Agentic Workflows

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372 papers

Latest in Agentic Workflows

May 19, 2026cs.AI

AgentCo-op: Retrieval-Based Synthesis of Interoperable Multi-Agent Workflows

Designing multi-agent workflows is especially difficult in open-ended scientific settings where tasks lack curated training sets, reliable scalar evaluation metrics, and standardized interfaces between existing tools and agents. We propose AgentCo-op, a retrieval-based synthesis framework that composes reusable skills, tools, and external agents into executable workflows through typed artifact handoffs, then applies bounded self-guided local repair to implicated components when execution evidence indicates failure. In two open-world genomics case studies, AgentCo-op composes independently developed scientific agents and external tool repositories into auditable workflows without redesigning them or running global topology search. It coordinates specialized agents for spatial transcriptomics and gene-set interpretation to enable collaborative discovery from spatial transcriptomics data, and builds a parallel workflow for cross-modality marker analysis on single-cell multiome data. AgentCo-op can also import a searched workflow as a structural prior and improve it by grounding nodes with retrieved components and applying local repair, showing that synthesis and search are complementary. On six coding, math, and question-answering benchmarks, AgentCo-op achieves the best result on four benchmarks and the best average score under a unified backbone setting, while consistently reducing per-task cost relative to multi-agent baselines. Together, these results suggest that retrieval-based synthesis can extend automated agentic workflow design beyond benchmark-optimized agent graphs to open-world workflows built from existing agents, tools, and typed artifacts.
Shuaike Shen, Wenduo Cheng, Shike Wang +2
May 19, 2026cs.CV

DocQT: Improving Document Forgery Localization Robustness via Diverse JPEG Quantization Tables

Document manipulation localization models achieve strong performance on public benchmarks yet fail to generalize to operational document workflows. We identify a critical and overlooked source of this gap: the mismatch between the narrow distribution of JPEG quantization tables used during training -restricted to standard libjpeg quality factors -and the heterogeneous compression profiles encountered in real-world insurance document pipelines. To isolate this factor, we conduct a controlled factorial study comparing two architectures with contrasting levels of quantization table awareness -FFDN [2] and Mesorch [20] -each trained under either standard quality factor augmentation (Standard-QT ) or operationally calibrated quantization tables sampled from DocQT, a quantization-table bank derived from a MAIF operational image corpus (Real-QT ), and evaluated under three recompression conditions. Training under Real-QT yields substantial localization gains on DocTamper [15] and significantly reduces the pixel-level false positive rate on authentic operational documents, but only for architectures that explicitly ingest the quantization table as input. The released DocQT quantization-table dataset and compression-reproduction material are directly available at https://github.com/Kyliroco/Improving-Document-Forgery-Localization-Robustness-via-Diverse-JPEG-Quantization-Tables. These results demonstrate that standard quality factor augmentation does not adequately proxy operational compression diversity, and that architectural choices explicitly conditioning on the quantization table provide a meaningful robustness advantage for real-world deployment.
Kylian Ronfleux-Corail, Guillaume Bernard, Mickaël Coustaty +1
May 19, 2026cs.CL

Base Models Look Human To AI Detectors

As AI-generated text enters the real-world at scale, institutions increasingly use commercial AI-text detectors, especially in education and academic-integrity workflows. We report a surprising empirical finding about such systems: when evaluated by GPTZero and Pangram, generated text from base models is often judged overwhelmingly human, whereas text generated by their instruction-tuned counterparts is not. Building on this observation, we propose Humanization by Iterative Paraphrasing (HIP), a detector-agnostic pipeline that minimally fine-tunes a base model into a paraphraser and applies it iteratively. Compared with the baselines we test, HIP yields a stronger trade-off between semantic preservation and detector evasion on commercial detectors. Across Llama-3 and Qwen-3 families, spanning model sizes from 0.6B to 70B, HIP consistently improves detector human-likeness. Our findings suggest that current detectors are tracking artifacts of instruction tuning and local context more than any invariant notion of machine-generated text. This, in turn, calls for detector designs that model these factors more explicitly.
Yixuan Even Xu, Ziqian Zhong, Aditi Raghunathan +2
May 18, 2026cs.AI

Learning to Hand Off: Provably Convergent Workflow Learning under Interface Constraints

We study workflow learning in a setting where specialized agents hand off control through a shared artifact, each agent observes only a local function of that artifact and its own private state, and no centralized learner accesses joint trajectories -- the operating regime of multi-agent LLM pipelines that span organizational, vendor, or trust boundaries. We formalize this regime as an interface-constrained semi-Markov decision process (IC-SMDP), whose decision epochs occur at handoff times, and design IC-QQ, an asynchronous decentralized QQ-learning algorithm in which cross-agent coordination at every handoff is exactly one scalar. Our main result is a finite-sample bound for neural IC-QQ that decomposes into three independently controllable error sources: neural function-approximation error, interface representation gap, and a mixing-time residual, under the random option-duration discount. Establishing this bound requires lifting the approximate information state (AIS) framework from single-agent primitive-step MDPs to multi-agent SMDPs and controlling Markovian noise under random duration, neither of which has been done in prior work. To our knowledge this is the first finite-sample guarantee for neural QQ-learning under decentralized partial observability. Four experiments: a controlled synthetic IC-SMDP that validates the bound term-by-term, multi-LLM mathematical reasoning, multi-agent routing, and multi-agent CPU programming, show that IC-QQ matches a centralized oracle without any agent observing joint trajectories, with each of the three error sources scaling along its corresponding axis as the bound predicts.
Jiayu Li, Enpei Zhang, Dawei Zhou +2
May 18, 2026cs.AI

PathoSage: Towards Multi-Source Evidence Adjudication in Pathology via Experience-Aware Agentic Workflow

Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and agent workflows have shown strong promise for computational pathology, yet reliable patch-level reasoning remains challenging. End-to-end pathology MLLMs often hallucinate morphological features, while recent agentic systems usually merge tool outputs and retrieved knowledge into a shared context, making decisions vulnerable to conflicting evidence and context contamination. We propose PathoSage, a three-stage framework that explicitly separates knowledge retrieval, evidence collection, and evidence adjudication for patch-level pathology multimodal reasoning. Its core component, Structured Evidence Deliberation, independently evaluates heterogeneous evidence from tools, performs conflict analysis, and generates the final judgment in a fresh context to reduce anchoring bias. We further introduce a training-free Beta-Bernoulli experience system with continuous credit assignment to model long-term tool reliability and construct similarity-weighted priors for future tool use. Experiments show that PathoSage effectively mitigates VQA hallucinations and classifier disagreement, outperforming strong pathology MLLM and agentic baselines. Our results highlight explicit evidence adjudication and reliability-aware tool modeling as key ingredients for robust pathology agents.
Chengyang Zhang, Wenchuan Zhang, Bo Li +5
May 18, 2026cs.CL

PROTEA: Offline Evaluation and Iterative Refinement for Multi-Agent LLM Workflows

Multi-agent LLM workflows -- systems composed of multiple role-specific LLM calls -- often outperform single-prompt baselines, but they remain difficult to debug and refine. Failures can originate from subtle errors in intermediate outputs that propagate to downstream nodes, requiring developers to inspect long traces and infer which agent to modify. We present PROTEA, a unified interface for offline, test-driven improvement of multi-agent workflows. PROTEA executes a workflow, scores intermediate node outputs with configurable rubrics, and overlays per-node states and rationales on the workflow graph to localize likely bottlenecks. To support complex systems where final-answer references are the primary supervision, PROTEA performs backward node evaluation: it generates candidate node-level expectations from final-answer references and graph context, then compares them with observed node outputs. For selected nodes, PROTEA presents targeted prompt revisions as editable before/after comparisons, then automatically reruns and re-evaluates the workflow to show output changes and score trajectories within the same interface. In two production-adjacent workflows, PROTEA improved document-inspection accuracy from 64.3% to 83.9% and recommendation Hit@5 from 0.30 to 0.38. In a formative study with six experienced LLM developers, participants valued graph-level localization, per-node rationales, and editable before/after prompt revisions.
Kazuki Kawamura, Satoshi Waki, Kei Tateno
May 18, 2026cs.LG

AURORA: Contextual Orthogonalization for Geometric Representation Learning in Healthcare Foundation Models

Recent healthcare foundation models have achieved strong predictive performance through large scale self supervised learning, yet their latent representations frequently entangle physiologic severity, intervention intensity, observational structure, and institutional workflow into shared embedding directions. While effective for downstream prediction, such representations remain semantically opaque and unstable under contextual shift. We introduce AURORA, Adaptive Uncertainty aware Representations through Orthogonalized Relational Alignment, a new framework for healthcare representation learning based on contextual latent geometry. Rather than optimizing a single unified embedding manifold, AURORA decomposes representations into orthogonal semantic subspaces corresponding to distinct contextual factors and learns relational consistency objectives within each subspace. This induces latent spaces that are both semantically disentangled and geometrically interpretable. Across multiple clinical prediction and retrieval tasks, AURORA consistently outperforms reconstruction, contrastive, and self distillation baselines while substantially improving contextual disentanglement, neighborhood purity, and robustness under institutional distribution shift. Our results suggest that latent geometry itself constitutes an important axis of healthcare foundation model design and that explicitly structuring representation space according to contextual semantics provides a complementary direction beyond conventional predictive compression objectives.
Yuanyun Zhang, Shi Li
May 18, 2026cs.AI

Agents for Experiments, Experiments for Agents: A Design Grammar for AI-Enabled Experimental Science

AI systems are becoming active participants in organizational and knowledge work. They increasingly interact with humans, coordinate workflows, and operate in multi-agent arrangements. Understanding their effects therefore requires more than measuring output accuracy; it requires evidence about mechanisms, delegation, feedback, and control. Experiments remain central to this task, but they also face a recursive challenge: we need experiments for agents to study these arrangements, and we may need agents for experiments to help search the expanding space of possible designs. Yet experimental conditions for human-AI and agentic workflows are still largely specified in prose, making them difficult to compare, reuse, or audit. We frame this as a problem of workflow representation, traceability, and governance in AI-enabled knowledge production. We introduce SEED (Structural Encoding for Experimental Discovery), a framework that represents experimental conditions as typed actor-flow graphs. SEED supports three design functions: describing conditions as interaction structures, evaluating structural novelty relative to encoded prior designs, and generating candidate designs under feasibility and governance constraints. We report a lightweight empirical feasibility test that compares graph-blind and SEEDguided generation in a medical-triage design task. In this diagnostic contrast, SEED-guided candidate designs show clearer actor-flow changes, assumptions, and governance checks, supporting the feasibility of the grammar as a design aid. The commentary closes by identifying governance tensions around novelty, replication, validity, diversity of inquiry, and accountability.
Yingjie Zhang, Chun Feng, Weizhang Zhu +1
May 17, 2026cs.AI

GraphMind: From Operational Traces to Self-Evolving Workflow Automation

Complex operational workflows coordinating personnel, tools, and information are central to system operations, yet end-to-end automation remains challenging due to extensive human input requirements and limited ability to adapt over time. We present GraphMind, a system that constructs, executes, and evolves action-centric workflow graphs with minimal human effort. The system operates in three phases. First, a scalable offline pipeline extracts structured workflow graphs from large volumes of human resolution traces, capturing problems, actions, and their causal relationships. Second, an online multi-agent traversal engine navigates the graph to dynamically construct and execute workflows, combining graph-guided retrieval with LLM-driven reasoning at each step. Third, Adaptive Traversal Reinforcement (ATR) reinforces successful traversal paths, enabling execution-informed graph adaptation. GraphMind has been deployed across four production cloud database services for incident investigation. Evaluated on 93 held-out incidents and validated via blind expert review, the system outperforms an Agentic Summary-RAG baseline in mitigation reach, hallucination rate, and diagnostic throughput while requiring 8x less retrieval context. The ATR layer reduces hallucination rate by 26%, demonstrating that workflow graphs can learn from execution feedback. A 12-week field study confirms practical value: 97% of scored conversations yield actionable results within interactive latency.
Yiwen Zhu, Joyce Cahoon, Anna Pavlenko +13
May 17, 2026cs.AI

Towards trustworthy agentic AI: a comprehensive survey of safety, robustness, privacy, and system security

Agentic AI systems -- Large Language Models (LLMs) augmented with planning, tool use, memory, and long-horizon interactions -- can execute complex tasks autonomously, but their multi-step trajectories introduce new failure modes that challenge trustworthiness. This survey provides a focused examination of trustworthy agentic AI through two core dimensions that are critical for high-risk deployments: Safety and Robustness, and Privacy and System Security. For each dimension, we clarify key concepts, identify where risks emerge along the agent workflow, and summarize stage-targeted mitigation strategies. Other trustworthiness aspects (value alignment, transparency, fairness, and accountability) are discussed as relevant context rather than parallel chapters. To support consistent comparison and deployment decisions, we consolidate evaluation into a unified metrics-and-benchmarks hub, emphasizing both outcome and process signals (e.g., constraint violations, trace completeness, and adversarial success rates) and offering scenario-to-metric guidance for release gating. We conclude by outlining open challenges such as self-evolving agents, runtime monitoring and verification, privacy-preserving personalization, and the trust-utility trade-off, and present a case study of real-world security failures in open-source agentic systems. Our goal is to serve as a practical reference for researchers and practitioners building trustworthy agentic systems in high-stakes environments.
Jinhu Qi, Muzhi Li, Jiahong Liu +9
May 15, 2026cs.CL

CHI-Bench: Can AI Agents Automate End-to-End, Long-Horizon, Policy-Rich Healthcare Workflows?

End-to-end automation of realistic healthcare operations stresses three capabilities underrepresented in current benchmarks: policy density, decisions must be grounded in a large library of medical, insurance, and operational rules; Multi-role composition: a single task requires the agent to play multiple roles with handoffs; and multilateral interaction: intermediate workflow steps are multi-turn dialogs, such as peer-to-peer review and patient outreach. We introduce χχ-Bench, a benchmark of long-horizon healthcare workflows across three domains: provider prior authorization, payer utilization management, and care management. Each task hands the agent a clinical case in a high-fidelity simulator of 20 healthcare apps exposed via 87 MCP tools, which it must drive to a terminal status through tool calls and writing the role's artifacts, guided by a 1,290+ document managed-care operations handbook skill. Across 30 agent harness/models configurations, the best agent resolves only 28.0% of tasks, no agent clears 20% on strict pass^3, and executing all tasks in a single session slumps the performance to 3.8%. These results raise the hypothesis that similar gaps are likely to surface in other policy-dense, role-composed, irreversible enterprise domains.
Haolin Chen, Deon Metelski, Leon Qi +30
May 15, 2026cs.HC

LLMs in Qualitative Research: Opportunities, Limitations, and Practical Considerations

This paper examines the opportunities, limitations, and practical considerations associated with the use of large language models (LLMs) in qualitative research. Drawing on a multidisciplinary perspective that combines expertise in qualitative methods and explainable AI, the paper argues that responsible integration of LLMs into qualitative workflows requires researchers to engage critically with a curated set of technical parameters, that is, context window constraints, temperature and top-p sampling settings, user and system prompt design, and model documentation in the form of system cards. The paper situates these considerations within the epistemological commitments of qualitative research, including reflexivity, positionality, and interpretive judgment, and discusses how the opacity of contemporary LLMs differs from earlier natural language processing tools such as topic models and lexicon-based sentiment analyzers.
Henry Salgado, Meagan R. Kendall, Martine Ceberio +1
May 15, 2026cs.AI

ScreenSearch: Uncertainty-Aware OS Exploration

Desktop GUI agents operate under partial observability: visually similar screens can correspond to different underlying workflow states, so locally plausible actions can lead to sharply different outcomes. We frame this as a problem of computer/OS state exploration, where effective behavior requires both expanding the reachable frontier and reducing ambiguity before committing. We present ScreenSearch, a system that combines structural screen retrieval and deduplication with an ambiguity-aware PUCT graph-bandit for large-scale desktop exploration. The retrieval layer converts UIA trees into location-aware structural features, indexes related screens through sparse token search and metadata filters, and maintains a shared deduplicated state graph across VM workers. On top of this graph, we define a scalable ambiguity signal based on matched-action outcome dispersion. If similar screens produce different next states under the same action signature, the state should be probed further rather than treated as resolved. We use this signal together with frontier rewards to drive large-scale exploration and replay-start policy evaluation over the shared graph. Across 11 desktop applications, ScreenSearch collects over 1M screenshots and over 30K deduplicated states, yielding large exploration corpora with substantial cross-application and within-application diversity. On a fixed replay-start slice, we observe a clear novelty--ambiguity trade-off: some policies reduce ambiguity quickly while discovering little frontier. Ambiguity reduction alone is therefore not a sufficient exploration objective. Appendix ablations show that stronger proposal priors can materially improve unique-state discovery during corpus building. These results suggest that state identity, proposal quality, and ambiguity-aware search all matter when deciding when to probe and when to commit.
Michael Solodko, Justin Wagle
May 15, 2026cs.AI

SaaS-Bench: Can Computer-Use Agents Leverage Real-World SaaS to Solve Professional Workflows?

Computer-Using Agents (CUAs) are rapidly extending large language models (LLMs) beyond text-based reasoning toward action execution in more complex environments, such as web browsers and graphical user interfaces (GUIs). However, existing web and GUI agent benchmarks often rely on simplified settings, isolated tasks, or short-horizon interactions, making it difficult to assess capabilities of agents in realistic professional workflows. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) environments are a natural choice for CUA evaluation, as they host a large share of modern digital work and naturally involve dynamic system states, cross-application coordination, domain-specific knowledge, and long-horizon dependencies. To this end, we introduce SaaS-Bench, a benchmark built on 23 deployable SaaS systems across six professional domains, containing 106 tasks grounded in realistic work scenarios. These tasks require long-horizon execution, cover both text-only and multimodal settings, and are evaluated with weighted verification checkpoints that measure strict task completion and partial progress. Experiments show that representative LLM-based agents struggle on SaaS-Bench, with even the strongest model completing fewer than 4% of tasks end-to-end, exposing limitations in planning, state tracking, cross-application context maintenance, and error recovery. Code are available at https://github.com/UniPat-AI/SaaS-Bench for reproduction.
Kean Shi, Zihang Li, Tianyi Ma +13
May 15, 2026cs.AI

ColPackAgent: Agent-Skill-Guided Hard-Particle Monte Carlo Workflows for Colloidal Packing

We introduce ColPackAgent, an agent framework that autonomously runs Monte Carlo simulations of colloidal packing through a Model Context Protocol (MCP) tool server and an agent skill, whether as a standalone agent or inside an existing agent system. By harnessing the MCP server and agent skill, ColPackAgent executes a structured workflow for colloidal packing simulations, which are central to studies of phase behavior, self-assembly, and materials design. Without dedicated simulation tools and workflow instructions, general-purpose Large Language Model (LLM) agents tend to describe such workflows rather than execute them reliably. The MCP server exposes a custom-built colpack Python package that wraps HOOMD-blue hard-particle Monte Carlo, and the skill encodes a four-stage workflow contract. ColPackAgent can carry out the workflow interactively with human feedback, autonomously from an end-to-end prompt, or as autoresearch following a provided program file. We demonstrate the system in different modes with several colloidal packing simulation examples such as cube particles in 3D, a binary system of disks and capsules in 2D, and the 2D hard-disk freezing transition using autoresearch. We also compare model performance on this workflow across a panel of LLMs with 17 stage-specific prompts. This benchmark provides a stage-level check of how reliably different models follow the setup, planning, and analysis workflow. Together, these results show that pairing a domain Python package with MCP tools and a portable agent skill provides a practical route for turning a simulation toolkit into an agent-assisted research workflow.
Lijie Ding, Changwoo Do
May 14, 2026cs.AI

APWA: A Distributed Architecture for Parallelizable Agentic Workflows

Autonomous multi-agent systems based on large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities in independently solving complex tasks in a wide breadth of application domains. However, these systems hit critical reasoning, coordination, and computational scaling bottlenecks as the size and complexity of their tasks grow. These limitations hinder multi-agent systems from achieving high-throughput processing for highly parallelizable tasks, despite the availability of parallel computing and reasoning primitives in the underlying LLMs. We introduce the Agent-Parallel Workload Architecture (APWA), a distributed multi-agent system architecture designed for the efficient processing of heavily parallelizable agentic workloads. APWA facilitates parallel execution by decomposing workflows into non-interfering subproblems that can be processed using independent resources without cross-communication. It supports heterogeneous data and parallel processing patterns, and it accommodates tasks from a wide breadth of domains. In our evaluation, we demonstrate that APWA can dynamically decompose complex queries into parallelizable workflows and scales on larger tasks in settings where prior systems fail completely.
Evan Rose, Tushin Mallick, Matthew D. Laws +2
May 14, 2026cs.MA

Multi-Agentic Approach for History Matching of Oil Reservoirs

History matching is a central inverse problem in reservoir engineering, where uncertain reservoir parameters must be calibrated against observations. Although automated history matching can reduce manual effort, practical deployment remains difficult because engineers must still configure heterogeneous workflows involving parameter selection, physically admissible bounds, optimizer choice, hyperparameter tuning, simulator execution, and diagnostic reporting. We propose PetroGraph, a multi-agent framework for intelligent reservoir history matching that decomposes this workflow into specialized agents for model review, experimental planning, parameterization, optimization, simulation, and summarization. The system combines large language model agents with domain-specific tools, retrieval-augmented access to simulator documentation, validation of modified ECLIPSE input decks, human-in-the-loop checkpoints, and an OPM Flow-based simulation backend. This design enables users to initiate and steer history matching through natural language while preserving explicit control over selected parameters and optimization settings. We evaluate PetroGraph on three reservoir models of increasing complexity: the synthetic SPE1 model, the faulted SPE9 benchmark, and the real-field Norne model. Using weighted normalized root mean square error as the objective, PetroGraph reduces the mismatch by 95% on SPE1, 69% on SPE9, and 13% on Norne. These results demonstrate that multi-agent orchestration can automate key decisions in history matching, lower the expertise barrier for operating complex simulation workflows, and provide a flexible foundation for extensible, domain-aware reservoir model adaptation.
Linar Samigullin, Sergei Shumilin, Evgeny Burnaev
May 14, 2026cs.AI

Small, Private Language Models as Teammates for Educational Assessment Design

Generative AI increasingly supports educational design tasks, e.g., through Large Language Models (LLMs), demonstrating the capability to design assessment questions that are aligned with pedagogical frameworks (e.g., Bloom's taxonomy). However, they often rely on subjective or limited evaluation methods; focus primarily on proprietary models; or rarely systematically examine generation, evaluation, or deployment constraints in real educational settings. Meanwhile, Small Language Models (SLMs) have emerged as local alternatives that better address privacy and resource limitations; yet their effectiveness for assessment tasks remains underexplored. To address this gap, we systematically compare LLMs and SLMs for assessment question design; evaluate generation quality across Bloom's taxonomy levels using reproducible, pedagogically grounded metrics; and further assess model-based judging against expert-informed evaluation by analyzing reliability and agreement patterns. Results show that SLMs achieve competitive performance across key pedagogically motivated quality dimensions while enabling local, privacy-sensitive deployment. However, model-based evaluations also exhibit systematic inconsistencies and bias relative to expert ratings. These findings provide evidence to posit language models as bounded assistants in assessment workflows; underscore the necessity of Human-in-the-Loop; and advance the automated educational question generation field by examining quality, reliability, and deployment-aware trade-offs.
Chris Davis Jaldi, Anmol Saini, Shan Zhang +3
May 14, 2026cs.AI

GraphFlow: An Architecture for Formally Verifiable Visual Workflows Enabling Reliable Agentic AI Automation

GraphFlow is a visual workflow system designed to improve the reliability of agentic AI automation in multi-step, mission-critical processes. In these workflows, small errors compound rapidly: under an idealized model of independent steps, a ten-step process with 90% per-step reliability completes successfully only 35% of the time. Existing workflow platforms provide durable execution and observability but offer few semantic correctness guarantees, while agentic systems plan at inference time, making behavior sensitive to prompt variation and difficult to audit. GraphFlow is designed to address this gap by treating workflow diagrams as the executable specification, a single artifact defining data scope, execution semantics, and monitoring. At compile time, a restricted class of diagrams is specified to produce reusable automations whose contracts (preconditions, postconditions, and composition obligations) are intended to be proof-checked before admission to a shared library. At runtime, a durable engine records outcomes in an append-only event log and can enforce contracts at system boundaries, supporting replay, retries, and audit. Swimlanes make trust boundaries explicit, separating verified logic from external systems, human judgment, and AI decisions. A year-long pilot across three clinical sites executed 8,728 cohort-enrolled workflow runs with a 97.08% completion rate under an early prototype without the verified-core subsystem; observed failures were localized primarily to external integrations. The formal semantics and proof-checked admission model described here are specified and under active development. Evaluation of the verified core is reserved for future work.
Drewry H. Morris, Luis Valles, Reza Hosseini Ghomi
May 14, 2026cs.AI

A Deterministic Agentic Workflow for HS Tariff Classification: Multi-Dimensional Rule Reasoning with Interpretable Decisions

Harmonized System (HS) tariff classification is a high-stakes, expert-level task in which a free-form product description must be mapped to a specific six- or eight-digit code under the General Interpretive Rules (GIR), section notes, chapter notes, and Explanatory Notes. The difficulty lies not in knowledge volume but in multi-dimensional rule reasoning: a correct classification must satisfy competing priority rules along several axes simultaneously, including material, form, function, essential character, the part-versus-whole boundary, and specific listing versus residual headings. End-to-end prompting of large language models fails characteristically by resolving one axis while ignoring the priority constraints on the others. We present a deterministic agentic workflow in contrast to self-planning agents: the control flow is fixed, language model calls are confined to narrow stages, and reflection and verification are retained as local mechanisms. This design yields interpretability by construction--each decision is decomposed into stage-wise structured outputs with verbatim citation of the chapter or section notes that bear on it. The architecture combines offline knowledge-engineering of the Chinese HS tariff with an online six-stage pipeline. Evaluated on HSCodeComp at the six-digit level, the workflow reaches 75.0% top-1 and 91.5% top-3 at four digits, and 64.2% top-1 and 78.3% top-3 at six digits with Qwen3.6-plus; an open-weight Qwen3.6-27B-FP8 backbone in non-thinking mode achieves 84.2% four-digit and 77.4% six-digit top-1 agreement with the frontier model. A two-stage manual audit of 226 six-digit disagreements suggests that a non-trivial fraction of HSCodeComp ground-truth labels may deviate from HS general rules; full adjudication records are released in the appendix as preliminary findings for community review.
Yu Zhang, Dongjiang Zhuang, Qu Zhou +4
May 14, 2026cs.AI

MediaClaw: Multimodal Intelligent-Agent Platform Technical Report

MediaClaw is a multimodal agent platform built on the OpenClaw ecosystem. Its core design follows a three-layer architecture of unified abstraction, pluginized extension, and workflow orchestration. The system is intended to address practical deployment pain points in AIGC adoption, including fragmented capabilities, heterogeneous interfaces, disconnected production processes, and limited reuse of high-quality production workflows. \system{} abstracts full-category AIGC capabilities into a unified invocation model, uses plugins to support hot-pluggable capability expansion, and uses task-oriented Skills to turn complex production processes into reusable workflow assets. This report focuses on the architectural design philosophy of MediaClaw, the design logic of its core capability model, and the key engineering trade-offs in implementation. It aims to provide reusable practical reference for building multimodal capability platforms.
Shaoan Zhao, Huanlin Gao, Qiang Hui +9
May 14, 2026cs.SE

In-IDE Toolkit for Developers of AI-Based Features

AI-enabled features built on LLMs and agentic workflows are difficult to test, debug, and reproduce, especially for product-focused software engineers without a machine learning background. We present the AI Toolkit plugin for JetBrains IDEs, which brings tracing and evaluation directly into the Run/Debug loop. A mixed methods study with practitioners presents three consistent needs: (1) make evaluation regular and repeatable, (2) expose traces at the moment of execution, and (3) minimize setup and context switching. Guided by these needs, the AI Toolkit introduces an IDE-native workflow: run-triggered trace capture; immediate, hierarchical inspection; one-click "Add to Dataset" from traces; and unit-test-like evaluations with pluggable metrics. The first release in PyCharm shows promising early signals - strong conversion when promoted at Run, sustained usage among those who capture traces, and low churn - suggesting that IDE-native observability lowers activation energy and helps developers adopt disciplined practices. We detail the design and implementation of the AI Agents Debugger and AI Evaluation, report initial adoption telemetry, and outline next steps to broaden framework coverage and scale evaluations. Together, these results indicate that integrating AI observability and evaluation into everyday IDE workflows can make modern AI development accessible to non-ML specialists while preserving software-engineering practices.
Yaroslav Sokolov, Yury Khudyakov, Lenar Sharipov +3
May 14, 2026cs.LG

Lang2MLIP: End-to-End Language-to-Machine Learning Interatomic Potential Development with Autonomous Agentic Workflows

Developing machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) for complex materials systems remains challenging because it requires expertise in atomistic simulations, machine learning, and workflow design, as well as iterative active learning procedures. Existing automated pipelines typically assume a fixed sequence of stages or depend on domain experts, which limits their adaptability to heterogeneous materials systems where the optimal curriculum is not known in advance. To lower the barrier to developing MLIPs for non-experts, we propose Lang2MLIP, a multi-agent framework that takes natural-language input and formulates end-to-end MLIP development as a sequential decision-making problem solved by large language models (LLMs). At each step, a decision-making agent observes the current dataset, model, evaluation results, and execution log, and then automatically selects an appropriate action to improve the model. This removes the need for a predefined pipeline and enables the agent to self-correct by revisiting earlier subsystems when new failures arise. We evaluate this approach on a solid electrolyte interphase (SEI) system with multiple components and interfaces. These results suggest that LLM-based multi-agent systems are a promising direction for automating MLIP development and making it more accessible to non-experts.
Wenwen Li, Yuki Orimo, Nontawat Charoenphakdee
May 14, 2026cs.AI

Herculean: An Agentic Benchmark for Financial Intelligence

As AI agents improve, the central question is no longer whether they can solve isolated well-defined financial tasks, but whether they can reliably carry out financial professional work. Existing financial benchmarks offer only a partial view of this ability, as they primarily evaluate static competencies such as question answering, retrieval, summarization, and classification. We introduce Herculean, the first skilled benchmark for agentic financial intelligence spanning four representative workflows, including Trading, Hedging, Market Insights, and Auditing. Each workflow is instantiated as a standardized MCP-based skill environment with its own tools, interaction dynamics, constraints, and success criteria, enabling consistent end-to-end assessment of heterogeneous agent systems. Across frontier agents, we find agents perform relatively well on Trading and Market Insights, but struggle substantially on Hedging and Auditing, where long-horizon coordination, state consistency, and structured verification are critical. Overall, our results point to a key gap in current agents in turning financial reasoning into dependable workflow execution in high-stakes financial workflows.
Xueqing Peng, Zhuohan Xie, Yupeng Cao +60
May 14, 2026cs.AI

Are Agents Ready to Teach? A Multi-Stage Benchmark for Real-World Teaching Workflows

Language agents are increasingly deployed in complex professional workflows, with tutoring emerging as a particularly high-stakes capability that remains largely unmeasured in existing benchmarks. Effective tutor agents require more than producing correct answers or executing accurate tool calls: a robust tutor must diagnose learner state, adapt support over time, make pedagogically justified decisions grounded in educational evidence, and execute interventions within realistic learning-management systems. We introduce EduAgentBench, a source-grounded benchmark for holistically evaluating tutor agents across the full scope of teaching work. It contains 150 quality-controlled tasks across three capability surfaces: professional pedagogical judgment, situated multi-turn tutoring, and Canvas-style teaching workflow completion. Tasks are constructed through a pedagogical-insight-driven pipeline and evaluated with complementary verification signals and human review. Across a comprehensive evaluation of frontier models, our findings reveal that current models are generally capable of bounded pedagogical judgment, but still fall short of professional teaching standards in situated tutoring and autonomous teaching-workflow execution. To our knowledge, EduAgentBench is the first theory-grounded and realistic benchmark for evaluating the holistic teaching capability of tutor agents, providing a measurement foundation for developing future tutor agents that can support realistic teaching work.
Zixin Chen, Peng Liu, Rui Sheng +6
May 13, 2026cs.AI

ClawForge: Generating Executable Interactive Benchmarks for Command-Line Agents

Interactive agent benchmarks face a tension between scalable construction and realistic workflow evaluation. Hand-authored tasks are expensive to extend and revise, while static prompt evaluation misses failures that only appear when agents operate over persistent state. Existing interactive benchmarks have advanced agent evaluation significantly, but most initialize tasks from clean state and do not systematically test how agents handle pre-existing partial, stale, or conflicting artifacts. We present \textbf{ClawForge}, a generator-backed benchmark framework for executable command-line workflows under state conflict. The framework compiles scenario templates, grounded slots, initialized state, reference trajectories, and validators into reproducible task specifications, and evaluates agents step by step over persistent workflow surfaces using normalized end state and observable side effects rather than exact trajectory matching. We instantiate this framework as the ClawForge-Bench (17 scenarios, 6 ability categories). Results across seven frontier models show that the best model reaches only 45.3% strict accuracy, wrong-state replacement remains below 17% for all models, and the widest model separation (17% to 90%) is driven by whether agents inspect existing state before acting. Partial-credit and step-efficiency analyses further reveal that many failures are near-miss closures rather than early breakdowns, and that models exhibit qualitatively different failure styles under state conflict.
Yuxiang Lai, Peng Xia, Haonian Ji +8
May 13, 2026cs.CV

ProtoMedAgent: Multimodal Clinical Interpretability via Privacy-Aware Agentic Workflows

While interpretable prototype networks offer compelling case-based reasoning for clinical diagnostics, their raw continuous outputs lack the semantic structure required for medical documentation. Bridging this gap via standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) routinely triggers ``retrieval sycophancy,'' where Large Language Models (LLMs) hallucinate post-hoc rationalizations to align with visual predictions. We introduce ProtoMedAgent, a framework that formalizes multimodal clinical reporting as an iterative, zero-gradient test-time optimization problem over a strict neuro-symbolic bottleneck. Operating on a frozen prototype backbone, we distill latent visual and tabular features into a discrete semantic memory. Online generation is strictly constrained by exact set-theoretic differentials and a reflective Scribe-Critic loop, mathematically precluding unsupported narrative claims. To safely bound data disclosure, we introduce a semantic privacy gate governed by kk-anonymity and ℓ\ell-diversity. Evaluated on a 4,160-patient clinical cohort, ProtoMedAgent achieves 91.2% Comparison Set Faithfulness where it fundamentally outperforms standard RAG (46.2%). ProtoMedAgent additionally leverages a binding ℓ\ell-diversity phase transition to systematically reduce artifact-level membership inference risks by an absolute 9.8%.
Alvaro Lopez Pellicer, Plamen Angelov, Marwan Bukhari +3
May 13, 2026cs.AI

SPIN: Structural LLM Planning via Iterative Navigation for Industrial Tasks

Industrial LLM agent systems often separate planning from execution, yet LLM planners frequently produce structurally invalid or unnecessarily long workflows, leading to brittle failures and avoidable tool and API cost. We propose \texttt{SPIN}, a planning wrapper that combines validated Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) planning with prefix based execution control. \texttt{SPIN} enforces a strict DAG contract through \texttt{_validate_plan_text} and repair prompting, producing executable plans before downstream execution, and then evaluates DAG prefixes incrementally to stop when the current prefix is sufficient to answer the query. On AssetOpsBench, across 261 scenarios, \texttt{SPIN} reduces executed tasks from 1061 to 623 and improves \emph{Accomplished} from 0.638 to 0.706, while reducing tool calls from 11.81 to 6.82 per run. On MCP Bench, the same wrapper improves planning, grounding, and dependency related scores for both GPT OSS1 and Llama 4 Maverick.
Yusuke Ozaki, Dhaval Patel
May 13, 2026cs.CL

FlowCompile: An Optimizing Compiler for Structured LLM Workflows

Structured LLM workflows, where specialized LLM sub-agents execute according to a predefined graph, have become a powerful abstraction for solving complex tasks. Optimizing such workflows, i.e., selecting configurations for each sub-agent to balance accuracy and latency, is challenging due to the combinatorial design space over model choices, reasoning budgets, and workflow structures. Existing cost-aware methods largely treat workflow optimization as a routing problem, selecting a configuration at inference time for each query according to the accuracy-latency objective used during training. We argue that structured LLM workflows can also be optimized from a compilation perspective: before deployment, the system can globally explore the workflow design space and construct a reusable set of workflow-level configurations spanning diverse accuracy-latency trade-offs. Drawing inspiration from machine learning compilers, we introduce FlowCompile, a structured LLM workflow compiler that performs compile-time design space exploration to identify a high-quality, reusable trade-off set. FlowCompile decomposes a workflow into sub-agents, profiles each sub-agent under diverse configurations, and composes these measurements through a structure-aware proxy to estimate workflow-level accuracy and latency. It then identifies diverse high-quality configurations in a single compile-time pass, without retraining or online adaptation. Experiments across diverse workflows and challenging benchmarks show that FlowCompile consistently outperforms heuristically optimized workflow configurations and routing-based baselines, delivering up to 6.4x speedup. The compiled configuration set further serves as a reusable optimization artifact, enabling flexible deployment under varying runtime preferences and supporting downstream selection or routing.
Junyan Li, Zhang-Wei Hong, Maohao Shen +2
May 13, 2026cs.AI

AI-Generated Slides: Are They Good? Can Students Tell?

As generative AI (GenAI) tools become easily accessible, there is promise in using such tools to support instructors. To that end, this paper examines using GenAI to help generate slides from instructor authored course notes, emphasizing instructor and student perceptions. We examine an end-to-end education tool (NotebookLM), two general-purpose LLMs (Claude, M365 Copilot), and two coding assistants (Cursor, Claude Code). We first analyze whether GenAI generated slides are good'' via narrative assessment by educators. We choose the best slides to use (with some modification) in a real course setting, and compare the student perception of human vs. AI generated slides. We find that coding assistant tools produce slides that were most accurate, complete, and pedagogically sound. Additionally, students rate GenAI slides to be of similar quality as instructor-created slides, and cannot reliably identify which slides are AI-generated. Additionally, we find a negative correlation between a high quality rating and a high AI-generated'' rating, suggesting students associate poor quality with the source of the slides being AI. These findings highlight promising opportunities for integrating GenAI into instructional design workflows and call for further research on how educators can best harness such tools responsibly and effectively.
Juho Leinonen, Lisa Zhang, Arto Hellas
May 13, 2026cs.AR

GenAI-Driven Approach to RISC-V Supply Chain Exploration

This paper presents an LLM-empowered workflow for RISC-V supply chain analysis, integrating Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) to enable comprehensive, multimodal data-driven insights. The proposed approach addresses the challenges of heterogeneous and unstructured supply chain data by leveraging LLMs for textual understanding and VLMs for extracting information from visual artifacts such as diagrams, tables, and scanned documents. These models collaboratively identify key entities and relationships, which are then organized into a knowledge graph representing supply chain components and their interdependencies. For analytical reasoning, the workflow incorporates MDE techniques and constraint-based modeling to enable formal validation of dependencies, detection of bottlenecks, and assessment of risks. The synergy between LLM- and VLM-based semantic understanding and MDE-based formal analysis supports both exploratory and systematic evaluation of supply chain resilience. A human-in-the-loop mechanism further enables interactive querying and expert validation. The approach is evaluated in RISC-V ecosystem scenarios, demonstrating its effectiveness in generating actionable insights, enhancing transparency, and supporting decision-making in complex semiconductor supply chains.
Nenad Petrovic, Andre Schamschurko, Yingjie Xu +1
May 13, 2026cs.MA

A Multi-Agent Orchestration Framework for Venture Capital Due Diligence

We present a fully automated multi-agent framework for corporate due diligence and market analysis in venture capital. The system runs on an event-driven orchestration architecture, combining Large Language Models (LLMs) with real-time web retrieval to synthesize unstructured data into structured investment intelligence. A central technical contribution is a programmatic extraction pipeline that reverse-engineers the frontend-to-backend communication of the Greek Business Registry (ΓΓ.E.MH.), querying dynamic endpoints to retrieve official financial filings that are then parsed using a layout-aware OCR extractor. A structural fallback mechanism explicitly flags data absence rather than generating unverified figures, directly targeting hallucination in financial contexts. All workflow artifacts are publicly available to support replication.
Grigorios Alexandrou, Katerina Pramatari
May 13, 2026stat.ML

When Should an AI Workflow Release? Always-Valid Inference for Black-Box Generate-Verify Systems

LLM-enabled AI workflows increasingly produce outputs through iterative generate-evaluate-revise loops. Each iteration can improve the candidate, but it also creates a release decision: when to stop and output the current result? This raises a statistical challenge because deployment-time evaluator scores are adaptively generated and repeatedly monitored, yet the likelihood models or exchangeability assumptions typically used for calibration are unavailable. We propose an always-valid release wrapper for existing generator-evaluator pipelines. The wrapper builds a hard-negative reference pool of high-scoring failures, calibrates deployment-time evaluator scores against this pool, and accumulates the resulting evidence with an e-process. This separates two roles: the reference pool turns black-box scores into conservative evidence, while the e-process provides validity under optional stopping. In theory, we show that a conservative reference pool yields finite-sample control of the probability of releasing on infeasible tasks, that is, tasks for which the given workflow is not capable of producing a reliable solution. We also characterize conditions under which the same conservative rule still achieves nontrivial release on feasible tasks. In an MBPP+ coding-agent case study, the wrapper reduces premature incorrect release relative to baseline stopping rules while still releasing on tasks for which the workflow repeatedly accumulates moderate supporting evidence.
Young Hyun Cho, Will Wei Sun
May 12, 2026q-bio.QM

Towards Discovery of Polymers for Insulin Delivery via Physics-Grounded Agentic Workflows

Cold-chain storage limits access to insulin for hundreds of millions of people; a thermally protective patch polymer could help, but the design space is too large for exhaustive experiment. Starting from that problem, we narrow to an agentic workflow: a large language model (LLM) calls physics-based tools through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), searching the discrete PSMILES space under a budget of OpenMM Packmol-matrix evaluations. The LLM acts as an implicit acquisition function conditioned on a persistent "discovery world": hypotheses, literature claims, and simulation outcomes updated each iteration. Under matched oracle budgets, the best autonomous campaign reaches an insulin-polymer interaction energy of -2263 kJ/mol, outperforming reinforcement-learning baselines by 68% and Bayesian optimization by 19%. Three independent campaigns converge on one structural motif (dense hydrogen-bond donors and acceptors per repeat unit) while physics checks reject infeasible packings and name-structure mismatches before they steer the next step. The science stage is CPU-bound and runs on commodity hardware. More broadly, the same architecture and workflow designed here applies to other protein-stabilization tasks whenever a tractable screening oracle is available.
Martins Otun
May 12, 2026cs.AI

ProfiliTable: Profiling-Driven Tabular Data Processing via Agentic Workflows

Table processing-including cleaning, transformation, augmentation, and matching-is a foundational yet error-prone stage in real-world data pipelines. While recent LLM-based approaches show promise for automating such tasks, they often struggle in practice due to ambiguous instructions, complex task structures, and the lack of structured feedback, resulting in syntactically correct but semantically flawed code. To address these challenges, we propose ProfiliTable, an autonomous multi-agent framework centered on dynamic profiling, which constructs and iteratively refines a unified execution context through interactive exploration, knowledge-augmented synthesis, and feedback-driven refinement. ProfiliTable integrates (i) a Profiler that performs ReAct-style data exploration to build semantic understanding, (ii) a Generator that retrieves curated operators to synthesize task-aware code, and (iii) an Evaluator-Summarizer loop that injects execution scores and diagnostic insights to enable closed-loop refinement. Extensive experiments on a diverse benchmark covering 18 tabular task types demonstrate that ProfiliTable consistently outperforms strong baselines, particularly in complex multi-step scenarios. These results highlight the critical role of dynamic profiling in reliably translating ambiguous user intents into robust and governance-compliant table transformations.
Wei Liu, Yang Gu, Xi Yan +5
May 12, 2026cs.CV

H3D-MarNet: Wavelet-Guided Dual-Path Learning for Metal Artifact Suppression and CT Modality Transformation for Radiotherapy Workflows

Metal artifacts in computed tomography (CT) severely degrade image quality, compromising diagnostic accuracy and radiotherapy planning, especially in cancer patients with high-density implants. We propose H3D-MarNet, a two-stage framework for artifact-aware CT domain transformation from kilo-voltage CT (kVCT) to mega-voltage CT (MVCT). In the first stage, a wavelet-based preprocessing module suppresses metal-induced artifacts through frequency-aware denoising while preserving anatomical structures. In second stage, Domain-TransNet performs kVCT-to-MVCT domain transformation using a hybrid volumetric learning architecture. Domain-TransNet integrates a CNN-based encoder to capture fine-grained local anatomical details and a transformer-based encoder to model long-range volumetric dependencies. The complementary representations are fused through an attention-based feature fusion mechanism to ensure spatial and contextual coherence across slices. A multi-stage, attention-guided decoder, supported by deep supervision, progressively reconstructs artifact-suppressed MVCT volumes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that H3D-MarNet achieves 28.14 dB PSNR and 0.717 SSIM on artifact-affected slices from full dataset, indicating effective metal artifact suppression and anatomical preservation, highlighting its potential for reliable CT modality transformation in clinical radiotherapy workflows.
Mubashara Rehman, Niki Martinel, Michele Avanzo +2
May 11, 2026gr-qc

Discovery of Interpretable Surrogates via Agentic AI: Application to Gravitational Waves

Fast surrogate models for expensive simulations are now essential across the sciences, yet they typically operate as black boxes. We present \texttt{GWAgent}, a large language model (LLM)-based workflow that constructs interpretable analytic surrogates directly from simulation data. Surrogate modeling is well suited to agentic workflows because candidate models can be quantitatively validated against ground-truth simulations at each iteration. As a demonstration, we build a surrogate for gravitational waveforms from eccentric binary black hole mergers. We show that providing the agent with a physics-informed domain ansatz substantially improves output model accuracy. The resulting analytic surrogate attains a median Advanced LIGO mismatch of 6.9×10−46.9\times10^{-4} together with an ∼8.4×\sim 8.4\times speedup in waveform evaluation, surpassing both symbolic regression and conventional machine learning baselines. Beyond producing an accurate model, the workflow identifies compact physical structure from the learned representation. As an astrophysical application, we use \texttt{GWAgent} to analyze the eccentricity of GW200129 and infer e20Hz=0.099−0.044+0.063e_{20\mathrm{Hz}}=0.099^{+0.063}_{-0.044}. These results show that validation-constrained agentic workflows can produce accurate, fast, and interpretable surrogates for scientific simulations and inference.
Tousif Islam, Digvijay Wadekar, Tejaswi Venumadhav +4
May 11, 2026cs.CR

Comment and Control: Hijacking Agentic Workflows via Context-Grounded Evolution

Automation platforms such as GitHub Actions and n8n are increasingly adopting so-called agentic workflows, which integrate Large Language Model (LLM) agents for tasks such as code review and data synchronization. While bringing convenience for developers, this integration exposes a new risk: An adversary may control and craft certain inputs, such as GitHub issue comments, to manipulate the LLM agent for unwanted actions, such as credential exfiltration and arbitrary command execution. To our knowledge, no prior academic work has studied such a risk in agentic workflows. In this paper, we design the first detection and exploitation framework, called JAW, to hijack agentic workflows hosted on automation platforms via a novel approach called Context-Grounded Evolution. Our key idea is to evolve agentic workflow inputs under the contexts derived from hybrid program analysis for hijacking purposes. Specifically, JAW generates agentic workflow contexts through three analyses: (i) static path-feasibility analysis to identify feasible agent-invocation paths and the input constraints required to trigger them, (ii) dynamic prompt-provenance analysis to determine how that input is transformed and embedded into the LLM context, and (iii) capability analysis to identify the actions and restrictions available to the agent at runtime. Our evaluation of JAW on GitHub workflows and n8n templates showed that 4714 GitHub workflows and eight n8n templates can be successfully hijacked, for example, to leak user credentials. Our findings span 15 widely-used GitHub Actions, including official GitHub Actions for Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Qwen CLI, and Cursor CLI, and two official n8n nodes. We responsibly disclosed all findings to the affected vendors and received many acknowledgements, fixes, and bug bounties, notably from GitHub, Google, and Anthropic.
Neil Fendley, Zhengyu Liu, Aonan Guan +2
May 11, 2026cs.CR

Engineering Robustness into Personal Agents with the AI Workflow Store

The dominant paradigm for AI agents is an "on-the-fly" loop in which agents synthesize plans and execute actions within seconds or minutes in response to user prompts. We argue that this paradigm short-circuits disciplined software engineering (SE) processes -- iterative design, rigorous testing, adversarial evaluation, staged deployment, and more -- that have delivered the (relatively) reliable and secure systems we use today. By focusing on rapid, real-time synthesis, are AI agents effectively delivering users improvised prototypes rather than systems fit for high-stakes scenarios in which users may unwittingly apply them? This paper argues for the need to integrate rigorous SE processes into the agentic loop to produce production-grade, hardened, and deterministically-constrained agent workflows that substantially outperform the potentially brittle and vulnerable results of on-the-fly synthesis. Doing so may require extra compute and time, and if so, we must amortize the cost of rigor through reuse across a broad user community. We envision an AI Workflow Store that consists of hardened and reusable workflows that agents can invoke with far greater reliability and security than improvised tool chains. We outline the research challenges of this vision, which stem from a broader flexibility-robustness tension that we argue requires moving beyond the ``on-the-fly'' paradigm to navigate effectively.
Roxana Geambasu, Mariana Raykova, Pierre Tholoniat +3
May 11, 2026cs.SE

Deterministic vs. LLM-Controlled Orchestration for COBOL-to-Python Modernization

Modernizing legacy COBOL systems remains difficult due to scarce expertise, large and long-lived codebases, and strict correctness requirements. Recent large language model (LLM)-based modernization systems increasingly rely on agentic workflows in which the model controls multi-step tool execution. However, it remains unclear whether delegating execution control to the LLM improves correctness, robustness, or efficiency in structured software engineering workflows. We present a controlled empirical study of deterministic and LLM-controlled orchestration for COBOL-to-Python modernization. Using a unified experimental framework, we hold the language models, prompts, tools, configurations, and source programs constant while varying only the execution control strategy. This isolates orchestration as the sole experimental variable. We evaluate both approaches using functional correctness, robustness across repeated stochastic runs, and computational efficiency. Across multiple models, deterministic orchestration achieves comparable computational accuracy to LLM-controlled orchestration while improving worst-case robustness and reducing performance variability across runs. Deterministic execution also reduces token consumption by up to 3.5x, leading to substantially lower operational cost. These results suggest that, in structured modernization workflows with explicit validation stages, fixed execution policies provide more stable and cost-efficient behavior than fully agentic orchestration without reducing translation quality.
Naing Oo Lwin, Rajesh Kumar
May 10, 2026cs.DL

CheckSupport: A Local LLM-Powered Tool for Automated Manuscript Submission Checklist Selection and Completion

Transparent and standardized reporting is essential for reproducible scientific research, yet adherence to reporting guidelines remains inconsistent because of the manual effort required to select and complete checklists. We present CheckSupport, an open-source, locally deployable system that uses large language models to automate the recommendation of reporting checklists and the evidence-grounded completion of checklists for scientific manuscripts. CheckSupport employs a staged prompting strategy that decomposes reporting workflows into constrained inference tasks, prioritizing faithful extraction over generative text synthesis. All inference is performed locally using instruction-tuned models, preserving data privacy and enabling reproducible, auditable workflows. Evaluated on a corpus of peer-reviewed manuscripts, CheckSupport achieved 90% overall accuracy for checklist recommendations and 88% overall accuracy for item-level completion while operating on CPU-only hardware. On average, the wall-clock time per manuscript was 12.5 seconds, including the checklist recommendation and full checklist completion. These results demonstrate that large language models, when applied as structured inference components, can reduce reporting burden and support more transparent and reproducible scientific reporting across disciplines.
Satvik Tripathi, Don Enwerem, Kevin Song +3
May 10, 2026cs.AI

Towards a Virtual Neuroscientist: Autonomous Neuroimaging Analysis via Multi-Agent Collaboration

Transforming neuroimaging data into clinically actionable biomarkers is a knowledge-intensive and labor-intensive process. Standardized workflows such as fMRIPrep have improved robustness and efficiency, but they are statically configured and cannot reason about downstream objectives, deliberate over alternative strategies, or close the loop between intermediate evidence and subsequent decisions in the way a human researcher would. This lack of closed-loop adaptation often leaves domain experts trapped in a cycle of manual trial-and-error to tune parameters and remediate pipeline failures, severely constraining the scalability of clinical biomarker development. To bridge this gap, we introduce NEXUS, an autonomous multi-agent framework that integrates neuroimaging workflow execution with scientific-objective understanding. Unlike conventional flat toolcalling agents, NEXUS adopts a code-centric execution paradigm where specialist agents collaboratively synthesize and optimize executable programs over composable domain-specific primitives. This design enables robust, long-horizon workflow construction that adapts dynamically to runtime observations. Furthermore, we propose a hierarchical verification framework for autonomous quality control, integrating cohort-level metric screening with agentic visual inspection to drive evidence-grounded workflow remediation. Experiments on ADHD-200 and ADNI demonstrate that NEXUS outperforms standard workflow-based baselines in predictive performance while exhibiting sophisticated agentic behaviors, including strategy exploration and adaptive refinement. The code is available at https://github.com/LearningKeqi/Virtual-Neuroscientist-NEXUS.
Keqi Han, Songlin Zhao, Yao Su +4
May 10, 2026cs.AI

Position: Avoid Overstretching LLMs for every Enterprise Task

Enterprise workloads are dominated by deterministic, structured, and knowledge-dependent tasks operating under strict cost, latency, and reliability constraints. While these are often addressed through large language model (LLM) deployment or distillation into smaller models, we argue this is inefficient, unreliable, and misaligned with enterprise task structures. Instead, AI systems should treat language models as interfaces rather than monolithic engines, externalizing knowledge and computation into dedicated components for greater reliability, scalability, and transparency. Our theoretical evidences show that finite-capacity models cannot fully capture the breadth of knowledge required for enterprise tasks, creating inherent limits to efficiency and interpretability. Building on this, we take the position that language models should primarily be used for structured extraction in deterministic enterprise workflows, while computation and storage are delegated to knowledge bases and symbolic procedures. We formally demonstrate that such modular architectures are more reliable and maintainable than monolithic frameworks, offering a sustainable foundation for enterprise tasks.
Kuldeep Singh, Anson Bastos, Isaiah Onando Mulang'
May 10, 2026cs.AI

Do Self-Evolving Agents Forget? Capability Degradation and Preservation in Lifelong LLM Agent Adaptation

Recent advances in LLM agents enable systems that autonomously refine workflows, accumulate reusable skills, self-train their underlying models, and maintain persistent memory. However, we show that such self-evolution is often non-monotonic: adapting to new task distributions can progressively degrade previously acquired capabilities across all major evolution channels. We identify this phenomenon as \emph{capability erosion under self-evolution} and show that it consistently emerges across workflow, skill, model, and memory evolution. To mitigate this issue, we propose \emph{Capability-Preserving Evolution} (CPE), a general stabilization principle that constrains destructive capability drift during continual adaptation. Across all four evolution dimensions, CPE consistently improves retained capability stability while preserving adaptation performance. For example, in workflow evolution, CPE improves retained simple-task performance from 41.8% to 52.8% under GPT-5.1 optimization while simultaneously achieving stronger complex-task adaptation. Our findings suggest that stable long-horizon self-evolving agents require not only acquiring new capabilities, but also explicitly preserving previously learned ones during continual adaptation.
Ye Yu, Xiaopeng Yuan, Haibo Jin +3
May 9, 2026cs.LG

AgentSlimming: Towards Efficient and Cost-Aware Multi-Agent Systems

Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex tasks. However, manually designing optimal communication topologies is labor-intensive, while automated expansion methods often result in bloated structures with redundant agents, leading to excessive token consumption. To address this problem, we introduce \textbf{AgentSlimming}, a plug-and-play compression framework for graph-structured multi-agent workflows. Motivated by pruning and quantization in neural networks, AgentSlimming compresses workflows by first estimating the importance score of each agent with a hybrid mechanism, and then removes redundant agents or replaces them with low-cost ones, where each operation is validated using a baseline-anchored acceptance rule to prevent performance collapse. Experiments show that AgentSlimming reduces average token cost by up to 78.9% with negligible performance degradation, and sometimes even improves accuracy, achieving a strong Pareto-optimal trade-off between cost and quality. \textit{Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/CitrusYL/AgentSlimming
Yulang Chen, Haoxuan Peng, Jinyan Liu +3
May 9, 2026cs.AI

EvoMAS: Learning Execution-Time Workflows for Multi-Agent Systems

Large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems have shown strong potential on complex tasks through agent specialization, tool use, and collaborative reasoning. However, most automated multi-agent system design methods still follow a one-shot paradigm: a workflow is optimized or selected before execution and then reused unchanged throughout the task. This static coordination strategy is ill-suited for long-horizon tasks whose subgoals, intermediate evidence, and information needs evolve over multiple execution stages. We propose EvoMAS, a framework for execution-time multi-agent workflow construction. EvoMAS formulates workflow construction as a meta-level sequential decision problem along a single task trajectory. At each stage, it constructs an explicit task state through a Planner-Evaluator-Updater pipeline and uses a learned Workflow Adapter to instantiate a stage-specific layered workflow from a fixed pool of candidate agents. The adapter is trained with policy gradients using sparse, verifiable terminal task success as the main supervision signal, while evaluator-based process reward is analyzed separately under very-hard sparse-reward settings. Experiments on GAIA, HLE, and DeepResearcher show that EvoMAS outperforms single-agent baselines and recent automated multi-agent workflow design methods. Our analyses further show that explicit task-state construction and learned workflow adaptation provide complementary benefits. Additional results indicate that process reward is most useful when terminal success is extremely sparse, and qualitative case studies illustrate that EvoMAS adapts agent coordination as the task state evolves.
Chengdong Xu, Kaiqiang Ke, Ziheng Liu +4
May 9, 2026cs.MA

Beyond the All-in-One Agent: Benchmarking Role-Specialized Multi-Agent Collaboration in Enterprise Workflows

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly expected to operate in enterprise environments, where work is distributed across specialized roles, permission-controlled systems, and cross-departmental procedures. However, existing enterprise benchmarks largely evaluate single agents with broad tool access, while existing multi-agent benchmarks rarely capture realistic enterprise constraints such as role specialization, access control, stateful business systems, and policy-based approvals. We introduce \textsc{EntCollabBench}, a benchmark for evaluating enterprise multi-agent collaboration. \textsc{EntCollabBench} simulates a permission-isolated organization with 11 role-specialized agents across six departments and contains two evaluation subsets: a Workflow subset, where agents collaboratively modify enterprise system states, and an Approval subset, where agents make policy-grounded decisions. Evaluation is based on execution traces, database state verification, and deterministic policy adjudication rather than natural-language response judging. Experiments with representative LLM agents show that current models still struggle with end-to-end enterprise collaboration, especially in delegation, context transfer, parameter grounding, workflow closure, and decision commitment. \textsc{EntCollabBench} provides a reproducible testbed for measuring and improving agent systems intended for realistic organizational environments.
Tao Yu, Hao Wang, Changyu Li +15
May 9, 2026cs.DB

PrepBench: How Far Are We from Natural-Language-Driven Data Preparation?

Data preparation is a central and time-consuming stage in data analysis workflows. Traditionally, commercial tools have relied on graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to simplify data preparation, allowing users to define transformations through visual operators and workflows. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) raise the possibility of a paradigm shift toward natural language (NL)-driven data preparation, in which users can specify preparation intents in NL directly. However, it remains unclear how far current LLM-based agents are from this paradigm shift in practice. Existing code generation benchmarks do not capture key characteristics of data preparation, including ambiguous user intents, imperfect real-world data, and the need to translate code into interpretable workflows for validation. To bridge this gap, we present PrepBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate NL-driven data preparation along three core capabilities: interactive disambiguation, prep-code generation, and code-to-workflow translation. We crawl data from the Preppin' Data Challenges, and then extend it into a systematically designed benchmark. The benchmark covers diverse domains, and each task involves 3 to 18 data preparation steps. Nearly half of the tasks require over 100 lines of Python code, and the longest solutions approach 300 lines. Our evaluation shows that, despite recent progress, realizing this paradigm shift remains challenging for state-of-the-art LLMs. PrepBench provides a principled benchmark for measuring this gap and helps identify key challenges toward realizing NL-driven data preparation.
Jingzhe Xu, Rui Wang, Jiannan Wang +1
May 8, 2026cs.SE

Mazocarta: A Seeded Procedural Deckbuilder for Instrumented Game Development

Mazocarta is a seeded procedural tactical deckbuilder implemented in Rust, compiled to WebAssembly for browser play, and executable natively for simulation. Its primary technical contribution is not the invention of a new deckbuilding genre, but the construction of an instrumented game-development reference artifact: the same rules engine supports interactive play, native command-line simulation, automated end-to-end tests, save/load fixtures, and local-area multiplayer. This paper describes Mazocarta's architecture, deterministic run model, reproducible balance probes, and QR-mediated WebRTC pairing for local multiplayer. An evaluation snapshot over 1,000 deterministic seeds shows that the simulation pipeline can produce reproducible development signals. In the evaluated configuration, single-player and two-player autoplay win rates were 36.1% and 34.9% over 1,000 deterministic seeds, respectively. These rates are not presented as final player-facing balance metrics, but as repeatable probes for future balance shifts and regressions. Mazocarta is positioned as a playable open-source reference artifact for instrumented game development: deterministic regression checks, automated playtesting workflows, balance probes for game mechanics, and browser-native local multiplayer all exercise one shared production rules core.
Timothy C. Cogan
May 7, 2026cs.AI

Beyond the Black Box: Interpretability of Agentic AI Tool Use

AI agents are promising for high-stakes enterprise workflows, but dependable deployment remains limited because these tool-use decisions are difficult to diagnose and control. Agents may skip required tool calls, invoke tools unnecessarily, or take actions whose consequences become visible only after execution. Existing observability methods are external: prompts reveal correlations, evaluations score outputs, and logs arrive only after the model has already acted. In long-horizon settings, these failures are costly because an early tool mistake can alter the rest of the execution trajectory, increase token consumption, and create downstream safety and security risk. We introduce a mechanistic-interpretability toolkit built on Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs), which decompose activations into sparse internal features, and linear probes, lightweight classifiers that read signals from those features. The framework reads model states before each action and infers whether a tool is needed and how risky the next tool action is. It identifies the model layers and features most associated with tool decisions and tests their functional importance through feature ablation. We train the probes on multi-step agent execution traces from the NVIDIA Nemotron function-calling dataset and apply the same workflow to GPT-OSS 20B and Gemma 3 27B models. The goal is not to replace external evaluation, but to add a missing layer: visibility into what the model signaled internally before action. This helps surface deeper causes of agent failure, especially in long-horizon runs where an early mistake can impact subsequent agent behavior. More broadly, the paper shows how mechanistic interpretability can support internal observability for monitoring tool calls and risk in agent systems.
Hariom Tatsat, Ariye Shater
May 7, 2026cs.AI

AI co-mathematician: Accelerating mathematicians with agentic AI

We introduce the AI co-mathematician, a workbench for mathematicians to interactively leverage AI agents to pursue open-ended research. The AI co-mathematician is optimized to provide holistic support for the exploratory and iterative reality of mathematical workflows, including ideation, literature search, computational exploration, theorem proving and theory building. By providing an asynchronous, stateful workspace that manages uncertainty, refines user intent, tracks failed hypotheses, and outputs native mathematical artifacts, the system mirrors human collaborative workflows. In early tests, the AI co-mathematician helped researchers solve open problems, identify new research directions, and uncover overlooked literature references. Besides demonstrating a highly interactive paradigm for AI-assisted mathematical discovery, the AI co-mathematician also achieves state of the art results on hard problem-solving benchmarks, including scoring 48% on FrontierMath Tier 4, a new high score among all AI systems evaluated.
Daniel Zheng, Ingrid von Glehn, Yori Zwols +15
May 7, 2026cs.LG

Efficient Serving for Dynamic Agent Workflows with Prediction-based KV-Cache Management

LLM-based workflows compose specialized agents to execute complex tasks, and these agents usually share substantial context, allowing KV-Cache reuse to save computation. Existing approaches either manage KV-Cache at agent level and fail to exploit the reuse opportunities within workflows, or manage cache at the workflow level but assume that each workflow calls a static sequence of agents. However, practical workflows are typically dynamic, where the sequence of invoked agents and thus induced cache reuse opportunities depend on the context of each task. To serve such dynamic workflows efficiently, we build a system dubbed PBKV (\textbf{P}rediction-\textbf{B}ased \textbf{KV}-Cache Management). For each workflow, PBKV predicts the agent invocations in several future steps by fusing the guidance from historical workflows and context of the target workflow. Based on the predictions, PBKV estimates the reuse potential of cache entries and keeps the high-potential entries in GPU memory. To be robust to prediction errors, PBKV utilizes the predictions conservatively during both cache eviction and prefetching. Experiments on three workflow benchmarks show that PBKV achieves up to 1.85×1.85\times speedup over LRU on dynamic workflows, and up to 1.26×1.26\times speedup over the SOTA baseline KVFlow on the static workflow.
Haoyu Zheng, Fangcheng Fu, Jia Wu +6
May 7, 2026cs.AI

Beyond Task Success: Measuring Workflow Fidelity in LLM-Based Agentic Payment Systems

LLM-based multi-agent systems are increasingly deployed for payment workflows, yet prevailing metrics, Task Success Rate (TSR) and Agent Handoff F1-Score (HF1), capture only final outcomes or unordered routing decisions. We introduce the Agentic Success Rate (ASR), a trajectory-fidelity metric that compares observed and expected agent execution sequences at the transition level, decomposing performance into Transition Recall and Transition Precision. Applied to the Hierarchical Multi-Agent System for Payments (HMASP) across 18 LLMs and 90,000 task instances, ASR reveals that 10 of 18 models systematically skip a confirmation checkpoint during payment checkout, a deviation invisible to both TSR and HF1, while 8 models enforce the checkpoint perfectly. Notably, GPT-4.1 exhibits hidden workflow shortcuts despite achieving perfect TSR and HF1, while GPT-5.2 achieves perfect ASR. Prompt refinements and deterministic routing guards guided by ASR diagnostics yield substantial TSR improvements, with gains up to +93.8 percentage points for previously struggling models, demonstrating that trajectory-level evaluation is essential in regulated domains.
Donghao Huang, Joon Kiat Chua, Zhaoxia Wang
May 7, 2026cs.AI

On Time, Within Budget: Constraint-Driven Online Resource Allocation for Agentic Workflows

Agentic systems increasingly solve complex user requests by executing orchestrated workflows, where subtasks are assigned to specialized models or tools and coordinated according to their dependencies. While recent work improves agent efficiency by optimizing the performance--cost--latency frontier, real deployments often impose concrete requirements: a workflow must be completed within a specified budget and before a specified deadline. This shifts the goal from average efficiency optimization to maximizing the probability that the entire workflow completes successfully under explicit budget and deadline constraints. We study \emph{constraint-driven online resource allocation for agentic workflows}. Given a dependency-structured workflow and estimates of success rates and generation lengths for each subtask--model pair, the executor dynamically allocates models and parallel samples across simultaneously executable subtasks while managing the remaining budget and time. We formulate this setting as a finite-horizon stochastic online allocation problem and propose \emph{Monte Carlo Portfolio Planning} (MCPP), a lightweight closed-loop planner that directly estimates constrained completion probability through simulated workflow executions and replans after observed outcomes. Experiments on CodeFlow and ProofFlow demonstrate that MCPP consistently improves constrained completion probability over strong baselines across a wide range of budget--deadline constraints.
Xinglin Wang, Zishen Liu, Shaoxiong Feng +9
May 7, 2026cs.AI

MAS-Algorithm: A Workflow for Solving Algorithmic Programming Problems with a Multi-Agent System

Algorithmic problem solving serves as a rigorous testbed for evaluating structured reasoning in AI coding systems, as it directly reflects a model's ability to perform structured reasoning in complex scenarios. Existing approaches predominantly rely on model-centric strategies, such as architectural modifications and data scaling, which are costly and offer limited interpretability. Alternative methods leveraging external tools or prompting techniques (e.g., chain-of-thought) are often fragmented and lack a unified framework. In this paper, we propose MAS-Algorithm, a systematic multi-agent workflow for algorithmic problem solving inspired by the practices of competitive programmers and algorithm engineers. Our framework decomposes the end-to-end solving process into modular stages, enabling structured reasoning, tool integration, and flexible coordination among agents. The design emphasizes both rigor and extensibility, allowing it to generalize across diverse problem types. Experimental results on a self-constructed benchmark demonstrate consistent improvements across multiple Qwen series models, achieving an average gain of 6.48% in acceptance rate. In contrast, parameter-efficient fine-tuning on the same data yields only a marginal improvement of 0.89%. We further observe a 4.72% gain on LiveCodeBench-Pro, along with consistent improvements across additional accuracy and efficiency metrics. Beyond performance gains, we conduct comprehensive analyses to better understand the reasoning process within the workflow, including error patterns and cross-scenario behaviors. We further perform customized replacement and ablation studies to explore the upper bound of the framework, showing that individual agents can contribute improvements of up to 27.7%. These results highlight the strong potential of MAS-Algorithm for advancing AI-driven algorithmic reasoning.
Yuliang Xu, Xiang Xu, Yao Wan +2
May 7, 2026cs.HC

PersonaTeaming: Supporting Persona-Driven Red-Teaming for Generative AI

Recent developments in AI safety research have called for red-teaming methods that effectively surface potential risks posed by generative AI models, with growing emphasis on how red-teamers' backgrounds and perspectives shape their strategies and the risks they uncover. While automated red-teaming approaches promise to complement human red-teaming through larger-scale exploration, existing automated approaches do not account for human identities and rarely incorporate human inputs. In this work, we explore persona-driven red-teaming to advance both automated red-teaming and human-AI collaboration. We first develop PersonaTeaming Workflow, which incorporates personas into the adversarial prompt generation process to explore a wider spectrum of adversarial strategies. Compared to RainbowPlus, a state-of-the-art automated red-teaming method, PersonaTeaming Workflow achieves higher attack success rates while maintaining prompt diversity. However, since automated personas only approximate real human perspectives, we further instantiate PersonaTeaming Workflow as PersonaTeaming Playground, a user-facing interface that enables red-teamers to author their own personas and collaborate with AI to mutate and refine prompts. In a user study with 11 industry practitioners, we found that PersonaTeaming Playground enabled diverse red-teaming strategies and outputs that practitioners perceived as useful, and that AI-generated suggestions in the PersonaTeaming Playground encouraged out-of-the-box thinking even when practitioners did not follow them strictly. Together, our work advances both automated and human-in-the-loop approaches to red-teaming, while shedding light on interaction patterns and design insights for supporting human-AI collaboration in generative AI red-teaming.
Wesley Hanwen Deng, Mingxi Yan, Sunnie S. Y. Kim +5
May 6, 2026cs.AI

From History to State: Constant-Context Skill Learning for LLM Agents

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly used to operate browsers, files, code and tools, making personal assistants a natural deployment target. Yet personal agents face a privacy-cost-capability tension: cloud models execute multi-step workflows well but expose sensitive intermediate context to external APIs, while local models preserve privacy but remain less reliable. Both settings also pay repeatedly for long skill prompts and growing histories. We propose constant-context skill learning, a context-to-weights framework for recurring agent workflows: reusable procedures are learned in lightweight task-family modules, while inference conditions only on the current observation and a compact state block. A deterministic tracker renders this state block from task progress and supplies aligned subgoal rewards, so each module can be trained with step-level SFT and refined through online RL. Across ALFWorld, WebShop, and SciWorld, our agents achieve strong performance across Qwen3-4B, Qwen3-8B and Llama-3.1-8B. With Qwen3-8B, SFT+RL reaches 89.6% unseen success on ALFWorld, 76.8% success on WebShop, and 66.4% unseen success on SciWorld. They match or exceed strong published agent-training results while reducing prompt tokens per turn by 2--7×\times relative to controlled ReAct prompting baselines, showing that procedural context can be moved from prompts into weights.
Haoyang Xie, Xinyuan Wang, Yancheng Wang +2
May 6, 2026cs.HC

Making AI Drafts Count: A Quality Threshold in Audio Description Workflows

Audio description (AD) narrates visual elements in video for blind and low-vision audiences. Recent work has shown that giving novice describers an AI-generated draft to start from helps produce higher-quality AD and lowers the barrier to entry. What remains an open question is how draft quality shapes the editing process. We investigate this through GenAD, an AD generation pipeline that incorporates accessibility guidelines and contextual video information, and RefineAD, an editing interface for human revisions. Human-AI contributions are measured across text, timing, and delivery. In a within-subjects study, we compared authoring from scratch against editing AI drafts of varying quality. GenAD drafts cut completion time by more than half and significantly reduced cognitive load. In contrast, baseline drafts generated from simple, unguided prompts offered only modest benefits, pointing to a minimum quality threshold for effectiveness. Qualitative findings suggest this threshold is content-dependent; as visual complexity increases, so does the quality needed from AI drafts. We propose this as a design principle: effective AI assistance should clear a quality threshold suited to the target content, rather than simply be present.
Lana Do, Shasta Ihorn, Charity M. Pitcher-Cooper +7
May 5, 2026cs.CL

Material Database Agent: A Multimodal Agentic Framework for Scientific Literature Mining

Materials science workflows rely on structured and unstructured data from the vast body of available scientific literature. However, most of the experimental details remain buried in text, tables, graphs and figures. Thus, constructing databases that incorporate this data is a manual, time-consuming, and hard-to-scale process. Multimodal large language models have made it feasible to extract information from text and scientific figures with high speed and accuracy. This opens the possibility of an AI system that can create production-scale material databases. Material Database Agent (MDA) is a modular, multi-agent system architecture for converting research literature into structured databases. MDA accepts article PDFs as input, which are subsequently processed in parallel into markdown files and figures. Multiple sub-agents read these markdown files and figures in parallel to assemble sub-databases for each paper. These sub-databases are then compiled into a single tabular database by an agent. As opposed to using either a rule-based approach or a single-pass pipeline for extracting information, MDA is a specialized architecture for transforming the literature into a database in the field of materials science. More generally, this study provides a basis for positioning multimodal agentic information extraction as a viable means for constructing next-generation scientific databases from the primary literature.
Achuth Chandrasekhar, Omid Barati Farimani, Radheesh Sharma Meda +1
May 5, 2026cs.MA

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 ≥\geq3-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 10−210^{-2}in to approximately ±10−3\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