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Injection detectors deployed to protect LLM agents are calibrated on static, template-based payloads that announce themselves as override directives. We identify a systematic blind spot: when payloads are generated to mimic the domain vocabulary and authority structures of the target document, what we call domain camouflaged injection, standard detectors fail to flag them, with detection rates dropping from 93.8% to 9.7% on Llama 3.1 8B and from 100% to 55.6% on Gemini 2.0 Flash. We formalize this as the Camouflage Detection Gap (CDG), the difference in injection detection rate between static and camouflaged payloads. Across 45 tasks spanning three domains and two model families, CDG is large and statistically significant (chi^2 = 38.03, p < 0.001 for Llama; chi^2 = 17.05, p < 0.001 for Gemini), with zero reverse discordant pairs in either case. We additionally evaluate Llama Guard 3, a production safety classifier, which detects zero camouflage payloads (IDRcamouflage = 0.000), confirming that the blind spot extends beyond few-shot detectors to dedicated safety classifiers. We further show that multi-agent debate architectures amplify static injection attacks by up to 9.9x on smaller models, while stronger models show collective resistance. Targeted detector augmentation provides only partial remediation (10.2% improvement on Llama, 78.7% on Gemini), suggesting the vulnerability is architectural rather than incidental for weaker models. Our framework, task bank, and payload generator are released publicly.

Deepgenerative models havebecomeapromisingapproach for human motion prediction due to their ability to capture multimodal distributions and represent diverse human be haviors. However, generating predictions that are both di verse and jointly consistent among interacting agents re mains challenging. In addition, most existing approaches are primarily evaluated using single-agent (marginal) met rics, which fail to fully reflect the joint dynamics of multi agent interactions. We propose a diffusion-based frame work that improves multi-agent motion prediction by lever aging rich contextual information from historical trajecto ries. This information is incorporated through a guidance mechanism to enhance the diversity and expressiveness of predicted motions. To further enforce interaction consis tency, we introduce an energy-based formulation that re fines the joint trajectory distribution while preserving the plausibility of individual trajectories. Extensive experi ments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing methods. No tably, our approach substantially improves both marginal (ADE/FDE) and joint (JADE/JFDE) metrics on ETH/UCY over strong marginal baselines. Compared with prior joint prediction methods, it delivers significant gains in marginal metrics while maintaining competitive joint performance.

Skills are increasingly used to package agent instructions, workflows, scripts, and reference materials. In enterprise settings, however, skills often need to express more than task guidance: they must make goals, input boundaries, permissions, evidence requirements, output contracts, quality criteria, verification steps, human approval points, and handoff rules inspectable. This paper proposes contractual skills, a GovernSpec-inspired design framework for organizing SKILL.md files as readable task contracts while preserving lightweight skill discovery and progressive loading. The framework clarifies the boundary between contractual skills, GovernSpec YAML contracts, Model Context Protocol surfaces, tool adapters, runtime guardrails, tracing, and evaluation systems. We evaluate the framework with two offline experiments. A text-generation study covers three enterprise skills, fifteen synthetic tasks, four instruction conditions, and eight generation models, yielding 960 outputs and 1680 cross-judge score records. Contractual skills outperform no-skill and minimal-skill baselines on all tested models. Relative to information-rich plain expanded skills, the gains are small and mixed, suggesting that contractual fields mainly improve checkability and maintainability rather than raw generation quality. A tool-calling challenge covers eight models and 192 simulated tool-call records. Skills usually reduce high-risk tool attempts, but model differences remain and runtime tool guardrails are still required. The results suggest that contractual skills are best understood as a governance layer that makes task intent, boundaries, and acceptance criteria explicit, not as a standalone safety mechanism.

Achieving self-evolution in intelligent agents requires the continual accumulation of new knowledge across changing task sequences without forgetting previously acquired abilities. Existing approaches either internalize knowledge by updating model parameters, which induces catastrophic forgetting, or rely on external memory, which fails to genuinely enhance the model's intrinsic capabilities. We propose MoLEM, a generative mixture of latent memory framework based on a dynamic mixture-of-experts (MoE). We treat multiple experts as independent carriers to generate memory. A router selects and weights experts through key-query matching, and the aggregated latent memory is injected into the reasoning process. The base model for reasoning remains entirely frozen, with all experiential knowledge internalized into the additional modules, avoiding catastrophic forgetting. For continual learning, each training stage is paired with a lightweight autoencoder that selects the appropriate routing group at inference, and inputs that match no stage fall back to the pretrained model. Experiments train the framework on continual-learning sequences spanning math, science, and code domains. After training, we evaluate the framework on the corresponding test sets to measure task learning and competence preservation across continual adaptation stages. After the full continual-learning sequence, our method improves the average accuracy by 10.40% over the Vanilla pretrained baseline, while none of the competing methods consistently exceed this baseline across different training orders.

Large language models increasingly use external tools such as web search and document retrieval to solve information-intensive tasks. However, multi-hop tool use in complex tasks introduces substantial latency, since the model must repeatedly wait for tool observations before continuing. We study how to accelerate such trajectories without changing the final trajectory the model would have taken without acceleration, assuming access to faster but less reliable speculator tools. We develop a theoretical framework for lossless speculation in multi-hop tool-use settings, characterizing the optimal achievable latency gain. We propose SpecHop, a continuous speculation framework that maintains multiple speculative threads, verifies predicted observations asynchronously as target tool outputs arrive, commits correct branches, and rolls back incorrect ones. This preserves accuracy while reducing wall-clock latency. We show that SpecHop can approach oracle latency gains with enough active threads. Empirically, on retrieval-augmented multi-hop tasks, SpecHop closely matches theoretical predictions and reduces latency by up to 40% in some settings. Code: https://github.com/mehrdadsaberi/spechop

Self-evolving skill libraries, pioneered by Voyager, let frozen LLM agents accumulate reusable knowledge without weight updates, yet recent evaluation shows that LLM-authored skills deliver $+0.0$pp over no-skill baselines while human-curated ones deliver $+16.2$pp: the bottleneck is not skill authoring but lifecycle management. We introduce Ratchet, a single-agent loop in which a frozen LLM writes, retrieves, curates, and retires its own natural-language skills. Ratchet integrates four candidate hygiene mechanisms: outcome-driven retirement, a bounded active-cap, meta-skill authoring guidance, and pattern canonicalisation. On MBPP+ hard-100 with Claude Opus 4.7, Ratchet lifts held-out pass@1 from a $0.258 \pm 0.047$ baseline to a late-window rolling mean of $0.584$ (peak $0.658 \pm 0.042$) across 100 rounds and 3 seeds, a $+0.328 \pm 0.018$ rolling-mean gain where the no-skill control drifts at $+0.002 \pm 0.005$; the same recipe transfers to an agentic solver on SWE-bench Verified ($+0.22$ peak lift over 20 rounds). Eight ablations (A1--A8) reveal that the minimal working recipe is smaller than our design suggests: retirement and the meta-skill authoring prior are load-bearing, while explicit deduplication (canonicalisation, cover-guard) is subsumed by the meta-skill itself. A non-divergence proposition shows that bounded cap and retirement threshold together prevent expected performance from drifting below the no-skills floor.

Agentic systems are becoming more capable: agents define strategies, take actions, and interact with different environments. This autonomy poses serious challenges for overseeing and assessing agent behavior. Most current tools are limited, focusing on observability with basic evaluation capabilities or imposing static, hand-crafted error taxonomies that cannot adapt to new domains. To address this gap, we present Agentic CLEAR, an automatic, dynamic, and easy-to-use evaluation framework. It produces textual insights into the agent behavior on three levels of granularity: system, trace, and node. Agentic CLEAR operates above the observability layer, enabling seamless integration and featuring an intuitive UI that makes agent evaluation highly accessible. In our experiments on four benchmarks, seven agentic settings, and tens of thousands of LLM calls, we show that Agentic CLEAR produces high-quality, data-driven, insightful feedback. Our analysis shows strong alignment with human-annotated errors and the ability to predict task success rate.

Zero-Shot Compositional Image Retrieval (ZS-CIR) requires both preserving the visual continuity of the reference image and faithfully executing the semantic variables specified in the modification text, which constitutes the core challenge of the task. Existing methods often suffer from Perception Myopia in a single space, or fall into Logic Drift in iterative collaboration due to the perception ceiling of the underlying retriever. To address this issue, we propose a one-stop hierarchical Perception-to-Deliberation Framework (PDF), which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first to introduce experience self-evolution and Test-Time Scaling Law (TTS) into ZS-CIR. Relying on a hierarchical multi-agent architecture, PDF first utilizes an Intent Routing Manager to dynamically dispatch multi-view Worker perception signals based on modification intents to construct a high-recall candidate pool. Subsequently, the Decision Manager combines a Training-free Reasoning Policy Distillation mechanism with a Tournament-style TTS strategy to achieve self-evolving fine-grained reasoning, yielding the final retrieval results. Experimental results demonstrate that PDF achieves SOTA performance on three benchmark datasets: CIRR, CIRCO, and FashionIQ. This study indicates that experience-driven self-evolution and TTS represent a highly promising and scalable path for achieving zero-shot fine-grained multimedia retrieval. The code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

LLM-powered AI agents require high-frequency state exploration (e.g., test-time tree search and reinforcement learning), relying on rapid checkpoint and rollback (C/R) of the complete sandbox state, including files and process state (e.g., memory, contexts, etc.). Existing mechanisms duplicate the entire state, causing hundreds of milliseconds to seconds of latency per C/R, which severely bottlenecks deep search and large-scale fan-outs. This paper observes that subsequent checkpoints in AI agents are highly similar. Therefore, instead of full duplication, a sandbox should only duplicate the changes between consecutive checkpoints (Key Insight). However, it is non-trivial to realize the idea, mainly due to the missing OS supports. This paper proposes a new OS-level abstraction, DeltaState, to enable the change-based transactional C/R for AI agents with two co-designed OS mechanisms. First, DeltaFS enables change-based filesystem C/R by organizing the file states into layers and dynamically freezing the writable layer and inserting a new one during checkpoint, reducing file updates to copy-on-write, and making rollback a simple layer switch. Second, DeltaCR enables change-based process state C/R using incremental dumps, and accelerates rollback by bypassing traditional pipelines to directly fork() from a frozen template process. We then present DeltaBox, a novel agent sandbox achieving millisecond level C/R through the two new mechanisms. Evaluations on SWE-bench and RL micro-benchmarks show DeltaBox completes checkpoint and rollback in millisecond-level latency (14ms and 5ms, respectively), empowering agents to explore substantially more nodes under fixed time budgets.

Recent development of agents has renewed demand for long-context reasoning capacity of LLMs. However, training LLMs for this capacity requires costly long-document curation or heuristic context synthesis. We observe that agents produce massive trajectories when solving problems, invoking tools and receiving environment observations across many turns. The evidence needed to answer the original question is thus scattered throughout these turns, requiring integration of distant context segments. Nevertheless, standard agent SFT masks tool responses and only trains turn-level tool selection, creating a supervision blind spot where these scattered signals go unused. We propose Agent Context Compilation (ACC), which converts trajectories from search, software engineering, and database querying agents into long-context QA pairs that combine the original question with tool responses and environment observations gathered across multiple turns, training the model to answer directly without tool use. This makes the dependencies between the question and the evidence explicit, enabling direct supervision of long-context reasoning over distant segments without additional annotation. ACC is a simple but effective approach that can be combined with any existing long-context extension or training method, providing scalable supervised fine-tuning data. We validate ACC on long-range dependency modeling tasks through MRCR and GraphWalks, challenging benchmarks requiring cross-turn coreference resolution and graph traversal over extended contexts. Training Qwen3-30B-A3B with ACC achieves 68.3 on MRCR (+18.1) and 77.5 on GraphWalks (+7.6), results comparable to Qwen3-235B-A22B, while preserving general capabilities on GPQA, MMLU-Pro, AIME, and IFEval. Further mechanism analysis reveals that the ACC-trained model exhibits task-adaptive attention restructuring and expert specialization.

Today, tool-calling agents are commonly evaluated or tested on static datasets of execution traces, including input commands, agent responses, and associated tool calls. However, internal production datasets are often insufficient or unusable for testing; for example, they may contain sensitive or proprietary data, or they may be too sparse to support comprehensive testing (especially pre-deployment). In these settings, practitioners are increasingly replacing or augmenting real datasets with synthetic ones for evaluation purposes. A key challenge is quantifying the relation between these synthetic datasets and the real data. We introduce SynAE, an evaluation framework for assessing how well synthetic benchmarks for multi-turn, tool-calling agents replicate and augment the characteristics of real data trajectories. SynAE assesses the validity, fidelity, and diversity of synthetic data across four metric categories: (i) task instructions and intermediate responses, (ii) tool calls, (iii) final outputs, and (iv) downstream evaluation. We evaluate SynAE using recent agent benchmarks and test common synthetic data failure modes via realistic and controlled generation schemes. SynAE detects fine-grained variations in data validity, fidelity and diversity, and shows that no single metric is sufficient to fully characterize synthetic data quality, motivating a multi-axis evaluation of synthetic data for agent testing. A demo of SynAE is available at https://synae-2026-synae-demo.static.hf.space/index.html, with code at https://github.com/wsqwsq/SynAE.

Spreadsheet systems (e.g., Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets) play a central role in modern data-centric workflows. As AI agents grow increasingly capable of automating complex tasks, such as controlling computers and generating presentations, building an AI-driven spreadsheet agent has emerged as a promising research direction. Most existing spreadsheet agents rely on specialized prompting over general-purpose LLMs; while this design has potentials on simple spreadsheet operations, it struggles to manage the complex, multi-step workflows typical of real-world applications. We introduce Spreadsheet-RL, a reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning framework designed to train specialized spreadsheet agents within a realistic Microsoft Excel environment. Spreadsheet-RL features an automated pipeline for scalable collection of paired start-goal spreadsheets from online forums, as well as domain-specific evaluation tasks in areas such as finance and supply chain management, which we compile into the new Domain-Spreadsheet benchmark dataset. It also includes a Spreadsheet Gym environment designed for multi-turn RL: Spreadsheet Gym exposes extensive Excel functionality through a Python sandbox, along with a refined harness that incorporates a comprehensive tool set and carefully designed tool-routing rules for spreadsheet tasks. Through comprehensive experiments, we show that Spreadsheet-RL substantially enhances AI agent's performance on both general and domain-specific spreadsheet tasks: it improves Qwen3-4B-Thinking-2507's Pass@1 on SpreadsheetBench from 12.0% to 23.4%, and raises Pass@1 from 8.4% to 17.2% on our curated Domain-Spreadsheet dataset. These results highlight Spreadsheet-RL's strong potential for generalization and real-world adoption in spreadsheet automation, and broadly, its promise for advancing LLM-based interactions with data interfaces in everyday work.

We present Claw AI Lab, a lab-native autonomous research platform that advances automated research from a hidden prompt-to-paper pipeline into an interactive AI laboratory. Rather than centering the system around a single agent or a fixed serial workflow, we allow users to instantiate a full research team from one prompt, with customizable roles, collaborative workflows, real-time monitoring, artifact inspection, and rollback/resume control through a unified dashboard. The platform also supports distinct research modes for exploration, multi-agent discussion, and reproduction, making autonomous research substantially more steerable and laboratory-like in practice. A key practical contribution of Claw AI Lab lies in its Claw-Code Harness, which connects local codebases, datasets, and checkpoints to runnable experiments and feeds execution artifacts back into the research loop. As a result, the harness improves not only execution integration, but also experimental completion and result integrity: experiments are easier to inspect, iterate on, and faithfully transfer into final papers, reducing common failure modes such as partial runs and malformed result reporting. In our internal evaluation on five AI research case studies, using AutoResearchClaw as the baseline, Claw AI Lab is consistently preferred by AI expert judges on idea novelty, experiment completeness, and paper presentation quality. We view Claw AI Lab as an early step toward a new paradigm: autonomous research as usable, interactive, and reliability-aware scientific infrastructure.

Real-world image restoration is challenging due to complex and interacting mixed degradations. Recent agent-based approaches address this problem by composing multiple task-specific restoration tools. However, empirical analysis reveals that their performance is fundamentally limited by implicitly constrained planning spaces and the lack of coordination among independently pretrained tools. To address these issues, we propose OPERA (Optimized Planning-Execution Restoration Agent), a framework that jointly optimizes restoration planning and tool execution in an end-to-end manner. On the planning side, OPERA uses reinforcement learning to directly optimize tool composition over a combinatorial plan space, with the final restoration quality as the reward. On the execution side, OPERA introduces agent-guided co-training of restoration tools, enabling them to learn cooperative behaviors under sequential composition. Extensive experiments on multi-degradation benchmarks and real-world datasets demonstrate that OPERA consistently outperforms both all-in-one restoration models and existing agent-based methods across diverse and complex degradation scenarios.

As autonomous agents (e.g., OpenClaw) increasingly operate with deep system-level privileges to execute complex tasks, they introduce severe, unmitigated security risks. Current vulnerability analyses overwhelmingly focus on single-turn, stateless behaviors, overlooking the expanded attack surface inherent in stateful, multi-turn interactions and dynamic tool invocations. In this paper, we propose a novel, multi-dimensional evasion framework targeting LLM-based agent systems. We introduce three stealthy attack vectors: (1) Temporal evasion, which fragments malicious payloads across sequential interaction turns; (2) Spatial evasion, which conceals payloads within complex external artifacts that evade standard LLM parsing mechanisms; and (3) Semantic evasion, which obscures malicious intents beneath benign contextual noise. To systematically quantify these threats, we construct A3S-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark comprising 2,254 real-world agent execution trajectories. Evaluating a standard agent framework separately integrated with 10 mainstream LLM backbones against 20 practical threat scenarios, we demonstrate that our evasion framework elevates the average risk trigger rate from a 28.3% baseline to 52.6%. These findings reveal systemic, architecture-level vulnerabilities in current autonomous agent systems that existing defenses fail to address, highlighting an urgent need for defense mechanisms tailored to the unique threats.

Most agent frameworks are built around the language model: a conversation loop comes first, then tools, then rules, and finally a logging layer bolted on for observability, with state persisted as retrievable "memory." We describe ActiveGraph, a runtime that inverts this arrangement. The append-only event log is the source of truth; the working graph is a deterministic projection of that log; and behaviors--ordinary functions, classes, LLM-backed routines, or logic attached to typed edges--react to changes in the graph and emit new events. No component instructs another; coordination happens entirely through the shared graph. This single design decision yields three properties that retrieval-and-summarization memory systems do not provide: deterministic replay of any run from its log, cheap forking that branches a run at any event without re-executing the shared prefix, and end-to-end lineage from a high-level goal down to the individual model call that produced each artifact. We present the architecture, a determinism contract that makes replay sound, and a worked diligence example whose full causal structure is reconstructable from the log alone. We discuss--without claiming to demonstrate--why this substrate is unusually well suited to self-improving agents, and how it extends the BabyAGI lineage and prior graph-memory research.

Recent advances in large language models and tool-using agents have expanded the range of benchmarked web tasks. Yet an important class of specialized retrieval tasks remains undercharacterized. On many specialized data-retrieval websites, answer-bearing evidence becomes accessible only after establishing the correct site-specific retrieval state through filters, views, hierarchies, or scopes. We term this capability state-gated retrieval (SGR). We introduce SGR-Bench, a benchmark for this setting containing 100 expert-curated tasks spanning six source families and 12 public data ecosystems. Each task requires discovering the appropriate website and configuring its site-specific retrieval state to produce a structured answer. SGR-Bench pairs constraint-guided and goal-oriented formulations of the same underlying problems, enabling controlled comparisons between explicit and implicit guidance for state-gated retrieval. We evaluate eight CLI-based agentic LLM systems and three commercial search-agent products. On SGR-Bench, the strongest system reaches only 66.18% item-level F1, while row-level F1 remains much lower. A manual audit of 156 analyzable failed CLI trajectories shows why: agents often reach a relevant web source, but establish the wrong site-specific retrieval state. Retrieval-scope drift (37.2%) and criterion mismatch (27.6%) dominate, whereas final answer composition accounts for only 10.3%. The dataset and single-case evaluation instructions are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/PKUAIWeb/SGR-BENCH.

Static benchmarks capture only part of how large language models behave in practice. Real systems place models inside repeated loops with time limits, formatting constraints, and failure modes. We study this setting in a timed multi-phase Risk environment with explicit victory targets and repeated planning and execution cycles. In a replicated 32-game cross-provider championship under frozen rules, gemini-3.1-pro-preview won 20 of 32 games against gpt-5.1, claude-opus-4-7, and kimi-k2.6, and the pooled winner distribution differs strongly from an equal-strength null (p approx 1.5 x 10^-5). We then separate planning from execution by standardizing execution on a cheaper Gemini Flash scaffold. Under this design, a pooled 32-game planner bakeoff is consistent with near-equality (p approx 0.821), which indicates that much of the earlier provider spread came from end-to-end system behavior rather than planning alone. To study mechanism, we analyze saved planning and execution traces from the provider championship. Gemini refers to the terminal objective far more often than the other models and increases that focus as victory approaches. Gemini also converts more turns into deep conquest chains, even though it is not the cleanest runtime. These results show that live-agent performance depends on objective tracking, execution conversion, cost, and runtime reliability, and they support evaluating LLMs as components in bounded workflows rather than as isolated benchmark respondents.

LLM agents are shaped not only by their language models, but also by the runtime harness that mediates observation, tool use, action execution, feedback interpretation, and trajectory control. While existing agent adaptation methods mainly update model parameters, many failures in deterministic, rule-governed domains stem from mismatches at the model--environment interface. We propose Life-Harness, a lifecycle-aware runtime harness that improves frozen LLM agents without changing model weights or evaluation environments. Life-Harness evolves from training trajectories by converting recurring interaction failures into reusable interventions across environment contracts, procedural skills, action realization, and trajectory regulation, and remains fixed during held-out evaluation. On seven deterministic environments from $τ$-bench, $τ^2$-bench, and AgentBench, Life-Harness improves 116 out of 126 model--environment settings across 18 model backbones, with an average relative improvement of 88.5%. Harnesses evolved only from Qwen3-4B-Instruct trajectories transfer to 17 other models, showing that Life-Harness captures reusable environment-side structure rather than model-specific behavior. These results position runtime interface adaptation as a complementary alternative to model-centric agent training. Code is available at GitHub.

Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)-driven image restoration agent demonstrates effectiveness in degradation coupling scenarios by flexibly selecting tools and determining removal orders. However, their zero-shot planning often fails without experience, necessitating severe trial-and-error overhead to achieve satisfactory outcomes. Currently, two paradigms are employed to address this issue, yet a dilemma persists: Training-based methods embed intrinsic experience into parameters, achieving high inference efficiency but lacking compatibility with new tools or degradation. In contrast, training-free methods utilize explicit experience storage for compatibility but still incur trial-and-error overhead due to naive experience. To resolve the dilemma, we propose EvoIR-Agent, which first systematically formulates the experience components of a training-free image restoration agent. Subsequently, a hierarchical experience pool is constructed, which enables coarse-to-fine guidance for diverse tools and removal orders. Furthermore, a self-evolving mechanism is introduced to update the pool from scratch using accumulated records, thereby greatly improving performance and efficiency. Extensive experiments reveal that EvoIR-Agent achieves a significant lead in the full reference metrics and yields a remarkable Pareto-optimal balance between performance and efficiency compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

Agricultural decision-making increasingly requires multimodal systems that can transform visual observations into reliable, executable actions. However, existing agricultural multimodal benchmarks mainly evaluate final-answer correctness and provide limited support for assessing whether models can use external tools to complete precision-sensitive workflows. In this paper, we introduce AgroTools, a benchmark for evaluating tool-augmented multimodal agents in agriculture. AgroTools contains 539 question-answer instances paired with 1,097 heterogeneous agricultural images, spanning five task families and an executable environment of 14 agricultural tools. Each query is annotated with structured tool-use traces, enabling a dual-view evaluation of both process-level execution quality and outcome-level task success. We benchmark 9 open-source and 4 closed-source multimodal large language models on AgroTools. Results show that current models remain far from reliable in agricultural tool-use settings, with clear bottlenecks in tool planning, argument generation, execution recovery, and final-answer synthesis. We hope AgroTools will support future research on multimodal agents for high-precision agricultural applications. The benchmark and evaluation are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/AgroTools/AgroTools.

Autonomous agentic systems are largely static after deployment: they do not learn from user interactions, and recurring failures persist until the next human-driven update ships a fix. Self-evolving agents have emerged in response, but all confine evolution to text-mutable artifacts — skill files, prompt configurations, memory schemas, workflow graphs — and leave the agent harness untouched. Since routing, hook ordering, state invariants, and dispatch live in code rather than in any text artifact, an entire class of structural failure is physically unreachable from the text layer. We argue that source-level adaptation is a fundamentally more general medium: it is Turing-complete, a strict superset of every text-mutable scope, takes effect deterministically rather than through base-model compliance, and does not erode under long-context drift. We present MOSS, a system that performs self-rewriting at the source level on production agentic substrates. Each evolution is anchored to an automatically curated batch of production-failure evidence and proceeds through a deterministic multi-stage pipeline; code modification is delegated to a pluggable external coding-agent CLI while MOSS retains stage ordering and verdicts. Candidates are verified by replaying the batch against the candidate image in ephemeral trial workers, then promoted via user-consent-gated, in-place container swap with health-probe-gated rollback. On OpenClaw, MOSS lifts a four-task mean grader score from 0.25 to 0.61 in a single cycle without human intervention.

Large language model (LLM)-based agents solve complex tasks by leveraging multi-step reasoning with iterative tool calls and environment interactions, which incur idle time while waiting for observations. Despite the prevalence of idle time in most agentic scenarios, existing works treat it as an unavoidable overhead or propose restricted solutions that overlook varying computational budgets across different tool calls and future observation uncertainty, thereby leading to suboptimal utilization of idle time. In this paper, we introduce IdleSpec, a scalable and generic inference approach that leverages idle-time computation to improve agent performance while minimizing latency overhead. Specifically, IdleSpec iteratively generates plan candidates during idle periods and, once observations become available, aggregates them to guide the next reasoning step. For effective plan generation under observation uncertainty, IdleSpec samples between complementary drafting strategies (i.e., progressive and recovery) from a learned distribution that is updated via posterior feedback. Our experiments demonstrate that IdleSpec significantly improves agent performance in various agentic scenarios by effectively utilizing idle time. In particular, on the GAIA and FRAMES, IdleSpec achieves 55.6% average accuracy with Gemini-2.5-Flash, surpassing the vanilla baseline without idle-time usage by 5.1%. Furthermore, for MLE-Bench, which involves substantial delay from code executions, IdleSpec achieves performance gains of up to 9.1% on the Any Medal rate, highlighting its generalizability to long-horizon tasks.

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents demonstrate strong reasoning and execution capabilities on complex tasks when guided by structured instructions, commonly referred to as workflows. However, existing workflow-assisted agent serving systems typically rely on predefined templates and shallow matching mechanisms, which limit their ability to capture deep semantic relationships and generalize to previously unseen tasks. To address these limitations, we propose a new workflow management paradigm that represents workflows using a unified graph, termed wGraph, where each node corresponds to an atomic operation. wGraph serves as a shared substrate from which task-specific workflows are dynamically instantiated. Building on wGraph primitives, we introduce GraphFlow, a system that efficiently integrates workflows into agent serving through two key designs. First, adaptive workflow generation dynamically constructs workflows from wGraph based on task semantics and constraint requirements. Second, workflow state management exploits wGraph structure to efficiently manage Key-Value (KV) caches, reducing redundant computation during agent serving. Extensive experiments across five benchmark datasets show that GraphFlow consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, yielding an average performance improvement of approximately 4.95 percentage points, while achieving an approximately 4$\times$ reduction in memory footprint.

The proliferation of large language models (LLMs) and modular skills has endowed autonomous agents with increasingly powerful capabilities. Existing frameworks typically rely on monolithic LLMs and fixed logic to interface with these skills. This gives rise to a critical bottleneck: different LLMs offer distinct advantages across diverse domains, yet current frameworks fail to exploit the complementary strengths of models and skills, thereby limiting their performance on downstream tasks. In this paper, we present Maestro (Multimodal Agent for Expert-Skill Targeted Reinforced Orchestration), a Reinforcement Learning (RL)-driven orchestration framework that reframes heterogeneous multimodal tasks as a sequential decision-making process over a hierarchical model-skill registry. Rather than consolidating all knowledge into a single model, Maestro trains a lightweight policy to dynamically compose ensembles of frozen expert models and a two-tier skill library, deciding at each step whether to invoke an external expert, which model-skill pair to select, and when to terminate. The policy is optimized via outcome-based RL, requiring no step-level supervision. We evaluate Maestro across ten representative multimodal benchmarks spanning mathematical reasoning, chart understanding, high-resolution perception, and domain-specific analysis. With only a 4B orchestrator, Maestro achieves an average accuracy of 70.1%, surpassing both GPT-5 (69.3%) and Gemini-2.5-Pro (68.7%). Crucially, the learned coordination policy generalizes to unseen models and skills without retraining: augmenting the registry with out-of-domain experts yields a 59.5% average on four challenging benchmarks, outperforming all closed-source baselines. Maestro further maintains high computational efficiency with low latency. The source code is available at https://github.com/jinyangwu/Maestro.

Video large language models (Video LLMs) achieve strong benchmark accuracy, yet often answer video questions through shortcuts such as single-frame cues and language priors rather than by tracking spatiotemporal dynamics. This issue is exacerbated in RL post-training, where correctness-only rewards can further reinforce shortcut policies that obtain high reward without tracking video dynamics. We address this by asking a controlled counterfactual question: if the visual world changed while the question remained fixed, should the answer change or stay the same? Based on this view, we propose Counterfactual Relational Policy Optimization (CRPO), a dual-branch RL framework for improving spatiotemporal sensitivity. CRPO constructs counterfactual videos through horizontal flips and temporal reversals, trains on both original and counterfactual branches, and introduces a Counterfactual Relation Reward (CRR) between their answers. CRR encourages answers to change for dynamic questions and remain unchanged for static questions. This cross-branch constraint makes it difficult for shortcut policies to be consistently rewarded across both branches. To evaluate this property, we introduce DyBench, a paired counterfactual video benchmark with 3,014 videos covering reversible dynamics, moving direction, and event sequence, together with a strict pair-accuracy metric that prevents fixed-answer shortcuts from inflating scores. Experiments show that CRPO outperforms prior RL methods on spatiotemporal-sensitive evaluations while maintaining competitive general video performance. On Qwen3-VL-8B, CRPO improves DyBench P-Acc by +7.7 and TimeBlind I-Acc by +8.2 over the base model, indicating improved spatiotemporal sensitivity rather than stronger reliance on static shortcuts. The project website can be found at https://ddz16.github.io/crpo.github.io/ .

Self-distillation bootstraps large language models (LLMs) by training on their own generations. However, existing methods either rely on external signals to curate self-generated outputs (e.g., correctness filtering, execution feedback, and reward search), which are costly and unavailable for the best-performing frontier models, or skip curation entirely and train on all raw outputs, an approach that is often domain-specific and hard to generalize. Both also share a deeper weakness that self-generated outputs entangle task-relevant capability with others, such as stylistic patterns, formatting artifacts, and model-specific errors, diluting the signal for the specific capability one aims to improve. In this paper, we propose Self-Policy Distillation (SPD), which achieves generalizable, capability selective without any external signal. Specifically, SPD extracts a low-rank capability subspace from the model's own gradients on correctness-defining tokens, projects key-value (KV) activations into this subspace during self-generation, and fine-tunes on the resulting raw outputs with standard next-token prediction loss. Through extensive experiments across code generation, mathematical reasoning, and multiple-choice QA, we show that SPD achieves up to 13% improvement over state-of-the-art self-distillation methods without external signals and up to 16% improvement over pre-trained baselines. Notably, SPD demonstrates superior generalizability, achieving 15% better performance under out-of-domain generalization settings.

Distillation attacks create a deployment trade-off for model providers: the same outputs that make a model more useful can also make it easier to imitate. We study this trade-off through a minimax game between a utility-constrained teacher and an adaptive student. Our framework yields tractable one-sided response rules: an adaptive evaluation rule in which the student reweights high-value examples, and a teacher-side defense template that suppresses outputs most useful for distillation. From a cheap proxy for example value, we derive Product-of-Experts (PoE), a simple forward-pass-only defense that combines the teacher with a proxy student during generation. Empirically, adaptive evaluation reveals a large passive--adaptive gap: on state-of-the-art defenses, adaptive students recover substantially more capability than passive evaluation suggests on GSM8K and MATH. Under this stronger evaluation, the apparent robustness gap between expensive defenses and PoE narrows considerably, while PoE remains substantially cheaper and preserves higher-quality reasoning traces. Overall, our results suggest that strong distillation remains difficult to stop, and that progress on antidistillation should be judged against adaptive students rather than passive ones. Our code is available at: https://github.com/ysfalh/distillation-game.

Closed-weight generative services are increasingly deployed through query-based APIs, where users can obtain generated outputs while model parameters remain inaccessible. However, such deployment does not prevent model stealing: an attacker can repeatedly query the service, collect large volumes of released synthetic images, and use them as training data for a private substitute model. This query-output-driven process enables unauthorized knowledge distillation and capability replication without direct access to the original weights. To mitigate this threat, a practical defense should preserve the visual fidelity of released images, provide explicit control over perturbation magnitude, and scale efficiently to large-volume output release. We present WaveGuard, a single-pass, generator-based protection framework that safeguards released synthetic images under a user-specified perturbation budget. WaveGuard employs a frequency-aware perturbation generator to inject structured, imperceptible perturbations that maintain perceptual utility for benign viewers while reducing the usefulness of protected images as training data for unauthorized student models. Extensive experiments under WikiArt-related synthetic-output distillation settings show that WaveGuard achieves a favorable efficacy--fidelity--efficiency trade-off, with explicit imperceptibility control and substantial gains in protection efficiency.

Text-to-image (T2I) systems increasingly rely on upstream prompters, either humans or multimodal large language models (MLLMs), to translate user intent into detailed prompts. Yet current benchmarks fix the prompt and only evaluate T2I models, leaving the prompting proficiency of this upstream component entirely unmeasured. We introduce AtelierEval, the first unified benchmark that quantifies prompting proficiency across 360 expert-crafted tasks. Grounded in a cognitive view, it spans three task categories and instantiates tasks using a taxonomy of real-world challenges, with a dual interface for both humans and MLLMs. To enable scalable and reliable evaluation, we propose AtelierJudge, a skill-based, memory-augmented agentic evaluator. It produces subjective and objective scores for prompt-image pairs, achieving a Spearman correlation of 0.79 with human experts, approaching human performance. Extensive experiments benchmark 8 MLLMs against 48 human users across 4 T2I backends, validate AtelierEval as a robust diagnostic tool, and reveal the superiority of mimicry over planning, advocating for an image-augmented direction for future prompters. Our work is released to support future research.