Skip to content

Category

artificial intelligence

4,333 papers

#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

DI-Bench: Systematically Generating In-Domain Data Intelligence Benchmarks for Enterprise Agents

Evaluating enterprise agents on domain-specific benchmarks is critical, yet public benchmarks rarely evaluate whether agents can integrate business knowledge with analytical computation, and constructing such benchmarks manually is costly. We present DI-Bench, a pipeline for generating realistic benchmarks for data intelligence (DI), the practice of extracting insights from large volumes of enterprise data. To emulate realistic DI tasks that require both computation and knowledge retrieval, DI-Bench builds an artifact linkage graph over data tables, dimensions, metrics, and documents to form questions involving structured data and associated knowledge. Ground truth answers are derived via query execution, followed by LLM question generation and validation. Applied to two public datasets, the pipeline produces a 731-task benchmark covering knowledge retrieval, analytical computation, and rule-grounded reasoning. To show the discriminatory capability and difficulty of the benchmark, we evaluate four models, revealing a substantial finding: models achieve only 32% accuracy when doing computational tasks where retrieved business rules modify the computation.

Jiangyun Zhang, Kristen Surrao, Torpong Nitayanont et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Inference-Time Graph Engineering for Multi-Agent LLM Workflows

Recent multi-agent LLM systems increasingly rely on graph-structured communication to coordinate specialized agents. We revisit multi-agent orchestration from a graph-engineering perspective: rather than optimizing a static topology, we synthesize a task-conditioned temporal workflow graph that jointly specifies agent connectivity and edge-level communication semantics. We introduce ReActNet, a training-free framework that compiles a query and a set of role-specialized agents into a sequence of directed communication graphs. Each graph snapshot corresponds to one reasoning stage, and each edge carries a natural-language instruction specifying the message that a source agent should provide to a target agent. The compiled temporal graph is then executed through structured message passing: agents update their reasoning states by integrating their previous states with messages from controller-assigned neighbors, and a final aggregator synthesizes the resulting states into the answer. This design separates graph compilation from graph execution, making multi-agent coordination explicit, inspectable, and task-conditioned without requiring reinforcement learning or gradient-based topology optimization. Across knowledge reasoning, mathematical problem solving, code generation, and GAIA-style assistant tasks, ReActNet consistently improves over fixed-topology and learned-topology baselines while maintaining competitive inference cost. These results suggest that effective multi-agent orchestration depends not only on which agents communicate, but also on engineering executable workflow graphs that encode when, why, and how information should flow during reasoning.

Katherine Tieu, Dongqi Fu, Yinglong Xia et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

From Monolithic Blending to Agentic Orchestration: Dynamic Response for Conversational Assistants at Scale

Conversational assistants can blend retrieval, action selection, escalation, and wording in a single model path, or separate those roles. We report a production migration of a customer-support assistant at a large accommodation marketplace (millions of conversations per month, 11 languages, 10-second P90). Dynamic Response (DR) replaces a single Qwen3-235B-A22B blended responder with a bounded ReAct orchestrator over typed tools plus a smaller generator that writes from a backend-validated context contract. Because the migration also changed prompts, alignment, and serving, we attribute each effect to its cause and claim as architecture effects only those measured on identical replayed turns: typed entity selection moves the reservation selector to a precision-first operating point (precision 8.3% to 89.1%, recall 75.2% to 67.3%), and typed action IDs with a membership check remove observed structured-action hallucination (2.14% to 0.0%). A low-ramp A/B test reproduces the replay escalation reductions: hard-escalation responses fall from 5.60% to 3.08% and soft-escalation responses from 9.56% to 2.49%, while production handoff volume holds roughly steady; self-solve is directional (+5.1 points, 95% CI [-2, +12]). Serving optimizations cut orchestrator P90 latency from 3.87s to 2.24s on a GPU footprint reduced by roughly one-third, and self-hosting reduces estimated annual model-serving cost by more than an order of magnitude.

Cen (Mia), Zhao, Peng Wang et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

The Normalization of Deviance in AI Development

Work on the risks of artificial intelligence has focused predominantly on capability risk: the danger that systems become too powerful, too autonomous, or too misaligned with human values. Far less attention has been paid to the organizational level---to whether the institutions building these systems are themselves predisposed to drift toward failure. This paper argues that they are. Regardless of how capable AI systems become, the organizations building them face the same structural dynamics that preceded past major technological disasters. Drawing on case studies of the Space Shuttle Challenger, the Three Mile Island accident, and the Boeing 737 MAX crashes, this paper identifies the common structural mechanisms preceding each failure and maps them onto contemporary AI development. The findings suggest that existing safety infrastructure may provide less protection than it appears, as organizations can complete safety processes in full compliance and still produce catastrophic outcomes. The pre-disaster period of AI development is still underway; the purpose of this paper is to make these dynamics legible while they can still be interrupted.

Emilio Barkett, Alexander Kimpton, Daniel Graham et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

Beyond Prompts: Measuring and Optimizing LLM Tool-Agent Harnesses

LLM tool agents can be improved without retraining by modifying the runtime harness around a fixed model: prompts, tool interfaces, middleware, state handling, and recovery logic. We study this setting as resource-bounded harness selection for fixed-model multi-turn tool agents, with the search surface scoped to prompts and tool-boundary middleware: edits are guarded intercepts at the tool boundary, not arbitrary rewriting of agent execution logic. Our optimizer-agnostic protocol reports mean held-out lift, worst-condition lift, repeatability, logged cost diagnostics, and RelLift95(B), a conservative estimate of the held-out gain of the harness selected under budget B. We instantiate the protocol with prompt-only and prompt-plus-middleware optimizers, including PRISM, which clusters failures and routes repairs to prompt, tool-boundary middleware, or joint edit surfaces within a Pareto search. On BFCL multi-round, tau2-Retail, and tau2-Telecom, PRISM obtains mean held-out lifts of 14.2, 14.9, and 10.1 percentage points and positive empirical RelLift95 on all three benchmarks, and a component ablation attributes the margin chiefly to failure-surface routing and the edit-pattern constraint. Across optimizers, the results show that some search procedures can occasionally find large gains but still choose brittle updates, so the reliability of the chosen harness should be reported alongside average held-out lift.

Cen (Mia), Zhao, Haibo Ruan et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

Recovering Temporal and Geographic Signals from Language Model Embeddings

Understanding whether language-model embeddings encode structured real-world information is important for both representation analysis and information retrieval. We study this question for temporal and geographic signals using a simple projection-based method that operates directly on output embeddings. Given a small set of seed examples, the method defines an axis in embedding space and ranks texts or entities by their projection onto that axis. Our approach is fully black-box and model-agnostic: it requires only embeddings, without access to model weights, internal activations, auxiliary probes, or additional training. This makes it applicable to modern embedding models available only through APIs and provides a lightweight way to analyze whether temporal and spatial dimensions are present in their representation spaces. We apply the method to temporal and geographic datasets and find that embedding projections recover meaningful chronological and spatial structure. These results provide evidence that output embeddings encode signals relevant to time and space, while also offering a practical tool for interpretability and for downstream temporal and geographic information retrieval tasks, such as temporal ordering, geographic ranking, and tagging.

Esteban Feuerstein, Victoria Klimkowski, Juan Manuel Ortiz de Zarate et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

CUSP: Decomposable Collective Uncertainty for Multi-Agent Multimodal Reasoning

Aggregating heterogeneous vision-language models (VLMs) can improve multimodal reasoning, but neither an individual model's confidence nor that of the aggregated answer measures reliability at the system level. We present CUSP (Collective Uncertainty through Semantic Opinion Pooling), a training-free uncertainty quantification framework that maps multiple VLM responses to a shared semantic response space, pools them into a pooled semantic opinion, and reports two complementary system-level signals: collective uncertainty, the dispersion of the pooled opinion, and Jensen-Shannon divergence (JSD), the conflict among the model-level opinions. Within this pooled semantic opinion, the unnormalized collective entropy decomposes exactly into the mean of the models'individual semantic entropies and the JSD, separating total dispersion from model conflict. Requiring neither token logits nor calibration labels, CUSP applies to open-weight and commercial VLMs alike. In static multi-VLM ensembles, collective uncertainty is the strongest signal in the small-model regime (0.764 AUROC for prediction-error detection, 0.889 AUARC for abstention), outperforming uncertainty baselines majority voting and naive selection by 4.7 to 15.8 points and widening its margin as the ensemble grows; JSD is strongest in the evaluated commercial regime (0.819 AUROC, 0.910 AUARC) and ranks hard-answer model conflict with AUROC up to 0.982. The pooled prediction also improves accuracy over the average single model by 5.6 to 13.0 points. Over the full trajectory of a multi-step, multi-agent system, subagent collective uncertainty ranks system failures above chance (0.619 AUROC) and gives the best abstention ordering among the evaluated signals (0.699 AUARC).

Chung-En Johnny Yu, David Garcia, Brian Jalaian et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

What LLM Trading Agents Actually Do in Production: A Six-Month, Population-Scale Record from Two Fleets

We present a continuous, population-scale measurement record of autonomous language-model trading agents operating in production across two systems with one design lineage: DX Terminal Pro (3,505 user-funded vaults trading real ETH in Base memecoin markets for 21 days, February to March 2026) and the DXAP live alpha fleet (500 to 599 user-created agents all-history, 91 to 117 concurrently active, trading Hyperliquid perpetuals, June to August 2026). The record spans roughly six months, 7.5M single-model invocations with about 300K onchain actions, and a further 231,638 multi-tool turns producing 14,596 fills. Four findings carry the paper. First, the operating layer determines behavior more than anything written in strategy text: a risk slider explains leverage (+0.425 per level), agent fixed effects absorb 60% of variance, and a leaderboard render boundary causally routes selection (regression discontinuity 1.75x at the top-3 cut). Second, sizing is volatility-blind: median leverage is 5.0x in every volatility sextile, and one posture-slider cell (11% of the book) holds 62% of liquidations. Third, agents capture almost none of the upside they reach: 43.2% of positions saw at least +300 bps of favorable excursion within 24h, yet 49.3% of those closed with a negative trade return; a mechanical bracket recovers +39.0 bps per position. Fourth, neither fleet shows a directional edge. The DXAP fleet is not profitable and trails a matched Hyperliquid retail benchmark (41% vs. 50% roundtrip win rate). A paired-replay league of frontier models on 416 captured production scenarios finds decision quality statistically indistinguishable at this horizon, while choice stability differs sharply across model families. Every headline survives day-clustered inference, permutation nulls, and a common-fee restatement; the paper closes with a 17-rule methodology canon bought with our own retractions.

T. J. Barton, Chris Constantakis, Patti Hauseman et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

The convergent laboratory: when AI reasoning, autonomous experiments, high performance and quantum computing reshape chemistry

This Comment emerges from TPC26 (https://tpc26.org), a conference convening leaders from academia, national laboratories, and industry who are reshaping materials science discovery. The meeting explored how AI, autonomous agents, self-driving labs, higher performance and quantum computing converge to amplify their individual impact on materials science discovery. The perspectives here reflect the firsthand experiences of researchers at these frontiers and capture the essence of this global endeavor. As AI-driven reasoning, autonomous agentic frameworks, self-driving laboratories, and fault-tolerant quantum processors mature simultaneously, we offer this Comment as a reference at what we believe is a tipping point of transformative advances and productive disruption in the chemical sciences.

Eliu Huerta, Xiaoyun Wang, Geetika Gupta et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Agents Trust Tools Too Much: Measuring Reliance on Unreliable Tools

Existing evaluations of tool-using agents primarily measure whether an agent can successfully complete diverse tasks with tools. These evaluations generally assume that tools return reliable information. However, tool returns in real-world systems can be plausible yet incorrect. We investigate how agents respond to unreliable tool returns by evaluating fourteen LLMs using three tools-web search, LLM sub-agent delegation, and code execution. For each tool, we corrupt its returns and measure whether agents adopt the corrupted content in their final answers. Agents exhibit high levels of overtrust across all three settings: the mean adoption rate exceeds one third for every tool and reaches 68.0% for web search. Analysis of reasoning traces reveals a particularly concerning failure mode: agents often recognize conflicts and even recover the correct answer internally, yet present only the corrupted answer without warning the user. To mitigate agents' overtrust in tool returns, we intervene at three levels: prompting by the user, metadata from the tool provider, and post-training by the agent builder. Although some interventions help for particular models or tools, none consistently mitigates overtrust across tools. These findings identify overtrust in unreliable tools as a serious and persistent failure mode, motivating evaluations and interventions that enable agents to validate tool outputs and transparently communicate unresolved conflicts.

Hoyeol Yang, Woojung Song, Taewon Kim et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Planning and Scheduling Business Processes under Control-Flow Uncertainty

Scheduling activities in business processes can improve efficiency (e.g., reduce makespan), but is challenging because the exact sequence of activities required to complete a case is often uncertain due to decisions based on data that emerges during execution. Nevertheless, probabilistic information regarding such decisions can often be estimated or derived from historical execution logs, and can help anticipate which execution paths are likely to lead to successful completion. Planning with particular execution paths affects feasibility, i.e., the probability of successful completion, and the expected number of superfluous activities that are planned but never executed. We frame the problem as a chance-constrained optimization problem and present two formulations: A decomposed approach with two stages, a planning stage that minimizes the expected number of superfluous activities subject to a feasibility constraint, and a scheduling stage that minimizes the makespan over the planned activities; and an integrated approach that combines planning and scheduling into a single formulation. Evaluation on two real-world and one synthetic dataset shows that the integrated approach yields superior makespans but is intractable at scale, while the decomposed approach scales to large settings.

Michel Kunkler, Stefanie Rinderle-Ma · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

EnvCraft: Synthesizing Executable Environments in Agentic RL for Claw-like Agent

The paradigm of LLMs has rapidly shifted from passive language interfaces to autonomous Claw-like agents that execute long-horizon tasks across stateful workspaces. While Agentic Reinforcement Learning (Agentic RL) provides a promising path to optimize these agents, its scaling is heavily bottlenecked by the severe scarcity of interactive training environments. Existing synthetic environments are strictly limited to tool-calling endpoints, rendering them insufficient for accommodating the end-to-end real-world demands of claw-like agents. To bridge this gap, we introduce EnvCraft, an automated framework for synthesizing executable environments and scalable training data. Specifically, EnvCraft employs an environment synthesis engine to build sandbox-isolated workspaces, alongside a topology-aware data generation engine to produce coherent task trajectories. Overall, we synthesize 139 interactive environments comprising approximately 20K complex tasks for Agentic RL training. Experiments on Qwen3/3.5 models (8B-32B) show that our method yields gains of up to +11.9% on Claw-style benchmarks and +8.0% on general tool-use benchmarks, with concurrent reductions in inference token cost. The results confirm that synthesized executable environments provide robust and generalizable learning signals for training.

Yirong Zeng, Shen You, Jinhang Feng et al. · 0 citations

From tech blogs

See all →

We use cookies to run the site and, with your consent, for analytics and to show ads. See our Cookie Policy.