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Lixiu Wu, Yuanrong Tang, Qisen Pan, Xianyang Zhan, Yuchen Han, Lanxi Xiao, Tianhong Wang, Chen Zhong, Jiangtao Gong

Due to privacy concerns, open dialogue datasets for mental health are primarily generated through human or AI synthesis methods. However, the inherent implicit nature of psychological processes, particularly those of clients, poses challenges to the authenticity and diversity of synthetic data. In this paper, we propose ECAs (short for Embodied Conversational Agents), a framework for embodied agent simulation based on Large Language Models (LLMs) that incorporates multiple psychological theoretical principles. Using simulation, we expand real counseling case data into a nuanced embodied cognitive memory space and generate dialogue data based on high-frequency counseling questions. We validated our framework using the D4 dataset. First, we created a public ECAs dataset through batch simulations based on D4. Licensed counselors evaluated our method, demonstrating that it significantly outperforms baselines in simulation authenticity and necessity. Additionally, two LLM-based automated evaluation methods were employed to confirm the higher quality of the generated dialogues compared to the baselines.

Hao Wu, Shoucheng Song, Chang Yao, Sheng Han, Huaiyu Wan, Youfang Lin, Kai Lv

In multi-agent systems, explicit cognition of teammates' decision logic serves as a critical factor in facilitating coordination. Communication (i.e., "Tell") can assist in the cognitive development process by information dissemination, yet it is inevitably subject to real-world constraints such as noise, latency, and attacks. Therefore, building the understanding of teammates' decisions without communication remains challenging. To address this, we propose a novel non-communication MARL framework that realizes the construction of cognition through local observation-based modeling (i.e., "Think"). Our framework enables agents to model teammates' active inference process. At first, the proposed method produces three teammate portraits: perception-belief-action. Specifically, we model the teammate's decision process as follows: 1) Perception: observing environments; 2) Belief: forming beliefs; 3) Action: making decisions. Then, we selectively integrate the belief portrait into the decision process based on the accuracy and relevance of the perception portrait. This enables the selection of cooperative teammates and facilitates effective collaboration. Extensive experiments on the SMAC, SMACv2, MPE, and GRF benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of our method.

Cuiling Wu, Yaozhong Gan, Junliang Xing, Ying Fu

We propose Multi-Agent Reflective Policy Optimization MARPO to alleviate the issue of sample inefficiency in multi-agent reinforcement learning. MARPO consists of two key components: a reflection mechanism that leverages subsequent trajectories to enhance sample efficiency, and an asymmetric clipping mechanism that is derived from the KL divergence and dynamically adjusts the clipping range to improve training stability. We evaluate MARPO in classic multi-agent environments, where it consistently outperforms other methods.

Quanmin Wei, Penglin Dai, Wei Li, Bingyi Liu, Xiao Wu

Precise environmental perception is critical for the reliability of autonomous driving systems. While collaborative perception mitigates the limitations of single-agent perception through information sharing, it encounters a fundamental communication-performance trade-off. Existing communication-efficient approaches typically assume MB-level data transmission per collaboration, which may fail due to practical network constraints. To address these issues, we propose InfoCom, an information-aware framework establishing the pioneering theoretical foundation for communication-efficient collaborative perception via extended Information Bottleneck principles. Departing from mainstream feature manipulation, InfoCom introduces a novel information purification paradigm that theoretically optimizes the extraction of minimal sufficient task-critical information under Information Bottleneck constraints. Its core innovations include: i) An Information-Aware Encoding condensing features into minimal messages while preserving perception-relevant information; ii) A Sparse Mask Generation identifying spatial cues with negligible communication cost; and iii) A Multi-Scale Decoding that progressively recovers perceptual information through mask-guided mechanisms rather than simple feature reconstruction. Comprehensive experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate that InfoCom achieves near-lossless perception while reducing communication overhead from megabyte to kilobyte-scale, representing 440-fold and 90-fold reductions per agent compared to Where2comm and ERMVP, respectively.

Pengyuan Wei, Giorgos Christopoulos, Zhouyang Shen, Jincheng Wang, Joshua Mukherjee, Ryuji Hirayama, Sriram Subramanian, Prateek Mittal

Acoustophoresis uses sound waves to manipulate small objects in mid-air and has broad potential in various applications. However, stable multi-particle levitation remains challenging due to complex acoustic dynamics and limitations of existing models. We introduce AcoustoReinforce, a reinforcement learning-based path planner that autonomously controls the motion of multiple levitated particles. Leveraging a decentralized architecture, it learns local neural policies that generate particle trajectories independently, enabling scalable, communication-free control even in densely populated acoustic fields. To ensure physical feasibility, acoustic trapping strength is incorporated as a constraint during both training and inference, producing trajectories that are collision-free, acoustically stable, and physically realizable within real-world system constraints. Experiments on a real-world levitation platform show that AcoustoReinforce outperforms state-of-the-art planners, improving task success rates by up to 130% across diverse configurations. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of learning-based decentralized control for complex multi-object acoustophoresis in real environments.

Lei Wang, Min Huang, Eduard Dragut

Aspect-Based Sentiment Intensity Analysis (ABSIA) has garnered increasing attention, though research largely focuses on domain-specific, sentence-level settings. In contrast, document-level ABSIA--particularly in addressing complex tasks like extracting Aspect-Category-Opinion-Sentiment-Intensity (ACOSI) tuples--remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce DanceHA, a multi-agent framework designed for open-ended, document-level ABSIA with informal writing styles. DanceHA has two main components: Dance, which employs a divide-and-conquer strategy to decompose the long-context ABSIA task into smaller, manageable sub-tasks for collaboration among specialized agents; and HA, Human-AI collaboration for annotation. We release Inf-ABSIA, a multi-domain document-level ABSIA dataset featuring fine-grained and high-accuracy labels from DanceHA. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our agentic framework and show that the multi-agent knowledge in DanceHA can be effectively transferred into student models. Our results highlight the importance of the overlooked informal styles in ABSIA, as they often intensify opinions tied to specific aspects.

Xufei Tian, Wenli Du, Shaoyi Yang, Han Hu, Hui Xin, Shifeng Qu, Ke Ye

Process simulation is a critical cornerstone of chemical engineering design. Current automated chemical design methodologies focus mainly on various representations of process flow diagrams. However, transforming these diagrams into executable simulation flowsheets remains a time-consuming and labor-intensive endeavor, requiring extensive manual parameter configuration within simulation software. In this work, we propose a novel multi-agent workflow that leverages the semantic understanding capabilities of large language models(LLMs) and enables iterative interactions with chemical process simulation software, achieving end-to-end automated simulation from textual process specifications to computationally validated software configurations for design enhancement. Our approach integrates four specialized agents responsible for task understanding, topology generation, parameter configuration, and evaluation analysis, respectively, coupled with Enhanced Monte Carlo Tree Search to accurately interpret semantics and robustly generate configurations. Evaluated on Simona, a large-scale process description dataset, our method achieves a 31. 1% improvement in the simulation convergence rate compared to state-of-the-art baselines and reduces the design time by 89. 0% compared to the expert manual design. This work demonstrates the potential of AI-assisted chemical process design, which bridges the gap between conceptual design and practical implementation. Our workflow is applicable to diverse process-oriented industries, including pharmaceuticals, petrochemicals, food processing, and manufacturing, offering a generalizable solution for automated process design.

Guokai Tang, Feng Zhao

Small language models (SLMs) run quickly, consume little memory, and can be deployed on edge devices, making them especially appealing when compute or energy is limited. Because of these advantages, boosting SLMs' reasoning ability has become an important research goal. A common approach is to distill the long chains of thought (long-CoTs) produced by large reasoning models (LRMs) into SLMs, hoping to transfer the larger models’ strong reasoning ability. However, SLMs do not always benefit from distillation of long-CoTs. The lengthy and complex semantic steps and large amount of self-reflection content in long-CoTs may exceed the limited learning capabilities of SLMs, and the impact of self-reflection density on the performance of SLMs is unclear. To resolve this capacity mismatch, we propose MACoT, a multi-agent framework that synthesizes chains of thought (CoTs) that are more suitable for small models rather than compressing or pruning existing ones. Through the interactive collaboration among six types of agents, MACoT synthesizes semantically explicit, logically clear CoTs that efficiently activate a small model’s internal knowledge through a carefully designed output pattern. At the same time, the CoTs synthesized by our method can retain a small amount of self-reflection content, thereby matching the learning capability of the small model and maximizing its reasoning accuracy. We fine-tuned Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct using only 1879 synthetic CoTs, significantly improving its performance on mathematical reasoning tasks and generalizing well, outperforming models trained on 5x more data. Through experiments, we found that a modest level of self-reflection boosts small-model performance, whereas excessive reflection sharply degrades it, which shows that “teaching SLMs to think” hinges on aligning each CoT’s cognitive load with the model’s capacity.

Yifan Su, Rishi Veerapaneni, Jiaoyang Li

Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) requires computing collision-free paths for multiple agents in shared environment. Most MAPF planners assume that each agent reaches a specific location at a specific timestep, but this is infeasible to directly follow on real systems where delays often occur. To address collisions caused by agents deviating due to delays, the Temporal Plan Graph (TPG) was proposed, which converts a MAPF time dependent solution into a time independent set of inter-agent dependencies. Recently, a Bidirectional TPG (BTPG) was proposed which relaxed some dependencies into "bidirectional pairs" and improved efficiency of agents executing their MAPF solution with delays. Our work improves upon this prior work by designing an algorithm, BPTG-max, that finds more bidirectional pairs. Our main theoretical contribution is in designing the BTPG-max algorithm is locally optimal, i.e. which constructs a BTPG where no additional bidirectional pairs can be added. We also show how in practice BTPG-max leads to BTPGs with significantly more bidirectional edges, superior anytime behavior, and improves robustness to delays.

Sanchit Sinha, Guangzhi Xiong, Zhenghao He, Aidong Zhang

Modern vision-language models (VLMs) deliver impressive predictive accuracy yet offer little insight into 'why' a decision is reached, frequently hallucinating facts, particularly when encountering out-of-distribution data. Neurosymbolic frameworks address this by pairing black-box perception with interpretable symbolic reasoning, but current methods extract their symbols solely from task labels, leaving them weakly grounded in the underlying visual data. In this paper, we introduce a multi-agent system - Concept-RuleNet that reinstates visual grounding while retaining transparent reasoning. Specifically, a multimodal concept generator first mines discriminative visual concepts directly from a representative subset of training images. Next, these visual concepts are utilized to condition symbol discovery, anchoring the generations in real image statistics and mitigating label bias. Subsequently, symbols are composed into executable first-order rules by a large language model reasoner agent - yielding interpretable neurosymbolic rules. Finally, during inference, a vision verifier agent quantifies the degree of presence of each symbol and triggers rule execution in tandem with outputs of black-box neural models, predictions with explicit reasoning pathways. Experiments on five benchmarks, including two challenging medical-imaging tasks and three underrepresented natural-image datasets, show that our system augments state-of-the-art neurosymbolic baselines by an average of 5% while also reducing the occurrence of hallucinated symbols in rules by up to 50%.

Qi Shi, Pavel Naumov

A law in a multiagent system is a set of constraints imposed on agents' behaviours to avoid undesirable outcomes. The paper considers two types of laws: useful laws that, if followed, completely eliminate the undesirable outcomes and gap-free laws that guarantee that at least one agent can be held responsible each time an undesirable outcome occurs. In both cases, we study the problem of finding a law that achieves the desired result by imposing the minimum restrictions. We prove that, for both types of laws, the minimisation problem is NP-hard even in the simple case of one-shot concurrent interactions. We also show that the approximation algorithm for the vertex cover problem in hypergraphs could be used to efficiently approximate the minimum laws in both cases.

Minghao Shao, Nanda Rani, Kimberly Milner, Haoran Xi, Meet Udeshi, Saksham Aggarwal, Venkata Sai Charan Putrevu, Sandeep K. Shukla, Prashanth Krishnamurthy, Farshad Khorrami 等

Recent advances in LLM agentic systems have improved the automation of offensive security tasks, particularly for Capture the Flag (CTF) challenges. We systematically investigate the key factors that drive agent success and provide a detailed recipe for building effective LLM-based offensive security agents. First, we present CTFJudge, a framework leveraging LLM as a judge to analyze agent trajectories and provide granular evaluation across CTF solving steps. Second, we propose a novel metric, CTF Competency Index (CCI) for partial correctness, revealing how closely agent solutions align with human-crafted gold standards. Third, we examine how LLM hyperparameters, namely temperature, top-p, and maximum token length, influence agent performance and automated cybersecurity task planning. For rapid evaluation, we present CTFTiny, a curated benchmark of 50 representative CTF challenges across binary exploitation, web, reverse engineering, forensics, and cryptography. Our findings identify optimal multi-agent coordination settings and lay the groundwork for future LLM agent research in cybersecurity.

Artem Pshenitsyn, Aleksandr Panov, Alexey Skrynnik

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is a powerful paradigm for solving cooperative and competitive decision-making problems. While many MARL benchmarks have been proposed, few combine continuous state and action spaces with challenging coordination and planning tasks. We introduce CAMAR, a new MARL benchmark designed explicitly for multi-agent pathfinding in environments with continuous actions. CAMAR supports cooperative and competitive interactions between agents and runs efficiently at up to 100,000 environment steps per second. We also propose a three-tier evaluation protocol to better track algorithmic progress and enable deeper analysis of performance. In addition, CAMAR allows the integration of classical planning methods such as RRT and RRT* into MARL pipelines. We use them as standalone baselines and combine RRT* with popular MARL algorithms to create hybrid approaches. We provide a suite of test scenarios and benchmarking tools to ensure reproducibility and fair comparison. Experiments show that CAMAR presents a challenging and realistic testbed for the MARL community.

Thomy Phan, Sven Koenig

Multi-agent path finding (MAPF) is the challenging problem of finding conflict-free paths with minimal costs for multiple agents. While traditional MAPF solvers are centralized using heuristic search, reinforcement learning (RL) is becoming increasingly popular due to its potential to learn decentralized and generalizing policies. RL-based MAPF must cope with spatial coordination, which is often addressed by combining independent training with ad hoc measures like replanning and communication. Such ad hoc measures often complicate the approach and require knowledge beyond the actual accessible information in RL, such as the full map occupation or broadcast communication channels, which limits generalizability, effectiveness, and sample efficiency. In this paper, we propose Partitioned Attention-based Reverse Curricula for Enhanced Learning (PARCEL), considering a bounding region for each agent. PARCEL trains all agents with overlapping regions jointly via self-attention to avoid potential conflicts. By employing a reverse curriculum, where the bounding regions grow as the policies improve, all agents will eventually merge into a single coordinated group. We evaluate PARCEL in two simple coordination tasks and four MAPF benchmark maps. Compared with state-of-the-art RL-based MAPF methods, PARCEL demonstrates better effectiveness and sample efficiency without ad hoc measures.

Thomy Phan, Shao-Hung Chan, Sven Koenig

Anytime multi-agent path finding (MAPF) is a promising approach to scalable and collision-free path optimization in multi-agent systems. MAPF-LNS, based on Large Neighborhood Search (LNS), is the current state-of-the-art approach where a fast initial solution is iteratively optimized by destroying and repairing selected paths, i.e., a neighborhood, of the solution. Delay-based MAPF-LNS has demonstrated particular effectiveness in generating promising neighborhoods via seed agents, according to their delays. Seed agents are selected using handcrafted strategies or online learning, where the former relies on human intuition about underlying structures, while the latter conducts black-box optimization, ignoring any structure. In this paper, we propose Truncated Adaptive Counterfactual K-ranked LEarning (TACKLE) to select seed agents via informed online learning by leveraging handcrafted strategies as human intuition. We show theoretically that TACKLE dominates its handcrafted and black-box learning counterparts in the limit. Our experiments demonstrate cost improvements of at least 60% in instances with one thousand agents, compared with state-of-the-art anytime solvers.

Yuanzhe Peng, Wenwei Zhao, Zhuo Lu, Jie Xu

Vertical Federated Learning (VFL) enables multiple clients with feature-partitioned data to collaboratively train models while preserving privacy by transmitting embeddings instead of raw data. However, such embeddings can still expose sensitive attributes (e.g., gender or race) unrelated to the target task, making them vulnerable to attribute inference attacks. Most existing privacy strategies may provide extra protection, but at the cost of reduced accuracy and excessive privacy budget. In this paper, we propose a novel equilibrium-driven VFL framework with selective privacy protection for sensitive attributes that are difficult to isolate from embeddings, thereby enhancing local privacy with minor accuracy compromise. We introduce two key innovations: (1) a NashCoder, which incorporates a surrogate head to jointly optimize accuracy and privacy; (2) an adaptive decomposition strategy based on Shapley values, which dynamically decomposes the global objective for distributed optimization from an equilibrium perspective. We theoretically analyze our framework and empirically evaluate it on three public datasets against five baselines, demonstrating significant improvements in the accuracy-privacy trade-off under various privacy settings. Extensive experimental results support our theoretical analysis.

Yiran Ni, Deshi Ye

The Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) problem is a computationally challenging task that involves coordinating collision-free trajectories for multiple cooperative agents. Although existing methods address corridor symmetry, where agents encounter repeated bidirectional conflicts in constrained environments, they typically focus exclusively on pairwise agent interactions. Our observations reveal that such pairwise symmetry frequently arises when multiple agents traverse shared corridors, necessitating repeated applications of the corridor reasoning technology over extended durations. To overcome this limitation, we propose a multi-agent corridor reasoning (MAC) technology capable of resolving group-level corridor symmetry in a single optimization step. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates that this technology preserves the completeness and optimality guarantees of Conflict-Based Search (CBS). By integrating MAC technology with CBSH-RTC, we developed CBSH-MACRT, which significantly outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms (CBSH-RTC and CBSH with mutex propagation) on standardized MAPF benchmarks, improving success rates by 8–40% and cutting runtimes by 14–67%.

Chunjiang Mu, Ya Zeng, Qiaosheng Zhang, Kun Shao, Chen Chu, Hao Guo, Danyang Jia, Zhen Wang, Shuyue Hu

Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to the ability to reason about others’ mental states, and higher-order ToM involves considering that others also possess their own ToM. Equipping large language model (LLM)-driven agents with ToM has long been considered to improve their coordination in multiagent collaborative tasks. However, we find that misaligned ToM orders—mismatches in the depth of ToM reasoning between agents—can lead to insufficient or excessive reasoning about others, thereby impairing their coordination. To address this issue, we design an adaptive ToM (A-ToM) agent, which can align in ToM orders with its partner. Based on prior interactions, the agent estimates the partner’s likely ToM order and leverages this estimation to predict the partner’s action, thereby facilitating behavioral coordination. We conduct empirical evaluations on four multi-agent coordination tasks: a repeated matrix game, two grid navigation tasks and an Overcooked task. The results validate our findings on ToM alignment and demonstrate the effectiveness of our AToM agent. Furthermore, we discuss the generalizability of our A-ToM to non-LLM-based agents, as well as what would diminish the importance of ToM alignment.

Radosław Miernik, Marek Szykuła, Jakub Kowalski, Jakub Cieśluk, Łukasz Galas, Wojciech Pawlik

We propose a new General Game Playing (GGP) system called Regular Games (RG). The main goal of RG is to be both computationally efficient and convenient for game design. The system consists of several languages. The core component is a low-level language that defines the rules by a finite automaton. It is minimal with only a few mechanisms, which makes it easy for automatic processing (by agents, analysis, optimization, etc.). The language is universal for the class of all finite turn-based games with imperfect information. Higher-level languages are introduced for game design (by humans or Procedural Content Generation), which are eventually translated to a low-level language. RG generates faster forward models than the current state of the art, beating other GGP systems (Regular Boardgames, Ludii) in terms of efficiency. Additionally, RG's ecosystem includes an editor with LSP, automaton visualization, benchmarking tools, and a debugger of game description transformations.

Hongbo Ma, Fei Shen, Hongbin Xu, Xiaoce Wang, Gang Xu, Jinkai Zheng, Liangqiong Qu, Ming Li

The advancement of intelligent agents has revolutionized problem-solving across diverse domains, yet solutions for personalized fashion styling remain underexplored, which holds immense promise for promoting shopping experiences. In this work, we present StyleTailor, the first collaborative agent framework that seamlessly unifies personalized apparel design, shopping recommendation, virtual try-on, and systematic evaluation into a cohesive workflow. To this end, StyleTailor pioneers an iterative visual refinement paradigm driven by multi-level negative feedback, enabling adaptive and precise user alignment. Specifically, our framework features two core agents, i.e., Designer for personalized garment selection and Consultant for virtual try-on, whose outputs are progressively refined via hierarchical vision-language model feedback spanning individual items, complete outfits, and try-on efficacy. Counterexamples are aggregated into negative prompts, forming a closed-loop mechanism that enhances recommendation quality. To assess the performance, we introduce a comprehensive evaluation suite encompassing style consistency, visual quality, face similarity, and artistic appraisal. Extensive experiments demonstrate StyleTailor's superior performance in delivering personalized designs and recommendations, outperforming strong baselines without negative feedback and establishing a new benchmark for intelligent fashion systems.