LLM Agent Orchestration

LLM: Large Language Model

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LLM agent orchestration studies how to organize language models, tools, and specialized agents into systems that can solve tasks requiring multiple steps. Common approaches include sequential and hierarchical pipelines, graph-based workflows, parallel delegation, adaptive routing, and plan–execute–reflect loops, with memory and verification used to manage state and catch errors. Work is evaluated on tasks such as coding, web research, tool use, and domain workflows, using measures that include success, cost, latency, and reliability. A central open tension is that added coordination can improve difficult tasks but also increase cost and failure opportunities, and its benefits depend on the model, task structure, and quality of execution controls.

Latest papers

463 papers61 papers in the last four weeks, up 74% on the four weeks before. 0.4% of all new papers.

May 7, 2026

Self-Programmed Execution for Language-Model Agents

At the heart of a language model agent is an orchestrator program which is responsible for the state transition between consecutive turns. In existing systems, this program is implemented in the harness. This paper introduces self-programmed execution (SPE), in which the model completion is itself the orchestrator program, and the harness evaluates this program but does not impose any fixed orchestration policy. Formally, an SPE state of an agentic machine is one from which a model completion can load any successor state up to an embedding, and an instance of an SPE state is one which executes the model completion as a program. In practice, the program requires a language with unusual features, as its source code doubles as the content of the model's context window. I therefore introduce Spell, a Lisp dialect in which programs can edit and re-evaluate themselves, and effectful expressions like model invocations are structured such that re-evaluating an edited program does not replay its side effects. Experiments with existing models, not trained for SPE or Spell, show that frontier models can learn Spell in-context and accomplish challenging agentic tasks. These results demonstrate how a LM can act as an agent without any fixed orchestration policy, and they raise the question of what self-orchestration strategies might be learned by a model trained for self-programmed execution. Code is available at https://github.com/lukejoconnor/spell.

Luke J. O'Connor

Harvard Medical School Boston, MA 02115

LLM Agent Orchestration LLM Agents

May 7, 2026

NeuroAgent: LLM Agents for Multimodal Neuroimaging Analysis and Research

Multimodal neuroimaging analysis often involves complex, modality-specific preprocessing workflows that require careful configuration, quality control, and coordination across heterogeneous toolchains. Beyond preprocessing, downstream statistical analysis and disease classification commonly require task-specific code, evaluation protocols, and data-format conventions, creating additional barriers between raw acquisitions and reproducible scientific analysis. We present NeuroAgent, an LLM-driven agentic framework that automates key preprocessing and analysis steps for heterogeneous neuroimaging data, including sMRI, fMRI, dMRI, and PET, and supports interactive downstream analysis through natural-language queries. NeuroAgent employs a hierarchical multi-agent architecture with a feedback-driven Generate-Execute-Validate engine: agents autonomously generate executable preprocessing code, detect and recover from runtime errors, and validate output integrity. We evaluate the system on 1,470 subjects pooled across all ADNI phases (CN=1,000, AD=470), where all subjects have sMRI and tabular data, with subsets also having Tau-PET (n=469), fMRI (n=278), and DTI (

n=620

). Pipeline ablation studies across multiple LLM backends show that capable models reach up to 100% intent-parsing accuracy, with the strongest backend (Qwen3.5-27B) reaching 84.8% end-to-end preprocessing step correctness. Automated recovery limits manual intervention to edge cases where human review is required via the Human-In-The-Loop interface. For Alzheimer's Disease classification using automatically preprocessed multimodal data, our agent ensemble achieves an AUC of 0.9518 with four modalities, outperforming all single-modality baselines. These results show that NeuroAgent can reduce the manual effort required for neuroimaging preprocessing and enable end-to-end automated analysis pipelines for neuroimaging research.

Lujia Zhong, Yihao Xia, Jianwei Zhang +4

1Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California · 2Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California · 3Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering, Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California

Multi-Agent LLM Systems LLM Agent Orchestration Alzheimer's Disease Classification Neuroimaging

May 7, 2026

Improving the Efficiency of Language Agent Teams with Adaptive Task Graphs

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in teams, yet existing coordination approaches often occupy two extremes. Highly structured methods rely on fixed roles, pipelines, or task decompositions assigned a priori. In contrast, fully unstructured teams enable adaptability and exploration but suffer from inefficiencies such as error propagation, inter-agent conflicts, and wasted resources (measured in time, tokens, or file operations). We introduce Language Agent Teams for Task Evolution (LATTE), a framework for coordinating LLM teams inspired by distributed systems, where processors must operate under partial observability and communication constraints. In LATTE, a team of agents collaboratively construct and maintain a shared, evolving coordination graph which encodes sub-task dependencies, individual agent assignment, and the current state of sub-task progress. This protocol maintains consistency while empowering agents to dynamically allocate work, adapt coordination, and discover new tasks. Across multiple collaborative tasks and a variety of base models, we demonstrate how LATTE reduces token usage, wall-clock time, communication, and coordination failures (e.g. file conflicts and redundant outputs) while matching or exceeding the accuracy of standard designs including MetaGPT, decentralized teams, top-down Leader-Worker hierarchies, and static decompositions.

Elizabeth Mieczkowski, Alexander Ku, Tiwalayo Eisape +5

Princeton University · University of Cambridge · MIT +1

Multi-Agent Coordination LLM Agent Orchestration Multi-Agent LLMs

May 7, 2026

More Is Not Always Better: Cross-Component Interference in LLM Agent Scaffolding

LLM agent systems are built by stacking scaffolding components (planning, tools, memory, self-reflection, retrieval) assuming more is better. We study cross-component interference (CCI): degradation when components interact destructively. We run a full factorial experiment over all 2^5=32 subsets of five components on HotpotQA and GSM8K with Llama-3.1-8B/70B (96 conditions, up to 10 seeds). The All-In system is consistently suboptimal: on HotpotQA, a single-tool agent surpasses All-In by 32% (F1 0.233 vs 0.177, p=0.023); on GSM8K, a 3-component subset beats All-In by 79% (0.43 vs 0.24, p=0.010). Optimal component count is task-dependent (k*=1-4) and scale-sensitive: at 70B, combinations that hurt at 8B provide gains, though All-In still trails the best subset. We fit a main-effects regression (R^2=0.916, adj-R^2=0.899, LOOCV=0.872), compute exact Shapley values, and find 183/325 submodularity violations (56.3%), showing greedy selection is unreliable. A three-body synergy among Tool Use, Self-Reflection, and Retrieval (INT_3=+0.175, 95% CI [+0.003,+0.351]) is reported as exploratory. CCI replicates across model families (Qwen2.5) and is robust to prompt paraphrasing. Our findings suggest maximally-equipped agent defaults should be replaced by task-specific subset selection via interaction-aware analysis.

Ming Liu

Amazon

LLM Agent Orchestration LLM Agent Evaluation

May 6, 2026

Securing the Agent: Vendor-Neutral, Multitenant Enterprise Retrieval and Tool Use

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and agentic AI systems are increasingly prevalent in enterprise AI deployments. However, real enterprise environments introduce challenges largely absent from academic treatments and consumer-facing APIs: multiple tenants with heterogeneous data, strict access-control requirements, regulatory compliance, and cost pressures that demand shared infrastructure. A fundamental problem underlies existing RAG architectures in these settings: retrieval systems rank documents by relevance--whether through semantic similarity, keyword matching, or hybrid approaches--not by authorization, so a query from one tenant can surface another tenant's confidential data simply because it scores highest. We formalize this gap and analyze additional shortcomings--including tool-mediated disclosure, context accumulation across turns, and client-side orchestration bypass--that arise when agentic systems conflate relevance with authorization. To address these challenges, we introduce a layered isolation architecture combining policy-aware ingestion, retrieval-time gating, and shared inference, enforced through server-side agentic orchestration. This approach centralizes security-critical operations--tool execution authorization, state isolation, and policy enforcement--on the server, creating natural enforcement points for multitenant isolation while allowing client-side frameworks to retain control over agent composition and latency-sensitive operations. We validate the proposed architecture through an open-source implementation in OGX, a vendor-neutral framework that implements an OpenAI-compatible, open-source Responses API with server-side multi-turn orchestration. We evaluate it empirically and show that ABAC gating eliminates cross-tenant leakage while introducing negligible overhead.

Francisco Javier Arceo, Varsha Prasad Narsing

Red Hat AI · Boston, USA

LLM Agent Orchestration AI Agent Security RAG Security Access Control Tool Access Control for LLM Agents

May 6, 2026

Design Conductor 2.0: An agent builds a TurboQuant inference accelerator in 80 hours

Driven by a rapid co-evolution of both harness and underlying models, LLM agents are improving at a dizzying pace. In our prior work (performed in Dec. 2025), we introduced "Design Conductor" (or just "Conductor"), a system capable of building a 5-stage Linux-capable RISC-V CPU in 12 hours. In this work, we introduce an updated multi-agent harness powered by frontier models released in April 2026, which is able to handle 80x larger tasks, at higher quality, fully autonomously. Following a brief introduction, we examine 4 designs that the system produced autonomously, including "VerTQ", an LLM inference accelerator which hard-wires support for TurboQuant in a 240-cycle pipeline, starting from the TurboQuant arXiv paper. VerTQ includes heavy compute processing, with 5129 FP16/32 units; the design was mapped to an FPGA at 125 MHz and consumes 5.7 mm^2 in TSMC 16FF (8 attention pipes). We review the key new characteristics that enabled these results. Finally, we analyze Design Conductor's token usage and other empirical characteristics, including its limitations.

The Verkor Team, Ravi Krishna, Suresh Krishna +1

The Verkor Team

AI Accelerator Inference Multi-Agent LLM Systems LLM Agent Orchestration FPGA Acceleration LLM Agent Harnesses

May 6, 2026

Uno-Orchestra: Parsimonious Agent Routing via Selective Delegation

Large language model (LLM) multi-agent systems typically rely on rigid orchestration, committing either to flat per-query routing or to hand-engineered task decomposition, so decomposition depth, worker choice, and inference budget are not jointly optimized under one objective. We introduce Uno-Orchestra, a unified orchestration policy that selectively decomposes a task and dispatches each subtask to an admissible (model, primitive) pair, with both decisions learned together from curated RL trajectories grounded in real worker interactions. Against 22 baselines on a 13-benchmark suite spanning math, code, knowledge, long-context, and agentic tool-use, Uno-Orchestra reaches 77.0% macro pass@1, roughly 16% above the strongest workflow baseline, at roughly an order of magnitude lower per-query cost, advancing the accuracy-efficiency frontier of selective delegation.

Zhiqing Cui, Haotong Xie, Jiahao Yuan +11

Project lead.

Multi-Agent System Optimization Multi-Agent Orchestration LLM Agent Orchestration LLM Agent Workflow Optimization Task Decomposition RL for LLM Agents+1

May 6, 2026

SADE: Symptom-Aware Diagnostic Escalation for LLM-Based Network Troubleshooting

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly applied to network troubleshooting, but root-cause localization on public benchmarks remains well below practical deployment thresholds. We argue this is because existing agents do not encode the disciplined, layer-by-layer methodology that human network engineers use, and instead rely on free-form deliberation that conflates evidence acquisition with hypothesis commitment. We present SADE (Symptom-Aware Diagnostic Escalation), an agent that encodes the classical Cisco troubleshooting methodology as an explicit policy. SADE pairs a phase-gated diagnostic workflow, which separates evidence acquisition from hypothesis commitment, with a routed library of fault-family skills and high-yield diagnostic helpers. On a held-out 523 incident set of the public NIKA benchmark covering eleven unseen scenarios, SADE improves root-cause F1 by 37 percentage points over a ReAct + GPT-5 baseline; a model-controlled comparison against the same Claude Sonnet backend without the SADE policy attributes 22 of those points to the diagnostic policy alone, showing that the gain is not a side-effect of the model upgrade.

Kuan-Hao Tseng, Niruth Bogahawatta, Yasod Ginige +3

University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia · University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

LLM Agent Orchestration LLM Agents Root Cause Analysis LLM Agent Routing Fault Diagnosis

May 5, 2026

When Context Hurts: The Crossover Effect of Knowledge Transfer on Multi-Agent Design Exploration

The prevailing assumption in agent orchestration is that more context is better. We test this on multi-agent software design across 10 tasks, 7 context-injection conditions, and over 2,700 runs, and find a crossover effect: the same artifact type improves design exploration on some tasks (up to 20

\times

tradeoff coverage) and actively degrades it on others (up to 46% reduction). On several tasks, an irrelevant document performs as well as or better than every relevant artifact. The direction is predicted by a single measurable variable--baseline exploration without context--with Pearson

r = -0.82

(

p < 0.001

). Probing the mechanism by manipulating convergence pressure through prompt design reveals two distinct regimes: convergence driven by training data priors (natural) responds to artifact disruption, while convergence driven by explicit instructions (induced) does not. The implication is that context injection should be conditional, not universal: one no-context trial is a cheap diagnostic that predicts whether knowledge artifacts will help or hurt a given task.

Saranyan Vigraham

Meta

Software Engineering Agents LLM Agent Orchestration LLM Context Management

May 5, 2026

Physics-Grounded Multi-Agent Architecture for Traceable, Risk-Aware Human-AI Decision Support in Manufacturing

High-precision CNC machining of free-form aerospace components requires bounded compensations informed by inspection, simulation, and process knowledge. Off-the-shelf large language model (LLM) assistants can generate text, but they do not reliably execute risk-constrained multi-step numerical workflows or provide auditable provenance for high-stakes decisions. We present multi-agent knowledge analysis (MAKA), a human-in-the-loop decision-support architecture that separates intent routing, tools-only quantitative analysis, knowledge graph retrieval, and critic-based verification that enforces physical plausibility, safety bounds, and provenance completeness before recommendations are surfaced for human approval. MAKA is instantiated on a Ti-6Al-4V rotor blade machining testbed by fusing virtual-machining path-tracking error fields, cutting-force and deflection simulations, and scan-based 3D inspection deviation maps from 16 blades. The analysis decomposes deviation into an evidence-linked pathing component, a drift-based wear proxy capturing systematic evolution across parts, a residual systematic compliance term, and a variability proxy for instability-aware escalation. In a three-level tool-orchestration benchmark (single-step through

\geq

3-step stateful sequences), MAKA improves successful tool execution by up to 87.5 percentage points relative to an unstructured single-model interaction pattern with identical tool access. Digital twin what-if studies show MAKA can coordinate traceable compensation candidates that reduce predicted surface deviation from order

10^{-2}

in to approximately

\pm 10^{-3}

in over most of the blade within the simulation environment, providing a pre-deployment verification signal for risk-aware human decision-making.

Danny Hoang, Ryan Matthiessen, Christopher Miller +5

School of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Manufacturing Engineering, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA · Connecticut Center for Advanced Technology, East Hartford, CT, USA · Quinnipiac University, Hamden, CT, USA +1

Manufacturing Multi-Agent LLM Systems LLM Agent Orchestration Human-AI Decision Making

May 5, 2026

From Intent to Execution: Composing Agentic Workflows with Agent Recommendation

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) built using AI agents fulfill a variety of user intents that may be used to design and build a family of related applications. However, the creation of such MAS currently involves manual composition of the plan, manual selection of appropriate agents, and manual creation of execution graphs. This paper introduces a framework for the automated creation of multi-agent systems which replaces multiple manual steps with an automated framework. The proposed framework consists of software modules and a workflow to orchestrate the requisite task- specific application. The modules include: an LLM-derived planner, a set of tasks described in natural language, a dynamic call graph, an orchestrator for map agents to tasks, and an agent recommender that finds the most suitable agent(s) from local and global agent registries. The agent recommender uses a two-stage information retrieval (IR) system comprising a fast retriever and an LLM-based re-ranker. We implemented a series of experiments exploring the choice of embedders, re- rankers, agent description enrichment, and supervising critique agent. We benchmarked this system end-to-end, evaluating the combination of planning, agent selection, and task completion, with our proposed approach. Our experimental results show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the- art in terms of the recall rate and is more robust and scalable compared to previous approaches. The critique agent holistically reevaluates both agent and tool recommendations against the overall plan. We show that the inclusion of the critique agent further enhances the recall score, proving that the comprehensive review and revision of task-based agent selection is an essential step in building end-to-end multi-agent systems.

Kishan Athrey, Ramin Pishehvar, Brian Riordan +1

Cisco Systems Inc.

LLM Agent Orchestration Multi-Agent Systems Multi-Agent Planning

May 4, 2026

ARIS: Autonomous Research via Adversarial Multi-Agent Collaboration

This report describes ARIS (Auto-Research-in-sleep), an open-source research harness for autonomous research, including its architecture, assurance mechanisms, and early deployment experience. The performance of agent systems built on LLMs depends on both the model weights and the harness around them, which governs what information to store, retrieve, and present to the model. For long-horizon research workflows, the central failure mode is not a visible breakdown but a plausible unsupported success: a long-running agent can produce claims whose evidential support is incomplete, misreported, or silently inherited from the executor's framing. Therefore, we present ARIS as a research harness that coordinates machine-learning research workflows through cross-model adversarial collaboration as a default configuration: an executor model drives forward progress while a reviewer from a different model family is recommended to critique intermediate artifacts and request revisions. ARIS has three architectural layers. The execution layer provides more than 65 reusable Markdown-defined skills, model integrations via MCP, a persistent research wiki for iterative reuse of prior findings, and deterministic figure generation. The orchestration layer coordinates five end-to-end workflows with adjustable effort settings and configurable routing to reviewer models. The assurance layer includes a three-stage process for checking whether experimental claims are supported by evidence: integrity verification, result-to-claim mapping, and claim auditing that cross-checks manuscript statements against the claim ledger and raw evidence, as well as a five-pass scientific-editing pipeline, mathematical-proof checks, and visual inspection of the rendered PDF. A prototype self-improvement loop records research traces and proposes harness improvements that are adopted only after reviewer approval.

Ruofeng Yang, Yongcan Li, Shuai Li

Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Shanghai Innovation Institute

AI Agent Reliability Multi-Agent LLM Systems LLM Agent Orchestration Autonomous Research Agents LLM Agent Reliability Scientific Claim Verification

May 4, 2026

Reinforcement Learning for LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems through Orchestration Traces

As large language model (LLM) agents evolve from isolated tool users into coordinated teams, reinforcement learning (RL) must optimize not only individual actions but also how work is spawned, delegated, communicated, aggregated, and stopped. This paper studies RL for LLM-based multi-agent systems through orchestration traces: temporal interaction graphs whose events include sub-agent spawning, delegation, communication, tool use, return, aggregation, and stopping decisions. Using this lens, we identify three technical axes. First, reward design spans eight families, including orchestration rewards for parallelism speedup, split correctness, and aggregation quality. Second, reward and credit signals attach to eight credit- or signal-bearing units from token to team; explicit counterfactual message-level credit remains especially sparse in our curated pool. Third, orchestration learning decomposes into five sub-decisions: when to spawn, whom to delegate to, how to communicate, how to aggregate, and when to stop. In our curated pool as of May 4, 2026, we found no explicit RL training method for the stopping decision. We connect academic methods to public industrial evidence from Kimi Agent Swarm, OpenAI Codex, and Anthropic Claude Code. The resulting scale gap is a gap between publicly reported deployment envelopes and open academic evaluation regimes, not independent verification of industrial training traces. We release the artifact at https://github.com/xxzcc/awesome-llm-mas-rl, including an 84-entry tagged paper pool, a 32-record exclusion log, scripted corpus statistics, and a minimal JSON schema for replayable orchestration traces.

Chenchen Zhang

Independent Researcher

Multi-Agent LLM Systems LLM Agent Orchestration Multi-Agent Systems RL for LLM Agents

May 4, 2026

Beyond State Machines: Executing Network Procedures with Agentic Tool-Calling Sequences

Agentic AI will be an essential enabling technology for designing future mobile communication systems, which could provide flexible and customized services, automate complex network operations, and drive autonomous decision-making across the network. This work studies how Large Language Model (LLM)-based network AI agents can be utilized to execute network procedures expressed as sequences of tool invocations. We investigate four approaches, which differ in how the agent obtains the procedure and in how execution is distributed between the agent and the underlying tools. We evaluated the latency and execution correctness across these approaches using a User Equipment (UE) IP allocation procedure as a case study. Furthermore, we conduct a stress test to examine how many sequential procedural steps an LLM agent can reliably execute before failure. Our results show that approaches relying on iterative agent-side reasoning incur higher latency and are more prone to execution errors, while approaches where the procedure is encapsulated within a single tool, which internally orchestrates the required steps by invoking other tools, reduce latency by limiting repeated reasoning. The stress-test results further show that the model with advanced tool-calling capability maintains reliable execution over longer procedures than the other evaluated models; however, all models exhibit reliability degradation as procedure length increases, revealing clear execution limits in multi-step tool-based workflows. To systematically analyze failures in procedure execution, we introduce a procedure-specific error taxonomy that categorizes deviations in multi-step procedural execution.

Purna Sai Garigipati, Onur Ayan, Kishor Chandra Joshi +1

Heisenberg Research Center, Huawei Technologies Duesseldorf GmbH, 80992 Munich, Germany · Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

LLM Agent Orchestration Tool-Using Agents Long-Horizon LLM Agents LLM Agent Reliability

May 4, 2026

EngiAgent: Fully Connected Coordination of LLM Agents for Solving Open-ended Engineering Problems with Feasible Solutions

Engineering problem solving is central to real-world decision-making, requiring mathematical formulations that not only represent complex problems but also produce feasible solutions under data and physical constraints. Unlike mathematical problem solving, which operates on predefined formulations, engineering tasks demand open-ended analysis, feasibility-driven modeling, and iterative refinement. Although large language models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities in reasoning and code generation, they often fail to ensure feasibility, which limits their applicability to engineering problem solving. To address this challenge, we propose EngiAgent, a multi-agent system with a fully connected coordinator that simulates expert workflows through specialized agents for problem analysis, modeling, verification, solving, and solution evaluation. The fully connected coordinator enables flexible feedback routing, overcoming the rigidity of prior pipeline-based reflection methods and ensuring feasibility at every stage of the process. This design not only improves robustness to diverse failure cases such as data extraction errors, constraint inconsistencies, and solver failures, but also enhances the overall quality of problem solving. Empirical results across four representative domains demonstrate that EngiAgent achieves substantial improvements in feasibility compared to prior approaches, establishing a new paradigm for feasibility-oriented engineering problem solving with LLMs. Our source code and data are available at https://github.com/AI4Engi/EngiAgent.

Xiyuan Zhou, Ruixi Zou, Xinlei Wang +4

Nanyang Technological University · The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen · INSAIT, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” +2

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Software Engineering Agents LLM Agent Orchestration Natural Language to Optimization Modeling LLM Agent Reliability

May 4, 2026

AAFLOW: Scalable Patterns for Agentic AI Workflows

Agentic workflows in large language model systems integrate retrieval, reasoning, and memory, but existing frameworks suffer from scalability and reproducibility limitations due to fragmented data orchestration, serialization overhead, and non-deterministic execution. Although these frameworks increase flexibility, they don't have a formal execution model that adheres to the principles of high-performance computing. We introduce AAFLOW, a unified distributed runtime that creates communication-efficient execution plans by modeling agentic workflows as an operator abstraction. Using Apache Arrow and Cylon, AAFLOW creates a zero-copy data plane that allows direct interoperability between preprocessing, embedding, and vector retrieval without the need for serialization overhead. To lower coordination costs, it uses resource-deterministic scheduling and asynchronous batching. While retaining comparable LLM generation throughput, experimental results demonstrate up to 4.64 times pipeline speedup and 2.8 times gains in embedding and upsert phases. Rather than LLM inference acceleration, these advantages result from enhanced data flow, batching, and communication efficiency.

Arup Kumar Sarker, Mills Staylor, Aymen Alsaadi +3

Department of Computer Science, Biocomplexity Institute and Initiative University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA, USA · Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University New Brunswick, NJ, USA · Biocomplexity Institute and Initiative University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA, USA +1

LLM Agent Orchestration Agentic Workflows

May 3, 2026

CyberAId: AI-Driven Cybersecurity for Financial Service Providers

European financial institutions face mounting regulatory pressure while their security operations centres remain constrained not by data or staffing but by reasoning capacity: enterprise SIEMs cover only a fraction of MITRE ATT&CK techniques, two thirds of SOC teams cannot keep pace with alert volumes, and the majority of breaches are preceded by alerts that are generated but never investigated. Frontier large language models now achieve state-of-the-art results on isolated cybersecurity tasks (one-day vulnerability exploitation, code-level patching, intrusion detection) yet no narrow win constitutes a platform that can compose across functions, persist multi-tenant state, map findings to regulatory regimes and survive an audit. This position paper argues that the right unit of construction is a hybrid multi-agent system in which specialised LLM subagents reason over classical SIEM/XDR telemetry rather than replacing it, share accumulated agent state across institutions through privacy-preserving federation, and can connect to complementary capability packs such as quantum-based authentication, digital twins for adversarial validation, and eBPF-based kernel telemetry. We present CyberAId, a model-agnostic, on-premise-deployable platform in which a Main Agent coordination layer, a Reporting capability, and specialist subagents operate within a shared runtime under bounded human-in-the-loop autonomy, organised around four falsifiable design principles, and aligned with relevant regulations. CyberAId will be validated at four representative financial use cases (client impersonation, anti-money-laundering for payment service providers, retail-banking incident response, and high-frequency-trading resilience) and propose skill-based agent adaptation as the most promising research direction for turning each deployment into a contribution to a continuously refined collective defence.

George Fatouros, Georgios Makridis, John Soldatos +18

Innov-Acts, Cyprus · University of Piraeus, Greece · Unparallel Innovation, Portugal +7

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Autonomous Cyber Defense LLM Agent Orchestration Cybersecurity

May 2, 2026

6G Needs Agents: Toward Agentic AI-Native Networks for Autonomous Intelligence

Sixth-generation (6G) networks are increasingly envisioned as AI-native infrastructures integrating communication, sensing, and computing into a unified fabric. However, existing approaches remain largely optimization-centric, relying on closed-loop control with limited reasoning capability. In this paper, we argue for a paradigm shift toward Agentic AI-Native 6G, in which Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents operate as bounded, policy-governed reasoning entities within a semantic control plane layered above deterministic 3GPP infrastructure. We propose a four-layer architecture that integrates deterministic network infrastructure, semantic abstraction of intent and context, hierarchical reasoning, and a distributed multi-agent fabric spanning device, edge, and core domains. To assess feasibility, we develop a proof-of-concept agentic reasoning and orchestration framework and conduct an extensive empirical study using a domain-specific 6G benchmark under realistic deployment constraints. Our results reveal a fundamental tradeoff between reasoning capability and system efficiency, showing that no single model simultaneously satisfies latency, throughput, and accuracy requirements. Instead, heterogeneous deployment of LLM agents across the device--edge--core continuum is necessary to balance these constraints. We further demonstrate that quantization introduces non-uniform effects across models, reinforcing the need for system-level optimization rather than model-level compression alone. These findings establish agentic intelligence as a viable architectural direction for 6G and highlight key challenges in achieving scalable, trustworthy, and self-reasoning networks. All experimental results and evaluation scripts are publicly available to support reproducibility.

Mohamed Amine Ferrag, Abderrahmane Lakas, Merouane Debbah

Department of Computer and Network Engineering, United Arab Emirates University, UAE · Research Institute for Digital Future, Khalifa University, UAE

6G Networks LLM Agent Orchestration Wireless Communications Multi-Agent LLMs

May 2, 2026

Agentic AI Systems Should Be Designed as Marginal Token Allocators

This position paper argues that agentic AI systems should be designed and evaluated as marginal token allocation economies rather than as text generators priced by the unit. We follow a single request -- a developer asking a coding agent to fix a failing test -- through four economic layers that today are designed in isolation: a router that decides which model answers, an agent that decides whether to plan, act, verify, or defer, a serving stack that decides how to produce each token, and a training pipeline that decides whether the trace is worth learning from. We show that all four layers are solving the same first-order condition -- marginal benefit equals marginal cost plus latency cost plus risk cost -- with different index sets and different prices. The framing is deliberately minimal: we do not propose a complete theory of AI economics. But adopting marginal token allocation as the shared accounting object explains why systems that locally minimize tokens globally misallocate them, predicts a small set of recurring failure modes (over-routing, over-delegation, under-verification, serving congestion, stale rollouts, cache misuse), and points to a concrete research agenda in token-aware evaluation, autonomy pricing, congestion-priced serving, and risk-adjusted RL budgeting.

Siqi Zhu

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

LLM Agent Orchestration LLM Agent Evaluation LLM Agent Training Agentic AI

May 1, 2026

Position: agentic AI orchestration should be Bayes-consistent

LLMs excel at predictive tasks and complex reasoning tasks, but many high-value deployments rely on decisions under uncertainty, for example, which tool to call, which expert to consult, or how many resources to invest. While the usefulness and feasibility of Bayesian approaches remain unclear for LLM inference, this position paper argues that the control layer of an agentic AI system (that orchestrates LLMs and tools) is a clear case where Bayesian principles should shine. Bayesian decision theory provides a framework for agentic systems that can help to maintain beliefs over task-relevant latent quantities, to update these beliefs from observed agentic and human-AI interactions, and to choose actions. Making LLMs themselves explicitly Bayesian belief-updating engines remains computationally intensive and conceptually nontrivial as a general modeling target. In contrast, this paper argues that coherent decision-making requires Bayesian principles at the orchestration level of the agentic system, not necessarily the LLM agent parameters. This paper articulates practical properties for Bayesian control that fit modern agentic AI systems and human-AI collaboration, and provides concrete examples and design patterns to illustrate how calibrated beliefs and utility-aware policies can improve agentic AI orchestration.

Theodore Papamarkou, Pierre Alquier, Matthias Bauer +27

PolyShape, Greece. · NTUA, Greece. · ESSEC Business School, Singapore. +19

LLM Agent Orchestration AI Control Bayesian Decision Theory Human-AI Decision Making Decision-Making under Uncertainty

May 1, 2026

Affordance Agent Harness: Verification-Gated Skill Orchestration

Affordance grounding requires identifying where and how an agent should interact in open-world scenes, where actionable regions are often small, occluded, reflective, and visually ambiguous. Recent systems therefore combine multiple skills (e.g., detection, segmentation, interaction-imagination), yet most orchestrate them with fixed pipelines that are poorly matched to per-instance difficulty, offer limited targeted recovery from intermediate errors, and fail to reuse experience from recurring objects. These failures expose a systems problem: test-time grounding must acquire the right evidence, decide whether that evidence is reliable enough to commit, and do so under bounded inference cost without access to labels. We propose Affordance Agent Harness, a closed-loop runtime that unifies heterogeneous skills with an evidence store and cost control, retrieves episodic memories to provide priors for recurring categories, and employs a Router to adaptively select and parameterize skills. An affordance-specific Verifier then gates commitments using self-consistency, cross-scale stability, and evidence sufficiency, triggering targeted retries before a final judge fuses accumulated evidence and trajectories into the prediction. Experiments on multiple affordance benchmarks and difficulty-controlled subsets show a stronger accuracy-cost Pareto frontier than fixed-pipeline baselines, improving grounding quality while reducing average skill calls and latency. Project page: https://tenplusgood.github.io/a-harness-page/.

Haojian Huang, Jiahao Shi, Yinchuan Li +1

HKUST(GZ) · Knowin AI · Harbin Engineering University +1

Multimodal Grounding LLM Agent Orchestration Robotic Affordance Inference

May 1, 2026

SAGA: Workflow-Atomic Scheduling for AI Agent Inference on GPU Clusters

AI agents execute tens to hundreds of chained LLM calls per task, yet GPU schedulers treat each call as independent, discarding gigabytes of intermediate state between steps and inflating end-to-end latency by 3-8x. We argue that this request-level abstraction is fundamentally mismatched to compound AI workloads, and propose a shift to program-level scheduling: treating the entire agent workflow (not individual inference calls) as the first-class schedulable unit. We present SAGA, a distributed scheduler that implements this abstraction through three mechanisms: (1) Agent Execution Graphs that capture workflow structure to predict KV cache reuse across tool-call boundaries, achieving within 1.31x of Bélády's optimal offline policy; (2) session-affinity batching with work stealing that co-locates correlated requests while maintaining global load balance; and (3) Agent Fair Share, a task-completion-time fairness metric with provable bounded-deviation guarantees. On a 64-GPU cluster serving SWE-bench coding agents and WebArena browser tasks, SAGA reduces task completion time by 1.64x (geometric mean, p < 0.001) over vLLM v0.15.1 with prefix caching and affinity routing, while improving GPU memory utilization by 1.22x and achieving 99.2% SLO attainment under multi-tenant interference. These latency gains come at a quantified cost: approximately 30% lower peak throughput than throughput-optimal batch scheduling, a tradeoff appropriate for the latency-sensitive interactive deployments that dominate compound AI usage. Our results demonstrate that workflow-aware scheduling is essential for efficient compound AI serving.

Dongxin Guo, Jikun Wu, Siu Ming Yiu

LLM Inference Efficiency LLM Agent Orchestration LLM Inference Scheduling

May 1, 2026

Agent Capsules: Quality-Gated Granularity Control for Multi-Agent LLM Pipelines

A multi-agent pipeline with N agents typically issues N LLM calls per run. Merging agents into fewer calls (compound execution) promises token savings, but naively merged calls silently degrade quality through tool loss and prompt compression. We present Agent Capsules, an adaptive execution runtime that treats multi-agent pipeline execution as an optimization problem with empirical quality constraints. The runtime instruments coordination overhead per group, scores composition opportunity, selects among three compound execution strategies, and gates every mode switch on rolling-mean output quality. A controlled negative result confirms that injecting more context into a merged call worsens compression rather than relieving it, so the framework's escalation ladder (standard, then two-phase, then sequential) recovers quality by moving toward per-agent dispatch rather than by rewriting merged prompts. On LLM-judged quality, the controller matches a hand-tuned oracle on every measured (model, group, mode) cell: routing compound whenever the oracle would, and reverting to fine whenever quality would fail the floor, without per-model configuration. Against a hand-crafted LangGraph implementation of a 14-agent competitive intelligence pipeline, Agent Capsules uses 51% fewer fine-mode input tokens and 42% fewer compound-mode input tokens, at +0.020 and +0.017 quality respectively. Against a DSPy implementation of a 5-agent due diligence pipeline, the framework uses 19% fewer tokens than uncompiled DSPy at quality parity, and 68% fewer tokens than MIPROv2 at +0.052 quality. Even before compound mode fires, the runtime delivers efficiency through automatic policy resolution, cache-aligned prompts, and topology-aware context injection, matching both hand-tuned and compile-time baselines without training data or per-pipeline engineering.

Aninda Ray

LLM Inference Efficiency Multi-Agent LLM Systems Multi-Agent System Optimization LLM Agent Orchestration LLM Agent Workflow Optimization LLM Agent Efficiency

Apr 30, 2026

In-Context Prompting Obsoletes Agent Orchestration for Procedural Tasks

Agent orchestration frameworks -- LangGraph, CrewAI, Google ADK, OpenAI Agents SDK, and others -- place an external orchestrator above the LLM, tracking state and injecting routing instructions at every turn. We present a controlled comparison showing that for procedural tasks, this architecture is dominated by a simpler alternative: putting the entire procedure in the system prompt and letting the model self-orchestrate. Across three domains -- travel booking (14 nodes), Zoom technical support (14 nodes), and insurance claims processing (55 nodes) -- we evaluate 200 conversations per condition using LLM-as-judge scoring on five quality criteria. The in-context approach scores 4.53--5.00 on a 5-point scale while a LangGraph orchestrator using the same model scores 4.17--4.84. The orchestrated system fails on 24% of travel, 9% of Zoom, and 17% of insurance conversations, compared to 11.5%, 0.5%, and 5% for the in-context baseline. While external orchestration may have been necessary for earlier models, advances in frontier model capabilities have made it unnecessary for multi-turn conversations following a defined procedure.

Simon Dennis, Michael Diamond, Rivaan Patil +2

i14, University of Melbourne · i14

LLM Prompting LLM Agent Orchestration Conversational Agents

Apr 30, 2026

TADI: Tool-Augmented Drilling Intelligence via Agentic LLM Orchestration over Heterogeneous Wellsite Data

We present TADI (Tool-Augmented Drilling Intelligence), an agentic AI system that transforms drilling operational data into evidence-based analytical intelligence. Applied to the Equinor Volve Field dataset, TADI integrates 1,759 daily drilling reports, selected WITSML real-time objects, 15,634 production records, formation tops, and perforations into a dual-store architecture: DuckDB for structured queries over 12 tables with 65,447 rows, and ChromaDB for semantic search over 36,709 embedded documents. Twelve domain-specialized tools, orchestrated by a large language model via iterative function calling, support multi-step evidence gathering that cross-references structured drilling measurements with daily report narratives. The system parses all 1,759 DDR XML files with zero errors, handles three incompatible well naming conventions, and is backed by 95 automated tests plus a 130-question stress-question taxonomy spanning six operational categories. We formalize the agent's behavior as a sequential tool-selection problem and propose the Evidence Grounding Score (EGS) as a simple grounding-compliance proxy based on measurements, attributed DDR quotations, and required answer sections. The complete 6,084-line, framework-free implementation is reproducible given the public Volve download and an API key, and the case studies and qualitative ablation analysis suggest that domain-specialized tool design, rather than model scale alone, is the primary driver of analytical quality in technical operations.

Rong Lu

LLM Agent Orchestration Tool-Using Agents Knowledge-Intensive QA

Apr 30, 2026

Heterogeneous Scientific Foundation Model Collaboration

Agentic large language model systems have demonstrated strong capabilities. However, their reliance on language as the universal interface fundamentally limits their applicability to many real-world problems, especially in scientific domains where domain-specific foundation models have been developed to address specialized tasks beyond natural language. In this work, we introduce Eywa, a heterogeneous agentic framework designed to extend language-centric systems to a broader class of scientific foundation models. The key idea of Eywa is to augment domain-specific foundation models with a language-model-based reasoning interface, enabling language models to guide inference over non-linguistic data modalities. This design allows predictive foundation models, which are typically optimized for specialized data and tasks, to participate in higher-level reasoning and decision-making processes within agentic systems. Eywa can serve as a drop-in replacement for a single-agent pipeline (EywaAgent) or be integrated into existing multi-agent systems by replacing traditional agents with specialized agents (EywaMAS). We further investigate a planning-based orchestration framework in which a planner dynamically coordinates traditional agents and Eywa agents to solve complex tasks across heterogeneous data modalities (EywaOrchestra). We evaluate Eywa across a diverse set of scientific domains spanning physical, life, and social sciences. Experimental results demonstrate that Eywa improves performance on tasks involving structured and domain-specific data, while reducing reliance on language-based reasoning through effective collaboration with specialized foundation models.

Zihao Li, Jiaru Zou, Feihao Fang +6

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

AI for Science LLM Agent Orchestration Multi-Agent Collaboration Multi-Agent Systems

Apr 29, 2026

Bian Que: An Agentic Framework with Flexible Skill Arrangement for Online System Operations

Operating and maintaining (O&M) large-scale online engine systems (eg, search, recommendation and advertising) demands substantial human effort for release monitoring, alert response, and root cause analysis. Despite the inherent suitability of LLM-based agents for such operational scenarios, the critical bottleneck impeding their practical deployment lies not in reasoning, but in orchestration capability - specifically, the precise selection of relevant data (encompassing metrics, logs, and change events) and applicable knowledge (including handbook-defined rules and empirically derived practitioner experience) tailored to each individual operational event. Feeding all signals indiscriminately causes dilution and hallucination, while manually curating the event-to-(data, knowledge) mapping is intractable under dozens of daily releases. Here we present Bian Que, an agentic operating framework with three contributions: (i) The unified operational paradigm, which abstracts routine daily O&M actions into three canonical patterns: release interception, proactive inspection, and alert root cause analysis; (ii) The flexible Skill Arrangement, each predefined Skill explicitly defines the requisite data and operational knowledge for each specific context. Such Skills can be automatically generated and updated by LLM agents, and can also be iteratively optimized by on-call engineers via natural language instructions. (iii) The unified self-evolving mechanism, where each correction signal enables two parallel evolutionary pathways: distilling event memory into knowledge, and targeted refinement of Skills. Deployed on the e-commerce search engine of KuaiShou, Bian Que reduces alert volume by 75%, achieves 80% root-cause analysis accuracy, cuts mean time to resolution by over 50%, and attains a 99.0% pass rate on offline evaluations. Codes are at https://github.com/benchen4395/BianQue_Assistant.

Bochao Liu, Zhipeng Qian, Yang Zhao +10

Kuaishou Technology

Continual Learning for LLM Agents LLM Agent Orchestration Agent Skill Learning Root Cause Analysis

Apr 29, 2026

Autonomous LLM Agents & CTFs: A Second Look

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly proposed to automate offensive security tasks, with recent studies reporting near human-level success rates in Capture-the-Flag (CTF) challenges. We here revisit these results, providing a second look at these claims. We engineer different agent architectures of increasing complexity and modularity on 30 web-based CTFs challenges spanning 14 vulnerability classes. We instantiate these agents with multiple LLM backbones, and compare them with claude-code, a general-purpose agent that automatically determines its internal architecture. Our evaluation yields three main findings. First, claude-code achieves performance comparable to the engineered architectures (19/30 solved tasks), suggesting that general-purpose agents are strong baselines for offensive security tasks. Second, both our architectures and claude-code struggle in the same challenge categories, revealing persistent barriers that keep current agents below human-level capability. Third, by leveraging our manually designed architectures we can systematically measure the impact of additional components, finding that structured orchestration of specialized roles outperforms monolithic designs, improving run-to-run consistency, and reducing execution costs.

Youness Bouchari, Matteo Boffa, Marco Mellia +3

Politecnico di Torino · Universit`a di Torino · Huawei Technologies France

LLM Agent Orchestration AI Agent Security Benchmarks LLMs for Cybersecurity LLM Agent Reliability

Apr 29, 2026

SiriusHelper: An LLM Agent-Based Operations Assistant for Big Data Platforms

Big data platforms are widely used in modern enterprises, and an in-production intelligent assistant is increasingly important to help users quickly find actionable guidance and reduce operational burden. While recent LLM+RAG assistants provide a natural interface, they face practical challenges in real deployments: limited scenario coverage across both general consultation and domain-specific troubleshooting workflows, inefficient knowledge access due to inadequate multi-hop retrieval and flat knowledge organization, and high maintenance cost because escalated tickets are unstructured and hard to convert into assistant improvements and reusable SOPs. In this paper, we present SiriusHelper, a deployed intelligent assistant for big data platforms. SiriusHelper serves as a unified online assistant that automatically identifies user intent and routes queries to the right handling path, including dedicated expert workflows for specialized scenarios (e.g., SQL execution diagnosis). To support complex troubleshooting, SiriusHelper combines a DeepSearch-driven mechanism with a priority-based hierarchical knowledge base to enable multi-hop retrieval without context overload, thus improving answer reliability and latency. To reduce expert overhead, SiriusHelper further introduces automated ticket understanding and SOP distillation: it diagnoses the assistant failure reason (e.g., missing knowledge or wrong routing) and extracts domain-specific SOPs to continuously enrich the knowledge base. Experiments and online deployment on Tencent Big Data platform show that SiriusHelper outperforms representative alternatives and reduces online ticket volume by 20.8%.

Yu Shen, Shiyang Liu, Qihang He +14

TEG, Tencent Inc., China · School of Computer Science, Peking University, China

Customer Support Automation LLM Agent Orchestration LLM Agent Self-Improvement LLM Agents

Apr 28, 2026

ADEMA: A Knowledge-State Orchestration Architecture for Long-Horizon Knowledge Synthesis with LLMAgents

Long-horizon LLM tasks often fail not because a single answer is unattainable, but because knowledge states drift across rounds, intermediate commitments remain implicit, and interruption fractures the evolving evidence chain. This paper presents ADEMA as a knowledge-state orchestration architecture for long-horizon knowledge synthesis rather than as a generic multi-agent runtime. The architecture combines explicit epistemic bookkeeping, heterogeneous dual-evaluator governance, adaptive task-mode switching, reputation-shaped resource allocation, checkpoint-resumable persistence, segment-level memory condensation, artifact-first assembly, and final-validity checking with safe fallback. Evidence is drawn entirely from existing materials: a four-scenario showcase package, a fixed 60-run mechanism matrix, targeted micro-ablation and artifact-chain supplements, and a repaired protocol-level benchmark in which code-oriented evaluation is the clearest quality-sensitive mechanism block. Across the fixed matrix, removing checkpoint/resume produced the only invalid run, and it did so in the interruption-sensitive resume condition. By contrast, dual evaluation, segment synthesis, and dynamic governance are best interpreted as supporting control mechanisms that shape trajectory discipline, explicit artifact progression, and cost-quality behavior rather than as universal binary prerequisites for completion. The contribution is therefore a knowledge-state orchestration architecture in which explicit epistemic state transition, evidence-bearing artifact progression, and recoverable continuity are the primary design commitments.

Zhou Hanlin, Chan Huah Yong

School of Computer Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), Penang, Malaysia · Xiamen Software Vocational & Technical College, Xiamen, China

LLM Agent Memory LLM Agent Orchestration Long-Horizon Agent Tasks