Agentic Systems

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15 papers in the last 28 days · 0.2% of indexed attention

Twelve weeks of publication activity for this topic as it is defined today.

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Period ending 2026-09-21

4 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Agentic Systems.

Period ending 2026-09-14

1 new paper

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Agentic Systems.

Period ending 2026-09-07

6 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Agentic Systems.

202 papers

Latest in Agentic Systems

Sep 23, 2026cs.MA

Agent-Based Modeling of Systems of Systems

This paper deals with the generic modeling of systems of systems (SoSs) using agent-based modeling. SoSs are large-scale systems, including numerous-possibly heterogeneous-interacting component systems evolving in a dynamic environment. The aim of this paper is to provide generic formalism allowing to represent and control the whole complexity of a SoS using agent-based simulations. In particular, organizational aspects of SoSs are managed with the Agent-Group-Role model. Functional aspects, guiding SoSs to accomplish their global goals, are handled via a functional specification. Multilevel aspects are modeled with the Influence Reaction Model for Multilevel Simulation (IRM4MLS) agent-based meta-model. Models generated using this formalism encompass static and dynamic aspects of SoSs. They consider reorganization of SoSs caused by changes of goals or subsystem capacity. All these elements are illustrated in this paper using a SoS case study of Intelligent Autonomous Vehicles initiated by the Intelligent Transportation for Dynamic Environment (InTraDE) European project to automate the port container logistic.
Jean-Baptiste Soyez, Gildas Morvan, Rochdi Merzouki +1
Sep 21, 2026cs.DB

Data Agents: Agentic Data Systems

Traditional data systems face profound limitations in the AI era, relying on human-crafted pipelines, lacking semantic understanding of heterogeneous data, and operating through rigid, reactive processing. To address these challenges, we propose a new paradigm called the Data Agent, designed to manage, process, and analyze data with minimal human intervention. Data agents autonomously execute a wide range of data-related tasks, transforming traditional data systems by shifting from manual design to autonomous orchestration, from literal manipulation to semantic interpretation, and from reactive to proactive processing. Our Data Agent system includes six components: semantic data organization, semantic operators, agentic pipeline orchestration and optimization, feedback-driven refinement, memory management, and proactive adaptation. Building on this foundation, we also develop two specialized agents: the data analytics agent and the data science agent. Experiments on real benchmarks demonstrate significant performance gains of our data agent over state-of-the-art methods. We identify open challenges to guide future research in building fully autonomous data systems.
Guoliang Li, Peiyao Zhou, Xuanhe Zhou +3
Sep 21, 2026cs.AI

Jev-Mem: System-One-Controlled Agentic Memory for Efficient AI Agents

Agentic memory is becoming essential for long-horizon AI agents, yet many existing systems rely on autoregressive LLMs to control how memories are organized, retrieved, and used, placing expensive generation on the critical path of memory operations. We introduce \textbf{\method}, a new agentic memory architecture inspired by System-One/System-Two cognition. System One captures fast, lightweight decision-making, whereas System Two performs slower, deliberative reasoning. Jev-Mem brings this division of labor to agentic memory through a dedicated System-One control plane, a structured multi-relational memory plane, and a System-Two reasoning plane. The System-One controller governs memory typing and relational organization during construction, and dynamically performs query routing, retrieval-budget allocation, graph traversal, candidate scoring, and adaptive stopping during retrieval. System Two is invoked only for complex reasoning and answer synthesis. This design improves both memory effectiveness and system efficiency: on LoCoMo Jev-Mem achieves an overall LLM-as-a-Judge score of 0.777, an 11.0% relative improvement over the strongest baseline, while reducing memory construction time to 158,s, a 6.6×\times speedup over the fastest competing memory system, and lowering average query latency to 0.93,s, a 36.7% reduction.
Dongming Jiang, Yi Li, Bingzhe Li
Sep 17, 2026cs.AI

A Proposal for an Agentic AI Architecture to Support Multi-Domain Decision-Making in the Brazilian Armed Forces

The growing complexity of multi-domain operational environments (land, aerospace, naval, cyber, and electromagnetic spectrum) has increased the volume and velocity of data reaching command-and-control (C2) centers, straining the observe-orient-decide-act (OODA) decision cycle. Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems currently employed in defense are, in general, reactive and isolated tools that still rely heavily on human operators to integrate information, assess scenarios, and formulate courses of action. This paper proposes a conceptual Agentic AI architecture for AI systems that can plan, access data sources, execute tools, and act autonomously and audibly, aimed at supporting decision-making across the three Brazilian Armed Forces (Navy, Army, and Air Force). Four application fronts are discussed (decision support, situational analysis, feasibility studies, and countermeasure suggestion), as well as the data and sensor access requirements and the security and permission safeguards necessary for responsible employment across administrative, strategic, operational, and tactical contexts.
Gioliano de Oliveira Braga, Sidnei Barbieri, Ágney Lopes Roth Ferraz +2
Sep 16, 2026cs.AI

Position: It is Time to Virtualize Foundation Models with a Self-evolving Operating System Layer

AI applications have shifted from single, monolithic foundation models (FM) to compound agentic systems. Yet today's stacks remain fragmented: even as protocols (e.g., MCP, A2A) ease tool/agent connectivity, each framework embeds an implicit runtime for state, memory, budgets, and guardrails, making behavior non-portable and governance brittle. It mirrors computing before operating systems, when every program re-implemented basic services. This position paper argues that the field now needs a Foundation Model Operating System (FMOS) -- a system layer that virtualizes FM interactions analogous to how virtual machines abstract physical hardware, giving applications the illusion of dedicated, trustworthy FM instances with effectively unbounded capabilities. Internally, the FMOS orchestrates knowledge across memory tiers, model selection and resource allocation, and verification and policy enforcement. Like the human brain switching between fast intuition and slow deliberation, the FMOS learns when to intervene and when to let inference proceed directly and continuously adapting its policies based on operational experience.
Suparna Bhattacharya, Tarun Kumar, Cong Xu +7
Sep 16, 2026cs.AI

Who Audits Whom, on What Substrate, with What Evidence? An Independence-Graded Audit Protocol for Agentic AI

Agentic AI systems plan, invoke tools and act with limited supervision; they are now both the subject of audits and, increasingly, the auditor. Independence, the foundation of assurance,is still applied to them as a binary. We argue that it must be graded along three orthogonal axes: principal independence (who controls the auditor), substrate independence (an auditor sharing the auditee's foundation-model family, toolchain or guardrails fails with it) and evidence independence (whether evidence is attestable rather than self-reported). Each axis has precedent; the contribution is to grade all three on a single audit, aggregate them by the weakest link, and apply the same rubric when the auditor is itself an agent. We give the model a formal basis by transplanting the beta-factor model of common-cause failure from reliability engineering, a seven-step protocol whose outputs a third party can verify, a structural detectability analysis of a procurement-controls agent audited at three grades, and a Monte Carlo study of the model in which a conventional internal audit of an agent-a real audit team, a second agent, provider logsp-surfaces 5.9% of the faults it could in principle see and none at all in half the fault classes. We map the triple to the EU AI Act as amended, ISO/IEC 42006, UK public-sector risk-management guidance and audit-regulator practice.
Mohamed Chahine Ghanem
Sep 14, 2026cs.LG

Agentic Search Spaces for Tabular Machine Learning

Despite the rapid progress of LLM-based agents for planning, code generation, and debugging, their practical value for tabular machine learning remains underexplored. In this paper, we investigate a concrete use case: whether state-of-the-art agentic AI systems can design extended HPO search spaces for established tabular models that outperform the standard search spaces provided by the model authors. Specifically, we represent each tabular model as a modular pipeline covering preprocessing, embeddings, architecture, training, and inference. We then task the agent to propose candidate code implementations for each module and use a classical HPO algorithm to jointly optimize over these candidates and the model's default hyperparameters. Compared with the base HPO spaces, the expanded search spaces improve the performance of nearly every model family across a suite of 45 datasets, with average relative gains of 0.6%, rising to 2.0% on small-to-medium regression datasets. Notably, these gains come at no extra tuning cost: the enlarged spaces outperform the base under the same tuning and ensembling budgets. The gains transfer to the recent TabArena benchmark, where the agentic spaces improve the official Elo scores of four of the five model families and the two strongest agentic ensembles surpass the best AutoGluon ensemble of conventional models. Overall, our study suggests that LLM agents can provide practical value for tabular ML by expanding the design space.
Renat Sergazinov, Artem Chistyakov, Sergey Pankevich +1
Sep 10, 2026cs.AI

Black-Box Red Teaming of Agentic AI: A Taxonomy-Driven Framework for Automated Risk Discovery

Agentic systems are rapidly moving to production, where they read untrusted inputs, call tools with real permissions, and act autonomously, expanding the security surface beyond chat-only models. Yet standard evaluations remain single-turn and fail to capture multi-step agent vulnerabilities. We present a systematic black-box framework for risk-aware agent evaluation requiring only basic system descriptions. Our approach introduces: (1) a seven-domain taxonomy mapping observable behaviors to risk categories, (2) fully automated SAGE-RT red teaming producing 120 adversarial scenarios per domain, and (3) human-validated evaluation using LLM judges. Empirical validation across two agent architectures (CrewAI and AutoGen) with four base models reveals alarming patterns: 56.25% average governance risk, 65% privacy risk in multi-agent configurations, and agent behavior vulnerabilities reaching 85%. Our black-box approach effectively identifies critical architectural vulnerabilities without privileged access, providing a scalable path toward safer agent deployments.
Divyanshu Kumar, Nitin Aravind Birur, Tanay Baswa +2
Sep 10, 2026cs.AI

Do Agents Know When They Succeed? Calibrating Agent Confidence from Internal Representations

As agentic systems getting adopted rapidly in safety critical applications, it is vital to measure the confidence associated with the agentic actions. In comparison to the traditional machine learning systems, agentic workflows have complex failure modes with planning, tool invocation and dynamic environment interactions. In this paper, we investigate whether model's internal representations provide stronger signals of eventual task success in multi-turn agentic setups. We introduce two complementary methods: Latent Trajectory Dynamics (LTD), which summarizes changes in residual-stream representations across an an interaction trajectory, and the Action Representation Probe (ARP), which predicts success from representations formed at action decisions. Across three interactive benchmarks (Bash, SQL, Python) and three model families (Qwen14B, Qwen7B, DeepSeek6.7B), our methods consistently outperform surface level generation and sequence-based calibration baselines providing a zero-overhead reliability monitor that requires neither prompt alterations nor multi-sample rollouts.
Priyanka Mary Mammen, Emil Joswin, Srujananjali Medicherla
Sep 8, 2026cs.CL

Benchmarking Hybrid Deep Research Across Database Querying and Web Search

While autonomous agents have made significant strides in "deep research" by iteratively navigating the open web to synthesize information, real-world problem-solving is rarely confined to a single environment. Complex analytical tasks inherently require agents to weave together evidence from both ambiguous unstructured text (e.g., the open web) and highly precise structured data (e.g., relational databases). However, existing benchmarks evaluate these modalities in isolation, failing to capture the critical "handoff" - the ability to preserve constraints when moving evidence between systems. We introduce HybridDeepResearch, to our knowledge the first deep-research benchmark that requires both web search and SQL to form a complete, verifiable answer. The benchmark contains 380 tool-dependent tasks grounded in LiveSQLBench-Base-Lite databases and public web corpora, validated through automated checks and human review, and covering three reasoning patterns: SQL2S, S2SQL, and Parallel. Evaluations across proprietary and open-weight models under various agentic scaffolds reveal that even state-of-the-art models like GLM-5.2, Claude-Sonnet-4.6 and GPT-5 achieve only about 50-54% Pass@8 on the hard subset. Notably, results show that directional reasoning is substantially more difficult than parallel intersection, highlighting that bridging structured and unstructured information spaces without losing constraints remains a major open challenge for agentic systems. Code and datasets are publicly available at GitHub (https://github.com/Snowflake-AI-Research/HybridDeepResearch) and Hugging Face (https://huggingface.co/datasets/Snowflake/HybridDeepResearch).
Ruofan Wu, Peiran Xu, Xiaolong Li +9
Sep 8, 2026cs.MA

Beyond Agent Harnesses: Cross-Substrate Authority for Multi-Agent Systems

Agentic systems persist model-visible memory while mutating workspaces, while a runtime, registry, or approval service may hold authority state outside both. Identical final files can then require opposite safe actions. We call this the cross-substrate authority gap: decision- relevant authorization information resides outside the planner-visible workspace or memory state. Across two controlled mini-benchmark families, three experiments compare planner-observation augmentation with an execution-time authority check using real Git lineage, durably recorded agent execution attempts, deterministic oracles, and two model routes. Experiment 1 is a 128-cell controlled evidence ablation: authority-blind candidate evidence obtains 0/32 final semantic success, while raw receipts and a typed relation both obtain 32/32. The missing authority fact accounts for the gain; typed packaging provides no observed planning-accuracy gain over equal raw information. Experiment 2 uses 96 planning calls: workspace-visible evidence yields 12/16 unsafe publication decisions, and planning with the typed relation remains unreliable (15/32 first actions correct; 11/32 invalid or absent). Experiment 3 replays the same 32 fixed model-generated first-action intents with zero additional model calls; a deterministic execution guard prevents all six unsafe intents from becoming effects and permits all 12 valid authorized publish intents. These results position authority enforcement at the mutation boundary as the operational endpoint of memory governance.
Yang Li, Sergey Volkov, Hai Liu +6
Sep 7, 2026cs.AI

A Cost-Aware Agentic Architecture for NL-to-SQL over Nested Enterprise Schemas, with a New Benchmark

Natural-language-to-SQL systems have ad- vanced rapidly on academic benchmarks, yet production enterprise schemas exhibit graph- like, semi-structured, deeply nested structure that current benchmarks do not measure. We make two complementary contributions. First, we introduce the DevRev NL2SQL bench- mark: 900 execution-verified queries with nested-type and link-graph structure, accom- panied by the Semantic Depth Score (SDS), a schema-agnostic rubric for analytical reasoning depth. Second, we present a cost-aware single- generation agentic architecture whose schema- selection, metadata-retrieval, and error-repair components are designed for the requirements this regime imposes. On the DevRev NL2SQL benchmark the system attains 91.7% answer correctness, a margin of 54.6 percentage points over the next-best baseline; on the Spider 2.0 Snowflake public dataset, it is competitive with leading systems at a single-generation operating point.
Yoga Sri Varshan Varadharajan, Ajay Yadav, Ritesh Goru +5
Sep 7, 2026cs.AI

MaxKernel: Agentic Kernel Generation for TPUs

Designing and authoring high-performance custom kernels for accelerators is a complex task that requires deep hardware-level expertise. Large Language Models (LLM) can be leveraged together with real-time compiler feedback to build agentic systems for kernel generation. In this work, we present MaxKernel, a multi-agent system that implements three distinct paradigms for TPU kernel development: (1) a Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) agent for collaborative, step-by-step design; (2) an Autonomous (Auto) agent that executes a fully automated, metric/trace-driven optimization loop; and (3) a Graph-Based Autonomous Search that scales the Auto agent for global exploration of the design space. All three paradigms leverage a shared pool of specialized sub-agents to handle planning, implementation, self-debugging, testing, and hardware profiling. We evaluate MaxKernel on JaxBench, a comprehensive suite of 50 diverse kernel tasks for TPUs, alongside complex, real-world workloads from state-of-the-art open-source models. We demonstrate that MaxKernel consistently generates highly optimized implementations, matching expert hand-tuned baselines and delivering significant performance across the benchmark. Our agent is open-sourced and available https://github.com/AI-Hypercomputer/accelerator-agents/tree/main/MaxKernel.
Shangkun Wang, Nina Cai, Charles Hoong +7
Sep 3, 2026cs.AI

Value-Preserving Architectures for Agentic AI Systems

The emergence of agentic AI and LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) presents unprecedented opportunities for automating complex tasks, while simultaneously raising critical concerns about the preservation of fundamental human-centered values, such as privacy, fairness, and safety. Although software engineering has traditionally focused on functional correctness, the adoption of LLMs and AI agents into complex socio-technical systems has intensified the need for responsible software engineering and robust value alignment. In MAS, architectural design decisions, such as coordination mechanisms, communication protocols, and system topologies, play a central role in shaping system behavior and the outcomes they produce. This paper argues that architectural choices influence not only the functionality and performance of MAS but can also promote value-oriented system behavior. Therefore, we investigate how different architectural designs support different human-centered values, discussing the following value-preserving architectural patterns: (i) a privacy-aware architecture with a federated topology, (ii) a distributed architecture to promote pluralism and diversity, and (iii) a guard-agent architecture to detect and mitigate unfairness. Finally, we introduce representative use cases to illustrate the proposed architectures in real-world scenarios. By linking architectural design with human-centered values, this work lays the foundation for a unified set of architectural patterns and guidelines towards the design of trustworthy MAS.
Alessandro Pesare, Tommaso Dolci, Katja Hose +1
Sep 1, 2026cs.LG

Bandits in Prod: Hyperparameter Optimization at Inference Time

Many production systems can assess a configuration only by using it on live requests and observing noisy feedback. Modern agentic systems are a prominent example, with inference-time choices such as model selection, retrieval depth, prompting strategy, and decoding temperature, yet often with no representative validation data. We formalize this setting as Online Hyperparameter Optimization (OHPO) and cast it as an infinitely many-armed bandit over mixed and conditional search spaces. We introduce IMABO, a general framework that combines any bandit policy for choosing among already sampled configurations with any oracle for proposing new ones. We instantiate it with IMOSS, a restart-free anytime policy whose active set grows as tβt^β, and prove an expected cumulative quantile-regret bound of O(pρ1/β+T(1+β)/2)O(p_ρ^{-1/β} + T^{(1+β)/2}), where β(0,1)β\in(0,1) controls active-set growth and pρp_ρ lower-bounds the probability that a proposed configuration falls in the top-ρρ fraction of the search space. We combine IMOSS with three practical oracles: a Tree-structured Parzen Estimator, an incumbent-mutation oracle driven by a per-coordinate bandit, and a pretrained tabular foundation model, all three improving over the uniform random oracle baseline. IMABO outperforms all baselines in terms of regret across diverse OHPO settings, from tuning classical machine-learning models to configuring LLM-based agents. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/Tiime-Software/IMABO.
Louis Abraham, Tuan-Anh Nguyen, Nicolas Devatine
Sep 1, 2026cs.AI

AgentFactory: Towards Automated Agentic System Design and Optimization

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities as powerful components in agentic systems, enabling sophisticated reasoning and complex task execution. However, current approaches to manually designing and optimizing agentic systems heavily rely on manual effort, limiting their adaptability and scalability. Recent work has explored the automated optimization of workflow designs. However, these approaches often overlook the crucial role of model capabilities and focus on single performance metrics, failing to address real-world deployment constraints. In this paper, we present AgentFactory, a framework that jointly optimizes both foundation models and workflow structures in agentic systems while considering multiple objectives including performance, cost, and efficiency. AgentFactory leverages advanced LLMs as optimizers to navigate the vast search space of possible configurations, employing a three-stage optimization pipeline to automatically discover effective combinations of fine-tuned models and optimized workflows. Through an iterative optimization process, our framework systematically explores and evaluates different agentic system designs, adapting to task-specific requirements while maintaining operational efficiency. We evaluate AgentFactory across eight benchmarks spanning five domains, including general reasoning, coding, mathematics, medicine, and finance. Our experiments demonstrate that AgentFactory consistently outperforms both manually designed methods and existing automated approaches, achieving an average improvement of 9.1% across all benchmarks, with particularly significant gains in domain-specific tasks (19.6% on MedQA and 18.7% on FinEval). These results establish AgentFactory as a promising approach for developing more capable and efficient agentic systems through automated optimization.
Enci Zhang, Haofeng Wang, Yuesheng Zhu +2
Sep 1, 2026cs.AI

ContextPipe: Database-Inspired Context Assembly for Long-Horizon Agents

Long-horizon large language model (LLM) agents require context assembly: the runtime must decide what to include in each prompt, in what order, and when to compact history under a hard context-window budget and a byte-sensitive prompt cache. In production agentic systems, this logic is scattered across prompt builders, ad hoc compaction routines, cache-break workarounds, and per-provider shims. We argue that context assembly is structurally isomorphic to query execution in a relational database: both execute under a hard budget, exploit a tiered cache, and leverage statistics. We adopt this discipline in ContextPipe: a five-phase pipeline (Plan Bind Optimize Execute Feedback) backed by a structured data-source catalog, a deterministic cache-aware optimizer, and an EXPLAIN ANALYZE trace. We show that context in ContextPipe is auditable, replayable, and failure-isolated. A preliminary evaluation using the SWE-bench Pro Qutebrowser subset shows that, compared with the append-only context construction policy, ContextPipe reduces total token volume by 31%, LLM calls by 23%, and response time by 9%, at the cost of a lower KV cache-hit ratio.
Peng Xu, Zuyu Zhang, Yuze Sun +3
Sep 1, 2026cs.CR

SoK: When Safe Agents Fail Together: The Security of Multi Agent LLM Systems

Safe agents can fail together. Multi-agent LLM systems (MAS) move information, state, decisions, and authority across principal boundaries, creating failures that local checks may miss. Without an execution-level view, a multi-agent setting can easily be mistaken for evidence of a genuinely multi-agent security effect. We thus systematize MAS security through an execution-centered analysis of 197 works, covering six interaction interfaces, four adversary positions, seven system-level risks, and eight recurring attack paths. We introduce an A-I-R framework that organizes attacks by adversary position, interaction interface, and resulting system-level risk, unifying otherwise fragmented attack mechanisms across MAS. We organize defenses through a five-part contract covering path target, observation, intervention, trust boundary, and recovery, and identify path closure and recovery as key challenges. We audit 44 evaluation and benchmark works and identify open challenges in isolating interaction effects, designing comparable and diagnostic metrics, supporting reuse across MAS designs, and evaluating open-system operation. Together, these findings motivate an interaction-aware view of MAS security: trace attacks end to end, test whether defenses close those paths, and evaluate system-level effects with appropriate counterfactuals.
Rui Yang, Junjie Xu, Zhengyu Liu +4
Aug 17, 2026cs.RO

Teach and Grow: An Agent-Centered Architecture for General Robot Learning

Vision-language-action (VLA) and world-action models typically absorb unfamiliar manipulation tasks through additional robot data collection and policy optimization. This recurring retraining burden slows the acquisition of new behavior. We present Teach-and-Grow Learning (TGL), a training-free architecture that turns a few successful demonstrations into reusable robot skills. Task acquisition requires no gradient updates, fine-tuning, or reinforcement learning: pretrained model weights remain fixed as the robot expands its explicit knowledge. Teaching is an accelerator, not a precondition, because the agent can also drive the robot directly, and demonstrations mainly improve reliability. Our implementation uses OpenAI GPT-6 Astra for multimodal reasoning and Codex to connect the agent to robot tools. The agent identifies subgoals shared across demonstrations, expresses them as closed-loop Skill Blocks, and grounds each block in the current scene. Physical feedback guides the next action and any recovery. Verified behaviors enter a persistent Skill Library; Experience Memory records the conditions and repairs that inform later decisions. TGL reaches 99.9% mean success on four LIBERO suites and 92.4% on seven LIBERO-Plus perturbation categories. Controlled studies show that taught blocks persist and improve related-task execution under the same model weights and executors. We further formulate a scaling hypothesis that relates effective reusable experience to falling future-task error and teaching demand. Code and demonstration videos: https://tgl.changnie.top .
Chang Nie, Zhe Liu, Hesheng Wang
Aug 13, 2026cs.MA

Reconcile Once, Write Anytime: A Trust-Tiered Librarian and a Multi-Agent Writer for Drift-Free, Point-in-Time Research

Long-form research reports generated by large language models drift, contradict themselves, and lose provenance: the same metric appears with different values, and rumor is quoted as confidently as an audited filing. We present a two-tier agentic system that separates a maintained, point-in-time knowledge library from report writing. A deterministic "librarian" ingests timestamped sources into a trust-tiered ontology, layering evidence cards, an authoritative metric ledger, and a claim graph into an always-current source of truth, not per-query RAG over raw chunks. A portable multi-agent "writer" runtime then composes a contradiction-free, evidence-grounded report at any knowledge cutoff T, reading only evidence with as_of <= T (no look-ahead); red-team verdicts flow back into the librarian. We evaluate on a self-collected, public corpus of 6,130 sources yielding 555,926 evidence cards (SEC EDGAR filings across 295 issuers and 11 sectors, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics releases, and Wikipedia). From the one library we compose four point-in-time reports on distinct theses and run eight reproducible experiments, whose headline metrics come from a deterministic quality-control gate, itself validated by defect-injection meta-evaluation at recall 1.0 and precision 1.0. A shared metric ledger removes 6,845 cross-section contradictions to zero. Tier-first selection is correct on 22/22 gold cases where a popularity-first baseline scores only 9/22; trust tiering leaks zero media-sourced numbers, and no government statistic displaces a company's own filing. A red-team refutation propagates back and self-corrects a later run with zero manual edits. Replay exhibits zero look-ahead violations across seven cutoffs while the library grows from 235,373 to 555,312 cards. Difficulty-tiered model routing exceeds the all-Opus quality ceiling while running 3.7x faster than serial.
Xing Zhang, Yanwei Cui, Guanghui Wang +1
Aug 11, 2026cs.LG

MERA: Model Evolution and Routing with Skill Adaptation for Agentic Systems at Scale

LLM agents execute heterogeneous sequences of model calls within a single task: some invocations require careful reasoning, while others are structured steps such as formatting or tool-argument construction. Prior routing methods exploit this asymmetry by assigning easy invocations to a cheaper small model and difficult ones to a large model. Such policies reduce inference cost, but they leave the small model's capability unchanged, so attainable savings remain bounded by the work the student can already solve. MERA instead improves the small model itself, using a single model invocation as the unit of adaptation. In each cycle, MERA replays failed student invocations to obtain execution-verified teacher demonstrations, distills recurring procedures into an iteratively updated SkillBook, and fine-tunes a student LoRA adapter via supervised learning and optional GRPO. Routing serves as supporting machinery for deployment: the improved student is served behind a cost-calibrated router with verifier-backed fallback, and a candidate SkillBook, adapter, or router is admitted only when joint replay preserves task quality. Empirically, four-cycle adaptation raises Qwen2.5-Coder-1.5B from 28.7% to 49.7% pass on held-out HumanEval+MBPP. Under verifier-backed fallback, the deployed policy retains 88.3% pass at 60.8% of always-Luna cost. On TAU-2, a fine-tuned Qwen3.5-2B improves from 14/35 to 18/35 and matches an unadapted 4B model. These results indicate that verifier-backed multi-cycle adaptation can increase small-model capability, rather than only routing around a fixed student.
Yuhang Yao, Zeyu Wang, Wanyi Chen +8
Aug 10, 2026cs.CL

Co-Evolution in Agentic Systems: Toward Self-Directed Evolution Beyond Human Design

Agentic systems are increasingly expected to improve after deployment, yet single-entity self-evolution is often bounded by a static learning context, such as fixed tasks and feedback. This survey focuses on co-evolution in agentic systems, a multi-component form of self-evolution in which multiple agents and their environment impose adaptive pressure on one another. To organize existing papers, we propose a progressive three-stage taxonomy that traces how the system gradually sheds human-engineered constraints. Agent--Agent Co-Evolution studies how agents adapt through dynamic peers, including adversarial, collaborative, and organizational adaptation. Agent--Environment Co-Evolution extends this loop to adaptive tasks, feedback, and interaction spaces that change with the agents. Meta Co-Evolution further explores the possibility of making the evolution mechanism itself evolvable. We also discuss open challenges in evaluating such systems, scaling them across multiple components, and keeping increasingly autonomous evolutionary processes safe and controllable. This survey provides a unified foundation for building robust and open-ended agentic systems that can improve beyond fixed human-designed paths.
Qing Zong, Jiayu Liu, Junhao Shen +9
Aug 6, 2026cs.CY

Agentic AI: User Empowerment or Enclosure?

Agentic AI promises a more flexible form of digital agency: systems that can act on users' behalf, from filtering content to negotiating prices to selecting services. Whether it will empower users is an open question, and we argue that the answer depends on more than the technology. We conduct a comparative case analysis of four more mature domains where similar forms of agency arose: browser-based ad blockers, platform recommender systems, financial robo-advisors, and email spam governance. Across the cases, decisions about whose interests agents would serve were resolved through technical arrangements: API choices, protocol governance, industry standards, and default configurations. Beyond their technical form, these were political decisions. We identify this as depoliticization, a concept from political theory, here at work in technological systems. Its most consequential effect is that individual outcomes and collective contestation capacity can move in opposite directions: spam inbox quality improved substantially while the organized capacity to contest spam governance collapsed. Where intermediary institutions sustained adversarial challenge, user-aligned agency proved more durable; where proprietary infrastructure and closed standard-setting absorbed contestation, displacement compounded. We apply this to agentic AI, where governance arrangements consolidating around the Model Context Protocol and the Agentic AI Foundation are settling these configurations before the choices that define what agents can do move outside the reach of users and the public.
David Gamba, Daniel M. Romero, Grant Schoenebeck
Aug 6, 2026cs.AI

TRAJDEBUG: Tracing Error Lifecycle to Identify Critical Failures in Long-Horizon Agent Trajectories

LLM-based agentic systems have shown remarkable capabilities in complex domains, while suffering from cascading errors and difficulty in debugging. Critical error detection aims to locate the earliest error step in a failed trajectory that is responsible for the final failure. However, progress faces two main challenges. First, long trajectories make it difficult to identify individual errors, since the evidence for judging a step may be scattered across distant instructions, observations, and prior context. Second, failed trajectories often contain multiple local errors with different downstream effects, only some of which remain responsible for the final failure. In this work, we propose TrajDebug, an error-lifecycle tracing framework that addresses long-trajectory error discovery with multi-granularity history compression and evidence-based error identification, and supports critical attribution by tracing each error's resolution status and terminal impact. We further construct TrajErrBench, a benchmark of 486 manually annotated failed trajectories from Tau2Bench and SWE-Bench Pro, covering realistic tool-use and coding scenarios. Experiments across diverse agent benchmarks show that TrajDebug achieves the best overall performance over existing baselines, and application studies further demonstrate that its diagnoses provide actionable feedback for improving downstream agent success. We will release the codes and data to facilitate further research.
Yunjia Qi, Zehua Yin, Xintong Shi +10
Aug 6, 2026cs.AI

Research Assistant: AstraZeneca's Agentic System for R&D

We describe Research Assistant, an internal LLM-based system developed at AstraZeneca to help scientists and clinicians explore biomedical questions across a broad range of data sources. The system provides a chat-style interface that brings together evidence from scientific literature, knowledge graphs, chemistry, clinical trials, safety resources, expression data, and internal experimental systems. It supports both a fast mode for direct question answering and a multi-step mode for more complex research tasks. Responses are grounded in retrieved evidence and linked back to the original sources, allowing users to review and further explore the underlying data. In this technical note, we outline the system architecture, the main design choices behind the product, and lessons learned from deploying it at scale to support day-to-day R&D workflows across AstraZeneca.
Piotr Grabowski, Mohamed Alameen, Jorge Bretones +16
Aug 5, 2026cs.DC

SparseDitto: An Agentic Sparse Compilation Framework through Architecture-Aware Synthesis on GPUs

Sparse matrix computation performance on GPU depends on how representation and execution schedule match the input structure and target hardware. No single implementation consistently dominates across sparsity patterns, operators, and hardwares. Existing sparse compilers and specialized systems cannot cover all of them simultaneously. We present SparseDitto, an agentic sparse compilation framework for sparse matrix computation on GPUs. It jointly synthesizes representation, execution schedule, and hardware mapping in a unified compilation plan. Structural analysis and a learned template-ranking prior guide architecture-aware synthesis. LLM-guided lowering realizes each plan as CUDA code, while target-GPU profiling drives plan refinement. SparseDitto covers multiple operators, e.g., SpMV, SpMM, and SpGEMM, and various representations within one framework. It can also automatically adapt to different hardwares. Across various SuiteSparse matrices, SparseDitto achieves geometric-mean speedups over cuSPARSE of 2.68×2.68\times on an NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 and 2.79×2.79\times on an NVIDIA H200 (up to 146.61×\times). Its generated SpMM kernels accelerate full-batch GCN training by up to 3.39×3.39\times.
Shiyang Li, Guangyan Sun, Jinwei Tang +3
Aug 5, 2026cs.CL

EASy: Towards Efficient LLM-Based Agentic System

Agentic systems have emerged as a promising paradigm for solving complex tasks by coordinating specialized LLM-based agents. However, most existing systems primarily optimize task success while giving limited consideration to execution efficiency under practical constraints such as executor capability and computational cost. Existing router-based methods have limited ability to reason over rich, evolving task contexts, multi-step dependencies, and intermediate execution feedback, and often generalize poorly to unseen executors. We propose EASy, a trainable agentic framework that jointly optimizes task performance and computational efficiency through reinforcement learning. EASy equips an LLM-based orchestrator with explicit knowledge of the capability and cost profiles of heterogeneous executors, enabling context-sensitive coordination beyond performance-only routing. It further introduces a milestone-plan-act workflow that decomposes complex tasks into manageable milestones, constructs dependency-aware execution graphs, assigns suitable executors, and parallelizes independent steps while adapting subsequent decisions to intermediate outcomes. To train the orchestrator, we develop a tree-structured rollout procedure that explores alternative milestone decompositions and execution plans, together with multi-component rewards that capture task correctness, execution efficiency, and trajectory completeness. Extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning, embodied decision-making, and deep research benchmarks show that EASy consistently achieves stronger performance-efficiency trade-offs than strong agentic baselines.
Junnan Liu, Linhao Luo, Thuy-Trang Vu +1
Aug 5, 2026cs.AI

Architectural Implications of Agentic AI Workflows

Agentic AI is emerging in datacenters, but its architectural implications remain unexplored. We organize agentic workflows in a taxonomy and present its first architectural characterization with a production study at Microsoft Azure and a controlled study of open-source frameworks. We show that agentic execution is fragmented and heterogeneous. Requests expand into a workflow of LLM inferences, tool invocations, and orchestration decisions that repeatedly cross the CPU-GPU boundary. Our taxonomy explains how this fragmentation turns into resource demand. As orchestration and tools run on the host, the CPU sits on the critical path. Execution structure sets the load over time, which stays low with sudden spikes. Model composition sets how evenly the workflow uses the GPUs. Diversity in tasks and tools widens this range even further. These characteristics expose architectural mismatches of conventional uniform servers. Fragmented execution strands CPU and GPU capacity despite bursty demand. Different software roles make homogeneous CPU provisioning inefficient. Finally, multiplexing many agents onto shared cores degrades microarchitectural locality. Guided by our findings, we derive implications for agentic servers and examine them through Agora, our prototype for commodity servers. Agora dynamically harvests idle CPU cores for co-located throughput work, while protecting agentic tail latency against tool spikes. It oversubscribes GPU memory by placing more agents on each GPU, prefetching the next agent's state to hide swap latency. To match the machine to the heterogeneous roles, Agora pools cores by role and applies affinity-aware scheduling to restore locality. It automatically tunes mechanisms to the workload. Agora improves utilization and server throughput while preserving agent tail latency. Our insights also identify key directions for future server architectures for agentic AI.
Jirong Yang, Peizhe Liu, Chaojie Zhang +1
Aug 4, 2026cs.SE

AgentForge: An Immersive Role-Playing Platform for Learning Agentic Software Engineering

Agentic AI is increasingly used to coordinate planning, implementation, review, and testing in software development, yet it often offers limited transparency into its decisions and interactions. Many such systems also assume that users can effectively guide the AI's decisions and validate its outputs. This assumption poses a particular challenge for novices, who must simultaneously learn how agentic AI works, how to collaborate with it effectively, and how to evaluate its outputs critically. To address this challenge, we present \textit{AgentForge}, an immersive learning system in which novices take on one of four software-engineering roles: Task Planner, Patch Author, Code Reviewer, or Test Runner, within a multi-agent code-repair workflow. In each practice session, the novices perform their chosen role while AI agents perform the remaining three. Through role-based scaffolding and metacognitive support, AgentForge clarifies role-specific responsibilities, makes agent coordination and intermediate artifacts visible, and encourages novices to monitor and evaluate their decisions. In a study with 37 novice developers, participants achieved high task-completion rates with AI-agent support. However, interaction demands differed significantly across practices: the Code Reviewer practice required more interaction turns, reroutes, and completion time (padj=.004p_{\mathrm{adj}} = .004) and was perceived as the most challenging. Participants nevertheless reported significant gains in their understanding of software repair and agent collaboration (padj<.001p_{\mathrm{adj}} < .001). These findings suggest that AgentForge can help novices develop practical software-engineering skills while learning to collaborate with agentic AI more critically and effectively.
Zihan Fang, Yueke Zhang, Yu Huang
Aug 4, 2026cs.AI

Formal Verification of Agentic Systems over Operational Data

Agentic systems driven by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world workflows where they act on persistent operational data. Before deployment, these systems need to be verified against business requirements that govern workflow execution and data evolution. However, existing approaches do not provide such system-level guarantees, as they mainly constrain or analyse behaviour at the agent's interface level. We study here the verification of agentic systems comprising a single LLM and a tool orchestration harness over relational operational data. We formalise them as Stateful Tool-Enabled Agentic Deployments (STEADs), give their semantics, define the problem of verifying them against First-Order Computation Tree Logic (FO-CTL) specifications, and show that it is undecidable. We identify sufficient conditions for exact preservation of FO-CTL specifications under a finite-domain restriction, over which verification is PSPACE-complete. The key requirement is that renaming opaque identifiers in the data must correspondingly rename the selected tool calls. We show that LLM-driven agents can violate this condition and introduce a canonical deployment wrapper that guarantees it for arbitrary base agents while preserving already-equivariant behaviour. We prove that computing canonical representations required by this construction is graph-isomorphism-hard. Finally, we illustrate our framework on an LLM agent orchestrating a case-management workflow.
Alejandro J. Mercado, Alessio Lomuscio
Aug 4, 2026cs.AI

The Agent Operating System (AOS): A Reference Operating Architecture for Distributed Agentic Systems

Large language models have transformed artificial intelligence from isolated prediction services into components of long-running, distributed systems that reason, invoke tools, retrieve external state, delegate tasks, and act on behalf of users and organizations. The surrounding ecosystem has responded with agent frameworks, workflow engines, model-serving platforms, memory systems, communication protocols, and observability tools. These technologies improve execution, but they do not provide a stable, implementation-independent operating architecture for governing intent, selecting capabilities, preserving authority across delegation, controlling uncertainty, coordinating runtime behavior, and reconstructing why consequential actions occurred. This paper proposes the Agent Operating System (AOS), a vendor-neutral reference operating architecture for distributed agentic systems. AOS contains two internal planes: a Control & Governance Plane responsible for intent, policy, trust, authority, confidence, auditability, observability, and human oversight; and a Runtime & Coordination Plane responsible for agent lifecycle, workflow coordination, model and tool routing, context and memory coordination, scheduling, traffic management, and runtime assurance. Platform services, Linux or Windows, container runtimes, and physical infrastructure remain outside the AOS boundary and are integrated through explicit interfaces. The paper specifies AOS concepts, invariants, interface objects, optimization objectives, deployment profiles, and reliability responsibilities. It also identifies tradeoffs and unresolved research questions. AOS is not presented as a replacement for existing frameworks or infrastructure; it is proposed as the operating architecture through which heterogeneous components can be composed into governable, reliable, observable, and interoperable agentic systems.
Ankur Sharma, Deep Shah
Aug 3, 2026cs.AI

ADIAS: Automated Design of Interactive Agentic Systems

Automated agent design improves agent harnesses through iterative revision, evaluation, and feedback summarization. Existing methods are largely candidate-centric: cross-round experience is organized around candidate agents, which leaves the repair progress implicit. This causes inefficient repair targeting, slow consolidation of partial progress, and propagation of ineffective interventions across rounds. Therefore, we formulate issue-centric agent optimization, in which repair progress is carried forward as an explicit persistent issue state to guide optimization, rather than re-derived from candidate history in each round. We instantiate the formulation in ADIAS, a framework for automated full-code agent design with two mechanisms. A persistent issue state maintains stable issue identities, lifecycle status, supporting evidence, and intervention-outcome histories. Issue-guided optimization uses this state to jointly propose repair targets and revision directions for subsequent focused full-code modification. Across five interactive benchmarks, ADIAS outperforms the strongest baseline by 25.2% on average and achieves consistent gains across four backbone models. Controlled ablations further show that removing persistent issue state or replacing issue-centric revision with candidate-centric policies leads to performance drops of up to 40.7%.
Lekang Jiang, Bohan Tang, Stephan Goetz +1
Aug 3, 2026cs.MA

Stateful Governance for Concurrent Agentic Systems

AI agents are moving from advisory interfaces into systems that execute consequential operations: issuing refunds, reserving scarce inventory, provisioning cloud resources, and initiating financial transfers. These workflows require governance over effects, not only over model outputs. Existing safeguards often decide whether an action is allowed from the information available when the action is requested. For stateful policies, that request-time view may be incomplete: budgets, inventory, approval status, and risk signals can change before the effect occurs, making an earlier authorization or approval stale. This paper studies stateful governance for concurrent agentic systems. We identify stale authorization as the core failure mode and define policy-state serializability, a correctness condition requiring committed effects to be explainable as authorized against the policy state immediately before they occur. We present MasuGate, a runtime architecture that keeps policies as reviewable programs while coordinating the state and effects needed to preserve their decisions. In experiments with a PostgreSQL-backed prototype of MasuGate, the system prevents stale authorizations missed by baselines that pass policy state as ordinary request context, preserves delayed approvals while unrelated work proceeds, keeps policy evolution mostly in policy text rather than trusted provider code, and avoids policy violations in a scripted, LLM-free procurement workflow where agent-governance baselines produce stale authorizations over shared budgets and inventory. More broadly, MasuGate suggests a path for integrating stateful governance boundaries into agent frameworks and provider-backed domains where agents act on shared resources.
Yuxiang Peng, Xiaodi Wu
Aug 3, 2026cs.CR

Agentic Incident Response through Digital Twin-Enhanced Multiscale Planning

Incident response is currently managed by security operators using predefined playbooks, resulting in slow, labor-intensive security decision-making processes. Consequently, there is a growing need for automated incident response planning. Decision-theoretic approaches based on control, optimization, and reinforcement learning have been proposed to automate such planning tasks with well-grounded approaches, yet most of which, while guaranteeing strong performance, are limited to abstract models and cannot be directly applied to operational systems. A promising approach to mitigate this limitation is to use the security knowledge embedded in large language models (LLMs) to develop agentic response systems. However, current agentic approaches rely on repeated invocations of the LLM to generate a response plan, which is unreliable and limits the planning horizon due to hallucination. In this paper, we develop a principled LLM-based planning method by combining decision-theoretic planning with LLM-generated response commands. The proposed agentic incident response approach uses a rollout planner to compute a high-level response strategy that allocates security resources (the tactical scale), which is then translated into executable commands by a lightweight LLM agent (the operational scale). Within this architecture, we use a digital twin that supports tactical planning through simulation and operational execution through emulation. Across three attack scenarios, our agentic approach reduces recovery execution time by 15.1% on average and increases the recovery rate by 33.6% over frontier LLM baselines.
Yiran Gao, Tao Li, Kim Hammar
Aug 2, 2026cs.AI

From AI Technical Debt to Agentic Technical Debt: A Systematic Mapping of Root Causes and Manifestations in Agentic AI Systems

The emergence of Agentic AI systems, characterized by autonomous reasoning, multi-agent collaboration, tool orchestration, adaptive decision-making, and persistent memory, represents a fundamental shift from traditional AI pipelines to dynamic software ecosystems. While AI Technical Debt (AITD) has been widely studied in machine learning and software engineering, existing models assume static, component-level architectures and fail to capture the dynamic and emergent behaviors of agentic environments. To address this gap, this paper introduces Agentic Technical Debt (AgTD), defined as technical debt that emerges, accumulates, propagates, and amplifies due to the autonomous and collaborative nature of Agentic AI systems. Building on our prior systematic scoping review of 31 AITDs across seven root-cause categories, we employ a theory-informed transformation methodology to reinterpret these debts in Agentic AI through direct transformation, contextual transformation, and manifestation expansion. We present the first systematic mapping of established AITDs to their agentic manifestations, showing how conventional debts evolve into system-level liabilities, including memory inconsistencies, orchestration fragility, cascading failures, and unsafe autonomous decision-making. Our findings show that technical debt extends beyond software artifacts to encompass agent behaviors, coordination mechanisms, and interactions among agents, tools, and execution environments. We further examine its implications for AI Trust, Risk, and Security Management (AI TRiSM), highlighting impacts on trustworthiness, governance, security, operational resilience, and Sustainability Technical Debt. Overall, this work establishes AgTD as a foundational software engineering construct and provides a transformation framework, taxonomy, and research agenda for managing technical debt in autonomous multi-agent AI systems.
Muhammad Tukur, Hayatullahi B. Adeyemo, Tao Chen +5
Aug 1, 2026cs.CR

Adversarial Attacks in Multi-Agent LLM Pipelines: Unveiling Structural Vulnerabilities in Agentic AI Architectures

Multi-agent LLM pipelines orchestrate multiple specialized language model agents into structured workflows where intermediate outputs are passed across agents to solve complex tasks. This design introduces a security gap absent in single-agent settings: once an agent accepts adversarial content, it is propagated as trusted input throughout the pipeline. We argue that this vulnerability stems from the absence of boundary verification, a security primitive that enforces explicit validation of data as it crosses inter-agent boundaries, including content, identity, execution intent, and state integrity. Without such verification, modern pipelines embed implicit trust assumptions that are not adversarially robust, giving rise to structurally distinct attack surfaces (e.g., content injection, agent impersonation, plan deviation, and memory poisoning). Leveraging annotated production traces from the GAIA and SWE-Bench benchmark, we show that these vulnerabilities arise in benign deployments and largely evade existing evaluation frameworks. We further operationalize these failure modes within a controlled multi-agent setting and evaluate them across GPT-5-mini, Claude Sonnet 4.5, and Kimi K2.5 under identical pipeline configurations. The results reveal that attack success aligns with pipeline structure rather than model capability, indicating that adversarial vulnerability is fundamentally an architectural property and motivating a shift toward pipeline-level defenses.
Faisal Haque Bappy, Tahrim Hossain, Tarannum Shaila Zaman +3
Jul 31, 2026cs.AI

Beyond Component Testing: Validating Agentic AI Systems

Agentic AI systems act through multi-step trajectories that combine planning, tool use, memory, interaction, and adaptation. This behavior stretches validation practice beyond component testing and one-shot input--output evaluation, because acceptable system behavior now depends on how decisions unfold over time and under changing environmental conditions. This survey synthesizes 257 papers spanning agent evaluation, software assurance, cyber-physical systems, runtime monitoring, and regulatory guidance in order to characterize the validation problem for agentic systems. The review is organized around a five-dimension taxonomy covering behavioral, safety, temporal, regulatory, and multi-agent concerns, and uses that taxonomy to map current approaches and expose recurrent coverage gaps. The analysis shows that behavioral evaluation is comparatively mature, while temporal validity, runtime evidence maintenance, regulatory legibility, and open-ended multi-agent systems assurance remain under-developed. Three cross-domain case studies (medical care, industrial operations, smart-mobility systems) provide operational illustrations of how the five taxonomy dimensions recur in safety-critical settings, grounded in the failure patterns documented in the reviewed literature. The paper concludes with a lifecycle-oriented research agenda centered on bounded-autonomy specifications, adversarial trajectory generation, runtime monitoring, and audit-ready evidence structures. The central claim is that trustworthy deployment of agentic AI depends on validating trajectories in context rather than assessing isolated components alone.
Fabio Orazio Mirto, Luca D'Agati, Giuseppe Tricomi +4
Jul 30, 2026cs.AI

HALO: Heterogeneous Admission through Localized Obligations for Safe Agentic Execution

Recent agentic AI systems may return a heterogeneous response containing notices, requests, handoffs, and actions. Conditions can change before external use, so components from the same response need not remain supported together. Rejecting the whole response discards useful components, whereas checking components independently can leave a dependent without its prerequisite. We present Heterogeneous Admission with Localized Obligations (HALO), a runtime protocol that preserves supported components whose declared prerequisites also remain supported, rechecks each exact action before dispatch, and allows blocked actions to be replaced only by fresh candidates. HALO matched all 96 admission expectations and passed all 20 protocol tests. In structured-response replay, it retained 248/248 supported components, including 128/128 unaffected by unrelated changes, while a whole-response policy retained 0/248. Across ten cold-start PX4/Gazebo sessions, HALO blocked every tested stale route, observed no matching stale setpoint, and completed all fresh recoveries.
Taewoo Park, Kyeonghyun Yoo, Kiseok Kim +2
Jul 29, 2026cs.CL

SkillSmith: Learning to Compose Parametric Skills and Textual Knowledge

Agentic systems driven by large language models (LLMs) regularly feature two key mechanisms to autonomously solve complex problems: synthesizing text-based knowledge and procedures from past experiences and building parametric (weight-space) skill libraries for recurring sub-goals. To date, research has largely treated these as orthogonal pursuits: either organizing textual knowledge through composition and reflection, or consolidating parametric skills via weight-space merging. Consequently, the seamless integration of text and model weights for targeted performance improvements remains largely unexplored. This work bridges this modality gap by treating model weights as an additional modality that an LLM can natively reason over. We instantiate parametric learning via prefix-tuning and augment an LLM to ingest both prefix weights and rich textual data which capture relationships to a target capability. Our augmented LLM, which we call SkillSmith, synthesizes these inputs to perform instruction-steered parametric synthesis, directly outputting new prefix weights that manifest the target skill. We demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms both text-only and weight-space-only baselines, unlocking performance gains that are out of reach for uni-modal (text-only or weight-only) adaptations.
Lucio M. Dery, Benedict Aaron Tjandra, Siavash Samiei +4
Jul 29, 2026cs.CV

VideoCoCo: Code-as-CoT for Physically-Consistent Video Generation via an Agentic Dual-Engine System

Text-to-video models have achieved remarkable visual quality, yet they still struggle to generate physically consistent dynamics because the temporal evolution of a scene must be inferred implicitly from a highly compressed text prompt. Existing chain-of-thought approaches introduce intermediate plans or visual states, but these representations are typically non-executable or temporally sparse, limiting their ability to instantiate and control the complete spatiotemporal process. To address this limitation, we introduce VideoCoCo, an agentic dual-engine framework in which executable Blender code serves as a process-level chain of thought. Given a text prompt, a coding agent synthesizes a Blender program that explicitly specifies the scene and its temporal evolution. The executable simulation engine runs the program to produce a deterministic spatiotemporal draft, which is subsequently transformed into a photorealistic video by a generative video engine through draft-conditioned editing. This decomposition separates process-level reasoning from high-fidelity visual realization. To adapt the video editor to simulated drafts, we construct VideoCoCo-3K, a curated dataset of draft-instruction-target triplets. VideoCoCo improves the OmniWeaving baseline from 0.475 to 0.558 on PhyGenBench and from 52.18 to 77.88 on VBench-2.0, achieving the best average score on both benchmarks. These results demonstrate that executable code provides an effective, controllable, and inspectable intermediate representation for physically consistent video generation.
Haodong Li, Tianfei Ren, Xiaoxiao Ma +25
Jul 28, 2026cs.SE

SARC-DQ: Runtime Data-Quality Gating for Agentic AI: Silent Evidence Defects, the Incompetence Shield, and Downstream-Only Remediation

Agentic systems act, so a defect in the evidence they retrieve becomes a wrong action with a currency cost. The most dangerous enterprise defects are metadata-borne: a stale price or a superseded record, perfectly well-formed in the payload and betrayed only by freshness, lineage, or provenance. Such a defect never enters the agent's context, and an agent cannot doubt data it cannot see. On a priced replenishment benchmark, a competent agent silently converts an injected metadata-borne defect into a costly action about 60% of the time, with zero data-quality flags and behavioral doubt markers at chance (AUC <= 0.50). Across four model tiers spanning roughly 15x in inference price, the rate stays flat: capability does not buy skepticism. A metadata-aware pre-action gate with downstream-only remediation recovers the loss fully on the signals its predicates cover and not at all on those they miss. A model-free oracle derived from the task's decision geometry tracks the measured rates with MAE 0.015 (Pearson r = 0.876, interval coverage 15/16 cells), giving the flat ladder an analytical form. Evidence integrity is a systems axis distinct from model capability; mitigation depends on enforcement placement and predicate coverage. Code, frozen results, and a deterministic analysis pipeline: https://github.com/besanson/dqSarc
Gaston Besanson
Jul 28, 2026cs.MA

Towards a Systems Foundation for Agentic Cloud Management

Agentic cloud management is emerging as a practice to automate laborious operations, minimize toil, and improve responsiveness. Despite the rapid development of autonomous management agents, we argue that the fundamental missing piece is a systems foundation to enable safe, effective operations across agents and between agents and human operators. In this paper, we advocate for the need of such a systems foundation and share our efforts on developing CloudWeaver, an agentic management substrate that works across existing cloud-user interfaces and future agent-native interfaces. Specifically, we discuss how CloudWeaver (1) scopes the context of individual agent sessions with local views of cloud resources and (2) coordinates concurrent management operations on shared cloud resources. CloudWeaver offers strong safety guarantees and attributable feedback in the presence of conflicting intents, while preserving concurrency between independent operations. We validate CloudWeaver using a representative Azure API workload.
Minghao Li, Ziqian Liu, Ziyu Mao +5
Jul 28, 2026cs.CV

Agentic AI in medicine: architectures, applications, evaluation, and challenges for clinical translation

Large language models and multimodal foundation models are enabling medical artificial intelligence (AI) systems to move beyond isolated prediction and undertake multistep clinical tasks that require planning, tool use, memory, iterative correction, and coordination among specialized agents. However, the scope of agentic AI in medicine remains unsettled, and current evaluation practices are not yet aligned with the requirements of clinical use. We conducted a scoping review with systematic evidence mapping across five electronic sources, screened 1,649 exportable records, and provisionally included 557 unique studies that met predefined criteria for goal-directed task execution, tool use, interaction with external resources, feedback-based refinement, or multi-agent collaboration. The included studies describe single agents that use external tools, workflows supported by retrieval and external knowledge, multimodal agents, and multi-agent systems applied to medical question answering, image interpretation, electronic health record analysis, drug safety, and clinical trial prediction. The evidence base remains dominated by public benchmarks, simulated settings, retrospective datasets, and small-scale expert evaluation. Process reliability, evidence traceability, uncertainty, safety, workflow impact, and external validity are evaluated less consistently. Clinical translation will depend on clearer definitions, reproducible evaluation, auditable oversight, interoperable system design, and prospective validation in real-world clinical workflows.
Zheng Tong, Yang Liu, Wanshu Fan +6
Jul 28, 2026cs.SE

Specula: Scaling formal specifications for autonomous model checking of system code

Specula is a push-button agentic system that generates high-quality formal specifications for large, complex system code and uses the specifications for highly effective model checking and bug finding. Specula employs large language model (LLM) based coding agents to autonomously develop TLA+ specifications, including invariants that describe correctness properties of the target system and formal models that describe the system implementation with the right level of abstractions. Specula is fully autonomous and thus eliminates the barrier of applying formal methods to real-world system code (as in traditional human-centric approaches). Meanwhile, Specula addresses limitations of LLM-driven techniques like reward hacking and hallucinations through self-evolving loops that iteratively improve specification quality by enabling the agents to deepen their understanding of system code and its behaviors. We have used Specula to check 48 open-source system projects; Specula found 249 bugs including many deep bugs that are hard to find by existing approaches. Specula has been used by several companies and is maintained at https://github.com/specula-org/Specula.
Qian Cheng, Saad Mohammad Rafid Pial, Ruize Tang +6
Jul 28, 2026cs.MA

SafeFlow: Semantic Information-Flow Control for Blocking Malicious Propagation in Multi-Agent Systems

Multi-agent systems improve capability through task decomposition and role specialization, but these same mechanisms introduce an important safety blind spot: a harmful objective can be fragmented into locally plausible subtasks, allowing malicious intent to evade detection by any single agent. This is a growing social-impact challenge: systems handling sensitive information or consequential tools can turn routine delegation into unauthorized disclosure or unsafe action. We argue that this failure mode is better understood as a semantic information-flow problem than as a single-turn prompt classification task. To address this, we propose SafeFlow, a defense framework for multi-agent systems that formalizes malicious cross-agent propagation as a semantic information-flow problem. SafeFlow attaches structured semantic taints to root requests, propagates them through a dynamic collaboration graph, and performs workflow-level validation to reconstruct the global risk context before irreversible actions are committed. Evaluated on four benchmarks spanning prompt injection, jailbreak-based unsafe tool use, risky code execution, and harmful web-agent behavior, SafeFlow reduces attack success rates compared to undefended baselines and external defenses while retaining high benign task completion and a high paired safe--harm success rate. Our findings show that multi-agent systems still lack mechanisms for preserving risk semantics across delegation boundaries. This gap can turn routine delegation into privacy harms or unsafe actions that affect people and organizations. SafeFlow keeps this risk visible throughout the workflow, before it results in harm.
Haowen Dai, Zonghao Ying, Wenfeng Li +10
Jul 27, 2026cs.AI

Towards an Agent Operating System - Lessons from Classical and Cloud OS

Every major wave of platform software follows the same arc: an initial period of experimentation with competing frameworks and ad-hoc implementations, followed by the articulation of a small set of stable abstractions with well-defined semantics, and finally consolidation around those abstractions into a platform that applications can portably target. POSIX did this for classical operating systems; Kubernetes did it for the cloud. Agentic AI systems - autonomous, LLM-driven agents that plan, use tools, maintain memory, and collaborate - are currently in the experimentation phase of the third such wave. dozens of frameworks and protocols have emerged, but no community consensus exists on what the core abstractions are or what guarantees they carry. Without that consensus, agentic applications cannot be written portably, platforms cannot compose reliably, and the field cannot advance beyond prototype deployments. We argue that the path forward is to follow the prior-wave methodology: derive new agentic abstractions by extending classical OS and cloud OS primitives to stochastic, natural-language-mediated execution, specify their semantics precisely, and consolidate around them - just as POSIX and Kubernetes consolidated their respective waves.
Gosia Steinder, Hubertus Franke
Jul 26, 2026cs.MA

A Comparative Study of MCP and A2A for Inter-Agent Coordination in LLM-Based Systems

Recent industry practice has seen the rapid emergence of agentic systems composed of heterogeneous, tool- and LLM-mediated agent components, raising practical questions about inter-agent coordination and protocol design. This paper presents an implementation-grounded comparison of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol, from a multi-agent systems engineering perspective, using an inter-agent coordination scenario involving LLM-based agents. We evaluate an MCP-based and an A2A-based multi-agent implementation of the same software engineering task against a set of requirements derived from prior literature and discussions with industry partners, including agent discoverability, multi-part messaging, multi-turn conversations, asynchronous communication, observability, interoperability, and access control. The results evidence that MCP can support inter-agent coordination in constrained LLM-based systems through a comparatively lightweight implementation model with lower coordination complexity, although coordination concerns such as conversational state management and task lifecycle handling must be implemented explicitly at the application layer. In contrast, A2A provides richer native support for stateful, multi-turn coordination through protocol-level abstractions for tasks and lifecycle management, but this comes with substantially greater implementation and coordination complexity. Given the narrow scope of the evaluated coordination pattern, these findings are presented as design observations from an empirical experience report rather than general claims of protocol suitability or superiority across broader classes of MAS, highlighting trade-offs and how protocol abstractions shape the distribution of coordination responsibilities in contemporary agentic systems.
Ionut Predoaia, Tuong Manh Vu, Konstantinos Barmpis +2
Jul 25, 2026cs.CR

False Prophets: On the Security of World Models in Agentic Systems

Large language models now power autonomous agents capable of complex, multi-step tasks in different environments. Accurate and reliable execution of these tasks requires the agent to predict the results of its actions. Recent research proposes to enhance predictive capabilities via specially trained environment simulators-world models. While world models can improve performance, they can also mislead agents into executing harmful actions, creating significant security and privacy risks. In this paper, we raise security concerns regarding the usage of world models in agentic systems. We discover a range of world model specific vulnerabilities, which can be exploited in terminal-based agents to execute malicious code or extract sensitive data. To facilitate future development, we introduce a security benchmark dataset designed for text-based world models. We argue that some risks are intrinsic to approximate world modeling, and show that attackers can induce mispredictions in agentic pipelines with up to 95% success rate, possibly resulting in unintended command execution, denial of service, drainage of wallet and private information extraction. Finally, we provide practical recommendations for practitioners to mitigate the discovered harms and harden agentic systems.
Erik Imgrund, Anna Wimbauer, Klim Kireev +1
Jul 25, 2026cs.AI

AgentOmnia: Scaling Agentic Models for Full-Scenario Applications

Large language model agents have advanced rapidly, yet progress remains fragmented across domains, capabilities, task difficulty, and interaction settings. We frame this as full-scenario agentic scaling and present AgentOmnia, a framework coordinating task-space definition, data synthesis, post-training, evaluation, and improvement across To-Consumer (ToC), To-Business (ToB), and To-Employee (ToE) applications. An extensible Domain x Capability x Atomic Difficulty taxonomy aligns these stages and enables fine-grained diagnosis with OmniaBench. AgentOmnia combines bidirectional environment-task synthesis with tool-dependency, program-structured, and solver-based pipelines, constructing 5,018 stateful environments with 255,375 tools and 52,361 tasks. Programs, solvers, and verifiers provide correctness signals, while supervised fine-tuning, online agentic reinforcement learning, and a rollback curriculum support post-training. Evaluation failures translate into Product Requirement Documents (PRDs) for targeted self-evolution. Starting from Qwen3-30B-A3B-Thinking-2507, AgentOmnia raises the pass rate on the OmniaBench challenging subset from 9.16% to 37.11% and the macro-average across OmniaBench, τ2τ^2-Bench, DeepPlanning, and VitaBench from 22.86% to 41.69%. Under a unified protocol,it leads the evaluated agentic post-trained baselines on OmniaBench and retains the highest four-benchmark macro-average. It also surpasses Qwen3-235B-A22B-Thinking-2507 on all four benchmarks and exceeds Qwen3.5-35B-A3B on the macro-average. Gains span three application splits, ten capability dimensions, eight atomic-difficulty factors, and 76 of 90 level-1 domains, indicating broad rather than category-specific improvement. A one-round study provides initial evidence for PRD-guided self-evolution, motivating validation at larger scales and in industrial settings.
Hao Jiang, Gangtao Xin, Yingdi Huang +35
Jul 23, 2026cs.RO

GS-Agent: Creating 4D Physical Worlds With Generative Simulation

Creating dynamic and physically realistic 4D worlds from natural language descriptions is both fascinating and challenging. Traditional computer graphics methods rely on manual creation, requiring extensive human effort to fine-tune materials, motions, and visual fidelity. Recent advances in generative foundation models have sparked interest in learning to generate such 4D worlds from large-scale data; however, existing methods still struggle to ensure physical plausibility and controllability. In this work, we take a different path by leveraging foundation models to construct an agentic system that emulates how humans traditionally create 4D worlds, yet automates the entire process. We present GS-Agent, an end-to-end multi-agent framework that integrates physics engines in the loop to generate realistic, dynamic, and controllable 4D physical worlds from natural language. Inspired by how humans build 4D worlds, GS-Agent decomposes the task into entity management, covering 3D asset curation, material tuning, placement, and motion control, and rendering configuration, including camera and lighting manipulation. Multiple agents with distinct expertise interact with the physics engine via code, seek multimodal feedback, and collaborate to iteratively construct 4D worlds that align with the given descriptions. Experimental results show that GS-Agent effectively converts natural language into diverse and physically plausible 4D worlds exhibiting rich interactions among liquids, deformable objects, and rigid bodies, while achieving cinematic camera and lighting control. We envision GS-Agent as a foundation for a new paradigm in 4D world generation, empowering creative content creation and physical AI. Project page at https://umass-embodied-agi.github.io/gs-agent/
Hongxin Zhang, Chunru Lin, Junyan Li +3
Jul 21, 2026cs.AI

Agents in the Wild: Where Research Meets Deployment

Agentic systems large language model (LLM) based architectures capable of reasoning, planning, acting, and coordinating with tools and other agents are rapidly transitioning from research prototypes to production scale deployments across domains such as software engineering, scientific discovery, and finance. While academic work has emphasized benchmarks and algorithmic innovation, deployment raises new challenges around robustness, safety, and reliability. This tutorial brings together researchers and practitioners to explore advances in reasoning and planning, multi agent coordination, and evaluation, highlighting open challenges arising from deployment experience. Through applied case studies in pharmaceutical discovery and financial systems, we analyze common design patterns that make agentic systems successful, and discuss practical mitigation strategies for failure modes, such as verification pipelines, fallback mechanisms, and human in the loop supervision. Attendees will gain a comprehensive view of the field along with concrete design patterns, evaluation checklists, and templates for safe and reliable deployment across industries.
Grace Hui Yang, Pranav N. Venkit, Hooman Sedghamiz +3
Jul 20, 2026cs.AI

Engineering Trustworthy Agentic AI for Critical Systems

Agentic artificial intelligence systems, capable of autonomous perception, planning, tool use, and multi-step action, are increasingly proposed for critical engineering domains where decisions carry physical, operational, or economic consequences. This survey addresses a gap in current literature by treating trustworthiness, whether agentic behavior can be verified, audited, and trusted under the constraints that engineering practice actually requires, as a first-class engineering property, rather than evaluating agentic AI by task capability alone. The study adopts a trustworthiness model organized around five cross-cutting dimensions: safety and constraint satisfaction; robustness and reliability; transparency and interpretability; accountability and auditability; and privacy and security. This is mapped onto an agentic assurance workflow spanning perception through audit. Building on this foundation, agentic systems architectures, threats, concrete trust mechanisms, and quantitative metrics are surveyed for direct application in agentic systems development and evaluation. These principles are then examined across four constraint-bound engineering domains: power systems, autonomous vehicles/robotics/UAVs, high-performance computing, and communication networks, identifying recurring design patterns, shared failure modes, and domain-specific gaps. Synthesizing across those domains, agentic AI trustworthiness is shown to be a single problem, with a path outlined toward a reusable, cross-domain assurance framework analogous to the graded certification regimes used by mature safety-critical engineering fields.
Omar Al-Refai, Ibrahim Shahbaz, Adam Ali Husseinat +3
Jul 19, 2026cs.SE

Specifying the Delegated-Autonomy Boundary: Requirements Engineering for Agentic AI

Agentic AI systems do not just predict or recommend; they plan, maintain state, and act in external environments with varying degrees of autonomy. This changes the requirements engineering problem in a specific and under-addressed way: it introduces what we call the delegated-autonomy boundary -- the set of decisions about what may be delegated to the system, under what graduated authority, with what oversight, and how control is returned. Current practices bury these decisions inside prompts, tool schemas, and runtime policies, even though they are requirements-level commitments. This paper proposes two complementary artifacts. First, an Agency Justification Record (AJR) helps teams decide when an agent is warranted over simpler alternatives. Second, an Agentic Delegation Policy (ADP) captures what must be specified for safe and effective development: purpose, authority, information, coordination, assurance, and evolution. Crucially, authority in the ADP is modelled as graduated, i.e., a tiered structure. We illustrate the framework with two contrasting examples: a safety-critical hospital discharge coordination agent and an automated code review agent.
Chetan Arora, Andreas Vogelsang, Abbi Sharma
Jul 16, 2026cs.CR

Bad Memory: Evaluating Prompt Injection Risks from Memory in Agentic Systems

A growing class of agentic systems maintain persistent state across sessions through memory files, behavioral preferences, and knowledge bases. While this makes agents more useful and self-improving, it also creates a new attack surface for prompt injections in which malicious instructions can be embedded within persistent files and influence future behavior. In this work, we study prompt injection attacks in memory-based agentic systems using a sandboxed synthetic workspace. We evaluate two agentic systems, Anthropic Claude Code and OpenAI Codex, across four models: Claude Haiku 4.5, Claude Opus 4.7, GPT-5.2, and GPT-5.5. Our results show that although it is difficult to make an agent overwrite its own memory files using untrusted external content, payloads already planted in those files can successfully attack current and future sessions. Attack success and payload persistence vary substantially across systems, models, adversarial goals, and multi-session attack sequences. These findings show that persistent memory changes the threat model for prompt injection and motivate defenses that protect memory updates without removing useful agent adaptation.
Soham Gadgil, David Alexander, Sai Sunku +1
Jul 16, 2026cs.SE

Beyond Generalist LLMs: Specialist Agentic Systems for Structured Code Workflow Execution

Large Language Models (LLMs) have accelerated the adoption of software development agents, now widely available as Integrated Development Environment (IDE) extensions and standalone applications. While these agents are typically general-purpose, it remains unclear whether specialist agents justify their additional development effort. We investigate this question in the context of business process automation, focusing on the transformation of Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) diagrams into executable agentic workflows. Since BPMN specifies explicit control-flow semantics, we focus on deterministic workflows in which a fixed process model and inputs uniquely determine the executed path. We introduce a specialist workflow for this task and compare it against generalist agents such as Roo and Cline. Our results show that the specialist solution produces agents that outperform generalist baselines by approximately 9-20 percentage points in tool-use exactness, 2-4x in penalty-adjusted latency, and 3x fewer tool-call errors, while reducing generation token cost by over 95% and eliminating repair iterations. We also find that generalist agents generate code inconsistently in both functionality and quality, limiting their suitability for industrial settings where reliability and maintainability are essential.
Harris Borman, Herman Wandabwa, Fusun Yu +4
Jul 15, 2026cs.RO

Zero2Skill: Bootstrapping Robot Skills through Autonomous Data Collection, Training, and Deployment

Autonomous data collection governs the volume and quality of real-world trajectories for manipulation policy learning. Existing pipelines reduce human effort via self-resetting, VLM verification, or language-guided correction, yet episode-scoped fixes must be reissued whenever the same failure recurs, so oversight cost grows with session length rather than with the number of distinct problems. We present Zero2Skill, a human-robot symbiotic agentic system in which corrections are retained and reused across rounds. The collection loop collects, verifies, and resets autonomously, pausing for a remote operator only when a phase exhausts an explicit retry budget. An LLM parser maps each natural-language utterance to a structured adjustment stored in Corrective Memory, so addressed failure modes typically need not be corrected again under the same conditions. On a real-robot desktop-clearing testbed, Zero2Skill matches teleoperation episode success while reducing human working time to 16%. Language corrections improve verifier-human agreement in all four evaluated settings and raise average single-attempt success from 12.5% to 47.5% (arm-selection: 20.0% to 50.0%). Policies fine-tuned on Zero2Skill data match teleoperation-trained policy success at a fraction of collection human cost.
Boyuan Wang, Zhenyuan Zhang, Zhiqin Yang +16
Jul 14, 2026cs.AI

Tracing Agentic Failure from the Flow of Success

Failure attribution for LLM-based agentic systems, i.e., identifying which steps in a failure trajectory caused the task to fail, is critical for debugging and improving these systems. Existing approaches either rely on prompting-based pipelines, which are computationally expensive, or require post-training on failure trajectories with step-level error annotations, which are costly to collect and difficult to scale. We argue that a practical failure attribution model should be lightweight and trainable without step-level supervision on failure data. To this end, we address unsupervised failure attribution, i.e., training exclusively on successful trajectories and identifying error steps at inference time given a failure trajectory. We propose OAT, which casts this problem as one-class learning with neural controlled differential equations, modeling the dynamical pattern of successful trajectories in latent space. At inference time, each step in a failure trajectory is assigned an anomaly score based on its deviation from the dynamics learned on successful trajectories, which is then used to form a set of error steps. With training on only 100 successful trajectories, experiments show that OAT is 200--5000 ×\times faster than prompting-based baselines, and, at the same time, consistently outperforms them in both in-domain and out-of-distribution datasets with +20% and +7% F1 scores, respectively, demonstrating that OAT is a promising and efficient direction for diagnosing agentic system failures.
Samuel Yeh, Yiwen Zhu, Shaleen Deep +1
Jul 14, 2026cs.AI

Agentic Service-Oriented Computing: A Manifesto for the Next Frontier of Service-Oriented Computing

The rapid emergence of LLM-powered autonomous and semi-autonomous agents is reshaping software systems from static, request-response components into goal-directed, adaptive, and tool-using computational actors. As these agents move from isolated cognitive prototypes into complex distributed workflows, they confront challenges that the Service-Oriented Computing community has studied for more than two decades: composition, interoperability, quality of service, lifecycle management, governance, security, and trust. Yet much of today's agentic AI ecosystem is developing these foundations ad hoc, without the engineering rigour required for dependable enterprise and societal deployment. This paper introduces Agentic Service-Oriented Computing (ASOC) as a new research and practice area concerned with engineering agents as services, orchestrating services through autonomous and semi-autonomous agents, and governing ecosystems of agents and services under constraints of trust, cybersecurity, compliance, performance, and accountability. We articulate six foundational principles of ASOC (harness-ability, composability, lifecycle engineering, trustworthiness by design, goal-driven orchestration, and observability/accountability) and organise a five-dimensional research agenda spanning: (i) agentic services foundations and lifecycle engineering; (ii) composition, orchestration, and interoperability; (iii) governance, observability, and accountability; (iv) security, trust, and risk management; and (v) evaluation, certification, and Agentic QoS. We argue that the Services Computing community is especially well positioned to provide the conceptual and engineering spine for this emerging field, transforming agentic AI from fragmented demonstrations into dependable, service-based systems worthy of human and organisational trust.
Amin Beheshti, Rong N. Chang, Boualem Benatallah +7
Jul 14, 2026cs.AI

Self-Improvements in Modern Agentic Systems: A Survey

Self-improving autonomous agents are moving from research prototypes to deployed systems. The primary goal is controllable evolution, or adaptation, from experience with minimal or even no human input. This survey frames modern self-improving agents as adaptive systems that convert experience into accumulated capability gains. We offer a system-level framework that represents a modern agent as a configuration coupling a foundation model with an operational scaffold of prompts, memory, tools, and control logic. Within this framework, self-improvement is formalized as a self-induced update operator that obtains and commits updates to model parameters or scaffold components. We organize prior work by update target and by the signals that drive change, then review applications and discuss evaluation, before closing with open problems and future directions. For convenience, we track technical updates on https://github.com/selfimproving-agent/awesome-Self-Improving-Agents.
Zhe Ren, Yimeng Chen, Dandan Guo +9
Jul 13, 2026cs.CL

Agentic systems for breast cancer treatment recommendations

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being explored for clinical decision support, but their reliability in complex oncology treatment planning remains unclear. We evaluated agentic LLM systems for breast cancer treatment recommendation generation using 72 real clinical cases across stages I to IV and 1,147 case-specific rubrics generated through Asymmetric Information Rubric Generation (AIRG), in which the rubric generator had access to real clinical decisions unavailable to the evaluated models. Seven pipelines were compared, including single-LLM baselines, tool-augmented systems, and multi-agent architectures with fact checking and autonomous subagent spawning. The best-performing configuration, Claude Opus 4.8 with the D&C+SA pipeline, achieved a global score of 0.594 ±\pm 0.025. Tool use and increased agent autonomy had mixed effects, improving performance in some settings but degrading it in others. Performance varied by clinical domain and disease stage, and oncologist-led error analysis revealed persistent clinically relevant failures, including incorrect or missing recommendations, flawed justifications, citation errors, outdated claims, and overconfidence. These findings suggest that agentic LLM systems can generate clinically relevant breast cancer recommendations, but remain insufficient for unsupervised clinical use.
Vinicius Anjos de Almeida, Nícolas Henrique Borges, Leonardo Vicenzi +5