper2Agent's effectiveness in creating reliable and capable paper agents through in-depth case studies. Paper2Agent created an agent that leverages AlphaGenome to interpret genomic variants and agents based on ScanPy and TISSUE to carry out single-cell and spatial transcriptomics analyses. We validate that these paper agents can reproduce the original paper's results and can correctly carry out novel user queries. By turning static papers into dynamic, interactive AI agents, Paper2Agent introduces a new paradigm for knowledge dissemination and a foundation for the collaborative ecosystem of AI co-scientists.

NExT-Search: Rebuilding User Feedback Ecosystem for Generative AI Search

Generative AI search is reshaping information retrieval by offering end-to-end answers to complex queries, reducing users' reliance on manually browsing and summarizing multiple web pages. However, while this paradigm enhances convenience, it disrupts the feedback-driven improvement loop that has historically powered the evolution of traditional Web search. Web search can continuously improve their ranking models by collecting large-scale, fine-grained user feedback (e.g., clicks, dwell time) at the document level. In contrast, generative AI search operates through a much longer search pipeline, spanning query decomposition, document retrieval, and answer generation, yet typically receives only coarse-grained feedback on the final answer. This introduces a feedback loop disconnect, where user feedback for the final output cannot be effectively mapped back to specific system components, making it difficult to improve each intermediate stage and sustain the feedback loop. In this paper, we envision NExT-Search, a next-generation paradigm designed to reintroduce fine-grained, process-level feedback into generative AI search. NExT-Search integrates two complementary modes: User Debug Mode, which allows engaged users to intervene at key stages; and Shadow User Mode, where a personalized user agent simulates user preferences and provides AI-assisted feedback for less interactive users. Furthermore, we envision how these feedback signals can be leveraged through online adaptation, which refines current search outputs in real-time, and offline update, which aggregates interaction logs to periodically fine-tune query decomposition, retrieval, and generation models. By restoring human control over key stages of the generative AI search pipeline, we believe NExT-Search offers a promising direction for building feedback-rich AI search systems that can evolve continuously alongside human feedback.

  • 7 authors
·
May 20 2

AI-Driven Real-Time Monitoring of Ground-Nesting Birds: A Case Study on Curlew Detection Using YOLOv10

Effective monitoring of wildlife is critical for assessing biodiversity and ecosystem health, as declines in key species often signal significant environmental changes. Birds, particularly ground-nesting species, serve as important ecological indicators due to their sensitivity to environmental pressures. Camera traps have become indispensable tools for monitoring nesting bird populations, enabling data collection across diverse habitats. However, the manual processing and analysis of such data are resource-intensive, often delaying the delivery of actionable conservation insights. This study presents an AI-driven approach for real-time species detection, focusing on the curlew (Numenius arquata), a ground-nesting bird experiencing significant population declines. A custom-trained YOLOv10 model was developed to detect and classify curlews and their chicks using 3/4G-enabled cameras linked to the Conservation AI platform. The system processes camera trap data in real-time, significantly enhancing monitoring efficiency. Across 11 nesting sites in Wales, the model achieved high performance, with a sensitivity of 90.56%, specificity of 100%, and F1-score of 95.05% for curlew detections, and a sensitivity of 92.35%, specificity of 100%, and F1-score of 96.03% for curlew chick detections. These results demonstrate the capability of AI-driven monitoring systems to deliver accurate, timely data for biodiversity assessments, facilitating early conservation interventions and advancing the use of technology in ecological research.

  • 9 authors
·
Nov 22, 2024

Real AI Agents with Fake Memories: Fatal Context Manipulation Attacks on Web3 Agents

The integration of AI agents with Web3 ecosystems harnesses their complementary potential for autonomy and openness yet also introduces underexplored security risks, as these agents dynamically interact with financial protocols and immutable smart contracts. This paper investigates the vulnerabilities of AI agents within blockchain-based financial ecosystems when exposed to adversarial threats in real-world scenarios. We introduce the concept of context manipulation, a comprehensive attack vector that exploits unprotected context surfaces, including input channels, memory modules, and external data feeds. Through empirical analysis of ElizaOS, a decentralized AI agent framework for automated Web3 operations, we demonstrate how adversaries can manipulate context by injecting malicious instructions into prompts or historical interaction records, leading to unintended asset transfers and protocol violations which could be financially devastating. To quantify these vulnerabilities, we design CrAIBench, a Web3 domain-specific benchmark that evaluates the robustness of AI agents against context manipulation attacks across 150+ realistic blockchain tasks, including token transfers, trading, bridges and cross-chain interactions and 500+ attack test cases using context manipulation. We systematically assess attack and defense strategies, analyzing factors like the influence of security prompts, reasoning models, and the effectiveness of alignment techniques. Our findings show that prompt-based defenses are insufficient when adversaries corrupt stored context, achieving significant attack success rates despite these defenses. Fine-tuning-based defenses offer a more robust alternative, substantially reducing attack success rates while preserving utility on single-step tasks. This research highlights the urgent need to develop AI agents that are both secure and fiduciarily responsible.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 20

HPCTransCompile: An AI Compiler Generated Dataset for High-Performance CUDA Transpilation and LLM Preliminary Exploration

The rapid growth of deep learning has driven exponential increases in model parameters and computational demands. NVIDIA GPUs and their CUDA-based software ecosystem provide robust support for parallel computing, significantly alleviating computational bottlenecks. Meanwhile, due to the cultivation of user programming habits and the high performance of GPUs, the CUDA ecosystem has established a dominant position in the field of parallel software. This dominance requires other hardware platforms to support CUDA-based software with performance portability. However, translating CUDA code to other platforms poses significant challenges due to differences in parallel programming paradigms and hardware architectures. Existing approaches rely on language extensions, domain-specific languages (DSLs), or compilers but face limitations in workload coverage and generalizability. Moreover, these methods often incur substantial development costs. Recently, LLMs have demonstrated extraordinary potential in various vertical domains, especially in code-related tasks. However, the performance of existing LLMs in CUDA transpilation, particularly for high-performance code, remains suboptimal. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework for generating high-performance CUDA and corresponding platform code pairs, leveraging AI compiler and automatic optimization technology. We further enhance the framework with a graph-based data augmentation method and introduce HPCTransEval, a benchmark for evaluating LLM performance on CUDA transpilation. We conduct experiments using CUDA-to-CPU transpilation as a case study on leading LLMs. The speedup ratio of the CPU operators has an average improvemnet of 43.8\%, highlighting the potential of LLMs to address compatibility challenges within the CUDA ecosystem. Our code is available at https://github.com/PJLAB-CHIP/HPCTransCompile.

  • 10 authors
·
Jun 12

A co-evolving agentic AI system for medical imaging analysis

Agentic AI is rapidly advancing in healthcare and biomedical research. However, in medical image analysis, their performance and adoption remain limited due to the lack of a robust ecosystem, insufficient toolsets, and the absence of real-time interactive expert feedback. Here we present "TissueLab", a co-evolving agentic AI system that allows researchers to ask direct questions, automatically plan and generate explainable workflows, and conduct real-time analyses where experts can visualize intermediate results and refine them. TissueLab integrates tool factories across pathology, radiology, and spatial omics domains. By standardizing inputs, outputs, and capabilities of diverse tools, the system determines when and how to invoke them to address research and clinical questions. Across diverse tasks with clinically meaningful quantifications that inform staging, prognosis, and treatment planning, TissueLab achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with end-to-end vision-language models (VLMs) and other agentic AI systems such as GPT-5. Moreover, TissueLab continuously learns from clinicians, evolving toward improved classifiers and more effective decision strategies. With active learning, it delivers accurate results in unseen disease contexts within minutes, without requiring massive datasets or prolonged retraining. Released as a sustainable open-source ecosystem, TissueLab aims to accelerate computational research and translational adoption in medical imaging while establishing a foundation for the next generation of medical AI.

  • 14 authors
·
Sep 24

AI-native Memory 2.0: Second Me

Human interaction with the external world fundamentally involves the exchange of personal memory, whether with other individuals, websites, applications, or, in the future, AI agents. A significant portion of this interaction is redundant, requiring users to repeatedly provide the same information across different contexts. Existing solutions, such as browser-stored credentials, autofill mechanisms, and unified authentication systems, have aimed to mitigate this redundancy by serving as intermediaries that store and retrieve commonly used user data. The advent of large language models (LLMs) presents an opportunity to redefine memory management through an AI-native paradigm: SECOND ME. SECOND ME acts as an intelligent, persistent memory offload system that retains, organizes, and dynamically utilizes user-specific knowledge. By serving as an intermediary in user interactions, it can autonomously generate context-aware responses, prefill required information, and facilitate seamless communication with external systems, significantly reducing cognitive load and interaction friction. Unlike traditional memory storage solutions, SECOND ME extends beyond static data retention by leveraging LLM-based memory parameterization. This enables structured organization, contextual reasoning, and adaptive knowledge retrieval, facilitating a more systematic and intelligent approach to memory management. As AI-driven personal agents like SECOND ME become increasingly integrated into digital ecosystems, SECOND ME further represents a critical step toward augmenting human-world interaction with persistent, contextually aware, and self-optimizing memory systems. We have open-sourced the fully localizable deployment system at GitHub: https://github.com/Mindverse/Second-Me.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 11 2

AI Transparency in the Age of LLMs: A Human-Centered Research Roadmap

The rise of powerful large language models (LLMs) brings about tremendous opportunities for innovation but also looming risks for individuals and society at large. We have reached a pivotal moment for ensuring that LLMs and LLM-infused applications are developed and deployed responsibly. However, a central pillar of responsible AI -- transparency -- is largely missing from the current discourse around LLMs. It is paramount to pursue new approaches to provide transparency for LLMs, and years of research at the intersection of AI and human-computer interaction (HCI) highlight that we must do so with a human-centered perspective: Transparency is fundamentally about supporting appropriate human understanding, and this understanding is sought by different stakeholders with different goals in different contexts. In this new era of LLMs, we must develop and design approaches to transparency by considering the needs of stakeholders in the emerging LLM ecosystem, the novel types of LLM-infused applications being built, and the new usage patterns and challenges around LLMs, all while building on lessons learned about how people process, interact with, and make use of information. We reflect on the unique challenges that arise in providing transparency for LLMs, along with lessons learned from HCI and responsible AI research that has taken a human-centered perspective on AI transparency. We then lay out four common approaches that the community has taken to achieve transparency -- model reporting, publishing evaluation results, providing explanations, and communicating uncertainty -- and call out open questions around how these approaches may or may not be applied to LLMs. We hope this provides a starting point for discussion and a useful roadmap for future research.

  • 2 authors
·
Jun 2, 2023

Arboretum: A Large Multimodal Dataset Enabling AI for Biodiversity

We introduce Arboretum, the largest publicly accessible dataset designed to advance AI for biodiversity applications. This dataset, curated from the iNaturalist community science platform and vetted by domain experts to ensure accuracy, includes 134.6 million images, surpassing existing datasets in scale by an order of magnitude. The dataset encompasses image-language paired data for a diverse set of species from birds (Aves), spiders/ticks/mites (Arachnida), insects (Insecta), plants (Plantae), fungus/mushrooms (Fungi), snails (Mollusca), and snakes/lizards (Reptilia), making it a valuable resource for multimodal vision-language AI models for biodiversity assessment and agriculture research. Each image is annotated with scientific names, taxonomic details, and common names, enhancing the robustness of AI model training. We showcase the value of Arboretum by releasing a suite of CLIP models trained using a subset of 40 million captioned images. We introduce several new benchmarks for rigorous assessment, report accuracy for zero-shot learning, and evaluations across life stages, rare species, confounding species, and various levels of the taxonomic hierarchy. We anticipate that Arboretum will spur the development of AI models that can enable a variety of digital tools ranging from pest control strategies, crop monitoring, and worldwide biodiversity assessment and environmental conservation. These advancements are critical for ensuring food security, preserving ecosystems, and mitigating the impacts of climate change. Arboretum is publicly available, easily accessible, and ready for immediate use. Please see the https://baskargroup.github.io/Arboretum/{project website} for links to our data, models, and code.

  • 15 authors
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Jun 25, 2024 1

From Prompt Injections to Protocol Exploits: Threats in LLM-Powered AI Agents Workflows

Autonomous AI agents powered by large language models (LLMs) with structured function-calling interfaces have dramatically expanded capabilities for real-time data retrieval, complex computation, and multi-step orchestration. Yet, the explosive proliferation of plugins, connectors, and inter-agent protocols has outpaced discovery mechanisms and security practices, resulting in brittle integrations vulnerable to diverse threats. In this survey, we introduce the first unified, end-to-end threat model for LLM-agent ecosystems, spanning host-to-tool and agent-to-agent communications, formalize adversary capabilities and attacker objectives, and catalog over thirty attack techniques. Specifically, we organized the threat model into four domains: Input Manipulation (e.g., prompt injections, long-context hijacks, multimodal adversarial inputs), Model Compromise (e.g., prompt- and parameter-level backdoors, composite and encrypted multi-backdoors, poisoning strategies), System and Privacy Attacks (e.g., speculative side-channels, membership inference, retrieval poisoning, social-engineering simulations), and Protocol Vulnerabilities (e.g., exploits in Model Context Protocol (MCP), Agent Communication Protocol (ACP), Agent Network Protocol (ANP), and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol). For each category, we review representative scenarios, assess real-world feasibility, and evaluate existing defenses. Building on our threat taxonomy, we identify key open challenges and future research directions, such as securing MCP deployments through dynamic trust management and cryptographic provenance tracking; designing and hardening Agentic Web Interfaces; and achieving resilience in multi-agent and federated environments. Our work provides a comprehensive reference to guide the design of robust defense mechanisms and establish best practices for resilient LLM-agent workflows.

  • 5 authors
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Jun 29

A Cartography of Open Collaboration in Open Source AI: Mapping Practices, Motivations, and Governance in 14 Open Large Language Model Projects

The proliferation of open large language models (LLMs) is fostering a vibrant ecosystem of research and innovation in artificial intelligence (AI). However, the methods of collaboration used to develop open LLMs both before and after their public release have not yet been comprehensively studied, limiting our understanding of how open LLM projects are initiated, organized, and governed as well as what opportunities there are to foster this ecosystem even further. We address this gap through an exploratory analysis of open collaboration throughout the development and reuse lifecycle of open LLMs, drawing on semi-structured interviews with the developers of 14 open LLMs from grassroots projects, research institutes, startups, and Big Tech companies in North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. We make three key contributions to research and practice. First, collaboration in open LLM projects extends far beyond the LLMs themselves, encompassing datasets, benchmarks, open source frameworks, leaderboards, knowledge sharing and discussion forums, and compute partnerships, among others. Second, open LLM developers have a variety of social, economic, and technological motivations, from democratizing AI access and promoting open science to building regional ecosystems and expanding language representation. Third, the sampled open LLM projects exhibit five distinct organizational models, ranging from single company projects to non-profit-sponsored grassroots projects, which vary in their centralization of control and community engagement strategies used throughout the open LLM lifecycle. We conclude with practical recommendations for stakeholders seeking to support the global community building a more open future for AI.

  • 4 authors
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Sep 29 2

Anatomy of a Machine Learning Ecosystem: 2 Million Models on Hugging Face

Many have observed that the development and deployment of generative machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) models follow a distinctive pattern in which pre-trained models are adapted and fine-tuned for specific downstream tasks. However, there is limited empirical work that examines the structure of these interactions. This paper analyzes 1.86 million models on Hugging Face, a leading peer production platform for model development. Our study of model family trees -- networks that connect fine-tuned models to their base or parent -- reveals sprawling fine-tuning lineages that vary widely in size and structure. Using an evolutionary biology lens to study ML models, we use model metadata and model cards to measure the genetic similarity and mutation of traits over model families. We find that models tend to exhibit a family resemblance, meaning their genetic markers and traits exhibit more overlap when they belong to the same model family. However, these similarities depart in certain ways from standard models of asexual reproduction, because mutations are fast and directed, such that two `sibling' models tend to exhibit more similarity than parent/child pairs. Further analysis of the directional drifts of these mutations reveals qualitative insights about the open machine learning ecosystem: Licenses counter-intuitively drift from restrictive, commercial licenses towards permissive or copyleft licenses, often in violation of upstream license's terms; models evolve from multi-lingual compatibility towards english-only compatibility; and model cards reduce in length and standardize by turning, more often, to templates and automatically generated text. Overall, this work takes a step toward an empirically grounded understanding of model fine-tuning and suggests that ecological models and methods can yield novel scientific insights.

  • 3 authors
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Aug 9 4

A Different Approach to AI Safety: Proceedings from the Columbia Convening on Openness in Artificial Intelligence and AI Safety

The rapid rise of open-weight and open-source foundation models is intensifying the obligation and reshaping the opportunity to make AI systems safe. This paper reports outcomes from the Columbia Convening on AI Openness and Safety (San Francisco, 19 Nov 2024) and its six-week preparatory programme involving more than forty-five researchers, engineers, and policy leaders from academia, industry, civil society, and government. Using a participatory, solutions-oriented process, the working groups produced (i) a research agenda at the intersection of safety and open source AI; (ii) a mapping of existing and needed technical interventions and open source tools to safely and responsibly deploy open foundation models across the AI development workflow; and (iii) a mapping of the content safety filter ecosystem with a proposed roadmap for future research and development. We find that openness -- understood as transparent weights, interoperable tooling, and public governance -- can enhance safety by enabling independent scrutiny, decentralized mitigation, and culturally plural oversight. However, significant gaps persist: scarce multimodal and multilingual benchmarks, limited defenses against prompt-injection and compositional attacks in agentic systems, and insufficient participatory mechanisms for communities most affected by AI harms. The paper concludes with a roadmap of five priority research directions, emphasizing participatory inputs, future-proof content filters, ecosystem-wide safety infrastructure, rigorous agentic safeguards, and expanded harm taxonomies. These recommendations informed the February 2025 French AI Action Summit and lay groundwork for an open, plural, and accountable AI safety discipline.

  • 20 authors
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Jun 27

Superplatforms Have to Attack AI Agents

Over the past decades, superplatforms, digital companies that integrate a vast range of third-party services and applications into a single, unified ecosystem, have built their fortunes on monopolizing user attention through targeted advertising and algorithmic content curation. Yet the emergence of AI agents driven by large language models (LLMs) threatens to upend this business model. Agents can not only free user attention with autonomy across diverse platforms and therefore bypass the user-attention-based monetization, but might also become the new entrance for digital traffic. Hence, we argue that superplatforms have to attack AI agents to defend their centralized control of digital traffic entrance. Specifically, we analyze the fundamental conflict between user-attention-based monetization and agent-driven autonomy through the lens of our gatekeeping theory. We show how AI agents can disintermediate superplatforms and potentially become the next dominant gatekeepers, thereby forming the urgent necessity for superplatforms to proactively constrain and attack AI agents. Moreover, we go through the potential technologies for superplatform-initiated attacks, covering a brand-new, unexplored technical area with unique challenges. We have to emphasize that, despite our position, this paper does not advocate for adversarial attacks by superplatforms on AI agents, but rather offers an envisioned trend to highlight the emerging tensions between superplatforms and AI agents. Our aim is to raise awareness and encourage critical discussion for collaborative solutions, prioritizing user interests and perserving the openness of digital ecosystems in the age of AI agents.

  • 7 authors
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May 23

Navigating Dataset Documentations in AI: A Large-Scale Analysis of Dataset Cards on Hugging Face

Advances in machine learning are closely tied to the creation of datasets. While data documentation is widely recognized as essential to the reliability, reproducibility, and transparency of ML, we lack a systematic empirical understanding of current dataset documentation practices. To shed light on this question, here we take Hugging Face -- one of the largest platforms for sharing and collaborating on ML models and datasets -- as a prominent case study. By analyzing all 7,433 dataset documentation on Hugging Face, our investigation provides an overview of the Hugging Face dataset ecosystem and insights into dataset documentation practices, yielding 5 main findings: (1) The dataset card completion rate shows marked heterogeneity correlated with dataset popularity. (2) A granular examination of each section within the dataset card reveals that the practitioners seem to prioritize Dataset Description and Dataset Structure sections, while the Considerations for Using the Data section receives the lowest proportion of content. (3) By analyzing the subsections within each section and utilizing topic modeling to identify key topics, we uncover what is discussed in each section, and underscore significant themes encompassing both technical and social impacts, as well as limitations within the Considerations for Using the Data section. (4) Our findings also highlight the need for improved accessibility and reproducibility of datasets in the Usage sections. (5) In addition, our human annotation evaluation emphasizes the pivotal role of comprehensive dataset content in shaping individuals' perceptions of a dataset card's overall quality. Overall, our study offers a unique perspective on analyzing dataset documentation through large-scale data science analysis and underlines the need for more thorough dataset documentation in machine learning research.

  • 3 authors
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Jan 24, 2024

UAVs Meet Agentic AI: A Multidomain Survey of Autonomous Aerial Intelligence and Agentic UAVs

Agentic UAVs represent a new frontier in autonomous aerial intelligence, integrating perception, decision-making, memory, and collaborative planning to operate adaptively in complex, real-world environments. Driven by recent advances in Agentic AI, these systems surpass traditional UAVs by exhibiting goal-driven behavior, contextual reasoning, and interactive autonomy. We provide a comprehensive foundation for understanding the architectural components and enabling technologies that distinguish Agentic UAVs from traditional autonomous UAVs. Furthermore, a detailed comparative analysis highlights advancements in autonomy with AI agents, learning, and mission flexibility. This study explores seven high-impact application domains precision agriculture, construction & mining, disaster response, environmental monitoring, infrastructure inspection, logistics, security, and wildlife conservation, illustrating the broad societal value of agentic aerial intelligence. Furthermore, we identify key challenges in technical constraints, regulatory limitations, and data-model reliability, and we present emerging solutions across hardware innovation, learning architectures, and human-AI interaction. Finally, a future roadmap is proposed, outlining pathways toward self-evolving aerial ecosystems, system-level collaboration, and sustainable, equitable deployments. This survey establishes a foundational framework for the future development, deployment, and governance of agentic aerial systems (Agentic UAVs) across diverse societal and industrial domains.

  • 3 authors
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Jun 7

EnvX: Agentize Everything with Agentic AI

The widespread availability of open-source repositories has led to a vast collection of reusable software components, yet their utilization remains manual, error-prone, and disconnected. Developers must navigate documentation, understand APIs, and write integration code, creating significant barriers to efficient software reuse. To address this, we present EnvX, a framework that leverages Agentic AI to agentize GitHub repositories, transforming them into intelligent, autonomous agents capable of natural language interaction and inter-agent collaboration. Unlike existing approaches that treat repositories as static code resources, EnvX reimagines them as active agents through a three-phase process: (1) TODO-guided environment initialization, which sets up the necessary dependencies, data, and validation datasets; (2) human-aligned agentic automation, allowing repository-specific agents to autonomously perform real-world tasks; and (3) Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol, enabling multiple agents to collaborate. By combining large language model capabilities with structured tool integration, EnvX automates not just code generation, but the entire process of understanding, initializing, and operationalizing repository functionality. We evaluate EnvX on the GitTaskBench benchmark, using 18 repositories across domains such as image processing, speech recognition, document analysis, and video manipulation. Our results show that EnvX achieves a 74.07% execution completion rate and 51.85% task pass rate, outperforming existing frameworks. Case studies further demonstrate EnvX's ability to enable multi-repository collaboration via the A2A protocol. This work marks a shift from treating repositories as passive code resources to intelligent, interactive agents, fostering greater accessibility and collaboration within the open-source ecosystem.

Agentic Web: Weaving the Next Web with AI Agents

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.

  • 18 authors
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Jul 28

Holistic Safety and Responsibility Evaluations of Advanced AI Models

Safety and responsibility evaluations of advanced AI models are a critical but developing field of research and practice. In the development of Google DeepMind's advanced AI models, we innovated on and applied a broad set of approaches to safety evaluation. In this report, we summarise and share elements of our evolving approach as well as lessons learned for a broad audience. Key lessons learned include: First, theoretical underpinnings and frameworks are invaluable to organise the breadth of risk domains, modalities, forms, metrics, and goals. Second, theory and practice of safety evaluation development each benefit from collaboration to clarify goals, methods and challenges, and facilitate the transfer of insights between different stakeholders and disciplines. Third, similar key methods, lessons, and institutions apply across the range of concerns in responsibility and safety - including established and emerging harms. For this reason it is important that a wide range of actors working on safety evaluation and safety research communities work together to develop, refine and implement novel evaluation approaches and best practices, rather than operating in silos. The report concludes with outlining the clear need to rapidly advance the science of evaluations, to integrate new evaluations into the development and governance of AI, to establish scientifically-grounded norms and standards, and to promote a robust evaluation ecosystem.

  • 19 authors
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Apr 22, 2024

Evaluating the Social Impact of Generative AI Systems in Systems and Society

Generative AI systems across modalities, ranging from text (including code), image, audio, and video, have broad social impacts, but there is no official standard for means of evaluating those impacts or for which impacts should be evaluated. In this paper, we present a guide that moves toward a standard approach in evaluating a base generative AI system for any modality in two overarching categories: what can be evaluated in a base system independent of context and what can be evaluated in a societal context. Importantly, this refers to base systems that have no predetermined application or deployment context, including a model itself, as well as system components, such as training data. Our framework for a base system defines seven categories of social impact: bias, stereotypes, and representational harms; cultural values and sensitive content; disparate performance; privacy and data protection; financial costs; environmental costs; and data and content moderation labor costs. Suggested methods for evaluation apply to listed generative modalities and analyses of the limitations of existing evaluations serve as a starting point for necessary investment in future evaluations. We offer five overarching categories for what can be evaluated in a broader societal context, each with its own subcategories: trustworthiness and autonomy; inequality, marginalization, and violence; concentration of authority; labor and creativity; and ecosystem and environment. Each subcategory includes recommendations for mitigating harm.

  • 18 authors
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Jun 9, 2023

LibVulnWatch: A Deep Assessment Agent System and Leaderboard for Uncovering Hidden Vulnerabilities in Open-Source AI Libraries

Open-source AI libraries are foundational to modern AI systems but pose significant, underexamined risks across security, licensing, maintenance, supply chain integrity, and regulatory compliance. We present LibVulnWatch, a graph-based agentic assessment framework that performs deep, source-grounded evaluations of these libraries. Built on LangGraph, the system coordinates a directed acyclic graph of specialized agents to extract, verify, and quantify risk using evidence from trusted sources such as repositories, documentation, and vulnerability databases. LibVulnWatch generates reproducible, governance-aligned scores across five critical domains, publishing them to a public leaderboard for longitudinal ecosystem monitoring. Applied to 20 widely used libraries, including ML frameworks, LLM inference engines, and agent orchestration tools, our system covers up to 88% of OpenSSF Scorecard checks while uncovering up to 19 additional risks per library. These include critical Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerabilities, absent Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs), licensing constraints, undocumented telemetry, and widespread gaps in regulatory documentation and auditability. By translating high-level governance principles into practical, verifiable metrics, LibVulnWatch advances technical AI governance with a scalable, transparent mechanism for continuous supply chain risk assessment and informed library selection.

  • 10 authors
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May 13

LLM as OS, Agents as Apps: Envisioning AIOS, Agents and the AIOS-Agent Ecosystem

This paper envisions a revolutionary AIOS-Agent ecosystem, where Large Language Model (LLM) serves as the (Artificial) Intelligent Operating System (IOS, or AIOS)--an operating system "with soul". Upon this foundation, a diverse range of LLM-based AI Agent Applications (Agents, or AAPs) are developed, enriching the AIOS-Agent ecosystem and signaling a paradigm shift from the traditional OS-APP ecosystem. We envision that LLM's impact will not be limited to the AI application level, instead, it will in turn revolutionize the design and implementation of computer system, architecture, software, and programming language, featured by several main concepts: LLM as OS (system-level), Agents as Applications (application-level), Natural Language as Programming Interface (user-level), and Tools as Devices/Libraries (hardware/middleware-level). We begin by introducing the architecture of traditional OS. Then we formalize a conceptual framework for AIOS through "LLM as OS (LLMOS)", drawing analogies between AIOS and traditional OS: LLM is likened to OS kernel, context window to memory, external storage to file system, hardware tools to peripheral devices, software tools to programming libraries, and user prompts to user commands. Subsequently, we introduce the new AIOS-Agent Ecosystem, where users can easily program Agent Applications (AAPs) using natural language, democratizing the development of software, which is different from the traditional OS-APP ecosystem. Following this, we explore the diverse scope of Agent Applications. We delve into both single-agent and multi-agent systems, as well as human-agent interaction. Lastly, drawing on the insights from traditional OS-APP ecosystem, we propose a roadmap for the evolution of the AIOS-Agent ecosystem. This roadmap is designed to guide the future research and development, suggesting systematic progresses of AIOS and its Agent applications.

  • 6 authors
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Dec 6, 2023

Vibe Coding vs. Agentic Coding: Fundamentals and Practical Implications of Agentic AI

This review presents a comprehensive analysis of two emerging paradigms in AI-assisted software development: vibe coding and agentic coding. While both leverage large language models (LLMs), they differ fundamentally in autonomy, architectural design, and the role of the developer. Vibe coding emphasizes intuitive, human-in-the-loop interaction through prompt-based, conversational workflows that support ideation, experimentation, and creative exploration. In contrast, agentic coding enables autonomous software development through goal-driven agents capable of planning, executing, testing, and iterating tasks with minimal human intervention. We propose a detailed taxonomy spanning conceptual foundations, execution models, feedback loops, safety mechanisms, debugging strategies, and real-world tool ecosystems. Through comparative workflow analysis and 20 detailed use cases, we illustrate how vibe systems thrive in early-stage prototyping and education, while agentic systems excel in enterprise-grade automation, codebase refactoring, and CI/CD integration. We further examine emerging trends in hybrid architectures, where natural language interfaces are coupled with autonomous execution pipelines. Finally, we articulate a future roadmap for agentic AI, outlining the infrastructure needed for trustworthy, explainable, and collaborative systems. Our findings suggest that successful AI software engineering will rely not on choosing one paradigm, but on harmonizing their strengths within a unified, human-centered development lifecycle.

  • 3 authors
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May 25 2

ReviewGuard: Enhancing Deficient Peer Review Detection via LLM-Driven Data Augmentation

Peer review serves as the gatekeeper of science, yet the surge in submissions and widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) in scholarly evaluation present unprecedented challenges. Recent work has focused on using LLMs to improve review efficiency or generate insightful review content. However, unchecked deficient reviews from both human experts and AI systems threaten to systematically undermine the peer review ecosystem and compromise academic integrity. To address this critical issue, we introduce ReviewGuard, an automated system for detecting and categorizing deficient reviews. ReviewGuard employs a comprehensive four-stage LLM-driven framework that: (1) collects ICLR and NeurIPS papers with their corresponding reviews from OpenReview; (2) annotates review types using GPT-4.1 with human validation; (3) addresses class imbalance and data scarcity through LLM-driven synthetic data augmentation, producing a final corpus of 6,634 papers, 24,657 real reviews, and 46,438 synthetic reviews; and (4) fine-tunes both encoder-based models and open source LLMs. We perform comprehensive feature analysis of the structure and quality of the review text. Compared to sufficient reviews, deficient reviews demonstrate lower rating scores, higher self-reported confidence, reduced structural complexity, and a higher proportion of negative sentiment. AI-generated text detection reveals that, since ChatGPT's emergence, AI-generated reviews have increased dramatically. In the evaluation of deficient review detection models, mixed training with synthetic and real review data provides substantial enhancements to recall and F1 scores on the binary task. This study presents the first LLM-driven system for detecting deficient peer reviews, providing evidence to inform AI governance in peer review while offering valuable insights into human-AI collaboration to maintain academic integrity.

  • 9 authors
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Oct 18

SpineBench: A Clinically Salient, Level-Aware Benchmark Powered by the SpineMed-450k Corpus

Spine disorders affect 619 million people globally and are a leading cause of disability, yet AI-assisted diagnosis remains limited by the lack of level-aware, multimodal datasets. Clinical decision-making for spine disorders requires sophisticated reasoning across X-ray, CT, and MRI at specific vertebral levels. However, progress has been constrained by the absence of traceable, clinically-grounded instruction data and standardized, spine-specific benchmarks. To address this, we introduce SpineMed, an ecosystem co-designed with practicing spine surgeons. It features SpineMed-450k, the first large-scale dataset explicitly designed for vertebral-level reasoning across imaging modalities with over 450,000 instruction instances, and SpineBench, a clinically-grounded evaluation framework. SpineMed-450k is curated from diverse sources, including textbooks, guidelines, open datasets, and ~1,000 de-identified hospital cases, using a clinician-in-the-loop pipeline with a two-stage LLM generation method (draft and revision) to ensure high-quality, traceable data for question-answering, multi-turn consultations, and report generation. SpineBench evaluates models on clinically salient axes, including level identification, pathology assessment, and surgical planning. Our comprehensive evaluation of several recently advanced large vision-language models (LVLMs) on SpineBench reveals systematic weaknesses in fine-grained, level-specific reasoning. In contrast, our model fine-tuned on SpineMed-450k demonstrates consistent and significant improvements across all tasks. Clinician assessments confirm the diagnostic clarity and practical utility of our model's outputs.

GAIA Search: Hugging Face and Pyserini Interoperability for NLP Training Data Exploration

Noticing the urgent need to provide tools for fast and user-friendly qualitative analysis of large-scale textual corpora of the modern NLP, we propose to turn to the mature and well-tested methods from the domain of Information Retrieval (IR) - a research field with a long history of tackling TB-scale document collections. We discuss how Pyserini - a widely used toolkit for reproducible IR research can be integrated with the Hugging Face ecosystem of open-source AI libraries and artifacts. We leverage the existing functionalities of both platforms while proposing novel features further facilitating their integration. Our goal is to give NLP researchers tools that will allow them to develop retrieval-based instrumentation for their data analytics needs with ease and agility. We include a Jupyter Notebook-based walk through the core interoperability features, available on GitHub at https://github.com/huggingface/gaia. We then demonstrate how the ideas we present can be operationalized to create a powerful tool for qualitative data analysis in NLP. We present GAIA Search - a search engine built following previously laid out principles, giving access to four popular large-scale text collections. GAIA serves a dual purpose of illustrating the potential of methodologies we discuss but also as a standalone qualitative analysis tool that can be leveraged by NLP researchers aiming to understand datasets prior to using them in training. GAIA is hosted live on Hugging Face Spaces - https://huggingface.co/spaces/spacerini/gaia.

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 2, 2023

Towards Best Practices for Open Datasets for LLM Training

Many AI companies are training their large language models (LLMs) on data without the permission of the copyright owners. The permissibility of doing so varies by jurisdiction: in countries like the EU and Japan, this is allowed under certain restrictions, while in the United States, the legal landscape is more ambiguous. Regardless of the legal status, concerns from creative producers have led to several high-profile copyright lawsuits, and the threat of litigation is commonly cited as a reason for the recent trend towards minimizing the information shared about training datasets by both corporate and public interest actors. This trend in limiting data information causes harm by hindering transparency, accountability, and innovation in the broader ecosystem by denying researchers, auditors, and impacted individuals access to the information needed to understand AI models. While this could be mitigated by training language models on open access and public domain data, at the time of writing, there are no such models (trained at a meaningful scale) due to the substantial technical and sociological challenges in assembling the necessary corpus. These challenges include incomplete and unreliable metadata, the cost and complexity of digitizing physical records, and the diverse set of legal and technical skills required to ensure relevance and responsibility in a quickly changing landscape. Building towards a future where AI systems can be trained on openly licensed data that is responsibly curated and governed requires collaboration across legal, technical, and policy domains, along with investments in metadata standards, digitization, and fostering a culture of openness.

Music Arena: Live Evaluation for Text-to-Music

We present Music Arena, an open platform for scalable human preference evaluation of text-to-music (TTM) models. Soliciting human preferences via listening studies is the gold standard for evaluation in TTM, but these studies are expensive to conduct and difficult to compare, as study protocols may differ across systems. Moreover, human preferences might help researchers align their TTM systems or improve automatic evaluation metrics, but an open and renewable source of preferences does not currently exist. We aim to fill these gaps by offering *live* evaluation for TTM. In Music Arena, real-world users input text prompts of their choosing and compare outputs from two TTM systems, and their preferences are used to compile a leaderboard. While Music Arena follows recent evaluation trends in other AI domains, we also design it with key features tailored to music: an LLM-based routing system to navigate the heterogeneous type signatures of TTM systems, and the collection of *detailed* preferences including listening data and natural language feedback. We also propose a rolling data release policy with user privacy guarantees, providing a renewable source of preference data and increasing platform transparency. Through its standardized evaluation protocol, transparent data access policies, and music-specific features, Music Arena not only addresses key challenges in the TTM ecosystem but also demonstrates how live evaluation can be thoughtfully adapted to unique characteristics of specific AI domains. Music Arena is available at: https://music-arena.org

  • 8 authors
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Jul 28 2

Growing Transformers: Modular Composition and Layer-wise Expansion on a Frozen Substrate

The prevailing paradigm for scaling large language models (LLMs) involves monolithic, end-to-end training, a resource-intensive process that lacks flexibility. This paper explores an alternative, constructive approach to model development, built upon the foundation of non-trainable, deterministic input embeddings. In prior [1], we established that high-level semantic reasoning can emerge in Transformers using frozen embeddings derived from the visual structure of Unicode glyphs. Here, we demonstrate that this fixed representational substrate acts as a universal "docking port," enabling two powerful and efficient scaling paradigms: seamless modular composition and progressive layer-wise growth. First, we show that specialist models trained on disparate datasets (e.g., Russian and Chinese text) can be merged into a single, more capable Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model, post-training, with zero architectural modification. This is achieved by simply averaging their output logits. The resulting MoE model exhibits immediate performance improvements on reasoning benchmarks like MMLU, surpassing its constituent experts without catastrophic forgetting. Second, we introduce a layer-wise constructive training methodology, where a deep Transformer is "grown" by progressively stacking and training one layer at a time. This method demonstrates stable convergence and a clear correlation between model depth and the emergence of complex reasoning abilities, such as those required for SQuAD. Our findings suggest a paradigm shift from monolithic optimization towards a more biological or constructive model of AI development, where complexity is built incrementally and modules can be composed freely. This opens new avenues for resource-efficient scaling, continual learning, and a more democratized ecosystem for building powerful AI systems. We release all code and models to facilitate further research.

  • 1 authors
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Jul 8 2

A Comprehensive Survey of Deep Research: Systems, Methodologies, and Applications

This survey examines the rapidly evolving field of Deep Research systems -- AI-powered applications that automate complex research workflows through the integration of large language models, advanced information retrieval, and autonomous reasoning capabilities. We analyze more than 80 commercial and non-commercial implementations that have emerged since 2023, including OpenAI/Deep Research, Gemini/Deep Research, Perplexity/Deep Research, and numerous open-source alternatives. Through comprehensive examination, we propose a novel hierarchical taxonomy that categorizes systems according to four fundamental technical dimensions: foundation models and reasoning engines, tool utilization and environmental interaction, task planning and execution control, and knowledge synthesis and output generation. We explore the architectural patterns, implementation approaches, and domain-specific adaptations that characterize these systems across academic, scientific, business, and educational applications. Our analysis reveals both the significant capabilities of current implementations and the technical and ethical challenges they present regarding information accuracy, privacy, intellectual property, and accessibility. The survey concludes by identifying promising research directions in advanced reasoning architectures, multimodal integration, domain specialization, human-AI collaboration, and ecosystem standardization that will likely shape the future evolution of this transformative technology. By providing a comprehensive framework for understanding Deep Research systems, this survey contributes to both the theoretical understanding of AI-augmented knowledge work and the practical development of more capable, responsible, and accessible research technologies. The paper resources can be viewed at https://github.com/scienceaix/deepresearch.

  • 2 authors
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Jun 14

Governed By Agents: A Survey On The Role Of Agentic AI In Future Computing Environments

The emergence of agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI), which can operate autonomously, demonstrate goal-directed behavior, and adaptively learn, indicates the onset of a massive change in today's computing infrastructure. This study investigates how agentic AI models' multiple characteristics may impact the architecture, governance, and operation under which computing environments function. Agentic AI has the potential to reduce reliance on extremely large (public) cloud environments due to resource efficiency, especially with processing and/or storage. The aforementioned characteristics provide us with an opportunity to canvas the likelihood of strategic migration in computing infrastructures away from massive public cloud services, towards more locally distributed architectures: edge computing and on-premises computing infrastructures. Many of these likely migrations will be spurred by factors like on-premises processing needs, diminished data consumption footprints, and cost savings. This study examines how a solution for implementing AI's autonomy could result in a re-architecture of the systems and model a departure from today's governance models to help us manage these increasingly autonomous agents, and an operational overhaul of processes over a very diverse computing systems landscape that bring together computing via cloud, edge, and on-premises computing solutions. To enable us to explore these intertwined decisions, it will be fundamentally important to understand how to best position agentic AI, and to navigate the future state of computing infrastructures.

  • 2 authors
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Sep 20

AI Flow: Perspectives, Scenarios, and Approaches

Pioneered by the foundational information theory by Claude Shannon and the visionary framework of machine intelligence by Alan Turing, the convergent evolution of information and communication technologies (IT/CT) has created an unbroken wave of connectivity and computation. This synergy has sparked a technological revolution, now reaching its peak with large artificial intelligence (AI) models that are reshaping industries and redefining human-machine collaboration. However, the realization of ubiquitous intelligence faces considerable challenges due to substantial resource consumption in large models and high communication bandwidth demands. To address these challenges, AI Flow has been introduced as a multidisciplinary framework that integrates cutting-edge IT and CT advancements, with a particular emphasis on the following three key points. First, device-edge-cloud framework serves as the foundation, which integrates end devices, edge servers, and cloud clusters to optimize scalability and efficiency for low-latency model inference. Second, we introduce the concept of familial models, which refers to a series of different-sized models with aligned hidden features, enabling effective collaboration and the flexibility to adapt to varying resource constraints and dynamic scenarios. Third, connectivity- and interaction-based intelligence emergence is a novel paradigm of AI Flow. By leveraging communication networks to enhance connectivity, the collaboration among AI models across heterogeneous nodes achieves emergent intelligence that surpasses the capability of any single model. The innovations of AI Flow provide enhanced intelligence, timely responsiveness, and ubiquitous accessibility to AI services, paving the way for the tighter fusion of AI techniques and communication systems.

  • 12 authors
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Jun 14

Bridging the Gap: Integrating Ethics and Environmental Sustainability in AI Research and Practice

As the possibilities for Artificial Intelligence (AI) have grown, so have concerns regarding its impacts on society and the environment. However, these issues are often raised separately; i.e. carbon footprint analyses of AI models typically do not consider how the pursuit of scale has contributed towards building models that are both inaccessible to most researchers in terms of cost and disproportionately harmful to the environment. On the other hand, model audits that aim to evaluate model performance and disparate impacts mostly fail to engage with the environmental ramifications of AI models and how these fit into their auditing approaches. In this separation, both research directions fail to capture the depth of analysis that can be explored by considering the two in parallel and the potential solutions for making informed choices that can be developed at their convergence. In this essay, we build upon work carried out in AI and in sister communities, such as philosophy and sustainable development, to make more deliberate connections around topics such as generalizability, transparency, evaluation and equity across AI research and practice. We argue that the efforts aiming to study AI's ethical ramifications should be made in tandem with those evaluating its impacts on the environment, and we conclude with a proposal of best practices to better integrate AI ethics and sustainability in AI research and practice.

  • 4 authors
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Apr 1

Deep Research Agents: A Systematic Examination And Roadmap

The rapid progress of Large Language Models (LLMs) has given rise to a new category of autonomous AI systems, referred to as Deep Research (DR) agents. These agents are designed to tackle complex, multi-turn informational research tasks by leveraging a combination of dynamic reasoning, adaptive long-horizon planning, multi-hop information retrieval, iterative tool use, and the generation of structured analytical reports. In this paper, we conduct a detailed analysis of the foundational technologies and architectural components that constitute Deep Research agents. We begin by reviewing information acquisition strategies, contrasting API-based retrieval methods with browser-based exploration. We then examine modular tool-use frameworks, including code execution, multimodal input processing, and the integration of Model Context Protocols (MCPs) to support extensibility and ecosystem development. To systematize existing approaches, we propose a taxonomy that differentiates between static and dynamic workflows, and we classify agent architectures based on planning strategies and agent composition, including single-agent and multi-agent configurations. We also provide a critical evaluation of current benchmarks, highlighting key limitations such as restricted access to external knowledge, sequential execution inefficiencies, and misalignment between evaluation metrics and the practical objectives of DR agents. Finally, we outline open challenges and promising directions for future research. A curated and continuously updated repository of DR agent research is available at: {https://github.com/ai-agents-2030/awesome-deep-research-agent}.

LIMI: Less is More for Agency

We define Agency as the emergent capacity of AI systems to function as autonomous agents actively discovering problems, formulating hypotheses, and executing solutions through self-directed engagement with environments and tools. This fundamental capability marks the dawn of the Age of AI Agency, driven by a critical industry shift: the urgent need for AI systems that don't just think, but work. While current AI excels at reasoning and generating responses, industries demand autonomous agents that can execute tasks, operate tools, and drive real-world outcomes. As agentic intelligence becomes the defining characteristic separating cognitive systems from productive workers, efficiently cultivating machine autonomy becomes paramount. Current approaches assume that more data yields better agency, following traditional scaling laws from language modeling. We fundamentally challenge this paradigm. LIMI (Less Is More for Intelligent Agency) demonstrates that agency follows radically different development principles. Through strategic focus on collaborative software development and scientific research workflows, we show that sophisticated agentic intelligence can emerge from minimal but strategically curated demonstrations of autonomous behavior. Using only 78 carefully designed training samples, LIMI achieves 73.5% on comprehensive agency benchmarks, dramatically outperforming state-of-the-art models: Kimi-K2-Instruct (24.1%), DeepSeek-V3.1 (11.9%), Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct (27.5%), and GLM-4.5 (45.1%). Most strikingly, LIMI demonstrates 53.7% improvement over models trained on 10,000 samples-achieving superior agentic intelligence with 128 times fewer samples. Our findings establish the Agency Efficiency Principle: machine autonomy emerges not from data abundance but from strategic curation of high-quality agentic demonstrations.

  • 21 authors
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Sep 22 5

LiteCUA: Computer as MCP Server for Computer-Use Agent on AIOS

We present AIOS 1.0, a novel platform designed to advance computer-use agent (CUA) capabilities through environmental contextualization. While existing approaches primarily focus on building more powerful agent frameworks or enhancing agent models, we identify a fundamental limitation: the semantic disconnect between how language models understand the world and how computer interfaces are structured. AIOS 1.0 addresses this challenge by transforming computers into contextual environments that language models can natively comprehend, implementing a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server architecture to abstract computer states and actions. This approach effectively decouples interface complexity from decision complexity, enabling agents to reason more effectively about computing environments. To demonstrate our platform's effectiveness, we introduce LiteCUA, a lightweight computer-use agent built on AIOS 1.0 that achieves a 14.66% success rate on the OSWorld benchmark, outperforming several specialized agent frameworks despite its simple architecture. Our results suggest that contextualizing computer environments for language models represents a promising direction for developing more capable computer-use agents and advancing toward AI that can interact with digital systems. The source code of LiteCUA is available at https://github.com/agiresearch/LiteCUA, and it is also integrated into the AIOS main branch as part of AIOS at https://github.com/agiresearch/AIOS.

  • 5 authors
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May 24

AI Agents vs. Agentic AI: A Conceptual Taxonomy, Applications and Challenge

This study critically distinguishes between AI Agents and Agentic AI, offering a structured conceptual taxonomy, application mapping, and challenge analysis to clarify their divergent design philosophies and capabilities. We begin by outlining the search strategy and foundational definitions, characterizing AI Agents as modular systems driven by Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Image Models (LIMs) for narrow, task-specific automation. Generative AI is positioned as a precursor, with AI Agents advancing through tool integration, prompt engineering, and reasoning enhancements. In contrast, Agentic AI systems represent a paradigmatic shift marked by multi-agent collaboration, dynamic task decomposition, persistent memory, and orchestrated autonomy. Through a sequential evaluation of architectural evolution, operational mechanisms, interaction styles, and autonomy levels, we present a comparative analysis across both paradigms. Application domains such as customer support, scheduling, and data summarization are contrasted with Agentic AI deployments in research automation, robotic coordination, and medical decision support. We further examine unique challenges in each paradigm including hallucination, brittleness, emergent behavior, and coordination failure and propose targeted solutions such as ReAct loops, RAG, orchestration layers, and causal modeling. This work aims to provide a definitive roadmap for developing robust, scalable, and explainable AI agent and Agentic AI-driven systems. >AI Agents, Agent-driven, Vision-Language-Models, Agentic AI Decision Support System, Agentic-AI Applications

  • 3 authors
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May 15 2

LLM Agent Operating System

The integration and deployment of large language model (LLM)-based intelligent agents have been fraught with challenges that compromise their efficiency and efficacy. Among these issues are sub-optimal scheduling and resource allocation of agent requests over the LLM, the difficulties in maintaining context during interactions between agent and LLM, and the complexities inherent in integrating heterogeneous agents with different capabilities and specializations. The rapid increase of agent quantity and complexity further exacerbates these issues, often leading to bottlenecks and sub-optimal utilization of resources. Inspired by these challenges, this paper presents AIOS, an LLM agent operating system, which embeds large language model into operating systems (OS). Specifically, AIOS is designed to optimize resource allocation, facilitate context switch across agents, enable concurrent execution of agents, provide tool service for agents, and maintain access control for agents. We present the architecture of such an operating system, outline the core challenges it aims to resolve, and provide the basic design and implementation of the AIOS. Our experiments on concurrent execution of multiple agents demonstrate the reliability and efficiency of our AIOS modules. Through this, we aim to not only improve the performance and efficiency of LLM agents but also to pioneer for better development and deployment of the AIOS ecosystem in the future. The project is open-source at https://github.com/agiresearch/AIOS.

  • 6 authors
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Mar 25, 2024 4

From LLM Reasoning to Autonomous AI Agents: A Comprehensive Review

Large language models and autonomous AI agents have evolved rapidly, resulting in a diverse array of evaluation benchmarks, frameworks, and collaboration protocols. However, the landscape remains fragmented and lacks a unified taxonomy or comprehensive survey. Therefore, we present a side-by-side comparison of benchmarks developed between 2019 and 2025 that evaluate these models and agents across multiple domains. In addition, we propose a taxonomy of approximately 60 benchmarks that cover general and academic knowledge reasoning, mathematical problem-solving, code generation and software engineering, factual grounding and retrieval, domain-specific evaluations, multimodal and embodied tasks, task orchestration, and interactive assessments. Furthermore, we review AI-agent frameworks introduced between 2023 and 2025 that integrate large language models with modular toolkits to enable autonomous decision-making and multi-step reasoning. Moreover, we present real-world applications of autonomous AI agents in materials science, biomedical research, academic ideation, software engineering, synthetic data generation, chemical reasoning, mathematical problem-solving, geographic information systems, multimedia, healthcare, and finance. We then survey key agent-to-agent collaboration protocols, namely the Agent Communication Protocol (ACP), the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and the Agent-to-Agent Protocol (A2A). Finally, we discuss recommendations for future research, focusing on advanced reasoning strategies, failure modes in multi-agent LLM systems, automated scientific discovery, dynamic tool integration via reinforcement learning, integrated search capabilities, and security vulnerabilities in agent protocols.

  • 3 authors
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Apr 28

AI4Research: A Survey of Artificial Intelligence for Scientific Research

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex domains such as logical reasoning and experimental coding. Motivated by these advancements, numerous studies have explored the application of AI in the innovation process, particularly in the context of scientific research. These AI technologies primarily aim to develop systems that can autonomously conduct research processes across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Despite these significant strides, a comprehensive survey on AI for Research (AI4Research) remains absent, which hampers our understanding and impedes further development in this field. To address this gap, we present a comprehensive survey and offer a unified perspective on AI4Research. Specifically, the main contributions of our work are as follows: (1) Systematic taxonomy: We first introduce a systematic taxonomy to classify five mainstream tasks in AI4Research. (2) New frontiers: Then, we identify key research gaps and highlight promising future directions, focusing on the rigor and scalability of automated experiments, as well as the societal impact. (3) Abundant applications and resources: Finally, we compile a wealth of resources, including relevant multidisciplinary applications, data corpora, and tools. We hope our work will provide the research community with quick access to these resources and stimulate innovative breakthroughs in AI4Research.

  • 16 authors
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Jul 2

BioAnalyst: A Foundation Model for Biodiversity

The accelerating loss of biodiversity presents critical challenges for ecological research and conservation strategies. The preservation of biodiversity is paramount for maintaining ecological balance and ensuring the sustainability of ecosystems. However, biodiversity faces numerous threats, including habitat loss, climate change, and the proliferation of invasive species. Addressing these and other ecology-related challenges, both at local and global scales, requires comprehensive monitoring, predictive and conservation planning capabilities. Artificial Intelligence (AI) Foundation Models (FMs) have gained significant momentum in numerous scientific domains by leveraging vast datasets to learn general-purpose representations adaptable to various downstream tasks. This paradigm holds immense promise for biodiversity conservation. In response, we introduce BioAnalyst, the first Foundation Model tailored for biodiversity analysis and conservation planning. BioAnalyst employs a transformer-based architecture, pre-trained on extensive multi-modal datasets encompassing species occurrence records, remote sensing indicators, climate and environmental variables. BioAnalyst is designed for adaptability, allowing for fine-tuning of a range of downstream tasks, such as species distribution modelling, habitat suitability assessments, invasive species detection, and population trend forecasting. We evaluate the model's performance on two downstream use cases, demonstrating its generalisability compared to existing methods, particularly in data-scarce scenarios for two distinct use-cases, establishing a new accuracy baseline for ecological forecasting. By openly releasing BioAnalyst and its fine-tuning workflows to the scientific community, we aim to foster collaborative efforts in biodiversity modelling and advance AI-driven solutions to pressing ecological challenges.

  • 7 authors
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Jul 11

Hype, Sustainability, and the Price of the Bigger-is-Better Paradigm in AI

With the growing attention and investment in recent AI approaches such as large language models, the narrative that the larger the AI system the more valuable, powerful and interesting it is is increasingly seen as common sense. But what is this assumption based on, and how are we measuring value, power, and performance? And what are the collateral consequences of this race to ever-increasing scale? Here, we scrutinize the current scaling trends and trade-offs across multiple axes and refute two common assumptions underlying the 'bigger-is-better' AI paradigm: 1) that improved performance is a product of increased scale, and 2) that all interesting problems addressed by AI require large-scale models. Rather, we argue that this approach is not only fragile scientifically, but comes with undesirable consequences. First, it is not sustainable, as its compute demands increase faster than model performance, leading to unreasonable economic requirements and a disproportionate environmental footprint. Second, it implies focusing on certain problems at the expense of others, leaving aside important applications, e.g. health, education, or the climate. Finally, it exacerbates a concentration of power, which centralizes decision-making in the hands of a few actors while threatening to disempower others in the context of shaping both AI research and its applications throughout society.

  • 3 authors
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Sep 21, 2024 1

General Scales Unlock AI Evaluation with Explanatory and Predictive Power

Ensuring safe and effective use of AI requires understanding and anticipating its performance on novel tasks, from advanced scientific challenges to transformed workplace activities. So far, benchmarking has guided progress in AI, but it has offered limited explanatory and predictive power for general-purpose AI systems, given the low transferability across diverse tasks. In this paper, we introduce general scales for AI evaluation that can explain what common AI benchmarks really measure, extract ability profiles of AI systems, and predict their performance for new task instances, in- and out-of-distribution. Our fully-automated methodology builds on 18 newly-crafted rubrics that place instance demands on general scales that do not saturate. Illustrated for 15 large language models and 63 tasks, high explanatory power is unleashed from inspecting the demand and ability profiles, bringing insights on the sensitivity and specificity exhibited by different benchmarks, and how knowledge, metacognition and reasoning are affected by model size, chain-of-thought and distillation. Surprisingly, high predictive power at the instance level becomes possible using these demand levels, providing superior estimates over black-box baseline predictors based on embeddings or finetuning, especially in out-of-distribution settings (new tasks and new benchmarks). The scales, rubrics, battery, techniques and results presented here represent a major step for AI evaluation, underpinning the reliable deployment of AI in the years ahead. (Collaborative platform: https://kinds-of-intelligence-cfi.github.io/ADELE.)

  • 26 authors
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Mar 8

Autonomous Deep Agent

This technical brief introduces Deep Agent, an advanced autonomous AI system designed to manage complex multi-phase tasks through a novel hierarchical task management architecture. The system's foundation is built on our Hierarchical Task DAG (HTDAG) framework, which dynamically decomposes high-level objectives into manageable sub-tasks while rigorously maintaining dependencies and execution coherence. Deep Agent advances beyond traditional agent systems through three key innovations: First, it implements a recursive two-stage planner-executor architecture that enables continuous task refinement and adaptation as circumstances change. Second, it features an Autonomous API & Tool Creation (AATC) system that automatically generates reusable components from UI interactions, substantially reducing operational costs for similar tasks. Third, it incorporates Prompt Tweaking Engine and Autonomous Prompt Feedback Learning components that optimize Large Language Model prompts for specific scenarios, enhancing both inference accuracy and operational stability. These components are integrated to form a service infrastructure that manages user contexts, handles complex task dependencies, and orchestrates end-to-end agentic workflow execution. Through this sophisticated architecture, Deep Agent establishes a novel paradigm in self-governing AI systems, demonstrating robust capability to independently handle intricate, multi-step tasks while maintaining consistent efficiency and reliability through continuous self-optimization.

  • 5 authors
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Feb 10

An Empirical Study of Pre-Trained Model Reuse in the Hugging Face Deep Learning Model Registry

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are being adopted as components in software systems. Creating and specializing DNNs from scratch has grown increasingly difficult as state-of-the-art architectures grow more complex. Following the path of traditional software engineering, machine learning engineers have begun to reuse large-scale pre-trained models (PTMs) and fine-tune these models for downstream tasks. Prior works have studied reuse practices for traditional software packages to guide software engineers towards better package maintenance and dependency management. We lack a similar foundation of knowledge to guide behaviors in pre-trained model ecosystems. In this work, we present the first empirical investigation of PTM reuse. We interviewed 12 practitioners from the most popular PTM ecosystem, Hugging Face, to learn the practices and challenges of PTM reuse. From this data, we model the decision-making process for PTM reuse. Based on the identified practices, we describe useful attributes for model reuse, including provenance, reproducibility, and portability. Three challenges for PTM reuse are missing attributes, discrepancies between claimed and actual performance, and model risks. We substantiate these identified challenges with systematic measurements in the Hugging Face ecosystem. Our work informs future directions on optimizing deep learning ecosystems by automated measuring useful attributes and potential attacks, and envision future research on infrastructure and standardization for model registries.

  • 8 authors
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Mar 4, 2023

Exploring the sustainable scaling of AI dilemma: A projective study of corporations' AI environmental impacts

The rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), has raised concerns regarding its global environmental impact that extends beyond greenhouse gas emissions to include consideration of hardware fabrication and end-of-life processes. The opacity from major providers hinders companies' abilities to evaluate their AI-related environmental impacts and achieve net-zero targets. In this paper, we propose a methodology to estimate the environmental impact of a company's AI portfolio, providing actionable insights without necessitating extensive AI and Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) expertise. Results confirm that large generative AI models consume up to 4600x more energy than traditional models. Our modelling approach, which accounts for increased AI usage, hardware computing efficiency, and changes in electricity mix in line with IPCC scenarios, forecasts AI electricity use up to 2030. Under a high adoption scenario, driven by widespread Generative AI and agents adoption associated to increasingly complex models and frameworks, AI electricity use is projected to rise by a factor of 24.4. Mitigating the environmental impact of Generative AI by 2030 requires coordinated efforts across the AI value chain. Isolated measures in hardware efficiency, model efficiency, or grid improvements alone are insufficient. We advocate for standardized environmental assessment frameworks, greater transparency from the all actors of the value chain and the introduction of a "Return on Environment" metric to align AI development with net-zero goals.

  • 6 authors
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Jan 24 3

Barbarians at the Gate: How AI is Upending Systems Research

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is starting to transform the research process as we know it by automating the discovery of new solutions. Given a task, the typical AI-driven approach is (i) to generate a set of diverse solutions, and then (ii) to verify these solutions and select one that solves the problem. Crucially, this approach assumes the existence of a reliable verifier, i.e., one that can accurately determine whether a solution solves the given problem. We argue that systems research, long focused on designing and evaluating new performance-oriented algorithms, is particularly well-suited for AI-driven solution discovery. This is because system performance problems naturally admit reliable verifiers: solutions are typically implemented in real systems or simulators, and verification reduces to running these software artifacts against predefined workloads and measuring performance. We term this approach as AI-Driven Research for Systems (ADRS), which iteratively generates, evaluates, and refines solutions. Using penEvolve, an existing open-source ADRS instance, we present case studies across diverse domains, including load balancing for multi-region cloud scheduling, Mixture-of-Experts inference, LLM-based SQL queries, and transaction scheduling. In multiple instances, ADRS discovers algorithms that outperform state-of-the-art human designs (e.g., achieving up to 5.0x runtime improvements or 50% cost reductions). We distill best practices for guiding algorithm evolution, from prompt design to evaluator construction, for existing frameworks. We then discuss the broader implications for the systems community: as AI assumes a central role in algorithm design, we argue that human researchers will increasingly focus on problem formulation and strategic guidance. Our results highlight both the disruptive potential and the urgent need to adapt systems research practices in the age of AI.

The Journey to Trustworthy AI- Part 1: Pursuit of Pragmatic Frameworks

This paper reviews Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (TAI) and its various definitions. Considering the principles respected in any society, TAI is often characterized by a few attributes, some of which have led to confusion in regulatory or engineering contexts. We argue against using terms such as Responsible or Ethical AI as substitutes for TAI. And to help clarify any confusion, we suggest leaving them behind. Given the subjectivity and complexity inherent in TAI, developing a universal framework is deemed infeasible. Instead, we advocate for approaches centered on addressing key attributes and properties such as fairness, bias, risk, security, explainability, and reliability. We examine the ongoing regulatory landscape, with a focus on initiatives in the EU, China, and the USA. We recognize that differences in AI regulations based on geopolitical and geographical reasons pose an additional challenge for multinational companies. We identify risk as a core factor in AI regulation and TAI. For example, as outlined in the EU-AI Act, organizations must gauge the risk level of their AI products to act accordingly (or risk hefty fines). We compare modalities of TAI implementation and how multiple cross-functional teams are engaged in the overall process. Thus, a brute force approach for enacting TAI renders its efficiency and agility, moot. To address this, we introduce our framework Set-Formalize-Measure-Act (SFMA). Our solution highlights the importance of transforming TAI-aware metrics, drivers of TAI, stakeholders, and business/legal requirements into actual benchmarks or tests. Finally, over-regulation driven by panic of powerful AI models can, in fact, harm TAI too. Based on GitHub user-activity data, in 2023, AI open-source projects rose to top projects by contributor account. Enabling innovation in TAI hinges on the independent contributions of the open-source community.

  • 2 authors
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Mar 19, 2024

From Efficiency Gains to Rebound Effects: The Problem of Jevons' Paradox in AI's Polarized Environmental Debate

As the climate crisis deepens, artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a contested force: some champion its potential to advance renewable energy, materials discovery, and large-scale emissions monitoring, while others underscore its growing carbon footprint, water consumption, and material resource demands. Much of this debate has concentrated on direct impacts -- energy and water usage in data centers, e-waste from frequent hardware upgrades -- without addressing the significant indirect effects. This paper examines how the problem of Jevons' Paradox applies to AI, whereby efficiency gains may paradoxically spur increased consumption. We argue that understanding these second-order impacts requires an interdisciplinary approach, combining lifecycle assessments with socio-economic analyses. Rebound effects undermine the assumption that improved technical efficiency alone will ensure net reductions in environmental harm. Instead, the trajectory of AI's impact also hinges on business incentives and market logics, governance and policymaking, and broader social and cultural norms. We contend that a narrow focus on direct emissions misrepresents AI's true climate footprint, limiting the scope for meaningful interventions. We conclude with recommendations that address rebound effects and challenge the market-driven imperatives fueling uncontrolled AI growth. By broadening the analysis to include both direct and indirect consequences, we aim to inform a more comprehensive, evidence-based dialogue on AI's role in the climate crisis.

  • 3 authors
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Jan 27

Small Language Models are the Future of Agentic AI

Large language models (LLMs) are often praised for exhibiting near-human performance on a wide range of tasks and valued for their ability to hold a general conversation. The rise of agentic AI systems is, however, ushering in a mass of applications in which language models perform a small number of specialized tasks repetitively and with little variation. Here we lay out the position that small language models (SLMs) are sufficiently powerful, inherently more suitable, and necessarily more economical for many invocations in agentic systems, and are therefore the future of agentic AI. Our argumentation is grounded in the current level of capabilities exhibited by SLMs, the common architectures of agentic systems, and the economy of LM deployment. We further argue that in situations where general-purpose conversational abilities are essential, heterogeneous agentic systems (i.e., agents invoking multiple different models) are the natural choice. We discuss the potential barriers for the adoption of SLMs in agentic systems and outline a general LLM-to-SLM agent conversion algorithm. Our position, formulated as a value statement, highlights the significance of the operational and economic impact even a partial shift from LLMs to SLMs is to have on the AI agent industry. We aim to stimulate the discussion on the effective use of AI resources and hope to advance the efforts to lower the costs of AI of the present day. Calling for both contributions to and critique of our position, we commit to publishing all such correspondence at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/lpr/slm-agents.

  • 8 authors
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Jun 2 2

Cognitive Kernel-Pro: A Framework for Deep Research Agents and Agent Foundation Models Training

General AI Agents are increasingly recognized as foundational frameworks for the next generation of artificial intelligence, enabling complex reasoning, web interaction, coding, and autonomous research capabilities. However, current agent systems are either closed-source or heavily reliant on a variety of paid APIs and proprietary tools, limiting accessibility and reproducibility for the research community. In this work, we present Cognitive Kernel-Pro, a fully open-source and (to the maximum extent) free multi-module agent framework designed to democratize the development and evaluation of advanced AI agents. Within Cognitive Kernel-Pro, we systematically investigate the curation of high-quality training data for Agent Foundation Models, focusing on the construction of queries, trajectories, and verifiable answers across four key domains: web, file, code, and general reasoning. Furthermore, we explore novel strategies for agent test-time reflection and voting to enhance agent robustness and performance. We evaluate Cognitive Kernel-Pro on GAIA, achieving state-of-the-art results among open-source and free agents. Notably, our 8B-parameter open-source model surpasses previous leading systems such as WebDancer and WebSailor, establishing a new performance standard for accessible, high-capability AI agents. Code is available at https://github.com/Tencent/CognitiveKernel-Pro

Cognitio Emergens: Agency, Dimensions, and Dynamics in Human-AI Knowledge Co-Creation

Scientific knowledge creation is fundamentally transforming as humans and AI systems evolve beyond tool-user relationships into co-evolutionary epistemic partnerships. When AlphaFold revolutionized protein structure prediction, researchers described engaging with an epistemic partner that reshaped how they conceptualized fundamental relationships. This article introduces Cognitio Emergens (CE), a framework addressing critical limitations in existing models that focus on static roles or narrow metrics while failing to capture how scientific understanding emerges through recursive human-AI interaction over time. CE integrates three components addressing these limitations: Agency Configurations describing how authority distributes between humans and AI (Directed, Contributory, Partnership), with partnerships dynamically oscillating between configurations rather than following linear progression; Epistemic Dimensions capturing six specific capabilities emerging through collaboration across Discovery, Integration, and Projection axes, creating distinctive "capability signatures" that guide development; and Partnership Dynamics identifying forces shaping how these relationships evolve, particularly the risk of epistemic alienation where researchers lose interpretive control over knowledge they formally endorse. Drawing from autopoiesis theory, social systems theory, and organizational modularity, CE reveals how knowledge co-creation emerges through continuous negotiation of roles, values, and organizational structures. By reconceptualizing human-AI scientific collaboration as fundamentally co-evolutionary, CE offers a balanced perspective that neither uncritically celebrates nor unnecessarily fears AI's evolving role, instead providing conceptual tools for cultivating partnerships that maintain meaningful human participation while enabling transformative scientific breakthroughs.

  • 1 authors
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May 5 1

From AI for Science to Agentic Science: A Survey on Autonomous Scientific Discovery

Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping scientific discovery, evolving from specialized computational tools into autonomous research partners. We position Agentic Science as a pivotal stage within the broader AI for Science paradigm, where AI systems progress from partial assistance to full scientific agency. Enabled by large language models (LLMs), multimodal systems, and integrated research platforms, agentic AI shows capabilities in hypothesis generation, experimental design, execution, analysis, and iterative refinement -- behaviors once regarded as uniquely human. This survey provides a domain-oriented review of autonomous scientific discovery across life sciences, chemistry, materials science, and physics. We unify three previously fragmented perspectives -- process-oriented, autonomy-oriented, and mechanism-oriented -- through a comprehensive framework that connects foundational capabilities, core processes, and domain-specific realizations. Building on this framework, we (i) trace the evolution of AI for Science, (ii) identify five core capabilities underpinning scientific agency, (iii) model discovery as a dynamic four-stage workflow, (iv) review applications across the above domains, and (v) synthesize key challenges and future opportunities. This work establishes a domain-oriented synthesis of autonomous scientific discovery and positions Agentic Science as a structured paradigm for advancing AI-driven research.

Future of Work with AI Agents: Auditing Automation and Augmentation Potential across the U.S. Workforce

The rapid rise of compound AI systems (a.k.a., AI agents) is reshaping the labor market, raising concerns about job displacement, diminished human agency, and overreliance on automation. Yet, we lack a systematic understanding of the evolving landscape. In this paper, we address this gap by introducing a novel auditing framework to assess which occupational tasks workers want AI agents to automate or augment, and how those desires align with the current technological capabilities. Our framework features an audio-enhanced mini-interview to capture nuanced worker desires and introduces the Human Agency Scale (HAS) as a shared language to quantify the preferred level of human involvement. Using this framework, we construct the WORKBank database, building on the U.S. Department of Labor's O*NET database, to capture preferences from 1,500 domain workers and capability assessments from AI experts across over 844 tasks spanning 104 occupations. Jointly considering the desire and technological capability divides tasks in WORKBank into four zones: Automation "Green Light" Zone, Automation "Red Light" Zone, R&D Opportunity Zone, Low Priority Zone. This highlights critical mismatches and opportunities for AI agent development. Moving beyond a simple automate-or-not dichotomy, our results reveal diverse HAS profiles across occupations, reflecting heterogeneous expectations for human involvement. Moreover, our study offers early signals of how AI agent integration may reshape the core human competencies, shifting from information-focused skills to interpersonal ones. These findings underscore the importance of aligning AI agent development with human desires and preparing workers for evolving workplace dynamics.

  • 7 authors
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Jun 6

From Google Gemini to OpenAI Q* (Q-Star): A Survey of Reshaping the Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research Landscape

This comprehensive survey explored the evolving landscape of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), with a specific focus on the transformative impacts of Mixture of Experts (MoE), multimodal learning, and the speculated advancements towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). It critically examined the current state and future trajectory of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), exploring how innovations like Google's Gemini and the anticipated OpenAI Q* project are reshaping research priorities and applications across various domains, including an impact analysis on the generative AI research taxonomy. It assessed the computational challenges, scalability, and real-world implications of these technologies while highlighting their potential in driving significant progress in fields like healthcare, finance, and education. It also addressed the emerging academic challenges posed by the proliferation of both AI-themed and AI-generated preprints, examining their impact on the peer-review process and scholarly communication. The study highlighted the importance of incorporating ethical and human-centric methods in AI development, ensuring alignment with societal norms and welfare, and outlined a strategy for future AI research that focuses on a balanced and conscientious use of MoE, multimodality, and AGI in generative AI.

  • 5 authors
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Dec 17, 2023

Creating an LLM-based AI-agent: A high-level methodology towards enhancing LLMs with APIs

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized various aspects of engineering and science. Their utility is often bottlenecked by the lack of interaction with the external digital environment. To overcome this limitation and achieve integration of LLMs and Artificial Intelligence (AI) into real-world applications, customized AI agents are being constructed. Based on the technological trends and techniques, we extract a high-level approach for constructing these AI agents, focusing on their underlying architecture. This thesis serves as a comprehensive guide that elucidates a multi-faceted approach for empowering LLMs with the capability to leverage Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). We present a 7-step methodology that begins with the selection of suitable LLMs and the task decomposition that is necessary for complex problem-solving. This methodology includes techniques for generating training data for API interactions and heuristics for selecting the appropriate API among a plethora of options. These steps eventually lead to the generation of API calls that are both syntactically and semantically aligned with the LLM's understanding of a given task. Moreover, we review existing frameworks and tools that facilitate these processes and highlight the gaps in current attempts. In this direction, we propose an on-device architecture that aims to exploit the functionality of carry-on devices by using small models from the Hugging Face community. We examine the effectiveness of these approaches on real-world applications of various domains, including the generation of a piano sheet. Through an extensive analysis of the literature and available technologies, this thesis aims to set a compass for researchers and practitioners to harness the full potential of LLMs augmented with external tool capabilities, thus paving the way for more autonomous, robust, and context-aware AI agents.

  • 1 authors
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Dec 17, 2024

Telecom Foundation Models: Applications, Challenges, and Future Trends

Telecom networks are becoming increasingly complex, with diversified deployment scenarios, multi-standards, and multi-vendor support. The intricate nature of the telecom network ecosystem presents challenges to effectively manage, operate, and optimize networks. To address these hurdles, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been widely adopted to solve different tasks in telecom networks. However, these conventional AI models are often designed for specific tasks, rely on extensive and costly-to-collect labeled data that require specialized telecom expertise for development and maintenance. The AI models usually fail to generalize and support diverse deployment scenarios and applications. In contrast, Foundation Models (FMs) show effective generalization capabilities in various domains in language, vision, and decision-making tasks. FMs can be trained on multiple data modalities generated from the telecom ecosystem and leverage specialized domain knowledge. Moreover, FMs can be fine-tuned to solve numerous specialized tasks with minimal task-specific labeled data and, in some instances, are able to leverage context to solve previously unseen problems. At the dawn of 6G, this paper investigates the potential opportunities of using FMs to shape the future of telecom technologies and standards. In particular, the paper outlines a conceptual process for developing Telecom FMs (TFMs) and discusses emerging opportunities for orchestrating specialized TFMs for network configuration, operation, and maintenance. Finally, the paper discusses the limitations and challenges of developing and deploying TFMs.

  • 4 authors
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Aug 2, 2024

A Comprehensive Survey of Self-Evolving AI Agents: A New Paradigm Bridging Foundation Models and Lifelong Agentic Systems

Recent advances in large language models have sparked growing interest in AI agents capable of solving complex, real-world tasks. However, most existing agent systems rely on manually crafted configurations that remain static after deployment, limiting their ability to adapt to dynamic and evolving environments. To this end, recent research has explored agent evolution techniques that aim to automatically enhance agent systems based on interaction data and environmental feedback. This emerging direction lays the foundation for self-evolving AI agents, which bridge the static capabilities of foundation models with the continuous adaptability required by lifelong agentic systems. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of existing techniques for self-evolving agentic systems. Specifically, we first introduce a unified conceptual framework that abstracts the feedback loop underlying the design of self-evolving agentic systems. The framework highlights four key components: System Inputs, Agent System, Environment, and Optimisers, serving as a foundation for understanding and comparing different strategies. Based on this framework, we systematically review a wide range of self-evolving techniques that target different components of the agent system. We also investigate domain-specific evolution strategies developed for specialised fields such as biomedicine, programming, and finance, where optimisation objectives are tightly coupled with domain constraints. In addition, we provide a dedicated discussion on the evaluation, safety, and ethical considerations for self-evolving agentic systems, which are critical to ensuring their effectiveness and reliability. This survey aims to provide researchers and practitioners with a systematic understanding of self-evolving AI agents, laying the foundation for the development of more adaptive, autonomous, and lifelong agentic systems.

  • 15 authors
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Aug 10 2

AI for Service: Proactive Assistance with AI Glasses

In an era where AI is evolving from a passive tool into an active and adaptive companion, we introduce AI for Service (AI4Service), a new paradigm that enables proactive and real-time assistance in daily life. Existing AI services remain largely reactive, responding only to explicit user commands. We argue that a truly intelligent and helpful assistant should be capable of anticipating user needs and taking actions proactively when appropriate. To realize this vision, we propose Alpha-Service, a unified framework that addresses two fundamental challenges: Know When to intervene by detecting service opportunities from egocentric video streams, and Know How to provide both generalized and personalized services. Inspired by the von Neumann computer architecture and based on AI glasses, Alpha-Service consists of five key components: an Input Unit for perception, a Central Processing Unit for task scheduling, an Arithmetic Logic Unit for tool utilization, a Memory Unit for long-term personalization, and an Output Unit for natural human interaction. As an initial exploration, we implement Alpha-Service through a multi-agent system deployed on AI glasses. Case studies, including a real-time Blackjack advisor, a museum tour guide, and a shopping fit assistant, demonstrate its ability to seamlessly perceive the environment, infer user intent, and provide timely and useful assistance without explicit prompts.

Common Sense Is All You Need

Artificial intelligence (AI) has made significant strides in recent years, yet it continues to struggle with a fundamental aspect of cognition present in all animals: common sense. Current AI systems, including those designed for complex tasks like autonomous driving, problem-solving challenges such as the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC), and conversational benchmarks like the Turing Test, often lack the ability to adapt to new situations without extensive prior knowledge. This manuscript argues that integrating common sense into AI systems is essential for achieving true autonomy and unlocking the full societal and commercial value of AI. We propose a shift in the order of knowledge acquisition emphasizing the importance of developing AI systems that start from minimal prior knowledge and are capable of contextual learning, adaptive reasoning, and embodiment -- even within abstract domains. Additionally, we highlight the need to rethink the AI software stack to address this foundational challenge. Without common sense, AI systems may never reach true autonomy, instead exhibiting asymptotic performance that approaches theoretical ideals like AIXI but remains unattainable in practice due to infinite resource and computation requirements. While scaling AI models and passing benchmarks like the Turing Test have brought significant advancements in applications that do not require autonomy, these approaches alone are insufficient to achieve autonomous AI with common sense. By redefining existing benchmarks and challenges to enforce constraints that require genuine common sense, and by broadening our understanding of embodiment to include both physical and abstract domains, we can encourage the development of AI systems better equipped to handle the complexities of real-world and abstract environments.

  • 1 authors
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Jan 11

SAI: Solving AI Tasks with Systematic Artificial Intelligence in Communication Network

In the rapid development of artificial intelligence, solving complex AI tasks is a crucial technology in intelligent mobile networks. Despite the good performance of specialized AI models in intelligent mobile networks, they are unable to handle complicated AI tasks. To address this challenge, we propose Systematic Artificial Intelligence (SAI), which is a framework designed to solve AI tasks by leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) and JSON-format intent-based input to connect self-designed model library and database. Specifically, we first design a multi-input component, which simultaneously integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) and JSON-format intent-based inputs to fulfill the diverse intent requirements of different users. In addition, we introduce a model library module based on model cards which employ model cards to pairwise match between different modules for model composition. Model cards contain the corresponding model's name and the required performance metrics. Then when receiving user network requirements, we execute each subtask for multiple selected model combinations and provide output based on the execution results and LLM feedback. By leveraging the language capabilities of LLMs and the abundant AI models in the model library, SAI can complete numerous complex AI tasks in the communication network, achieving impressive results in network optimization, resource allocation, and other challenging tasks.

  • 4 authors
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Oct 13, 2023

A Comprehensive Survey of Mixture-of-Experts: Algorithms, Theory, and Applications

Artificial intelligence (AI) has achieved astonishing successes in many domains, especially with the recent breakthroughs in the development of foundational large models. These large models, leveraging their extensive training data, provide versatile solutions for a wide range of downstream tasks. However, as modern datasets become increasingly diverse and complex, the development of large AI models faces two major challenges: (1) the enormous consumption of computational resources and deployment difficulties, and (2) the difficulty in fitting heterogeneous and complex data, which limits the usability of the models. Mixture of Experts (MoE) models has recently attracted much attention in addressing these challenges, by dynamically selecting and activating the most relevant sub-models to process input data. It has been shown that MoEs can significantly improve model performance and efficiency with fewer resources, particularly excelling in handling large-scale, multimodal data. Given the tremendous potential MoE has demonstrated across various domains, it is urgent to provide a comprehensive summary of recent advancements of MoEs in many important fields. Existing surveys on MoE have their limitations, e.g., being outdated or lacking discussion on certain key areas, and we aim to address these gaps. In this paper, we first introduce the basic design of MoE, including gating functions, expert networks, routing mechanisms, training strategies, and system design. We then explore the algorithm design of MoE in important machine learning paradigms such as continual learning, meta-learning, multi-task learning, and reinforcement learning. Additionally, we summarize theoretical studies aimed at understanding MoE and review its applications in computer vision and natural language processing. Finally, we discuss promising future research directions.

  • 2 authors
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Mar 10

SciMaster: Towards General-Purpose Scientific AI Agents, Part I. X-Master as Foundation: Can We Lead on Humanity's Last Exam?

The rapid advancements of AI agents have ignited the long-held ambition of leveraging them to accelerate scientific discovery. Achieving this goal requires a deep understanding of the frontiers of human knowledge. As such, Humanity's Last Exam (HLE) provides an exceptionally challenging touchstone for evaluating scientific AI agents. In this work, we aim to construct the foundational architecture for general-purpose agents and validate the capabilities through leading performance on HLE. To achieve this, we introduce X-Master, a tool-augmented reasoning agent designed to emulate human researchers by interacting flexibly with external tools during its reasoning process. This agent, guided by the conceptualization of code as an interaction language, can flexibly leverage built-in Python libraries and our customized tools to augment the reasoning. We further scale its capabilities through X-Masters, a scattered-and-stacked agentic workflow that systematically enhances breadth and depth of reasoning. Our open-source solution, X-Masters, sets a new state-of-the-art record on HLE with a score of 32.1%, surpassing OpenAI's and Google's Deep Research (26.6% and 26.9%) and becoming the first to exceed the 30% threshold. This work allows us to gain a deeper understanding of complex task-solving and accumulates valuable experience that can inform future advancements, guiding subsequent model training.

From MOOC to MAIC: Reshaping Online Teaching and Learning through LLM-driven Agents

Since the first instances of online education, where courses were uploaded to accessible and shared online platforms, this form of scaling the dissemination of human knowledge to reach a broader audience has sparked extensive discussion and widespread adoption. Recognizing that personalized learning still holds significant potential for improvement, new AI technologies have been continuously integrated into this learning format, resulting in a variety of educational AI applications such as educational recommendation and intelligent tutoring. The emergence of intelligence in large language models (LLMs) has allowed for these educational enhancements to be built upon a unified foundational model, enabling deeper integration. In this context, we propose MAIC (Massive AI-empowered Course), a new form of online education that leverages LLM-driven multi-agent systems to construct an AI-augmented classroom, balancing scalability with adaptivity. Beyond exploring the conceptual framework and technical innovations, we conduct preliminary experiments at Tsinghua University, one of China's leading universities. Drawing from over 100,000 learning records of more than 500 students, we obtain a series of valuable observations and initial analyses. This project will continue to evolve, ultimately aiming to establish a comprehensive open platform that supports and unifies research, technology, and applications in exploring the possibilities of online education in the era of large model AI. We envision this platform as a collaborative hub, bringing together educators, researchers, and innovators to collectively explore the future of AI-driven online education.

  • 33 authors
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Sep 5, 2024 3

AlphaGo Moment for Model Architecture Discovery

While AI systems demonstrate exponentially improving capabilities, the pace of AI research itself remains linearly bounded by human cognitive capacity, creating an increasingly severe development bottleneck. We present ASI-Arch, the first demonstration of Artificial Superintelligence for AI research (ASI4AI) in the critical domain of neural architecture discovery--a fully autonomous system that shatters this fundamental constraint by enabling AI to conduct its own architectural innovation. Moving beyond traditional Neural Architecture Search (NAS), which is fundamentally limited to exploring human-defined spaces, we introduce a paradigm shift from automated optimization to automated innovation. ASI-Arch can conduct end-to-end scientific research in the domain of architecture discovery, autonomously hypothesizing novel architectural concepts, implementing them as executable code, training and empirically validating their performance through rigorous experimentation and past experience. ASI-Arch conducted 1,773 autonomous experiments over 20,000 GPU hours, culminating in the discovery of 106 innovative, state-of-the-art (SOTA) linear attention architectures. Like AlphaGo's Move 37 that revealed unexpected strategic insights invisible to human players, our AI-discovered architectures demonstrate emergent design principles that systematically surpass human-designed baselines and illuminate previously unknown pathways for architectural innovation. Crucially, we establish the first empirical scaling law for scientific discovery itself--demonstrating that architectural breakthroughs can be scaled computationally, transforming research progress from a human-limited to a computation-scalable process. We provide comprehensive analysis of the emergent design patterns and autonomous research capabilities that enabled these breakthroughs, establishing a blueprint for self-accelerating AI systems.

  • 7 authors
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Jul 23 1

The Rise and Potential of Large Language Model Based Agents: A Survey

For a long time, humanity has pursued artificial intelligence (AI) equivalent to or surpassing the human level, with AI agents considered a promising vehicle for this pursuit. AI agents are artificial entities that sense their environment, make decisions, and take actions. Many efforts have been made to develop intelligent AI agents since the mid-20th century. However, these efforts have mainly focused on advancement in algorithms or training strategies to enhance specific capabilities or performance on particular tasks. Actually, what the community lacks is a sufficiently general and powerful model to serve as a starting point for designing AI agents that can adapt to diverse scenarios. Due to the versatile and remarkable capabilities they demonstrate, large language models (LLMs) are regarded as potential sparks for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), offering hope for building general AI agents. Many research efforts have leveraged LLMs as the foundation to build AI agents and have achieved significant progress. We start by tracing the concept of agents from its philosophical origins to its development in AI, and explain why LLMs are suitable foundations for AI agents. Building upon this, we present a conceptual framework for LLM-based agents, comprising three main components: brain, perception, and action, and the framework can be tailored to suit different applications. Subsequently, we explore the extensive applications of LLM-based agents in three aspects: single-agent scenarios, multi-agent scenarios, and human-agent cooperation. Following this, we delve into agent societies, exploring the behavior and personality of LLM-based agents, the social phenomena that emerge when they form societies, and the insights they offer for human society. Finally, we discuss a range of key topics and open problems within the field.

  • 30 authors
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Sep 14, 2023

RE-Bench: Evaluating frontier AI R&D capabilities of language model agents against human experts

Frontier AI safety policies highlight automation of AI research and development (R&D) by AI agents as an important capability to anticipate. However, there exist few evaluations for AI R&D capabilities, and none that are highly realistic and have a direct comparison to human performance. We introduce RE-Bench (Research Engineering Benchmark, v1), which consists of 7 challenging, open-ended ML research engineering environments and data from 71 8-hour attempts by 61 distinct human experts. We confirm that our experts make progress in the environments given 8 hours, with 82% of expert attempts achieving a non-zero score and 24% matching or exceeding our strong reference solutions. We compare humans to several public frontier models through best-of-k with varying time budgets and agent designs, and find that the best AI agents achieve a score 4x higher than human experts when both are given a total time budget of 2 hours per environment. However, humans currently display better returns to increasing time budgets, narrowly exceeding the top AI agent scores given an 8-hour budget, and achieving 2x the score of the top AI agent when both are given 32 total hours (across different attempts). Qualitatively, we find that modern AI agents possess significant expertise in many ML topics -- e.g. an agent wrote a faster custom Triton kernel than any of our human experts' -- and can generate and test solutions over ten times faster than humans, at much lower cost. We open-source the evaluation environments, human expert data, analysis code and agent trajectories to facilitate future research.

  • 22 authors
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Nov 22, 2024

Internet of Agents: Weaving a Web of Heterogeneous Agents for Collaborative Intelligence

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has paved the way for the development of highly capable autonomous agents. However, existing multi-agent frameworks often struggle with integrating diverse capable third-party agents due to reliance on agents defined within their own ecosystems. They also face challenges in simulating distributed environments, as most frameworks are limited to single-device setups. Furthermore, these frameworks often rely on hard-coded communication pipelines, limiting their adaptability to dynamic task requirements. Inspired by the concept of the Internet, we propose the Internet of Agents (IoA), a novel framework that addresses these limitations by providing a flexible and scalable platform for LLM-based multi-agent collaboration. IoA introduces an agent integration protocol, an instant-messaging-like architecture design, and dynamic mechanisms for agent teaming and conversation flow control. Through extensive experiments on general assistant tasks, embodied AI tasks, and retrieval-augmented generation benchmarks, we demonstrate that IoA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, showcasing its ability to facilitate effective collaboration among heterogeneous agents. IoA represents a step towards linking diverse agents in an Internet-like environment, where agents can seamlessly collaborate to achieve greater intelligence and capabilities. Our codebase has been released at https://github.com/OpenBMB/IoA.

  • 10 authors
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Jul 9, 2024 4

Beyond Pipelines: A Survey of the Paradigm Shift toward Model-Native Agentic AI

The rapid evolution of agentic AI marks a new phase in artificial intelligence, where Large Language Models (LLMs) no longer merely respond but act, reason, and adapt. This survey traces the paradigm shift in building agentic AI: from Pipeline-based systems, where planning, tool use, and memory are orchestrated by external logic, to the emerging Model-native paradigm, where these capabilities are internalized within the model's parameters. We first position Reinforcement Learning (RL) as the algorithmic engine enabling this paradigm shift. By reframing learning from imitating static data to outcome-driven exploration, RL underpins a unified solution of LLM + RL + Task across language, vision and embodied domains. Building on this, the survey systematically reviews how each capability -- Planning, Tool use, and Memory -- has evolved from externally scripted modules to end-to-end learned behaviors. Furthermore, it examines how this paradigm shift has reshaped major agent applications, specifically the Deep Research agent emphasizing long-horizon reasoning and the GUI agent emphasizing embodied interaction. We conclude by discussing the continued internalization of agentic capabilities like Multi-agent collaboration and Reflection, alongside the evolving roles of the system and model layers in future agentic AI. Together, these developments outline a coherent trajectory toward model-native agentic AI as an integrated learning and interaction framework, marking the transition from constructing systems that apply intelligence to developing models that grow intelligence through experience.

AutoClimDS: Climate Data Science Agentic AI -- A Knowledge Graph is All You Need

Climate data science faces persistent barriers stemming from the fragmented nature of data sources, heterogeneous formats, and the steep technical expertise required to identify, acquire, and process datasets. These challenges limit participation, slow discovery, and reduce the reproducibility of scientific workflows. In this paper, we present a proof of concept for addressing these barriers through the integration of a curated knowledge graph (KG) with AI agents designed for cloud-native scientific workflows. The KG provides a unifying layer that organizes datasets, tools, and workflows, while AI agents -- powered by generative AI services -- enable natural language interaction, automated data access, and streamlined analysis. Together, these components drastically lower the technical threshold for engaging in climate data science, enabling non-specialist users to identify and analyze relevant datasets. By leveraging existing cloud-ready API data portals, we demonstrate that "a knowledge graph is all you need" to unlock scalable and agentic workflows for scientific inquiry. The open-source design of our system further supports community contributions, ensuring that the KG and associated tools can evolve as a shared commons. Our results illustrate a pathway toward democratizing access to climate data and establishing a reproducible, extensible framework for human--AI collaboration in scientific research.

  • 8 authors
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Sep 25

The AI Community Building the Future? A Quantitative Analysis of Development Activity on Hugging Face Hub

Open source developers have emerged as key actors in the political economy of artificial intelligence (AI), with open model development being recognised as an alternative to closed-source AI development. However, we still have a limited understanding of collaborative practices in open source AI. This paper responds to this gap with a three-part quantitative analysis of development activity on the Hugging Face (HF) Hub, a popular platform for building, sharing, and demonstrating models. First, we find that various types of activity across 348,181 model, 65,761 dataset, and 156,642 space repositories exhibit right-skewed distributions. Activity is extremely imbalanced between repositories; for example, over 70% of models have 0 downloads, while 1% account for 99% of downloads. Second, we analyse a snapshot of the social network structure of collaboration on models, finding that the community has a core-periphery structure, with a core of prolific developers and a majority of isolate developers (89%). Upon removing isolates, collaboration is characterised by high reciprocity regardless of developers' network positions. Third, we examine model adoption through the lens of model usage in spaces, finding that a minority of models, developed by a handful of companies, are widely used on the HF Hub. Overall, we find that various types of activity on the HF Hub are characterised by Pareto distributions, congruent with prior observations about OSS development patterns on platforms like GitHub. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of the findings and recommendations for (open source) AI researchers, developers, and policymakers.

  • 3 authors
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May 20, 2024 1

Advances and Challenges in Foundation Agents: From Brain-Inspired Intelligence to Evolutionary, Collaborative, and Safe Systems

The advent of large language models (LLMs) has catalyzed a transformative shift in artificial intelligence, paving the way for advanced intelligent agents capable of sophisticated reasoning, robust perception, and versatile action across diverse domains. As these agents increasingly drive AI research and practical applications, their design, evaluation, and continuous improvement present intricate, multifaceted challenges. This survey provides a comprehensive overview, framing intelligent agents within a modular, brain-inspired architecture that integrates principles from cognitive science, neuroscience, and computational research. We structure our exploration into four interconnected parts. First, we delve into the modular foundation of intelligent agents, systematically mapping their cognitive, perceptual, and operational modules onto analogous human brain functionalities, and elucidating core components such as memory, world modeling, reward processing, and emotion-like systems. Second, we discuss self-enhancement and adaptive evolution mechanisms, exploring how agents autonomously refine their capabilities, adapt to dynamic environments, and achieve continual learning through automated optimization paradigms, including emerging AutoML and LLM-driven optimization strategies. Third, we examine collaborative and evolutionary multi-agent systems, investigating the collective intelligence emerging from agent interactions, cooperation, and societal structures, highlighting parallels to human social dynamics. Finally, we address the critical imperative of building safe, secure, and beneficial AI systems, emphasizing intrinsic and extrinsic security threats, ethical alignment, robustness, and practical mitigation strategies necessary for trustworthy real-world deployment.

  • 47 authors
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Mar 31 7

ColorAgent: Building A Robust, Personalized, and Interactive OS Agent

With the advancements in hardware, software, and large language model technologies, the interaction between humans and operating systems has evolved from the command-line interface to the rapidly emerging AI agent interactions. Building an operating system (OS) agent capable of executing user instructions and faithfully following user desires is becoming a reality. In this technical report, we present ColorAgent, an OS agent designed to engage in long-horizon, robust interactions with the environment while also enabling personalized and proactive user interaction. To enable long-horizon interactions with the environment, we enhance the model's capabilities through step-wise reinforcement learning and self-evolving training, while also developing a tailored multi-agent framework that ensures generality, consistency, and robustness. In terms of user interaction, we explore personalized user intent recognition and proactive engagement, positioning the OS agent not merely as an automation tool but as a warm, collaborative partner. We evaluate ColorAgent on the AndroidWorld and AndroidLab benchmarks, achieving success rates of 77.2% and 50.7%, respectively, establishing a new state of the art. Nonetheless, we note that current benchmarks are insufficient for a comprehensive evaluation of OS agents and propose further exploring directions in future work, particularly in the areas of evaluation paradigms, agent collaboration, and security. Our code is available at https://github.com/MadeAgents/mobile-use.

Learning on the Job: An Experience-Driven Self-Evolving Agent for Long-Horizon Tasks

Large Language Models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse domains, yet significant challenges persist when deploying them as AI agents for real-world long-horizon tasks. Existing LLM agents suffer from a critical limitation: they are test-time static and cannot learn from experience, lacking the ability to accumulate knowledge and continuously improve on the job. To address this challenge, we propose MUSE, a novel agent framework that introduces an experience-driven, self-evolving system centered around a hierarchical Memory Module. MUSE organizes diverse levels of experience and leverages them to plan and execute long-horizon tasks across multiple applications. After each sub-task execution, the agent autonomously reflects on its trajectory, converting the raw trajectory into structured experience and integrating it back into the Memory Module. This mechanism enables the agent to evolve beyond its static pretrained parameters, fostering continuous learning and self-evolution. We evaluate MUSE on the long-horizon productivity benchmark TAC. It achieves new SOTA performance by a significant margin using only a lightweight Gemini-2.5 Flash model. Sufficient Experiments demonstrate that as the agent autonomously accumulates experience, it exhibits increasingly superior task completion capabilities, as well as robust continuous learning and self-evolution capabilities. Moreover, the accumulated experience from MUSE exhibits strong generalization properties, enabling zero-shot improvement on new tasks. MUSE establishes a new paradigm for AI agents capable of real-world productivity task automation.

IntellAgent: A Multi-Agent Framework for Evaluating Conversational AI Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming artificial intelligence, evolving into task-oriented systems capable of autonomous planning and execution. One of the primary applications of LLMs is conversational AI systems, which must navigate multi-turn dialogues, integrate domain-specific APIs, and adhere to strict policy constraints. However, evaluating these agents remains a significant challenge, as traditional methods fail to capture the complexity and variability of real-world interactions. We introduce IntellAgent, a scalable, open-source multi-agent framework designed to evaluate conversational AI systems comprehensively. IntellAgent automates the creation of diverse, synthetic benchmarks by combining policy-driven graph modeling, realistic event generation, and interactive user-agent simulations. This innovative approach provides fine-grained diagnostics, addressing the limitations of static and manually curated benchmarks with coarse-grained metrics. IntellAgent represents a paradigm shift in evaluating conversational AI. By simulating realistic, multi-policy scenarios across varying levels of complexity, IntellAgent captures the nuanced interplay of agent capabilities and policy constraints. Unlike traditional methods, it employs a graph-based policy model to represent relationships, likelihoods, and complexities of policy interactions, enabling highly detailed diagnostics. IntellAgent also identifies critical performance gaps, offering actionable insights for targeted optimization. Its modular, open-source design supports seamless integration of new domains, policies, and APIs, fostering reproducibility and community collaboration. Our findings demonstrate that IntellAgent serves as an effective framework for advancing conversational AI by addressing challenges in bridging research and deployment. The framework is available at https://github.com/plurai-ai/intellagent

  • 2 authors
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Jan 19 2

TheAgentCompany: Benchmarking LLM Agents on Consequential Real World Tasks

We interact with computers on an everyday basis, be it in everyday life or work, and many aspects of work can be done entirely with access to a computer and the Internet. At the same time, thanks to improvements in large language models (LLMs), there has also been a rapid development in AI agents that interact with and affect change in their surrounding environments. But how performant are AI agents at helping to accelerate or even autonomously perform work-related tasks? The answer to this question has important implications for both industry looking to adopt AI into their workflows, and for economic policy to understand the effects that adoption of AI may have on the labor market. To measure the progress of these LLM agents' performance on performing real-world professional tasks, in this paper, we introduce TheAgentCompany, an extensible benchmark for evaluating AI agents that interact with the world in similar ways to those of a digital worker: by browsing the Web, writing code, running programs, and communicating with other coworkers. We build a self-contained environment with internal web sites and data that mimics a small software company environment, and create a variety of tasks that may be performed by workers in such a company. We test baseline agents powered by both closed API-based and open-weights language models (LMs), and find that with the most competitive agent, 24% of the tasks can be completed autonomously. This paints a nuanced picture on task automation with LM agents -- in a setting simulating a real workplace, a good portion of simpler tasks could be solved autonomously, but more difficult long-horizon tasks are still beyond the reach of current systems.

  • 21 authors
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Dec 18, 2024 2

HumanAgencyBench: Scalable Evaluation of Human Agency Support in AI Assistants

As humans delegate more tasks and decisions to artificial intelligence (AI), we risk losing control of our individual and collective futures. Relatively simple algorithmic systems already steer human decision-making, such as social media feed algorithms that lead people to unintentionally and absent-mindedly scroll through engagement-optimized content. In this paper, we develop the idea of human agency by integrating philosophical and scientific theories of agency with AI-assisted evaluation methods: using large language models (LLMs) to simulate and validate user queries and to evaluate AI responses. We develop HumanAgencyBench (HAB), a scalable and adaptive benchmark with six dimensions of human agency based on typical AI use cases. HAB measures the tendency of an AI assistant or agent to Ask Clarifying Questions, Avoid Value Manipulation, Correct Misinformation, Defer Important Decisions, Encourage Learning, and Maintain Social Boundaries. We find low-to-moderate agency support in contemporary LLM-based assistants and substantial variation across system developers and dimensions. For example, while Anthropic LLMs most support human agency overall, they are the least supportive LLMs in terms of Avoid Value Manipulation. Agency support does not appear to consistently result from increasing LLM capabilities or instruction-following behavior (e.g., RLHF), and we encourage a shift towards more robust safety and alignment targets.

  • 4 authors
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Sep 10 2

OlympicArena: Benchmarking Multi-discipline Cognitive Reasoning for Superintelligent AI

The evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been significantly accelerated by advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), gradually showcasing potential cognitive reasoning abilities in problem-solving and scientific discovery (i.e., AI4Science) once exclusive to human intellect. To comprehensively evaluate current models' performance in cognitive reasoning abilities, we introduce OlympicArena, which includes 11,163 bilingual problems across both text-only and interleaved text-image modalities. These challenges encompass a wide range of disciplines spanning seven fields and 62 international Olympic competitions, rigorously examined for data leakage. We argue that the challenges in Olympic competition problems are ideal for evaluating AI's cognitive reasoning due to their complexity and interdisciplinary nature, which are essential for tackling complex scientific challenges and facilitating discoveries. Beyond evaluating performance across various disciplines using answer-only criteria, we conduct detailed experiments and analyses from multiple perspectives. We delve into the models' cognitive reasoning abilities, their performance across different modalities, and their outcomes in process-level evaluations, which are vital for tasks requiring complex reasoning with lengthy solutions. Our extensive evaluations reveal that even advanced models like GPT-4o only achieve a 39.97% overall accuracy, illustrating current AI limitations in complex reasoning and multimodal integration. Through the OlympicArena, we aim to advance AI towards superintelligence, equipping it to address more complex challenges in science and beyond. We also provide a comprehensive set of resources to support AI research, including a benchmark dataset, an open-source annotation platform, a detailed evaluation tool, and a leaderboard with automatic submission features.

  • 28 authors
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Jun 18, 2024 2

The infrastructure powering IBM's Gen AI model development

AI Infrastructure plays a key role in the speed and cost-competitiveness of developing and deploying advanced AI models. The current demand for powerful AI infrastructure for model training is driven by the emergence of generative AI and foundational models, where on occasion thousands of GPUs must cooperate on a single training job for the model to be trained in a reasonable time. Delivering efficient and high-performing AI training requires an end-to-end solution that combines hardware, software and holistic telemetry to cater for multiple types of AI workloads. In this report, we describe IBM's hybrid cloud infrastructure that powers our generative AI model development. This infrastructure includes (1) Vela: an AI-optimized supercomputing capability directly integrated into the IBM Cloud, delivering scalable, dynamic, multi-tenant and geographically distributed infrastructure for large-scale model training and other AI workflow steps and (2) Blue Vela: a large-scale, purpose-built, on-premises hosting environment that is optimized to support our largest and most ambitious AI model training tasks. Vela provides IBM with the dual benefit of high performance for internal use along with the flexibility to adapt to an evolving commercial landscape. Blue Vela provides us with the benefits of rapid development of our largest and most ambitious models, as well as future-proofing against the evolving model landscape in the industry. Taken together, they provide IBM with the ability to rapidly innovate in the development of both AI models and commercial offerings.

  • 146 authors
·
Jul 7, 2024

FinWorld: An All-in-One Open-Source Platform for End-to-End Financial AI Research and Deployment

Financial AI holds great promise for transforming modern finance, with the potential to support a wide range of tasks such as market forecasting, portfolio management, quantitative trading, and automated analysis. However, existing platforms remain limited in task coverage, lack robust multimodal data integration, and offer insufficient support for the training and deployment of large language models (LLMs). In response to these limitations, we present FinWorld, an all-in-one open-source platform that provides end-to-end support for the entire financial AI workflow, from data acquisition to experimentation and deployment. FinWorld distinguishes itself through native integration of heterogeneous financial data, unified support for diverse AI paradigms, and advanced agent automation, enabling seamless development and deployment. Leveraging data from 2 representative markets, 4 stock pools, and over 800 million financial data points, we conduct comprehensive experiments on 4 key financial AI tasks. These experiments systematically evaluate deep learning and reinforcement learning algorithms, with particular emphasis on RL-based finetuning for LLMs and LLM Agents. The empirical results demonstrate that FinWorld significantly enhances reproducibility, supports transparent benchmarking, and streamlines deployment, thereby providing a strong foundation for future research and real-world applications. Code is available at Github~https://github.com/DVampire/FinWorld.

  • 5 authors
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Aug 4

Revisiting Citizen Science Through the Lens of Hybrid Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can augment and sometimes even replace human cognition. Inspired by efforts to value human agency alongside productivity, we discuss the benefits of solving Citizen Science (CS) tasks with Hybrid Intelligence (HI), a synergetic mixture of human and artificial intelligence. Currently there is no clear framework or methodology on how to create such an effective mixture. Due to the unique participant-centered set of values and the abundance of tasks drawing upon both human common sense and complex 21st century skills, we believe that the field of CS offers an invaluable testbed for the development of HI and human-centered AI of the 21st century, while benefiting CS as well. In order to investigate this potential, we first relate CS to adjacent computational disciplines. Then, we demonstrate that CS projects can be grouped according to their potential for HI-enhancement by examining two key dimensions: the level of digitization and the amount of knowledge or experience required for participation. Finally, we propose a framework for types of human-AI interaction in CS based on established criteria of HI. This "HI lens" provides the CS community with an overview of several ways to utilize the combination of AI and human intelligence in their projects. It also allows the AI community to gain ideas on how developing AI in CS projects can further their own field.

  • 16 authors
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Apr 30, 2021

Neural Brain: A Neuroscience-inspired Framework for Embodied Agents

The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) has shifted from static, data-driven models to dynamic systems capable of perceiving and interacting with real-world environments. Despite advancements in pattern recognition and symbolic reasoning, current AI systems, such as large language models, remain disembodied, unable to physically engage with the world. This limitation has driven the rise of embodied AI, where autonomous agents, such as humanoid robots, must navigate and manipulate unstructured environments with human-like adaptability. At the core of this challenge lies the concept of Neural Brain, a central intelligence system designed to drive embodied agents with human-like adaptability. A Neural Brain must seamlessly integrate multimodal sensing and perception with cognitive capabilities. Achieving this also requires an adaptive memory system and energy-efficient hardware-software co-design, enabling real-time action in dynamic environments. This paper introduces a unified framework for the Neural Brain of embodied agents, addressing two fundamental challenges: (1) defining the core components of Neural Brain and (2) bridging the gap between static AI models and the dynamic adaptability required for real-world deployment. To this end, we propose a biologically inspired architecture that integrates multimodal active sensing, perception-cognition-action function, neuroplasticity-based memory storage and updating, and neuromorphic hardware/software optimization. Furthermore, we also review the latest research on embodied agents across these four aspects and analyze the gap between current AI systems and human intelligence. By synthesizing insights from neuroscience, we outline a roadmap towards the development of generalizable, autonomous agents capable of human-level intelligence in real-world scenarios.

A Rigorous Benchmark with Multidimensional Evaluation for Deep Research Agents: From Answers to Reports

Artificial intelligence is undergoing the paradigm shift from closed language models to interconnected agent systems capable of external perception and information integration. As a representative embodiment, Deep Research Agents (DRAs) systematically exhibit the capabilities for task decomposition, cross-source retrieval, multi-stage reasoning, and structured output, which markedly enhance performance on complex and open-ended tasks. However, existing benchmarks remain deficient in evaluation dimensions, response formatting, and scoring mechanisms, limiting their capacity to assess such systems effectively. This paper introduces a rigorous benchmark and a multidimensional evaluation framework tailored to DRAs and report-style responses. The benchmark comprises 214 expert-curated challenging queries distributed across 10 broad thematic domains, each accompanied by manually constructed reference bundles to support composite evaluation. The framework enables comprehensive evaluation of long-form reports generated by DRAs, incorporating integrated scoring metrics for semantic quality, topical focus, and retrieval trustworthiness. Extensive experimentation confirms the superior performance of mainstream DRAs over web-search-tool-augmented reasoning models, yet reveals considerable scope for further improvement. This study provides a robust foundation for capability assessment, architectural refinement, and paradigm advancement in DRA systems.

On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models

AI is undergoing a paradigm shift with the rise of models (e.g., BERT, DALL-E, GPT-3) that are trained on broad data at scale and are adaptable to a wide range of downstream tasks. We call these models foundation models to underscore their critically central yet incomplete character. This report provides a thorough account of the opportunities and risks of foundation models, ranging from their capabilities (e.g., language, vision, robotics, reasoning, human interaction) and technical principles(e.g., model architectures, training procedures, data, systems, security, evaluation, theory) to their applications (e.g., law, healthcare, education) and societal impact (e.g., inequity, misuse, economic and environmental impact, legal and ethical considerations). Though foundation models are based on standard deep learning and transfer learning, their scale results in new emergent capabilities,and their effectiveness across so many tasks incentivizes homogenization. Homogenization provides powerful leverage but demands caution, as the defects of the foundation model are inherited by all the adapted models downstream. Despite the impending widespread deployment of foundation models, we currently lack a clear understanding of how they work, when they fail, and what they are even capable of due to their emergent properties. To tackle these questions, we believe much of the critical research on foundation models will require deep interdisciplinary collaboration commensurate with their fundamentally sociotechnical nature.

  • 114 authors
·
Aug 16, 2021

Efficient and Scalable Agentic AI with Heterogeneous Systems

AI agents are emerging as a dominant workload in a wide range of applications, promising to be the vehicle that delivers the promised benefits of AI to enterprises and consumers. Unlike conventional software or static inference, agentic workloads are dynamic and structurally complex. Often these agents are directed graphs of compute and IO operations that span multi-modal data input and conversion), data processing and context gathering (e.g vector DB lookups), multiple LLM inferences, tool calls, etc. To scale AI agent usage, we need efficient and scalable deployment and agent-serving infrastructure. To tackle this challenge, in this paper, we present a system design for dynamic orchestration of AI agent workloads on heterogeneous compute infrastructure spanning CPUs and accelerators, both from different vendors and across different performance tiers within a single vendor. The system delivers several building blocks: a framework for planning and optimizing agentic AI execution graphs using cost models that account for compute, memory, and bandwidth constraints of different HW; a MLIR based representation and compilation system that can decompose AI agent execution graphs into granular operators and generate code for different HW options; and a dynamic orchestration system that can place the granular components across a heterogeneous compute infrastructure and stitch them together while meeting an end-to-end SLA. Our design performs a systems level TCO optimization and preliminary results show that leveraging a heterogeneous infrastructure can deliver significant TCO benefits. A preliminary surprising finding is that for some workloads a heterogeneous combination of older generation GPUs with newer accelerators can deliver similar TCO as the latest generation homogenous GPU infrastructure design, potentially extending the life of deployed infrastructure.

  • 3 authors
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Jul 25

The Rise of AI Teammates in Software Engineering (SE) 3.0: How Autonomous Coding Agents Are Reshaping Software Engineering

The future of software engineering--SE 3.0--is unfolding with the rise of AI teammates: autonomous, goal-driven systems collaborating with human developers. Among these, autonomous coding agents are especially transformative, now actively initiating, reviewing, and evolving code at scale. This paper introduces AIDev, the first large-scale dataset capturing how such agents operate in the wild. Spanning over 456,000 pull requests by five leading agents--OpenAI Codex, Devin, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Claude Code--across 61,000 repositories and 47,000 developers, AIDev provides an unprecedented empirical foundation for studying autonomous teammates in software development. Unlike prior work that has largely theorized the rise of AI-native software engineering, AIDev offers structured, open data to support research in benchmarking, agent readiness, optimization, collaboration modeling, and AI governance. The dataset includes rich metadata on PRs, authorship, review timelines, code changes, and integration outcomes--enabling exploration beyond synthetic benchmarks like SWE-bench. For instance, although agents often outperform humans in speed, their PRs are accepted less frequently, revealing a trust and utility gap. Furthermore, while agents accelerate code submission--one developer submitted as many PRs in three days as they had in three years--these are structurally simpler (via code complexity metrics). We envision AIDev as a living resource: extensible, analyzable, and ready for the SE and AI communities. Grounding SE 3.0 in real-world evidence, AIDev enables a new generation of research into AI-native workflows and supports building the next wave of symbiotic human-AI collaboration. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/SAILResearch/AI_Teammates_in_SE3. > AI Agent, Agentic AI, Coding Agent, Agentic Coding, Software Engineering Agent

  • 3 authors
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Jul 20

How Far Are We From AGI

The evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) has profoundly impacted human society, driving significant advancements in multiple sectors. Yet, the escalating demands on AI have highlighted the limitations of AI's current offerings, catalyzing a movement towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). AGI, distinguished by its ability to execute diverse real-world tasks with efficiency and effectiveness comparable to human intelligence, reflects a paramount milestone in AI evolution. While existing works have summarized specific recent advancements of AI, they lack a comprehensive discussion of AGI's definitions, goals, and developmental trajectories. Different from existing survey papers, this paper delves into the pivotal questions of our proximity to AGI and the strategies necessary for its realization through extensive surveys, discussions, and original perspectives. We start by articulating the requisite capability frameworks for AGI, integrating the internal, interface, and system dimensions. As the realization of AGI requires more advanced capabilities and adherence to stringent constraints, we further discuss necessary AGI alignment technologies to harmonize these factors. Notably, we emphasize the importance of approaching AGI responsibly by first defining the key levels of AGI progression, followed by the evaluation framework that situates the status-quo, and finally giving our roadmap of how to reach the pinnacle of AGI. Moreover, to give tangible insights into the ubiquitous impact of the integration of AI, we outline existing challenges and potential pathways toward AGI in multiple domains. In sum, serving as a pioneering exploration into the current state and future trajectory of AGI, this paper aims to foster a collective comprehension and catalyze broader public discussions among researchers and practitioners on AGI.

  • 8 authors
·
May 16, 2024

Understanding Telecom Language Through Large Language Models

The recent progress of artificial intelligence (AI) opens up new frontiers in the possibility of automating many tasks involved in Telecom networks design, implementation, and deployment. This has been further pushed forward with the evolution of generative artificial intelligence (AI), including the emergence of large language models (LLMs), which is believed to be the cornerstone toward realizing self-governed, interactive AI agents. Motivated by this, in this paper, we aim to adapt the paradigm of LLMs to the Telecom domain. In particular, we fine-tune several LLMs including BERT, distilled BERT, RoBERTa and GPT-2, to the Telecom domain languages, and demonstrate a use case for identifying the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standard working groups. We consider training the selected models on 3GPP technical documents (Tdoc) pertinent to years 2009-2019 and predict the Tdoc categories in years 2020-2023. The results demonstrate that fine-tuning BERT and RoBERTa model achieves 84.6% accuracy, while GPT-2 model achieves 83% in identifying 3GPP working groups. The distilled BERT model with around 50% less parameters achieves similar performance as others. This corroborates that fine-tuning pretrained LLM can effectively identify the categories of Telecom language. The developed framework shows a stepping stone towards realizing intent-driven and self-evolving wireless networks from Telecom languages, and paves the way for the implementation of generative AI in the Telecom domain.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 9, 2023

Consent in Crisis: The Rapid Decline of the AI Data Commons

General-purpose artificial intelligence (AI) systems are built on massive swathes of public web data, assembled into corpora such as C4, RefinedWeb, and Dolma. To our knowledge, we conduct the first, large-scale, longitudinal audit of the consent protocols for the web domains underlying AI training corpora. Our audit of 14,000 web domains provides an expansive view of crawlable web data and how consent preferences to use it are changing over time. We observe a proliferation of AI-specific clauses to limit use, acute differences in restrictions on AI developers, as well as general inconsistencies between websites' expressed intentions in their Terms of Service and their robots.txt. We diagnose these as symptoms of ineffective web protocols, not designed to cope with the widespread re-purposing of the internet for AI. Our longitudinal analyses show that in a single year (2023-2024) there has been a rapid crescendo of data restrictions from web sources, rendering ~5%+ of all tokens in C4, or 28%+ of the most actively maintained, critical sources in C4, fully restricted from use. For Terms of Service crawling restrictions, a full 45% of C4 is now restricted. If respected or enforced, these restrictions are rapidly biasing the diversity, freshness, and scaling laws for general-purpose AI systems. We hope to illustrate the emerging crisis in data consent, foreclosing much of the open web, not only for commercial AI, but non-commercial AI and academic purposes.

  • 49 authors
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Jul 20, 2024 3