Daily Papers

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into Geographic Information Systems (GIS) marks a paradigm shift toward autonomous spatial analysis. However, evaluating these LLM-based agents remains challenging due to the complex, multi-step nature of geospatial workflows. Existing benchmarks primarily rely on static text or code matching, neglecting dynamic runtime feedback and the multimodal nature of spatial outputs. To address this gap, we introduce GeoAgentBench (GABench), a dynamic and interactive evaluation benchmark tailored for tool-augmented GIS agents. GABench provides a realistic execution sandbox integrating 117 atomic GIS tools, encompassing 53 typical spatial analysis tasks across 6 core GIS domains. Recognizing that precise parameter configuration is the primary determinant of execution success in dynamic GIS environments, we designed the Parameter Execution Accuracy (PEA) metric, which utilizes a "Last-Attempt Alignment" strategy to quantify the fidelity of implicit parameter inference. Complementing this, a Vision-Language Model (VLM) based verification is proposed to assess data-spatial accuracy and cartographic style adherence. Furthermore, to address the frequent task failures caused by parameter misalignments and runtime anomalies, we developed a novel agent architecture, Plan-and-React, that mimics expert cognitive workflows by decoupling global orchestration from step-wise reactive execution. Extensive experiments with seven representative LLMs demonstrate that the Plan-and-React paradigm significantly outperforms traditional frameworks, achieving the optimal balance between logical rigor and execution robustness, particularly in multi-step reasoning and error recovery. Our findings highlight current capability boundaries and establish a robust standard for assessing and advancing the next generation of autonomous GeoAI.

Recent progress in multimodal reasoning has enabled agents that can interpret imagery, connect it with language, and perform structured analytical tasks. Extending such capabilities to the remote sensing domain remains challenging, as models must reason over spatial scale, geographic structures, and multispectral indices while maintaining coherent multi-step logic. To bridge this gap, OpenEarthAgent introduces a unified framework for developing tool-augmented geospatial agents trained on satellite imagery, natural-language queries, and detailed reasoning traces. The training pipeline relies on supervised fine-tuning over structured reasoning trajectories, aligning the model with verified multistep tool interactions across diverse analytical contexts. The accompanying corpus comprises 14,538 training and 1,169 evaluation instances, with more than 100K reasoning steps in the training split and over 7K reasoning steps in the evaluation split. It spans urban, environmental, disaster, and infrastructure domains, and incorporates GIS-based operations alongside index analyses such as NDVI, NBR, and NDBI. Grounded in explicit reasoning traces, the learned agent demonstrates structured reasoning, stable spatial understanding, and interpretable behaviour through tool-driven geospatial interactions across diverse conditions. We report consistent improvements over a strong baseline and competitive performance relative to recent open and closed-source models.

Recent advancements in tool-equipped Agents (LLMs) have enabled complex tasks like secure database interactions and multi-agent code development. However, scaling tool capacity beyond agent reasoning or model limits remains a challenge. In this paper, we address these challenges by introducing Toolshed Knowledge Bases, a tool knowledge base (vector database) designed to store enhanced tool representations and optimize tool selection for large-scale tool-equipped Agents. Additionally, we propose Advanced RAG-Tool Fusion, a novel ensemble of tool-applied advanced retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques across the pre-retrieval, intra-retrieval, and post-retrieval phases, without requiring model fine-tuning. During pre-retrieval, tool documents are enhanced with key information and stored in the Toolshed Knowledge Base. Intra-retrieval focuses on query planning and transformation to increase retrieval accuracy. Post-retrieval refines the retrieved tool documents and enables self-reflection. Furthermore, by varying both the total number of tools (tool-M) an Agent has access to and the tool selection threshold (top-k), we address trade-offs between retrieval accuracy, agent performance, and token cost. Our approach achieves 46%, 56%, and 47% absolute improvements on the ToolE single-tool, ToolE multi-tool and Seal-Tools benchmark datasets, respectively (Recall@5).

Tool-augmented LLMs are a promising approach to create AI agents that can have realistic conversations, follow procedures, and call appropriate functions. However, evaluating them is challenging due to the diversity of possible conversations, and existing datasets focus only on single interactions and function-calling. We present a test generation pipeline to evaluate LLMs as conversational AI agents. Our framework uses LLMs to generate diverse tests grounded on user-defined procedures. For that, we use intermediate graphs to limit the LLM test generator's tendency to hallucinate content that is not grounded on input procedures, and enforces high coverage of the possible conversations. Additionally, we put forward ALMITA, a manually curated dataset for evaluating AI agents in customer support, and use it to evaluate existing LLMs. Our results show that while tool-augmented LLMs perform well in single interactions, they often struggle to handle complete conversations. While our focus is on customer support, our method is general and capable of AI agents for different domains.

There has been growing interest in building agents that can interact with digital platforms to execute meaningful enterprise tasks autonomously. Among the approaches explored are tool-augmented agents built on abstractions such as Model Context Protocol (MCP) and web agents that operate through graphical interfaces. Yet, it remains unclear whether such complex agentic systems are necessary given their cost and operational overhead. We argue that a coding agent equipped only with a terminal and a filesystem can solve many enterprise tasks more effectively by interacting directly with platform APIs. We evaluate this hypothesis across diverse real-world systems and show that these low-level terminal agents match or outperform more complex agent architectures. Our findings suggest that simple programmatic interfaces, combined with strong foundation models, are sufficient for practical enterprise automation.

Tool agents--LLM-based systems that interact with external APIs--offer a way to execute real-world tasks. However, as tasks become increasingly complex, these agents struggle to identify and call the correct APIs in the proper order. To tackle this problem, we investigate converting API documentation into a structured API graph that captures API dependencies and leveraging it for multi-tool queries that require compositional API calls. To support this, we introduce In-N-Out, the first expert-annotated dataset of API graphs built from two real-world API benchmarks and their documentation. Using In-N-Out significantly improves performance on both tool retrieval and multi-tool query generation, nearly doubling that of LLMs using documentation alone. Moreover, graphs generated by models fine-tuned on In-N-Out close 90% of this gap, showing that our dataset helps models learn to comprehend API documentation and parameter relationships. Our findings highlight the promise of using explicit API graphs for tool agents and the utility of In-N-Out as a valuable resource. We release our dataset and code at https://github.com/holi-lab/In-N-Out-API-Graph.

We introduce tulip agent, an architecture for autonomous LLM-based agents with Create, Read, Update, and Delete access to a tool library containing a potentially large number of tools. In contrast to state-of-the-art implementations, tulip agent does not encode the descriptions of all available tools in the system prompt, which counts against the model's context window, or embed the entire prompt for retrieving suitable tools. Instead, the tulip agent can recursively search for suitable tools in its extensible tool library, implemented exemplarily as a vector store. The tulip agent architecture significantly reduces inference costs, allows using even large tool libraries, and enables the agent to adapt and extend its set of tools. We evaluate the architecture with several ablation studies in a mathematics context and demonstrate its generalizability with an application to robotics. A reference implementation and the benchmark are available at github.com/HRI-EU/tulip_agent.

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has enabled tool-augmented agents capable of solving complex real-world tasks through step-by-step reasoning. However, existing evaluations often focus on general-purpose or multimodal scenarios, leaving a gap in domain-specific benchmarks that assess tool-use capabilities in complex remote sensing use cases. We present ThinkGeo, an agentic benchmark designed to evaluate LLM-driven agents on remote sensing tasks via structured tool use and multi-step planning. Inspired by tool-interaction paradigms, ThinkGeo includes human-curated queries spanning a wide range of real-world applications such as urban planning, disaster assessment and change analysis, environmental monitoring, transportation analysis, aviation monitoring, recreational infrastructure, and industrial site analysis. Queries are grounded in satellite or aerial imagery, including both optical RGB and SAR data, and require agents to reason through a diverse toolset. We implement a ReAct-style interaction loop and evaluate both open and closed-source LLMs (e.g., GPT-4o, Qwen2.5) on 486 structured agentic tasks with 1,778 expert-verified reasoning steps. The benchmark reports both step-wise execution metrics and final answer correctness. Our analysis reveals notable disparities in tool accuracy and planning consistency across models. ThinkGeo provides the first extensive testbed for evaluating how tool-enabled LLMs handle spatial reasoning in remote sensing.

Recent developments in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for selecting relevant tools from a tool knowledge base enable LLM agents to scale their complex tool calling capabilities to hundreds or thousands of external tools, APIs, or agents-as-tools. However, traditional RAG-based tool retrieval fails to capture structured dependencies between tools, limiting the retrieval accuracy of a retrieved tool's dependencies. For example, among a vector database of tools, a "get stock price" API requires a "stock ticker" parameter from a "get stock ticker" API, and both depend on OS-level internet connectivity tools. In this paper, we address this limitation by introducing Graph RAG-Tool Fusion, a novel plug-and-play approach that combines the strengths of vector-based retrieval with efficient graph traversal to capture all relevant tools (nodes) along with any nested dependencies (edges) within the predefined tool knowledge graph. We also present ToolLinkOS, a new tool selection benchmark of 573 fictional tools, spanning over 15 industries, each with an average of 6.3 tool dependencies. We demonstrate that Graph RAG-Tool Fusion achieves absolute improvements of 71.7% and 22.1% over na\"ive RAG on ToolLinkOS and ToolSandbox benchmarks, respectively (mAP@10). ToolLinkOS dataset is available at https://github.com/EliasLumer/Graph-RAG-Tool-Fusion-ToolLinkOS

Scaling test-time computation improves performance across different tasks on large language models (LLMs), which has also been extended to tool-augmented agents. For these agents, scaling involves not only "thinking" in tokens but also "acting" via tool calls. The number of tool calls directly bounds the agent's interaction with the external environment. However, we find that simply granting agents a larger tool-call budget fails to improve performance, as they lack "budget awareness" and quickly hit a performance ceiling. To address this, we study how to scale such agents effectively under explicit tool-call budgets, focusing on web search agents. We first introduce the Budget Tracker, a lightweight plug-in that provides the agent with continuous budget awareness, enabling simple yet effective scaling. We further develop BATS (Budget Aware Test-time Scaling), an advanced framework that leverages this awareness to dynamically adapt its planning and verification strategy, deciding whether to "dig deeper" on a promising lead or "pivot" to new paths based on remaining resources. To analyze cost-performance scaling in a controlled manner, we formalize a unified cost metric that jointly accounts for token and tool consumption. We provide the first systematic study on budget-constrained agents, showing that budget-aware methods produce more favorable scaling curves and push the cost-performance Pareto frontier. Our work offers empirical insights toward a more transparent and principled understanding of scaling in tool-augmented agents.

Significant focus has been placed on integrating large language models (LLMs) with various tools in developing general-purpose agents. This poses a challenge to LLMs' tool-use capabilities. However, there are evident gaps between existing tool-use evaluations and real-world scenarios. Current evaluations often use AI-generated queries, single-step tasks, dummy tools, and text-only interactions, failing to reveal the agents' real-world problem-solving abilities effectively. To address this, we propose GTA, a benchmark for General Tool Agents, featuring three main aspects: (i) Real user queries: human-written queries with simple real-world objectives but implicit tool-use, requiring the LLM to reason the suitable tools and plan the solution steps. (ii) Real deployed tools: an evaluation platform equipped with tools across perception, operation, logic, and creativity categories to evaluate the agents' actual task execution performance. (iii) Real multimodal inputs: authentic image files, such as spatial scenes, web page screenshots, tables, code snippets, and printed/handwritten materials, used as the query contexts to align with real-world scenarios closely. We design 229 real-world tasks and executable tool chains to evaluate mainstream LLMs. Our findings show that real-world user queries are challenging for existing LLMs, with GPT-4 completing less than 50% of the tasks and most LLMs achieving below 25%. This evaluation reveals the bottlenecks in the tool-use capabilities of current LLMs in real-world scenarios, which provides future direction for advancing general-purpose tool agents. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/open-compass/GTA.

Cutting-edge agentic AI systems are built on foundation models that can be adapted to plan, reason, and interact with external tools to perform increasingly complex and specialized tasks. As these systems grow in capability and scope, adaptation becomes a central mechanism for improving performance, reliability, and generalization. In this paper, we unify the rapidly expanding research landscape into a systematic framework that spans both agent adaptations and tool adaptations. We further decompose these into tool-execution-signaled and agent-output-signaled forms of agent adaptation, as well as agent-agnostic and agent-supervised forms of tool adaptation. We demonstrate that this framework helps clarify the design space of adaptation strategies in agentic AI, makes their trade-offs explicit, and provides practical guidance for selecting or switching among strategies during system design. We then review the representative approaches in each category, analyze their strengths and limitations, and highlight key open challenges and future opportunities. Overall, this paper aims to offer a conceptual foundation and practical roadmap for researchers and practitioners seeking to build more capable, efficient, and reliable agentic AI systems.

Agentic AI systems represent a new frontier in artificial intelligence, where agents often based on large language models(LLMs) interact with tools, environments, and other agents to accomplish tasks with a degree of autonomy. These systems show promise across a range of domains, but their architectural underpinnings remain immature. This paper conducts a comprehensive review of the types of agents, their modes of interaction with the environment, and the infrastructural and architectural challenges that emerge. We identify a gap in how these systems manage tool orchestration at scale and propose a reusable design abstraction: the "Control Plane as a Tool" pattern. This pattern allows developers to expose a single tool interface to an agent while encapsulating modular tool routing logic behind it. We position this pattern within the broader context of agent design and argue that it addresses several key challenges in scaling, safety, and extensibility.

AI agents increasingly rely on external tools to solve complex, long-horizon tasks. Advancing such agents requires reproducible evaluation and large-scale training in controllable, diverse, and realistic tool-use environments. However, real-world APIs are limited in availability, domain coverage, and stability, often requiring access keys and imposing rate limits, which render them impractical for stable evaluation or scalable training. To address these challenges, we introduce SynthTools, a flexible and scalable framework for generating synthetic tool ecosystems. Our framework consists of three core components: Tool Generation for automatic and scalable creation of diverse tools, Tool Simulation to emulate realistic tool behaviors, and Tool Audit to ensure correctness and consistency of tool simulation. To illustrate its scalability, we show that SynthTools can readily produce toolsets that span twice as many domains and twice as many tools per domain as prior work. Furthermore, the tool simulation and tool audit components demonstrate strong reliability, achieving 94% and 99% accuracy respectively. Finally, we construct downstream tasks from the generated tools that even state-of-the-art models struggle to complete. By enabling scalable, diverse, and reliable tool ecosystems, SynthTools provides a practical path toward large-scale training and stable evaluation of tool-use agents. Our code is available at https://github.com/namkoong-lab/SynthTools.

Vector data is one of the two core data structures in geographic information science (GIS), essential for accurately storing and representing geospatial information. Shapefile, the most widely used vector data format, has become the industry standard supported by all major geographic information systems. However, processing this data typically requires specialized GIS knowledge and skills, creating a barrier for researchers from other fields and impeding interdisciplinary research in spatial data analysis. Moreover, while large language models (LLMs) have made significant advancements in natural language processing and task automation, they still face challenges in handling the complex spatial and topological relationships inherent in GIS vector data. To address these challenges, we propose ShapefileGPT, an innovative framework powered by LLMs, specifically designed to automate Shapefile tasks. ShapefileGPT utilizes a multi-agent architecture, in which the planner agent is responsible for task decomposition and supervision, while the worker agent executes the tasks. We developed a specialized function library for handling Shapefiles and provided comprehensive API documentation, enabling the worker agent to operate Shapefiles efficiently through function calling. For evaluation, we developed a benchmark dataset based on authoritative textbooks, encompassing tasks in categories such as geometric operations and spatial queries. ShapefileGPT achieved a task success rate of 95.24%, outperforming the GPT series models. In comparison to traditional LLMs, ShapefileGPT effectively handles complex vector data analysis tasks, overcoming the limitations of traditional LLMs in spatial analysis. This breakthrough opens new pathways for advancing automation and intelligence in the GIS field, with significant potential in interdisciplinary data analysis and application contexts.

Tool-augmented large language models (LLMs), hereafter LLM agents, leverage external tools to solve diverse tasks and interface with the real world. However, current training practices largely rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) over static trajectories or reinforcement learning (RL) on narrow tasks, and generalize poorly beyond development settings, leading to brittleness with new tools and unseen workflows. Because code execution reflects many structures of real-world workflows, coding problems provide a natural basis for building agent training environments. Motivated by this, we introduce CodeGym, a scalable framework that synthesizes diverse, verifiable, and controllable multi-turn tool-use environments for agent RL, enabling LLM agents to explore and master various workflows actively. CodeGym rewrites static coding problems into interactive environments by extracting atomic functions or logic into callable tools, yielding verifiable tasks that span various tool-execution workflows. Models of varying sizes and chain-of-thought configurations, trained in CodeGym, exhibit consistent out-of-distribution generalizability; for example, Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct achieves an absolute accuracy gain of 8.7 points on the OOD benchmark tau-Bench. These results highlight CodeGym as a step toward scalable general-purpose RL environments that align with real-world agent workflows.

The performance of LLM-based agents depends not only on the agent itself but also on the quality of the tool interfaces it consumes. While prior work has focused heavily on agent fine-tuning, tool interfaces-including natural language descriptions and parameter schemas-remain largely human-oriented and often become a bottleneck, especially when agents must select from large candidate tool sets. Existing approaches to improving tool interfaces rely on execution traces, which are frequently unavailable in cold-start or privacy-constrained settings, and typically optimize each tool independently, limiting scalability and generalization to unseen tools. We propose Trace-Free+, a curriculum learning framework that progressively transfers supervision from trace-rich settings to trace-free deployment, encouraging the model to abstract reusable interface-usage patterns and tool usage outcomes. To support this approach, we construct a large-scale dataset of high-quality tool interfaces using a structured workflow over a diverse collection of tools. Experiments on StableToolBench and RestBench show consistent gains on unseen tools, strong cross-domain generalization, and robustness as the number of candidate tools scales to over 100, demonstrating that tool interface optimization is a practical and deployable complement to agent fine-tuning.

Multi-agent systems (MAS) demonstrate clear advantages in tackling complex problems by coordinating diverse agents and external tools. However, most existing orchestration methods rely on static workflows or serial agent scheduling, and are further constrained by heterogeneous interface protocols between tools and agents. This leads to high system complexity and poor extensibility. To mitigate these issues, we propose Agent-as-Tool, a unified parallel orchestration paradigm that abstracts both agents and tools into a standardized, learnable action space with protocol normalization and explicit state feedback. Building on this paradigm, we train a lightweight orchestrator, ParaManager, which decouples planning decisions from subtask solving, enabling state-aware parallel subtask decomposition, delegation, and asynchronous execution. For training, we adopt a two-stage ParaManager training pipeline. It improves robustness by incorporating supervised fine-tuning (SFT) trajectories equipped with recovery mechanisms, and further applies reinforcement learning (RL) to achieve an optimal balance among task success, protocol compliance, diversity, and reasoning efficiency. Experiments show that ParaManager achieves strong performance across multiple benchmarks and exhibits robust generalization under unseen model pools.

Interactive digital maps have revolutionized how people travel and learn about the world; however, they rely on pre-existing structured data in GIS databases (e.g., road networks, POI indices), limiting their ability to address geo-visual questions related to what the world looks like. We introduce our vision for Geo-Visual Agents--multimodal AI agents capable of understanding and responding to nuanced visual-spatial inquiries about the world by analyzing large-scale repositories of geospatial images, including streetscapes (e.g., Google Street View), place-based photos (e.g., TripAdvisor, Yelp), and aerial imagery (e.g., satellite photos) combined with traditional GIS data sources. We define our vision, describe sensing and interaction approaches, provide three exemplars, and enumerate key challenges and opportunities for future work.

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has empowered intelligent agents to leverage diverse external tools for solving complex real-world problems. However, as agents increasingly depend on multiple tools, they encounter new challenges: extended contexts from disparate sources and noisy or irrelevant tool outputs can undermine system reliability and accuracy. These challenges underscore the necessity for enhanced stability in agent-based systems. To address this, we introduce dynamic supervision and maneuvering mechanisms, constructing a robust and dynamic Multi-Agent System (MAS) architecture within the AWorld framework. In our approach, the Execution Agent invokes the Guard Agent at critical steps to verify and correct the reasoning process, effectively reducing errors arising from noise and bolstering problem-solving robustness. Extensive experiments on the GAIA test dataset reveal that our dynamic maneuvering mechanism significantly improves both the effectiveness and stability of solutions, outperforming single-agent system (SAS) and standard tool-augmented systems. As a result, our dynamic MAS system achieved first place among open-source projects on the prestigious GAIA leaderboard. These findings highlight the practical value of collaborative agent roles in developing more reliable and trustworthy intelligent systems.

Recent advances in LLM Multi-Agent Systems enable scalable orchestration of sub-agents, each coordinating hundreds or thousands of tools or Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers. However, existing retrieval methods typically match queries against coarse agent-level descriptions before routing, which obscures fine-grained tool functionality and often results in suboptimal agent selection. We introduce Tool-to-Agent Retrieval, a unified framework that embeds both tools and their parent agents in a shared vector space and connects them through metadata relationships. By explicitly representing tool capabilities and traversing metadata to the agent level, Tool-to-Agent Retrieval enables granular tool-level or agent-level retrieval, ensuring that agents and their underlying tools or MCP servers are equally represented without the context dilution that arises from chunking many tools together. Evaluating Tool-to-Agent Retrieval across eight embedding models, our approach achieves consistent improvements of 19.4% in Recall@5 and 17.7% in nDCG@5 over previous state-of-the-art agent retrievers on the LiveMCPBench benchmark.

Tool-using LLM agents still struggle in open-world settings with large tool pools, long-horizon objectives, wild constraints, and unreliable tool states. For scalable and realistic training and testing, we introduce an open-world tool-using environment, built on 5,571 format unified tools across 204 commonly used apps. It includes a task creation engine that synthesizes long-horizon, multi-tool workflows with wild constraints, and a state controller that injects interruptions and failures to stress-test robustness. On top of this environment, we develop a tool select-then-execute agent framework with a planner-actor decomposition to separate deliberate reasoning and self-correction from step-wise execution. Comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art LLMs reveals the misalignment between tool planning and execution abilities, the constraint following weakness of existing LLMs, and DeepSeek-v3.2's strongest robustness. Finally, we collect 1,170 trajectories from our environment to fine-tune LLMs, achieving superior performance to baselines using 119k samples, indicating the environment's value as both a realistic benchmark and a data engine for tool-using agents. Our code and data will be publicly released.

Since the introduction of the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the number of available tools for Large Language Models (LLMs) has increased significantly. These task-specific tool sets offer an alternative to general-purpose tools such as web browsers, while being easier to develop and maintain than GUIs. However, current general-purpose agents predominantly rely on web browsers for interacting with the environment. Here, we introduce TheMCPCompany, a benchmark for evaluating tool-calling agents on tasks that involve interacting with various real-world services. We use the REST APIs of these services to create MCP servers, which include over 18,000 tools. We also provide manually annotated ground-truth tools for each task. In our experiments, we use the ground truth tools to show the potential of tool-calling agents for both improving performance and reducing costs assuming perfect tool retrieval. Next, we explore agent performance using tool retrieval to study the real-world practicality of tool-based agents. While all models with tool retrieval perform similarly or better than browser-based agents, smaller models cannot take full advantage of the available tools through retrieval. On the other hand, GPT-5's performance with tool retrieval is very close to its performance with ground-truth tools. Overall, our work shows that the most advanced reasoning models are effective at discovering tools in simpler environments, but seriously struggle with navigating complex enterprise environments. TheMCPCompany reveals that navigating tens of thousands of tools and combining them in non-trivial ways to solve complex problems is still a challenging task for current models and requires both better reasoning and better retrieval models.

Clinical image interpretation is inherently multi-step and tool-centric: clinicians iteratively combine visual evidence with patient context, quantify findings, and refine their decisions through a sequence of specialized procedures. While LLM-based agents promise to orchestrate such heterogeneous medical tools, existing systems treat tool sets and invocation strategies as static after deployment. This design is brittle under real-world domain shifts, across tasks, and evolving diagnostic requirements, where predefined tool chains frequently degrade and demand costly manual re-design. We propose MACRO, a self-evolving, experience-augmented medical agent that shifts from static tool composition to experience-driven tool discovery. From verified execution trajectories, the agent autonomously identifies recurring effective multi-step tool sequences, synthesizes them into reusable composite tools, and registers these as new high-level primitives that continuously expand its behavioral repertoire. A lightweight image-feature memory grounds tool selection in a visual-clinical context, while a GRPO-like training loop reinforces reliable invocation of discovered composites, enabling closed-loop self-improvement with minimal supervision. Extensive experiments across diverse medical imaging datasets and tasks demonstrate that autonomous composite tool discovery consistently improves multi-step orchestration accuracy and cross-domain generalization over strong baselines and recent state-of-the-art agentic methods, bridging the gap between brittle static tool use and adaptive, context-aware clinical AI assistance. Code will be available upon acceptance.

Deep research agents integrate fragmented evidence through multi-step tool use. BrowseComp offers a text-only testbed for such agents, but existing multimodal benchmarks rarely require both weak visual cues composition and BrowseComp-style multi-hop verification. Geolocation is a natural testbed because answers depend on combining multiple ambiguous visual cues and validating them with open-web evidence. Thus, we introduce GeoBrowse, a geolocation benchmark that combines visual reasoning with knowledge-intensive multi-hop queries. Level 1 tests extracting and composing fragmented visual cues, and Level 2 increases query difficulty by injecting long-tail knowledge and obfuscating key entities. To support evaluation, we provide an agentic workflow GATE with five think-with-image tools and four knowledge-intensive tools, and release expert-annotated stepwise traces grounded in verifiable evidence for trajectory-level analysis. Experiments show that GATE outperforms direct inference and open-source agents, indicating that no-tool, search-only or image-only setups are insufficient. Gains come from coherent, level-specific tool-use plans rather than more tool calls, as they more reliably reach annotated key evidence steps and make fewer errors when integrating into the final decision. The GeoBrowse bernchmark and codes are provided in https://github.com/ornamentt/GeoBrowse

Tool-calling agents are increasingly deployed in real-world customer-facing workflows. Yet most studies on tool-calling agents focus on idealized settings with general, fixed, and well-specified tasks. In real-world applications, user requests are often (1) ambiguous, (2) changing over time, or (3) infeasible due to policy constraints, and training and evaluation data that cover these diverse, complex interaction patterns remain under-represented. To bridge the gap, we present Trajectory2Task, a verifiable data generation pipeline for studying tool use at scale under three realistic user scenarios: ambiguous intent, changing intent, and infeasible intents. The pipeline first conducts multi-turn exploration to produce valid tool-call trajectories. It then converts these trajectories into user-facing tasks with controlled intent adaptations. This process yields verifiable task that support closed-loop evaluation and training. We benchmark seven state-of-the-art LLMs on the generated complex user scenario tasks and observe frequent failures. Finally, using successful trajectories obtained from task rollouts, we fine-tune lightweight LLMs and find consistent improvements across all three conditions, along with better generalization to unseen tool-use domains, indicating stronger general tool-calling ability.

Users often omit essential details in their requests to LLM-based agents, resulting in under-specified inputs for tool use. This poses a fundamental challenge for tool-augmented agents, as API execution typically requires complete arguments, highlighting the need for personalized tool calling. To study this problem, we introduce MPT, a benchmark comprising 265 multi-session dialogues that cover three challenges: Preference Recall, Preference Induction, and Preference Transfer. We also propose PRefine, a test-time memory-augmented method that represents user preferences as evolving hypotheses. Through a generate--verify--refine loop, it extracts reusable constraints from history and improves tool-calling accuracy while using only 1.24% of the tokens required by full-history prompting. These results indicate that robust personalization in agentic systems depends on memory that captures the reasons behind user choices, not just the choices themselves.

Tool learning empowers large language models (LLMs) as agents to use external tools to extend their capability. Existing methods employ one single LLM-based agent to iteratively select and execute tools, thereafter incorporating the result into the next action prediction. However, they still suffer from potential performance degradation when addressing complex tasks due to: (1) the limitation of the inherent capability of a single LLM to perform diverse actions, and (2) the struggle to adaptively correct mistakes when the task fails. To mitigate these problems, we propose the ConAgents, a Cooperative and interactive Agents framework, which modularizes the workflow of tool learning into Grounding, Execution, and Observing agents. We also introduce an iterative calibration (IterCali) method, enabling the agents to adapt themselves based on the feedback from the tool environment. Experiments conducted on three datasets demonstrate the superiority of our ConAgents (e.g., 6 point improvement over the SOTA baseline). We further provide fine-granularity analysis for the efficiency and consistency of our framework.

AI agents increasingly act through external tools: they query databases, execute shell commands, read and write files, and send network requests. Yet in most current agent stacks, model-generated tool calls are handed to the execution layer with no framework-agnostic control point in between. Post-execution observability can record these actions, but it cannot stop them before side effects occur. We present AEGIS, a pre-execution firewall and audit layer for AI agents. AEGIS interposes on the tool-execution path and applies a three-stage pipeline: (i) deep string extraction from tool arguments, (ii) content-first risk scanning, and (iii) composable policy validation. High-risk calls can be held for human approval, and all decisions are recorded in a tamper-evident audit trail based on Ed25519 signatures and SHA-256 hash chaining. In the current implementation, AEGIS supports 14 agent frameworks across Python, JavaScript, and Go with lightweight integration. On a curated suite of 48 attackinstances, AEGIS blocks all attacks in the suite before execution; on 500 benign tool calls, it yields a 1.2% false positive rate; and across 1,000 consecutive interceptions, it adds 8.3 ms median latency. The live demo will show end-to-end interception of benign, malicious, and human-escalated tool calls, allowing attendees to observe real-time blocking, approval workflows, and audit-trail generation. These results suggest that pre-execution mediation for AI agents can be practical, low-overhead, and directly deployable.

We study budget-constrained tool-augmented agents, where a large language model must solve multi-step tasks by invoking external tools under a strict monetary budget. We formalize this setting as sequential decision making in context space with priced and stochastic tool executions, making direct planning intractable due to massive state-action spaces, high variance of outcomes and prohibitive exploration cost. To address these challenges, we propose INTENT, an inference-time planning framework that leverages an intention-aware hierarchical world model to anticipate future tool usage, risk-calibrated cost, and guide decisions online. Across cost-augmented StableToolBench, INTENT strictly enforces hard budget feasibility while substantially improving task success over baselines, and remains robust under dynamic market shifts such as tool price changes and varying budgets.

We introduce VisTA, a new reinforcement learning framework that empowers visual agents to dynamically explore, select, and combine tools from a diverse library based on empirical performance. Existing methods for tool-augmented reasoning either rely on training-free prompting or large-scale fine-tuning; both lack active tool exploration and typically assume limited tool diversity, and fine-tuning methods additionally demand extensive human supervision. In contrast, VisTA leverages end-to-end reinforcement learning to iteratively refine sophisticated, query-specific tool selection strategies, using task outcomes as feedback signals. Through Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), our framework enables an agent to autonomously discover effective tool-selection pathways without requiring explicit reasoning supervision. Experiments on the ChartQA, Geometry3K, and BlindTest benchmarks demonstrate that VisTA achieves substantial performance gains over training-free baselines, especially on out-of-distribution examples. These results highlight VisTA's ability to enhance generalization, adaptively utilize diverse tools, and pave the way for flexible, experience-driven visual reasoning systems.

Iterative industrial design-simulation optimization is bottlenecked by the CAD-CAE semantic gap: translating simulation feedback into valid geometric edits under diverse, coupled constraints. To fill this gap, we propose COSMO-Agent (Closed-loop Optimization, Simulation, and Modeling Orchestration), a tool-augmented reinforcement learning (RL) framework that teaches LLMs to complete the closed-loop CAD-CAE process. Specifically, we cast CAD generation, CAE solving, result parsing, and geometry revision as an interactive RL environment, where an LLM learns to orchestrate external tools and revise parametric geometries until constraints are satisfied. To make this learning stable and industrially usable, we design a multi-constraint reward that jointly encourages feasibility, toolchain robustness, and structured output validity. In addition, we contribute an industry-aligned dataset that covers 25 component categories with executable CAD-CAE tasks to support realistic training and evaluation. Experiments show that COSMO-Agent training substantially improves small open-source LLMs for constraint-driven design, exceeding large open-source and strong closed-source models in feasibility, efficiency, and stability.

Computer Use Agents (CUAs) can act through both atomic GUI actions, such as click and type, and high-level tool calls, such as API-based file operations, but this hybrid action space often leaves them uncertain about when to continue with GUI actions or switch to tools, leading to suboptimal execution paths. This difficulty stems from the scarcity of high-quality interleaved GUI-Tool trajectories, the cost and brittleness of collecting real tool trajectories, and the lack of trajectory-level supervision for GUI-Tool path selection. In this paper, we propose ToolCUA, an end-to-end agent designed to learn optimal GUI-Tool path selection through a staged training paradigm. We first introduce an Interleaved GUI-Tool Trajectory Scaling Pipeline that repurposes abundant static GUI trajectories and synthesizes a grounded tool library, enabling diverse GUI-Tool trajectories without manual engineering or real tool-trajectory collection. We then perform Tool-Bootstrapped GUI RFT, combining warmup SFT with single-turn RL to improve decisions at critical GUI-Tool switching points. Finally, we optimize ToolCUA with Online Agentic RL in a high-fidelity GUI-Tool environment, guided by a Tool-Efficient Path Reward that encourages appropriate tool use and shorter execution paths. Experiments on OSWorld-MCP show that ToolCUA achieves 46.85% accuracy, a relative improvement of approximately 66% over the baseline, establishing a new state of the art among models of comparable scale. It also improves by 3.9% over GUI-only settings, demonstrating effective GUI-Tool orchestration. The results further suggest that training in a hybrid action space is a promising paradigm for real-world digital agents. Open-sourced here: https://x-plug.github.io/ToolCUA/

AI agents are autonomous systems that combine LLMs with external tools to solve complex tasks. While such tools extend capability, improper tool permissions introduce security risks such as indirect prompt injection and tool misuse. We characterize these failures as unbalanced tool-driven agency. Agents may retain unnecessary permissions (excessive agency) or fail to invoke required tools (insufficient agency), amplifying the attack surface and reducing performance. We introduce AgenTRIM, a framework for detecting and mitigating tool-driven agency risks without altering an agent's internal reasoning. AgenTRIM addresses these risks through complementary offline and online phases. Offline, AgenTRIM reconstructs and verifies the agent's tool interface from code and execution traces. At runtime, it enforces per-step least-privilege tool access through adaptive filtering and status-aware validation of tool calls. Evaluating on the AgentDojo benchmark, AgenTRIM substantially reduces attack success while maintaining high task performance. Additional experiments show robustness to description-based attacks and effective enforcement of explicit safety policies. Together, these results demonstrate that AgenTRIM provides a practical, capability-preserving approach to safer tool use in LLM-based agents.

Recently, tool-augmented LLMs have gained increasing attention. Given an instruction, tool-augmented LLMs can interact with various external tools in multiple rounds and provide a final answer. However, previous LLMs were trained on overly detailed instructions, which included API names or parameters, while real users would not explicitly mention these API details. This leads to a gap between trained LLMs and real-world scenarios. In addition, most works ignore whether the interaction process follows the instruction. To address these issues, we constructed a training dataset called MGToolBench, which contains statement and category-level instructions to better reflect real-world scenarios. In addition, we propose ToolPlanner, a two-stage reinforcement learning framework that utilizes path planning and two feedback mechanisms to enhance the LLM's task completion and instruction-following capabilities. Experimental results show that ToolPlanner significantly improves the Match Rate, Pass Rate and Win Rate by 26.8%, 20.2%, and 5.6% compared to the SOTA model. Human evaluation verifies that the multi-granularity instructions can better align with users' usage habits. Our data and code will be released upon acceptance.

Information seeking is a fundamental requirement for humans. However, existing LLM agents rely heavily on open-web search, which exposes two fundamental weaknesses: online content is noisy and unreliable, and many real-world tasks require precise, domain-specific knowledge unavailable from the web. The emergence of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) now allows agents to interface with thousands of specialized tools, seemingly resolving this limitation. Yet it remains unclear whether agents can effectively leverage such tools -- and more importantly, whether they can integrate them with general-purpose search to solve complex tasks. Therefore, we introduce InfoMosaic-Bench, the first benchmark dedicated to multi-source information seeking in tool-augmented agents. Covering six representative domains (medicine, finance, maps, video, web, and multi-domain integration), InfoMosaic-Bench requires agents to combine general-purpose search with domain-specific tools. Tasks are synthesized with InfoMosaic-Flow, a scalable pipeline that grounds task conditions in verified tool outputs, enforces cross-source dependencies, and filters out shortcut cases solvable by trivial lookup. This design guarantees both reliability and non-triviality. Experiments with 14 state-of-the-art LLM agents reveal three findings: (i) web information alone is insufficient, with GPT-5 achieving only 38.2% accuracy and 67.5% pass rate; (ii) domain tools provide selective but inconsistent benefits, improving some domains while degrading others; and (iii) 22.4% of failures arise from incorrect tool usage or selection, highlighting that current LLMs still struggle with even basic tool handling.

Large language model (LLM)-based agents have shown strong capabilities in using external tools to solve complex tasks. However, existing evaluations often overlook the temporal dimension of tool use, especially the impact of tool response latency, and are usually limited to single-task settings. In real-world applications, multiple tasks often need to be executed concurrently, and overall efficiency depends on whether an agent can use idle time while waiting for tool responses. We refer to this capability as asynchronous tool calling. To evaluate it, we propose AsyncTool, a benchmark for assessing LLM-based agents in interactive multi-task tool-use environments with delayed tool feedback. AsyncTool presents multiple heterogeneous tasks simultaneously and simulates realistic tool response latency during execution. Using a hybrid data evolution strategy, we construct a diverse asynchronous multitasking dataset that covers multiple scenarios and tool-use patterns. We evaluate models at the step, sub-task, and task levels, and introduce efficiency-oriented metrics to measure task coordination and completion efficiency. Extensive experiments show that delayed tool feedback poses substantial challenges to current agents and leads to clear performance degradation. Models that better coordinate task switching, dependency tracking, and state maintenance achieve stronger performance on AsyncTool. Our analysis identifies key failure modes of current tool-using agents and provides practical insights for designing future systems with stronger temporal reasoning and coordination capabilities.

Driven by rapid advancements of Large Language Models (LLMs), agents are empowered to combine intrinsic knowledge with dynamic tool use, greatly enhancing their capacity to address real-world tasks. In line with such an evolution, AgentScope introduces major improvements in a new version (1.0), towards comprehensively supporting flexible and efficient tool-based agent-environment interactions for building agentic applications. Specifically, we abstract foundational components essential for agentic applications and provide unified interfaces and extensible modules, enabling developers to easily leverage the latest progress, such as new models and MCPs. Furthermore, we ground agent behaviors in the ReAct paradigm and offer advanced agent-level infrastructure based on a systematic asynchronous design, which enriches both human-agent and agent-agent interaction patterns while improving execution efficiency. Building on this foundation, we integrate several built-in agents tailored to specific practical scenarios. AgentScope also includes robust engineering support for developer-friendly experiences. We provide a scalable evaluation module with a visual studio interface, making the development of long-trajectory agentic applications more manageable and easier to trace. In addition, AgentScope offers a runtime sandbox to ensure safe agent execution and facilitates rapid deployment in production environments. With these enhancements, AgentScope provides a practical foundation for building scalable, adaptive, and effective agentic applications.

Tool-augmented LLM agents tend to call tools indiscriminately, even when the model can answer directly. Each unnecessary call wastes API fees and latency, yet no existing benchmark systematically studies when a tool call is actually needed. We propose When2Tool, a benchmark of 18 environments (15 single-hop, 3 multi-hop) spanning three categories of tool necessity -- computational scale, knowledge boundaries, and execution reliability -- each with controlled difficulty levels that create a clear decision boundary between tool-necessary and tool-unnecessary tasks. We evaluate two families of training-free baselines: Prompt-only (varying the prompt to discourage unnecessary calls) and Reason-then-Act (requiring the model to reason about tool necessity before acting). Both provide limited control: Prompt-only suppresses necessary calls alongside unnecessary ones, and Reason-then-Act still incurs a disproportionate accuracy cost on hard tasks. To understand why these baselines fail, we probe the models' hidden states and find that tool necessity is linearly decodable from the pre-generation representation with AUROC 0.89--0.96 across six models, substantially exceeding the model's own verbalized reasoning. This reveals that models already know when tools are needed, but fail to act on this knowledge during generation. Building on this finding, we propose Probe&Prefill, which uses a lightweight linear probe to read the hidden-state signal and prefills the model's response with a steering sentence. Across all models tested, Probe&Prefill reduces tool calls by 48% with only 1.7% accuracy loss, while the best baseline at comparable accuracy only reduces 6% of tool calls, or achieves a similar tool call reduction but incurs a 5times higher accuracy loss. Our code is available at https://github.com/Trustworthy-ML-Lab/when2tool

We introduce TAPAS (Task-based Adaptation and Planning using AgentS), a multi-agent framework that integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) with symbolic planning to solve complex tasks without the need for manually defined environment models. TAPAS employs specialized LLM-based agents that collaboratively generate and adapt domain models, initial states, and goal specifications as needed using structured tool-calling mechanisms. Through this tool-based interaction, downstream agents can request modifications from upstream agents, enabling adaptation to novel attributes and constraints without manual domain redefinition. A ReAct (Reason+Act)-style execution agent, coupled with natural language plan translation, bridges the gap between dynamically generated plans and real-world robot capabilities. TAPAS demonstrates strong performance in benchmark planning domains and in the VirtualHome simulated real-world environment.

We present MiroThinker v1.0, an open-source research agent designed to advance tool-augmented reasoning and information-seeking capabilities. Unlike previous agents that only scale up model size or context length, MiroThinker explores interaction scaling at the model level, systematically training the model to handle deeper and more frequent agent-environment interactions as a third dimension of performance improvement. Unlike LLM test-time scaling, which operates in isolation and risks degradation with longer reasoning chains, interactive scaling leverages environment feedback and external information acquisition to correct errors and refine trajectories. Through reinforcement learning, the model achieves efficient interaction scaling: with a 256K context window, it can perform up to 600 tool calls per task, enabling sustained multi-turn reasoning and complex real-world research workflows. Across four representative benchmarks-GAIA, HLE, BrowseComp, and BrowseComp-ZH-the 72B variant achieves up to 81.9%, 37.7%, 47.1%, and 55.6% accuracy respectively, surpassing previous open-source agents and approaching commercial counterparts such as GPT-5-high. Our analysis reveals that MiroThinker benefits from interactive scaling consistently: research performance improves predictably as the model engages in deeper and more frequent agent-environment interactions, demonstrating that interaction depth exhibits scaling behaviors analogous to model size and context length. These findings establish interaction scaling as a third critical dimension for building next-generation open research agents, complementing model capacity and context windows.

Existing GUI agent models relying on coordinate-based one-step visual grounding struggle with generalizing to varying input resolutions and aspect ratios. Alternatives introduce coordinate-free strategies yet suffer from learning under severe data scarcity. To address the limitations, we propose ToolTok, a novel paradigm of multi-step pathfinding for GUI agents, where operations are modeled as a sequence of progressive tool usage. Specifically, we devise tools aligned with human interaction habits and represent each tool using learnable token embeddings. To enable efficient embedding learning under limited supervision, ToolTok introduces a semantic anchoring mechanism that grounds each tool with semantically related concepts as natural inductive bias. To further enable a pre-trained large language model to progressively acquire tool semantics, we construct an easy-to-hard curriculum consisting of three tasks: token definition question-answering, pure text-guided tool selection, and simplified visual pathfinding. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks show that ToolTok achieves superior performance among models of comparable scale (4B) and remains competitive with a substantially larger model (235B). Notably, these results are obtained using less than 1% of the training data required by other post-training approaches. In addition, ToolTok demonstrates strong generalization across unseen scenarios. Our training & inference code is open-source at https://github.com/ZephinueCode/ToolTok.

We present Agent S, an open agentic framework that enables autonomous interaction with computers through a Graphical User Interface (GUI), aimed at transforming human-computer interaction by automating complex, multi-step tasks. Agent S aims to address three key challenges in automating computer tasks: acquiring domain-specific knowledge, planning over long task horizons, and handling dynamic, non-uniform interfaces. To this end, Agent S introduces experience-augmented hierarchical planning, which learns from external knowledge search and internal experience retrieval at multiple levels, facilitating efficient task planning and subtask execution. In addition, it employs an Agent-Computer Interface (ACI) to better elicit the reasoning and control capabilities of GUI agents based on Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Evaluation on the OSWorld benchmark shows that Agent S outperforms the baseline by 9.37% on success rate (an 83.6% relative improvement) and achieves a new state-of-the-art. Comprehensive analysis highlights the effectiveness of individual components and provides insights for future improvements. Furthermore, Agent S demonstrates broad generalizability to different operating systems on a newly-released WindowsAgentArena benchmark. Code available at https://github.com/simular-ai/Agent-S.

Current Large Language Model (LLM) agents demonstrate strong reasoning and tool use capabilities, but often lack self-awareness, failing to balance these approaches effectively. This imbalance leads to Tool Overuse, where models unnecessarily rely on external tools for tasks solvable with parametric knowledge, increasing computational overhead. Inspired by human metacognition, we introduce SMART (Strategic Model-Aware Reasoning with Tools), a paradigm that enhances an agent's self-awareness to optimize task handling and reduce tool overuse. To support this paradigm, we introduce SMART-ER, a dataset spanning three domains, where reasoning alternates between parametric knowledge and tool-dependent steps, with each step enriched by rationales explaining when tools are necessary. Through supervised training, we develop SMARTAgent, a family of models that dynamically balance parametric knowledge and tool use. Evaluations show that SMARTAgent reduces tool use by 24% while improving performance by over 37%, enabling 7B-scale models to match its 70B counterpart and GPT-4o. Additionally, SMARTAgent generalizes to out-of-distribution test data like GSM8K and MINTQA, maintaining accuracy with just one-fifth the tool calls. These highlight the potential of strategic tool use to enhance reasoning, mitigate overuse, and bridge the gap between model size and performance, advancing intelligent and resource-efficient agent designs.

The rapid advancements of AI agents have ignited the long-held ambition of leveraging them to accelerate scientific discovery. Achieving this goal requires a deep understanding of the frontiers of human knowledge. As such, Humanity's Last Exam (HLE) provides an exceptionally challenging touchstone for evaluating scientific AI agents. In this work, we aim to construct the foundational architecture for general-purpose agents and validate the capabilities through leading performance on HLE. To achieve this, we introduce X-Master, a tool-augmented reasoning agent designed to emulate human researchers by interacting flexibly with external tools during its reasoning process. This agent, guided by the conceptualization of code as an interaction language, can flexibly leverage built-in Python libraries and our customized tools to augment the reasoning. We further scale its capabilities through X-Masters, a scattered-and-stacked agentic workflow that systematically enhances breadth and depth of reasoning. Our open-source solution, X-Masters, sets a new state-of-the-art record on HLE with a score of 32.1%, surpassing OpenAI's and Google's Deep Research (26.6% and 26.9%) and becoming the first to exceed the 30% threshold. This work allows us to gain a deeper understanding of complex task-solving and accumulates valuable experience that can inform future advancements, guiding subsequent model training.

Interactive tool-using agents must solve real-world tasks via multi-turn interaction with both humans and external environments, requiring dialogue state tracking, multi-step tool execution, while following complex instructions. Post-training such agents is challenging because synthesis for high-quality multi-turn tool-use data is difficult to scale, and reinforcement learning (RL) could face noisy signals caused by user simulation, leading to degraded training efficiency. We propose a unified framework that combines a self-evolving data agent with verifier-based RL. Our system, EigenData, is a hierarchical multi-agent engine that synthesizes tool-grounded dialogues together with executable per-instance checkers, and improves generation reliability via closed-loop self-evolving process that updates prompts and workflow. Building on the synthetic data, we develop an RL recipe that first fine-tunes the user model and then applies GRPO-style training with trajectory-level group-relative advantages and dynamic filtering, yielding consistent improvements beyond SFT. Evaluated on tau^2-bench, our best model reaches 73.0% pass^1 on Airline and 98.3% pass^1 on Telecom, matching or exceeding frontier models. Overall, our results suggest a scalable pathway for bootstrapping complex tool-using behaviors without expensive human annotation.

Recent advances in reasoning and planning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have enabled their potential as autonomous agents capable of tool use in dynamic environments. However, in multi-turn conversational environments like tau-bench, these agents often struggle with consistent reasoning, adherence to domain-specific policies, and extracting correct information over a long horizon of tool-calls and conversation. To capture and mitigate these failures, we conduct a comprehensive manual analysis of the common errors occurring in the conversation trajectories. We then experiment with reformulations of inputs to the tool-calling agent for improvement in agent decision making. Finally, we propose the Input-Reformulation Multi-Agent (IRMA) framework, which automatically reformulates user queries augmented with relevant domain rules and tool suggestions for the tool-calling agent to focus on. The results show that IRMA significantly outperforms ReAct, Function Calling, and Self-Reflection by 16.1%, 12.7%, and 19.1%, respectively, in overall pass^5 scores. These findings highlight the superior reliability and consistency of IRMA compared to other methods in dynamic environments.

Tool-augmented LLM agents introduce security risks that extend beyond user-input filtering, including indirect prompt injection through fetched content, unsafe tool execution, credential leakage, and tampering with local control files. We present OpenClaw PRISM, a zero-fork runtime security layer for OpenClaw-based agent gateways. PRISM combines an in-process plugin with optional sidecar services and distributes enforcement across ten lifecycle hooks spanning message ingress, prompt construction, tool execution, tool-result persistence, outbound messaging, sub-agent spawning, and gateway startup. Rather than introducing a novel detection model, PRISM integrates a hybrid heuristic-plus-LLM scanning pipeline, conversation- and session-scoped risk accumulation with TTL-based decay, policy-enforced controls over tools, paths, private networks, domain tiers, and outbound secret patterns, and a tamper-evident audit and operations plane with integrity verification and hot-reloadable policy management. We outline an evaluation methodology and benchmark pipeline for measuring security effectiveness, false positives, layer contribution, runtime overhead, and operational recoverability in an agent-runtime setting, and we report current preliminary benchmark results on curated same-slice experiments and operational microbenchmarks. The system targets deployable runtime defense for real agent gateways rather than benchmark-only detection.

Tool-augmented large language models (LLMs) are emerging as deep research agents, systems that decompose complex queries, retrieve external evidence, and synthesize grounded responses. Yet current agents remain limited by shallow retrieval, weak alignment metrics, and brittle tool-use behavior. We introduce PokeeResearch-7B, a 7B-parameter deep research agent built under a unified reinforcement learning framework for robustness, alignment, and scalability. PokeeResearch-7B is trained by an annotation-free Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback (RLAIF) framework to optimize policies using LLM-based reward signals that capture factual accuracy, citation faithfulness, and instruction adherence. A chain-of-thought-driven multi-call reasoning scaffold further enhances robustness through self-verification and adaptive recovery from tool failures. Among 10 popular deep research benchmarks, PokeeResearch-7B achieves state-of-the-art performance among 7B-scale deep research agents. This highlights that careful reinforcement learning and reasoning design can produce efficient, resilient, and research-grade AI agents. The model and inference code is open-sourced under MIT license at https://github.com/Pokee-AI/PokeeResearchOSS.

Tool use has turned large language models (LLMs) into powerful agents that can perform complex multi-step tasks by dynamically utilising external software components. However, these tools must be implemented in advance by human developers, hindering the applicability of LLM agents in domains which demand large numbers of highly specialised tools, like in life sciences and medicine. Motivated by the growing trend of scientific studies accompanied by public code repositories, we propose ToolMaker, a novel agentic framework that autonomously transforms papers with code into LLM-compatible tools. Given a short task description and a repository URL, ToolMaker autonomously installs required dependencies and generates code to perform the task, using a closed-loop self-correction mechanism to iteratively diagnose and rectify errors. To evaluate our approach, we introduce a benchmark comprising 15 diverse and complex computational tasks spanning both medical and non-medical domains with over 100 unit tests to objectively assess tool correctness and robustness. ToolMaker correctly implements 80% of the tasks, substantially outperforming current state-of-the-art software engineering agents. ToolMaker therefore is a step towards fully autonomous agent-based scientific workflows.

Large language models (LLMs) can now access a wide range of external tools, thanks to the Model Context Protocol (MCP). This greatly expands their abilities as various agents. However, LLMs rely entirely on the text descriptions of tools to decide which ones to use--a process that is surprisingly fragile. In this work, we expose a vulnerability in prevalent tool/function-calling protocols by investigating a series of edits to tool descriptions, some of which can drastically increase a tool's usage from LLMs when competing with alternatives. Through controlled experiments, we show that tools with properly edited descriptions receive over 10 times more usage from GPT-4.1 and Qwen2.5-7B than tools with original descriptions. We further evaluate how various edits to tool descriptions perform when competing directly with one another and how these trends generalize or differ across a broader set of 10 different models. These phenomenons, while giving developers a powerful way to promote their tools, underscore the need for a more reliable foundation for agentic LLMs to select and utilize tools and resources.

Software development is a complex, multi-phase process traditionally requiring collaboration among individuals with diverse expertise. We propose AgentMesh, a Python-based framework that uses multiple cooperating LLM-powered agents to automate software development tasks. In AgentMesh, specialized agents - a Planner, Coder, Debugger, and Reviewer - work in concert to transform a high-level requirement into fully realized code. The Planner agent first decomposes user requests into concrete subtasks; the Coder agent implements each subtask in code; the Debugger agent tests and fixes the code; and the Reviewer agent validates the final output for correctness and quality. We describe the architecture and design of these agents and their communication, and provide implementation details including prompt strategies and workflow orchestration. A case study illustrates AgentMesh handling a non-trivial development request via sequential task planning, code generation, iterative debugging, and final code review. We discuss how dividing responsibilities among cooperative agents leverages the strengths of large language models while mitigating single-agent limitations. Finally, we examine current limitations - such as error propagation and context scaling - and outline future work toward more robust, scalable multi-agent AI systems for software engineering automation.

Recent advances in multi-agent systems highlight the potential of specialized small agents that collaborate via division of labor. Existing tool-integrated reasoning systems, however, often follow a single-agent paradigm in which one large model interleaves long-horizon reasoning with precise tool operations, leading to cognitive-load interference and unstable coordination. We present MSARL, a Multi-Small-Agent Reinforcement Learning framework that explicitly decouples reasoning from tool use. In MSARL, a Reasoning Agent decomposes problems and plans tool invocations, while multiple Tool Agents specialize in specific external tools, each trained via a combination of imitation learning and reinforcement learning with role-specific rewards. On mathematical problem solving with code execution, MSARL significantly improves reasoning stability and final-answer accuracy over single-agent baselines. Moreover, the architecture generalizes to diverse tool-use tasks, demonstrating that cognitive-role decoupling with small agents is a scalable blueprint for multi-agent AI design.

Real-world tool-using agents operate over long-horizon workflows with recurring structure and diverse demands, where effective behavior requires not only invoking atomic tools but also abstracting, and reusing higher-level tool compositions. However, existing benchmarks mainly measure instance-level success under static tool sets, offering limited insight into agents' ability to acquire such reusable skills. We address this gap by introducing SkillCraft, a benchmark explicitly stress-test agent ability to form and reuse higher-level tool compositions, where we call Skills. SkillCraft features realistic, highly compositional tool-use scenarios with difficulty scaled along both quantitative and structural dimensions, designed to elicit skill abstraction and cross-task reuse. We further propose a lightweight evaluation protocol that enables agents to auto-compose atomic tools into executable Skills, cache and reuse them inside and across tasks, thereby improving efficiency while accumulating a persistent library of reusable skills. Evaluating state-of-the-art agents on SkillCraft, we observe substantial efficiency gains, with token usage reduced by up to 80% by skill saving and reuse. Moreover, success rate strongly correlates with tool composition ability at test time, underscoring compositional skill acquisition as a core capability.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as tool-augmented agents for multi-step decision making, yet training robust tool-using agents remains challenging. Existing methods still require manual intervention, depend on non-verifiable simulated environments, rely exclusively on either supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning (RL), and struggle with stable long-horizon, multi-turn learning. To address these challenges, we introduce ASTRA, a fully automated end-to-end framework for training tool-augmented language model agents via scalable data synthesis and verifiable reinforcement learning. ASTRA integrates two complementary components. First, a pipeline that leverages the static topology of tool-call graphs synthesizes diverse, structurally grounded trajectories, instilling broad and transferable tool-use competence. Second, an environment synthesis framework that captures the rich, compositional topology of human semantic reasoning converts decomposed question-answer traces into independent, code-executable, and rule-verifiable environments, enabling deterministic multi-turn RL. Based on this method, we develop a unified training methodology that integrates SFT with online RL using trajectory-level rewards to balance task completion and interaction efficiency. Experiments on multiple agentic tool-use benchmarks demonstrate that ASTRA-trained models achieve state-of-the-art performance at comparable scales, approaching closed-source systems while preserving core reasoning ability. We release the full pipelines, environments, and trained models at https://github.com/LianjiaTech/astra.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have enabled LLM-based agents to directly interact with application user interfaces (UIs), enhancing agents' performance in complex tasks. However, these agents often suffer from high latency and low reliability due to the extensive sequential UI interactions. To address this issue, we propose AXIS, a novel LLM-based agents framework prioritize actions through application programming interfaces (APIs) over UI actions. This framework also facilitates the creation and expansion of APIs through automated exploration of applications. Our experiments on Office Word demonstrate that AXIS reduces task completion time by 65%-70% and cognitive workload by 38%-53%, while maintaining accuracy of 97%-98% compare to humans. Our work contributes to a new human-agent-computer interaction (HACI) framework and a fresh UI design principle for application providers in the era of LLMs. It also explores the possibility of turning every applications into agents, paving the way towards an agent-centric operating system (Agent OS).

REST APIs play important roles in enriching the action space of web agents, yet most API-based agents rely on curated and uniform toolsets that do not reflect the complexity of real-world APIs. Building tool-using agents for arbitrary domains remains a major challenge, as it requires reading unstructured API documentation, testing APIs and inferring correct parameters. We propose Doc2Agent, a scalable pipeline to build agents that can call Python-based tools generated from API documentation. Doc2Agent generates executable tools from API documentations and iteratively refines them using a code agent. We evaluate our approach on real-world APIs, WebArena APIs, and research APIs, producing validated tools. We achieved a 55\% relative performance improvement with 90\% lower cost compared to direct API calling on WebArena benchmark. A domain-specific agent built for glycomaterial science further demonstrates the pipeline's adaptability to complex, knowledge-rich tasks. Doc2Agent offers a generalizable solution for building tool agents from unstructured API documentation at scale.

Scientific reasoning inherently demands integrating sophisticated toolkits to navigate domain-specific knowledge. Yet, current benchmarks largely overlook agents' ability to orchestrate tools for such rigorous workflows. To bridge this gap, we introduce SciAgentGym, a scalable interactive environment featuring 1,780 domain-specific tools across four natural science disciplines, supported by a robust execution infrastructure. Complementing this, we present SciAgentBench, a tiered evaluation suite designed to stress-test agentic capabilities from elementary actions to long-horizon workflows. Our evaluation identifies a critical bottleneck: state-of-the-art models struggle with complex scientific tool-use. Even for a leading model like GPT-5, success rates drop sharply from 60.6% to 30.9% as interaction horizons extend, primarily due to failures in multi-step workflow execution. To address this, we propose SciForge, a data synthesis method that models the tool action space as a dependency graph to generate logic-aware training trajectories. By fine-tuning on these trajectories, our SciAgent-8B outperforms the significantly larger Qwen3-VL-235B-Instruct while exhibiting positive cross-domain transfer of scientific tool-use capabilities. These results underscore the promising potential of next-generation autonomous scientific agents.

Research on self-evolving language agents has accelerated, drawing increasing attention to their ability to create, adapt, and maintain tools from task requirements. However, existing benchmarks predominantly rely on predefined specifications, which limits scalability and hinders truly autonomous evolution. While recent studies attempt to dynamically generate tools, they primarily emphasize downstream performance, resulting in a "black-box" evaluation that makes it difficult to attribute failures to specific causes. To address this, we propose Tool-Genesis, a diagnostic benchmark designed to quantify agent capabilities across multiple dimensions, including interface compliance, functional correctness, and downstream utility. Tool-Genesis evaluates whether agents can construct task-relevant tools solely from abstract requirements (without preset specifications) and use them to solve realistic problems. Crucially, we find that even state-of-the-art models struggle to produce precise tool interfaces or executable logic in a one-shot setting. These minor initial flaws are amplified through the pipeline, leading to a sharp degradation in downstream metrics. We hope Tool-Genesis will guide future research toward training and steering models to synthesize persistent, general-purpose tools that better address real-world challenges.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and GPT-4 have demonstrated exceptional proficiency in natural language processing, their efficacy in addressing complex, multifaceted tasks remains limited. A growing area of research focuses on LLM-based agents equipped with external tools capable of performing diverse tasks. However, existing LLM-based agents only support a limited set of tools which is unable to cover a diverse range of user queries, especially for those involving expertise domains. It remains a challenge for LLM-based agents to extend their tools autonomously when confronted with various user queries. As GitHub has hosted a multitude of repositories which can be seen as a good resource for tools, a promising solution is that LLM-based agents can autonomously integrate the repositories in GitHub according to the user queries to extend their tool set. In this paper, we introduce GitAgent, an agent capable of achieving the autonomous tool extension from GitHub. GitAgent follows a four-phase procedure to incorporate repositories and it can learn human experience by resorting to GitHub Issues/PRs to solve problems encountered during the procedure. Experimental evaluation involving 30 user queries demonstrates GitAgent's effectiveness, achieving a 69.4% success rate on average.

AI agents -- systems that combine foundation models with reasoning, planning, memory, and tool use -- are rapidly becoming a practical interface between natural-language intent and real-world computation. This survey synthesizes the emerging landscape of AI agent architectures across: (i) deliberation and reasoning (e.g., chain-of-thought-style decomposition, self-reflection and verification, and constraint-aware decision making), (ii) planning and control (from reactive policies to hierarchical and multi-step planners), and (iii) tool calling and environment interaction (retrieval, code execution, APIs, and multimodal perception). We organize prior work into a unified taxonomy spanning agent components (policy/LLM core, memory, world models, planners, tool routers, and critics), orchestration patterns (single-agent vs.\ multi-agent; centralized vs.\ decentralized coordination), and deployment settings (offline analysis vs.\ online interactive assistance; safety-critical vs.\ open-ended tasks). We discuss key design trade-offs -- latency vs.\ accuracy, autonomy vs.\ controllability, and capability vs.\ reliability -- and highlight how evaluation is complicated by non-determinism, long-horizon credit assignment, tool and environment variability, and hidden costs such as retries and context growth. Finally, we summarize measurement and benchmarking practices (task suites, human preference and utility metrics, success under constraints, robustness and security) and identify open challenges including verification and guardrails for tool actions, scalable memory and context management, interpretability of agent decisions, and reproducible evaluation under realistic workloads.

Large reasoning models have demonstrated strong problem-solving abilities, yet real-world tasks often require external tools and long-horizon interactions. Existing agent frameworks typically follow predefined workflows, which limit autonomous and global task completion. In this paper, we introduce DeepAgent, an end-to-end deep reasoning agent that performs autonomous thinking, tool discovery, and action execution within a single, coherent reasoning process. To address the challenges of long-horizon interactions, particularly the context length explosion from multiple tool calls and the accumulation of interaction history, we introduce an autonomous memory folding mechanism that compresses past interactions into structured episodic, working, and tool memories, reducing error accumulation while preserving critical information. To teach general-purpose tool use efficiently and stably, we develop an end-to-end reinforcement learning strategy, namely ToolPO, that leverages LLM-simulated APIs and applies tool-call advantage attribution to assign fine-grained credit to the tool invocation tokens. Extensive experiments on eight benchmarks, including general tool-use tasks (ToolBench, API-Bank, TMDB, Spotify, ToolHop) and downstream applications (ALFWorld, WebShop, GAIA, HLE), demonstrate that DeepAgent consistently outperforms baselines across both labeled-tool and open-set tool retrieval scenarios. This work takes a step toward more general and capable agents for real-world applications. The code and demo are available at https://github.com/RUC-NLPIR/DeepAgent.

Creating autonomous virtual agents capable of using arbitrary software on any digital device remains a major challenge for artificial intelligence. Two key obstacles hinder progress: insufficient infrastructure for building virtual agents in real-world environments, and the need for in-the-wild evaluation of fundamental agent abilities. To address this, we introduce AgentStudio, an online, realistic, and multimodal toolkit that covers the entire lifecycle of agent development. This includes environment setups, data collection, agent evaluation, and visualization. The observation and action spaces are highly generic, supporting both function calling and human-computer interfaces. This versatility is further enhanced by AgentStudio's graphical user interfaces, which allow efficient development of datasets and benchmarks in real-world settings. To illustrate, we introduce a visual grounding dataset and a real-world benchmark suite, both created with our graphical interfaces. Furthermore, we present several actionable insights derived from AgentStudio, e.g., general visual grounding, open-ended tool creation, learning from videos, etc. We have open-sourced the environments, datasets, benchmarks, and interfaces to promote research towards developing general virtual agents for the future.

Graphical user interface (GUI) agents have advanced rapidly but still struggle with complex tasks involving novel UI elements, long-horizon actions, and personalized trajectories. In this work, we introduce Instruction Agent, a GUI agent that leverages expert demonstrations to solve such tasks, enabling completion of otherwise difficult workflows. Given a single demonstration, the agent extracts step-by-step instructions and executes them by strictly following the trajectory intended by the user, which avoids making mistakes during execution. The agent leverages the verifier and backtracker modules further to improve robustness. Both modules are critical to understand the current outcome from each action and handle unexpected interruptions(such as pop-up windows) during execution. Our experiments show that Instruction Agent achieves a 60% success rate on a set of tasks in OSWorld that all top-ranked agents failed to complete. The Instruction Agent offers a practical and extensible framework, bridging the gap between current GUI agents and reliable real-world GUI task automation.

We present Plancraft, a multi-modal evaluation dataset for LLM agents. Plancraft has both a text-only and multi-modal interface, based on the Minecraft crafting GUI. We include the Minecraft Wiki to evaluate tool use and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), as well as an oracle planner and oracle RAG information extractor, to ablate the different components of a modern agent architecture. To evaluate decision-making, Plancraft also includes a subset of examples that are intentionally unsolvable, providing a realistic challenge that requires the agent not only to complete tasks but also to decide whether they are solvable at all. We benchmark both open-source and closed-source LLMs and strategies on our task and compare their performance to a handcrafted planner. We find that LLMs and VLMs struggle with the planning problems that Plancraft introduces, and we offer suggestions on how to improve their capabilities.

Small LLMs often struggle to match the agentic capabilities of large, costly models. While reinforcement learning can help, progress has been limited by two structural bottlenecks: existing open-source agentic training data are narrow in task variety and easily solved; real-world APIs lack diversity and are unstable for large-scale reinforcement learning rollout processes. We address these challenges with SYNTHAGENT, a framework that jointly synthesizes diverse tool-use training data and simulates complete environments. Specifically, a strong teacher model creates novel tasks and tool ecosystems, then rewrites them into intentionally underspecified instructions. This compels agents to actively query users for missing details. When handling synthetic tasks, an LLM-based user simulator provides user-private information, while a mock tool system delivers stable tool responses. For rewards, task-level rubrics are constructed based on required subgoals, user-agent interactions, and forbidden behaviors. Across 14 challenging datasets in math, search, and tool use, models trained on our synthetic data achieve substantial gains, with small models outperforming larger baselines.

With the recent rapid advancement of Agentic Intelligence, agentic tool use in LLMs has become increasingly important. During multi-turn interactions between agents and users, the dynamic, uncertain, and stochastic nature of user demands poses significant challenges to the agent's tool invocation capabilities. Agents are no longer expected to simply call tools to deliver a result; rather, they must iteratively refine their understanding of user needs through communication while simultaneously invoking tools to resolve user queries. Existing reinforcement learning (RL) approaches for tool use lack the integration of genuinely dynamic users during the RL training process. To bridge this gap, we introduce MUA-RL (Multi-turn User-interacting Agent Reinforcement Learning for agentic tool use), a novel reinforcement learning framework that, for the first time in the field of agentic tool use, integrates LLM-simulated users into the reinforcement learning loop. MUA-RL aims to enable autonomous learning of models to communicate with users efficiently and use various tools to solve practical problems in dynamic multi-turn interactions. Evaluations are done on several multi-turn tool-using benchmarks (see Figure 1). Specifically, MUA-RL-32B achieves 67.3 on TAU2 Retail, 45.4 on TAU2 Airline, 28.3 on TAU2 Telecom, 28.4 on BFCL-V3 Multi Turn, and 82.5 on ACEBench Agent -- outperforming or matching the performance of larger open-source models such as DeepSeek-V3-0324 and Qwen3-235B-A22B in non-thinking settings.

As large language models evolve into tool-augmented agents, a central question remains unresolved: when is external tool use actually justified? Existing agent frameworks typically treat tools as ordinary actions and optimize for task success or reward, offering little principled distinction between epistemically necessary interaction and unnecessary delegation. This position paper argues that agents should invoke external tools only when epistemically necessary. Here, epistemic necessity means that a task cannot be completed reliably via the agent's internal reasoning over its current context, without any external interaction. We introduce the Theory of Agent (ToA), a framework that treats agents as making sequential decisions about whether remaining uncertainty should be resolved internally or delegated externally. From this perspective, common agent failure modes (e.g., overthinking and overacting) arise from miscalibrated decisions under uncertainty rather than deficiencies in reasoning or tool execution alone. We further discuss implications for training, evaluation, and agent design, highlighting that unnecessary delegation not only causes inefficiency but can impede the development of internal reasoning capability. Our position provides a normative criterion for tool use that complements existing decision-theoretic models and is essential for building agents that are not only correct, but increasingly intelligent.

Tool-augmented large language models (LLMs) leverage tools, often in the form of APIs, to enhance their reasoning capabilities on complex tasks, thus taking on the role of intelligent agents interacting with the real world. The recently introduced ToolLLaMA model by Qin et al. [2024] utilizes the depth-first search-based decision tree (DFSDT) method for reasoning with 16000+ real-world APIs, which effectively improves the planning and inferencing performance of tool-augmented LLMs compared to traditional chain reasoning approaches. However, their approach only employs successful paths from decision trees (also called inference trees) for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) during training, which does not fully exploit the advantages of the tree of thought. In this study, we propose an inference trajectory optimization framework based on the preference data extracted from decision trees to address this limitation. We first introduce a novel method for constructing preference data from the tree of thought, capitalizing on the failed explorations previously overlooked in the trees. Specifically, we generate an effective step-wise preference dataset, named ToolPreference, for tool use based on the ToolBench dataset. In the subsequent training phase, we first fine-tune the LLM with tool-usage expert trajectories and then use these step-wise preference pairs for direct preference optimization (DPO) to update the policy of the LLM, resulting in our ToolPrefer-LLaMA (TP-LLaMA) model. Our experiments demonstrate that by obtaining insights from errors in inference trees, TP-LLaMA significantly outperforms the baselines across almost all test scenarios by a large margin and exhibits better generalization capabilities with unseen APIs. At the same time, TP-LLaMA has also demonstrated superior reasoning efficiency compared to the baselines, making it more suitable for complex tool-usage reasoning tasks.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents hold great potential for automating complex tasks across diverse digital environments, from web applications to desktop software. However, the development of such agents is hindered by the lack of high-quality, multi-step trajectory data required for effective training. Existing approaches rely on expensive and labor-intensive human annotation, making them unsustainable at scale. To address this challenge, we propose AgentTrek, a scalable data synthesis pipeline that generates high-quality GUI agent trajectories by leveraging web tutorials. Our method automatically gathers tutorial-like texts from the internet, transforms them into task goals with step-by-step instructions, and employs a visual-language model agent to simulate their execution in a real digital environment. A VLM-based evaluator ensures the correctness of the generated trajectories. We demonstrate that training GUI agents with these synthesized trajectories significantly improves their grounding and planning performance over the current models. Moreover, our approach is more cost-efficient compared to traditional human annotation methods. This work underscores the potential of guided replay with web tutorials as a viable strategy for large-scale GUI agent training, paving the way for more capable and autonomous digital agents.

As agent systems powered by large language models (LLMs) advance, improving the task performance of an autonomous agent, especially in context understanding, tool usage, and response generation, has become increasingly critical. Although prior studies have advanced the overall design of LLM-based agents, systematic optimization of their internal reasoning and tool-use pipelines remains underexplored. This paper introduces an agent framework grounded in real-world practical experience, with three key innovations: (1) an adaptive prompt generation strategy that aligns with the agent's state and task goals to improve reliability and robustness; (2) a context-aware tool orchestration module that performs tool categorization, semantic retrieval, and adaptive invocation based on user intent and context; and (3) a layered memory mechanism that integrates session memory, task history, and external summaries to improve relevance and efficiency through dynamic summarization and compression. An end-to-end framework named Jenius-Agent has been integrated with three key optimizations, including tools based on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), file input/output (I/O), and execution feedback. The experiments show a 20 percent improvement in task accuracy, along with a reduced token cost, response latency, and invocation failures. The framework is already deployed in Jenius (https://www.jenius.cn), providing a lightweight and scalable solution for robust, protocol-compatible autonomous agents.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and extended reality (XR) are increasingly combined in applications such as motor skill training, personalized feedback, and embodied task guidance. Yet developing AI-XR systems remains challenging due to fragmented toolchains that push developers into ad hoc integrations, diverting their attention away from essential design concerns such as interactivity and context awareness. To address this issue, we present XARP (XR Agent-ready Remote Procedures), a toolkit for AI-XR development designed for both human developers and AI agents. XARP implements JSON-based remote procedure calls that allow server-side Python to control XR clients, providing a high-level abstraction over low-level integration details. Humans can use XARP as a Python library to write XR applications with reduced implementation overhead. AI agents operate with the same abstraction to dynamically call tools to generate XR applications at runtime in response to context changes and user requests. XARP offers Model Context Protocol (MCP) connectivity that allows third-party agents and tools to leverage XR capabilities, previously unavailable. We conducted three case studies that demonstrate XARP supports a variety of AI-XR applications, including AI-guided fencing, drone assistance, and room layout design. We evaluated XARP in a walkthrough study with 24 AI and XR developers. UTAUT scores indicate high potential for adoption, and participants reported that XARP can reduce authoring time, lower entry barriers for developers unfamiliar with AI or XR, and enable the implementation of novel AI-XR systems.

Information graphics are pivotal in effective information dissemination and storytelling. However, creating such graphics is extremely challenging for non-professionals, since the design process requires multifaceted skills and comprehensive knowledge. Thus, despite the many available authoring tools, a significant gap remains in enabling non-experts to produce compelling information graphics seamlessly, especially from scratch. Recent breakthroughs show that Large Language Models (LLMs), especially when tool-augmented, can autonomously engage with external tools, making them promising candidates for enabling innovative graphic design applications. In this work, we propose a LLM-centric interface with the agent GraphiMind for automatic generation, recommendation, and composition of information graphics design resources, based on user intent expressed through natural language. Our GraphiMind integrates a Textual Conversational Interface, powered by tool-augmented LLM, with a traditional Graphical Manipulation Interface, streamlining the entire design process from raw resource curation to composition and refinement. Extensive evaluations highlight our tool's proficiency in simplifying the design process, opening avenues for its use by non-professional users. Moreover, we spotlight the potential of LLMs in reshaping the domain of information graphics design, offering a blend of automation, versatility, and user-centric interactivity.

The rise of agentic systems that combine orchestration, tool use, and conversational capabilities, has been more visible by the recent advent of large language models (LLMs). While open-domain frameworks exist, applying them in private domains remains difficult due to heterogeneous tool formats, domain-specific jargon, restricted accessibility of APIs, and complex governance. Conventional solutions, such as fine-tuning on synthetic dialogue data, are burdensome and brittle under domain shifts, and risk degrading general performance. In this light, we introduce a framework for private-domain multi-agent conversational systems that avoids training and data generation by adopting behavior modeling and documentation. Our design simply assumes an orchestrator, a tool-calling agent, and a general chat agent, with tool integration defined through structured specifications and domain-informed instructions. This approach enables scalable adaptation to private tools and evolving contexts without continual retraining. The framework supports practical use cases, including lightweight deployment of multi-agent systems, leveraging API specifications as retrieval resources, and generating synthetic dialogue for evaluation -- providing a sustainable method for aligning agent behavior with domain expertise in private conversational ecosystems.

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly rely on multi-turn tool-integrated planning for knowledge-intensive and complex reasoning tasks. Existing implementations typically rely on a single agent, but they suffer from limited context length and noisy tool responses. A natural solution is to adopt a multi-agent framework with planner- and worker-agents to manage context. However, no existing methods support effective reinforcement learning post-training of tool-integrated multi-agent frameworks. To address this gap, we propose Multi-Agent Tool-Integrated Policy Optimization (MATPO), which enables distinct roles (planner and worker) to be trained within a single LLM instance using role-specific prompts via reinforcement learning. MATPO is derived from a principled credit assignment mechanism across planner and worker rollouts. This design eliminates the need to deploy multiple LLMs, which would be memory-intensive, while preserving the benefits of specialization. Experiments on GAIA-text, WebWalkerQA, and FRAMES show that MATPO consistently outperforms single-agent baselines by an average of 18.38% relative improvement in performance and exhibits greater robustness to noisy tool outputs. Our findings highlight the effectiveness of unifying multiple agent roles within a single LLM and provide practical insights for stable and efficient multi-agent RL training.

Tool-augmented large language models (LLMs) are attracting widespread attention when accessing up-to-date knowledge and alleviating hallucination issues. Nowadays, advanced closed-source LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT) have demonstrated surprising tool-usage capabilities through prompting and in-context learning techniques. To empower the capabilities of open-source LLMs (e.g., LLaMA) in manipulating tools, current efforts focus on either template-driven or token-triggered tool-usage. However, the former hampers LLMs' flexibility to address diverse user's queries due to constrained tool interactions, while the latter limits the generalizability when engaging with new tools, since tool-usage learning is based on task- and tool-specific datasets. To alleviate these concerns, in this paper, we propose a decision-aware and generalizable tool-usage framework (DEER). Specifically, we first construct the tool-usage samples with multiple decision branches via an automatic generation pipeline, thereby inspiring the decision-making awareness of LLMs under diverse scenarios. Meanwhile, we propose a novel tool sampling strategy to enhance the generalizability of LLMs over unseen tools. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed DEER is effective and significantly outperforms baselines across various datasets.

Tool-augmented language models have demonstrated strong capabilities, but their reliance on live API access creates scalability and reliability challenges during training and deployment. We propose MTR, a simulation-first training framework for tool-augmented reasoning. Instead of relying on live APIs, MTR learns from complete ReAct traces with schema-validated, simulated observations. Our approach operates through a multi-agent architecture where a ToolMaker generates task-specific, OpenAI-compatible tool interfaces, an AutoAgent produces structured think-act-observe sequences, and a ToolActor simulates realistic responses. Training proceeds in two stages: Stage-1 Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) teaches 'trace grammar' from complete reasoning sequences; Stage-2 Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) optimizes strategy with a composite trace reward that balances answer correctness and internal consistency. Across four multi-hop QA benchmarks (HotpotQA, MuSiQue, 2WikiMultiHopQA, Bamboogle), MTR attains competitive Exact Match (EM) scores to live-API systems and excels on reasoning-intensive tasks, suggesting that effective tool reasoning can be learned from structured traces without live interactions.

Chart visualizations, while essential for data interpretation and communication, are predominantly accessible only as images in PDFs, lacking source data tables and stylistic information. To enable effective editing of charts in PDFs or digital scans, we present PlotEdit, a novel multi-agent framework for natural language-driven end-to-end chart image editing via self-reflective LLM agents. PlotEdit orchestrates five LLM agents: (1) Chart2Table for data table extraction, (2) Chart2Vision for style attribute identification, (3) Chart2Code for retrieving rendering code, (4) Instruction Decomposition Agent for parsing user requests into executable steps, and (5) Multimodal Editing Agent for implementing nuanced chart component modifications - all coordinated through multimodal feedback to maintain visual fidelity. PlotEdit outperforms existing baselines on the ChartCraft dataset across style, layout, format, and data-centric edits, enhancing accessibility for visually challenged users and improving novice productivity.

Existing Tool-Integrated Reasoning (TIR) models have effectively extended the question-answering capabilities of LLMs by incorporating external tools. However, real-world scenarios present numerous open-ended problems where fixed tools often fail to meet task requirements. Furthermore, the lack of self-optimization mechanisms means that erroneous tool outputs can mislead the LLM's responses. Additionally, the construction of existing tools entails significant manual effort, which consequently constrains their applicability. Recognizing that the reasoning traces of LLMs encapsulate implicit problem-solving capabilities, we propose UCT, a novel training-free framework that transforms agents from tool users to tool creators. This approach harvests reasoning experiences and distills them into reusable assets. This method transforms the agent from a mere tool user into a tool creator, enabling adaptive tool creation and self-updating during the inference process. We also introduce a memory consolidation mechanism to maintain the tool library, ensuring high reusability of retained experiential memory for subsequent reasoning tasks. This novel automated tool construction paradigm continuously improves tool quality during reasoning, allowing the overall agent system to progress without additional training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method serves as a novel paradigm for enhancing the capabilities of TIR models. In particular, the significant performance gains achieved +20.86%uparrow and +23.04%uparrow on benchmarks across multi-domain mathematical and scientific reasoning tasks validate the self-evolving capability of the agent.

Large language models (LLMs) have garnered significant attention due to their impressive natural language processing (NLP) capabilities. Recently, many studies have focused on the tool utilization ability of LLMs. They primarily investigated how LLMs effectively collaborate with given specific tools. However, in scenarios where LLMs serve as intelligent agents, as seen in applications like AutoGPT and MetaGPT, LLMs are expected to engage in intricate decision-making processes that involve deciding whether to employ a tool and selecting the most suitable tool(s) from a collection of available tools to fulfill user requests. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce MetaTool, a benchmark designed to evaluate whether LLMs have tool usage awareness and can correctly choose tools. Specifically, we create a dataset called ToolE within the benchmark. This dataset contains various types of user queries in the form of prompts that trigger LLMs to use tools, including both single-tool and multi-tool scenarios. Subsequently, we set the tasks for both tool usage awareness and tool selection. We define four subtasks from different perspectives in tool selection, including tool selection with similar choices, tool selection in specific scenarios, tool selection with possible reliability issues, and multi-tool selection. We conduct experiments involving nine popular LLMs and find that the majority of them still struggle to effectively select tools, highlighting the existing gaps between LLMs and genuine intelligent agents. However, through the error analysis, we found there is still significant room for improvement. Finally, we conclude with insights for tool developers that follow ChatGPT to provide detailed descriptions that can enhance the tool selection performance of LLMs.

Large language model (LLM)-based agents that reason, plan, and act through tools, memory, and structured interaction are emerging as a promising paradigm for automating complex workflows. Recent systems such as OpenClaw and Claude Code exemplify a broader shift from passive response generation to action-oriented task execution. Yet as agents move toward open-ended, real-world deployment, relying on from-scratch reasoning and low-level tool calls for every task become increasingly inefficient, error-prone, and hard to maintain. This survey examines this challenge through the lens of agent skills, which we define as reusable procedural artifacts that coordinate tools, memory, and runtime context under task-specific constraints. Under this view, agents and skills play complementary roles: agents handle high-level reasoning and planning, while skills form the operational layer that enables reliable, reusable, and composable execution. Skills are therefore central to the scalability, robustness, and maintainability of modern agent systems. We organize the literature around four stages of the agent skill lifecycle -- representation, acquisition, retrieval, and evolution -- and review representative methods, ecosystem resources, and application settings across each stage. We conclude by discussing open challenges in quality control, interoperability, safe updating, and long-term capability management. All related resources, including research papers, open-source data, and projects, are collected for the community in blue{https://github.com/JayLZhou/Awesome-Agent-Skills}.

Tool-augmented LLMs are increasingly deployed as agents that interleave natural-language reasoning with executable Python actions, as in CodeAct-style frameworks. In deployment, these agents rely on runtime state that persists across steps. By contrast, common training pipelines treat agent traces as token sequences, with execution semantics left implicit. This raises a data-centric question: Is state persistence merely an inference-time scaffold, or can models learn to exploit it when training data exposes the corresponding execution semantics? We isolate state persistence as a training-time variable. We introduce Opaque Knapsack, a procedurally generated family of partially observable optimization tasks designed to prevent one-shot solutions. Item attributes and constraints are hidden behind budgeted tool calls, forcing multi-turn control flow and iterative state revision. Holding task instances, prompts, tools, model, and supervision fixed, we generate paired trajectories differing only in whether interpreter state persists across steps or resets after each action. We then fine-tune identical base models (Qwen3-8B) on each trace variant and evaluate all four train-runtime combinations. Our 2x2 cross-evaluation shows that execution semantics primarily affect how agents reach solutions, not whether they do: solution quality is statistically indistinguishable across conditions, but token cost and stability differ substantially. A persistent-trained model in a stateless runtime triggers missing-variable errors in roughly 80% of episodes; a stateless-trained model in a persistent runtime redundantly re-derives retained state, using roughly 3.5x more tokens. Interpreter persistence should be treated as a first-class semantic of agent traces. Aligning fine-tuning data with deployment runtimes improves efficiency and reduces brittle train-runtime mismatches.

Automatically generating 3D games in commercial game engines remains a non-trivial challenge, as it involves complex engine-related workflows for generating assets such as scenes, blueprints, and code. To address this challenge, we propose a novel multi-agent system, AutoUE, which coordinates multiple agents to end-to-end generate 3D games, covering model retrieval, scene generation, gameplay and interaction code synthesis, and automated game testing for evaluation. In order to mitigate tool-use hallucinations in LLMs, we introduce a retrieval-augmented generation mechanism that grounds agents with relevant UE tool documentation. Additionally, we incorporate game design patterns and engine constraints into the code generation process to ensure the generation of correct and robust code. Furthermore, we design an automated play-testing pipeline that generates and executes runtime test commands, enabling systematic evaluation of dynamic behaviors. Finally, we construct a game generation dataset and conduct a series of experiments that demonstrate AutoUE's ability to generate 3D games end-to-end, and validate the effectiveness of these designs.

The ability to use tools is fundamental for large language model (LLM) agents. Given a task, existing systems use LLMs to plan and generate tool calls, which are executed by real-world tools to complete the task. However, tool calls are prone to errors because they are derived merely from LLM intrinsic capabilities. What is more, while it is useful to let LLMs iteratively refine the tool-call sequence using execution results from real tools, this process can be expensive and lead to unsafe results. To improve LLM tool calls and address issues caused by using real tools for refinement, we introduce Gecko, a comprehensive environment that simulates tool responses using a combination of rules and LLMs. Specifically, Gecko checks the validity of tool calls including input arguments and tool names, synthesizes reasonable responses that adhere to the output schema, and assesses whether all task objectives have been achieved. These three types of feedback provided by Gecko allow LLMs to refine their tool calls, forming a simple yet effective test-time scaling method named GATS. On BFCLv3 and τ^2-bench, GATS consistently improves the tool calling performance of various LLMs including GPT-4o, GPT-5, and Gemini-3.0-pro. We further discuss working mechanisms of our method and share future possibilities.

Real-world multimodal agents solve multi-step workflows grounded in visual evidence. For example, an agent can troubleshoot a device by linking a wiring photo to a schematic and validating the fix with online documentation, or plan a trip by interpreting a transit map and checking schedules under routing constraints. However, existing multimodal benchmarks mainly evaluate single-turn visual reasoning or specific tool skills, and they do not fully capture the realism, visual subtlety, and long-horizon tool use that practical agents require. We introduce AgentVista, a benchmark for generalist multimodal agents that spans 25 sub-domains across 7 categories, pairing realistic and detail-rich visual scenarios with natural hybrid tool use. Tasks require long-horizon tool interactions across modalities, including web search, image search, page navigation, and code-based operations for both image processing and general programming. Comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art models exposes significant gaps in their ability to carry out long-horizon multimodal tool use. Even the best model in our evaluation, Gemini-3-Pro with tools, achieves only 27.3% overall accuracy, and hard instances can require more than 25 tool-calling turns. We expect AgentVista to accelerate the development of more capable and reliable multimodal agents for realistic and ultra-challenging problem solving.

Traditional data processing pipelines are typically static and handcrafted for specific tasks, limiting their adaptability to evolving requirements. While general-purpose agents and coding assistants can generate code for well-understood data pipelines, they lack the ability to autonomously monitor, manage, and optimize an end-to-end pipeline once deployed. We present Autonomous Data Processing using Meta-agents (ADP-MA), a framework that dynamically constructs, executes, and iteratively refines data processing pipelines through hierarchical agent orchestration. At its core, meta-agents analyze input data and task specifications to design a multi-phase plan, instantiate specialized ground-level agents, and continuously evaluate pipeline performance. The architecture comprises three key components: a planning module for strategy generation, an orchestration layer for agent coordination and tool integration, and a monitoring loop for iterative evaluation and backtracking. Unlike conventional approaches, ADP-MA emphasizes context-aware optimization, adaptive workload partitioning, and progressive sampling for scalability. Additionally, the framework leverages a diverse set of external tools and can reuse previously designed agents, reducing redundancy and accelerating pipeline construction. We demonstrate ADP-MA through an interactive demo that showcases pipeline construction, execution monitoring, and adaptive refinement across representative data processing tasks.

Equipping Large Language Models (LLMs) with external tools enables them to solve complex real-world problems. However, the robustness of existing methods remains a critical challenge when confronting novel or evolving tools. Existing trajectory-centric paradigms primarily rely on memorizing static solution paths during training, which limits the ability of LLMs to generalize tool usage to newly introduced or previously unseen tools. In this paper, we propose ToolMaster, a framework that shifts tool use from imitating golden tool-calling trajectories to actively learning tool usage through interaction with the environment. To optimize LLMs for tool planning and invocation, ToolMaster adopts a trial-and-execution paradigm, which trains LLMs to first imitate teacher-generated trajectories containing explicit tool trials and self-correction, followed by reinforcement learning to coordinate the trial and execution phases jointly. This process enables agents to autonomously explore correct tool usage by actively interacting with environments and forming experiential knowledge that benefits tool execution. Experimental results demonstrate that ToolMaster significantly outperforms existing baselines in terms of generalization and robustness across unseen or unfamiliar tools. All code and data are available at https://github.com/NEUIR/ToolMaster.

Large language model (LLM) agents augmented with external tools often struggle as number of tools grow large and become domain-specific. In such settings, ambiguous tool descriptions and under-specified agent instructions frequently lead to tool mis-selection and incorrect slot/value instantiation. We hypothesize that this is due to two root causes: generic, one-size-fits-all prompts that ignore tool-specific nuances, and underspecified tool schemas that lack clear guidance on when and how to use each tool and how to format its parameters. We introduce Joint Tool-Prompt Reflective Optimization (JTPRO), a framework for improving tool-calling reliability in trace-supervised settings by iteratively using rollout-driven reflection to co-optimize global instructions and per-tool schema/argument descriptions for accurate tool selection and argument instantiation in large tool inventories. JTPRO is designed to preserve only tool-local cues needed for correct disambiguation and slot filling. We evaluate JTPRO across multi-tool benchmarks, which account for different number of tools using three metrics: Tool Selection Accuracy (TSA), Slot Filling Accuracy(SFA), and Overall Success Rate(OSR) (correct tool + correct slots + correct values). JTPRO consistently outperforms strong baselines, including CoT-style agents, and reflective prompt optimizers such as GEPA by 5%-20% (relative) on OSR. Ablations show that joint optimization of instructions and tool schemas is more effective and robust than optimizing either component in isolation.

Scientific reasoning poses an excessive challenge for even the most advanced Large Language Models (LLMs). To make this task more practical and solvable for LLMs, we introduce a new task setting named tool-augmented scientific reasoning. This setting supplements LLMs with scalable toolsets, and shifts the focus from pursuing an omniscient problem solver to a proficient tool-user. To facilitate the research of such setting, we construct a tool-augmented training corpus named MathFunc which encompasses over 30,000 samples and roughly 6,000 tools. Building on MathFunc, we develop SciAgent to retrieve, understand and, if necessary, use tools for scientific problem solving. Additionally, we craft a benchmark, SciToolBench, spanning five scientific domains to evaluate LLMs' abilities with tool assistance. Extensive experiments on SciToolBench confirm the effectiveness of SciAgent. Notably, SciAgent-Mistral-7B surpasses other LLMs with the same size by more than 13% in absolute accuracy. Furthermore, SciAgent-DeepMath-7B shows much superior performance than ChatGPT.

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) is transforming search engines into conversational AI search products, primarily using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) on web corpora. However, this paradigm has significant industrial limitations. Traditional RAG approaches struggle with real-time needs and structured queries that require accessing dynamically generated content like ticket availability or inventory. Limited to indexing static pages, search engines cannot perform the interactive queries needed for such time-sensitive data. Academic research has focused on optimizing RAG for static content, overlooking complex intents and the need for dynamic sources like databases and real-time APIs. To bridge this gap, we introduce TURA (Tool-Augmented Unified Retrieval Agent for AI Search), a novel three-stage framework that combines RAG with agentic tool-use to access both static content and dynamic, real-time information. TURA has three key components: an Intent-Aware Retrieval module to decompose queries and retrieve information sources encapsulated as Model Context Protocol (MCP) Servers, a DAG-based Task Planner that models task dependencies as a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) for optimal parallel execution, and a lightweight Distilled Agent Executor for efficient tool calling. TURA is the first architecture to systematically bridge the gap between static RAG and dynamic information sources for a world-class AI search product. Serving tens of millions of users, it leverages an agentic framework to deliver robust, real-time answers while meeting the low-latency demands of a large-scale industrial system.

Large language models are powerful generalists, yet solving deep and complex problems such as those of the Humanity's Last Exam (HLE) remains both conceptually challenging and computationally expensive. We show that small orchestrators managing other models and a variety of tools can both push the upper bound of intelligence and improve efficiency in solving difficult agentic tasks. We introduce ToolOrchestra, a method for training small orchestrators that coordinate intelligent tools. ToolOrchestra explicitly uses reinforcement learning with outcome-, efficiency-, and user-preference-aware rewards. Using ToolOrchestra, we produce Orchestrator, an 8B model that achieves higher accuracy at lower cost than previous tool-use agents while aligning with user preferences on which tools are to be used for a given query. On HLE, Orchestrator achieves a score of 37.1%, outperforming GPT-5 (35.1%) while being 2.5x more efficient. On tau2-Bench and FRAMES, Orchestrator surpasses GPT-5 by a wide margin while using only about 30% of the cost. Extensive analysis shows that Orchestrator achieves the best trade-off between performance and cost under multiple metrics, and generalizes robustly to unseen tools. These results demonstrate that composing diverse tools with a lightweight orchestration model is both more efficient and more effective than existing methods, paving the way for practical and scalable tool-augmented reasoning systems.

Agentic systems enable the intelligent use of research tooling, augmenting a researcher's ability to investigate and propose novel solutions to existing problems. Within Additive Manufacturing (AM), alloy discovery remains a complex challenge, often requiring expertise in the various domains of materials science, thermodynamic simulations, and experimental analysis. Large Language Model (LLM) enabled agents can facilitate this endeavor by utilizing their extensive knowledge base to dispatch tool calls via Model Context Protocol (MCP) to perform actions such as Thermo-Calc property diagram calculations and lack of fusion process map generation. In addition, the multi-agent system developed in this work is able to effectively reason through complex user prompts and provide analysis on the printability of proposed alloys. These agents can dynamically adjust their task trajectory to the outcomes of tool call results, effectively enabling autonomous decision-making in practical environments. This work aims to utilize LLM enabled agents to automate and accelerate the task of alloy discovery within the field of additive manufacturing and showcase the benefits of adopting this multi-agent system.

Real-world multi-modal problems are rarely solved by a single machine learning model, and often require multi-step computational plans that involve stitching several models. Tool-augmented LLMs hold tremendous promise for automating the generation of such computational plans. However, the lack of standardized benchmarks for evaluating LLMs as planners for multi-step multi-modal tasks has prevented a systematic study of planner design decisions. Should LLMs generate a full plan in a single shot or step-by-step? Should they invoke tools directly with Python code or through structured data formats like JSON? Does feedback improve planning? To answer these questions and more, we introduce m&m's: a benchmark containing 4K+ multi-step multi-modal tasks involving 33 tools that include multi-modal models, (free) public APIs, and image processing modules. For each of these task queries, we provide automatically generated plans using this realistic toolset. We further provide a high-quality subset of 1,565 task plans that are human-verified and correctly executable. With m&m's, we evaluate 6 popular LLMs with 2 planning strategies (multi-step vs. step-by-step planning), 2 plan formats (JSON vs. code), and 3 types of feedback (parsing/verification/execution). Finally, we summarize takeaways from our extensive experiments. Our dataset and code are available on HuggingFace (https://huggingface.co/datasets/zixianma/mnms) and Github (https://github.com/RAIVNLab/mnms).

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities as intelligent agents capable of solving complex problems. However, effective planning in scenarios involving dependencies between API or tool calls-particularly in multi-turn conversations-remains a significant challenge. To address this, we introduce T1, a tool-augmented, multi-domain, multi-turn conversational dataset specifically designed to capture and manage inter-tool dependencies across diverse domains. T1 enables rigorous evaluation of agents' ability to coordinate tool use across nine distinct domains (4 single domain and 5 multi-domain) with the help of an integrated caching mechanism for both short- and long-term memory, while supporting dynamic replanning-such as deciding whether to recompute or reuse cached results. Beyond facilitating research on tool use and planning, T1 also serves as a benchmark for evaluating the performance of open-source language models. We present results powered by T1-Agent, highlighting their ability to plan and reason in complex, tool-dependent scenarios.

Autonomous agent frameworks still struggle to reconcile long-term experiential learning with real-time, context-sensitive decision-making. In practice, this gap appears as static cognition, rigid workflow dependence, and inefficient context usage, which jointly limit adaptability in open-ended and non-stationary environments. To address these limitations, we present AutoAgent, a self-evolving multi-agent framework built on three tightly coupled components: evolving cognition, on-the-fly contextual decision-making, and elastic memory orchestration. At the core of AutoAgent, each agent maintains structured prompt-level cognition over tools, self-capabilities, peer expertise, and task knowledge. During execution, this cognition is combined with live task context to select actions from a unified space that includes tool calls, LLM-based generation, and inter-agent requests. To support efficient long-horizon reasoning, an Elastic Memory Orchestrator dynamically organizes interaction history by preserving raw records, compressing redundant trajectories, and constructing reusable episodic abstractions, thereby reducing token overhead while retaining decision-critical evidence. These components are integrated through a closed-loop cognitive evolution process that aligns intended actions with observed outcomes to continuously update cognition and expand reusable skills, without external retraining. Empirical results across retrieval-augmented reasoning, tool-augmented agent benchmarks, and embodied task environments show that AutoAgent consistently improves task success, tool-use efficiency, and collaborative robustness over static and memory-augmented baselines. Overall, AutoAgent provides a unified and practical foundation for adaptive autonomous agents that must learn from experience while making reliable context-aware decisions in dynamic environments.

Graphical user interfaces (GUI) automation agents are emerging as powerful tools, enabling humans to accomplish increasingly complex tasks on smart devices. However, users often inadvertently omit key information when conveying tasks, which hinders agent performance in the current agent paradigm that does not support immediate user intervention. To address this issue, we introduce a Self-Correction GUI Navigation task that incorporates interactive information completion capabilities within GUI agents. We developed the Navi-plus dataset with GUI follow-up question-answer pairs, alongside a Dual-Stream Trajectory Evaluation method to benchmark this new capability. Our results show that agents equipped with the ability to ask GUI follow-up questions can fully recover their performance when faced with ambiguous user tasks.

Traditional map-making relies heavily on Geographic Information Systems (GIS), requiring domain expertise and being time-consuming, especially for repetitive tasks. Recent advances in generative AI (GenAI), particularly image diffusion models, offer new opportunities for automating and democratizing the map-making process. However, these models struggle with accurate map creation due to limited control over spatial composition and semantic layout. To address this, we integrate vector data to guide map generation in different styles, specified by the textual prompts. Our model is the first to generate accurate maps in controlled styles, and we have integrated it into a web application to improve its usability and accessibility. We conducted a user study with professional cartographers to assess the fidelity of generated maps, the usability of the web application, and the implications of ever-emerging GenAI in map-making. The findings have suggested the potential of our developed application and, more generally, the GenAI models in helping both non-expert users and professionals in creating maps more efficiently. We have also outlined further technical improvements and emphasized the new role of cartographers to advance the paradigm of AI-assisted map-making. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/claudaff/generative-ai-mapmaking/.

Augmented Language Models (ALMs) empower large language models with the ability to use tools, transforming them into intelligent agents for real-world interactions. However, most existing frameworks for ALMs, to varying degrees, are deficient in the following critical features: flexible customization, collaborative democratization, and holistic evaluation. We present gentopia, an ALM framework enabling flexible customization of agents through simple configurations, seamlessly integrating various language models, task formats, prompting modules, and plugins into a unified paradigm. Furthermore, we establish gentpool, a public platform enabling the registration and sharing of user-customized agents. Agents registered in gentpool are composable such that they can be assembled together for agent collaboration, advancing the democratization of artificial intelligence. To ensure high-quality agents, gentbench, an integral component of gentpool, is designed to thoroughly evaluate user-customized agents across diverse aspects such as safety, robustness, efficiency, etc. We release gentopia on Github and will continuously move forward.

Tool-using agents are increasingly expected to operate across realistic professional workflows, where they must interpret multimodal inputs, coordinate external tools, inspect intermediate artifacts, and revise their actions before producing a final result. Existing benchmarks, however, often evaluate tool use, computer use, and multimodal reasoning in isolation, leaving a gap between benchmark settings and end-to-end omni-modal tool use in the real world. To address this gap, we introduce MM-ToolBench, a benchmark and evaluation harness for task-oriented omni-modal tool use. MM-ToolBench contains 100 executable tasks from two macro task families, Customer Service and Intelligent Creation, covering 20 subcategory slices and supported by 27 MCP servers with 324 tools. The central design of MM-ToolBench is closed-loop multimodal verification: agents must execute tools, inspect rendered or transformed artifacts, and self-correct when outputs fail task-specific requirements. To make such evaluation scalable and verifiable, MM-ToolBench couples MCP-based execution with task-specific grounded evaluators and a semi-automated construction pipeline for scenario discovery, task instantiation, evaluator synthesis, and human audit. Experiments on 15 contemporary agentic models show that MM-ToolBench remains highly challenging: Claude Opus 4.6, commonly regarded as one of the strongest coding-agent models, achieves only 32.0% task success, far below the 94.0% human benchmark. We envision MM-ToolBench as a practical foundation for evaluating and advancing next-generation omni-modal tool-using agents through closed-loop multimodal verification.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in reasoning and tool utilization. However, the generalization of tool-augmented reinforcement learning (RL) across diverse domains remains underexplored. In this work, we investigate the cross-domain generalization of an LLM agent equipped with a code interpreter tool, which is exclusively trained on mathematical problem-solving tasks. Despite the restricted training domain, we evaluate the agent's performance across several distinct reasoning domains. The results reveal that RL-based tool usage learned from mathematical tasks can be effectively transferred to complex tasks in other domains, enabling great task performance and high token efficiency. To facilitate this cross-domain transfer, we propose a Tool Generalization Reinforcement Learning (TGRL) framework designed to promote domain-agnostic learning and skill migration, encompassing: (i) a standardized tool interface that abstracts domain-specific nuances through consistent formatting and explicit termination, fostering transferable invocation patterns; (ii) a dual-component reward system that decomposes rewards to incentivize generalizable behaviors like tool efficiency and reasoning abstraction, ensuring alignment and robustness across domain shifts; and (iii) an XML-based prompt template that separates thinking, tool calls, and responses to encourage modular, domain-invariant planning and coherent multi-turn interactions. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks validate our approach, achieving state-of-the-art performance and highlighting the cross-domain potential of Tool RL for LLM reasoning.

We propose CAD-Assistant, a general-purpose CAD agent for AI-assisted design. Our approach is based on a powerful Vision and Large Language Model (VLLM) as a planner and a tool-augmentation paradigm using CAD-specific modules. CAD-Assistant addresses multimodal user queries by generating actions that are iteratively executed on a Python interpreter equipped with the FreeCAD software, accessed via its Python API. Our framework is able to assess the impact of generated CAD commands on geometry and adapts subsequent actions based on the evolving state of the CAD design. We consider a wide range of CAD-specific tools including Python libraries, modules of the FreeCAD Python API, helpful routines, rendering functions and other specialized modules. We evaluate our method on multiple CAD benchmarks and qualitatively demonstrate the potential of tool-augmented VLLMs as generic CAD task solvers across diverse CAD workflows.

LLM agents extend large language models with tool-calling capabilities, but ambiguous user instructions often lead to incorrect invocations and task failures. We introduce a principled formulation of structured uncertainty over tool-call parameters, modeling joint tool-argument clarification as a POMDP with Expected Value of Perfect Information (EVPI) objective for optimal question selection and aspect-based cost modeling to prevent redundancy. Our SAGE-Agent leverages this structured uncertainty to achieve superior efficiency: increasing coverage on ambiguous tasks by 7-39\% while reducing clarification questions by 1.5-2.7times compared to strong prompting and uncertainty-based baselines. We present ClarifyBench, the first multi-turn tool-augmented disambiguation benchmark with realistic LLM-based user simulation across diverse domains including document editing, vehicle control, and travel booking. Additionally, we demonstrate that structured uncertainty provides effective training signals for reinforcement learning, boosting When2Call accuracy from 36.5\% to 65.2\% (3B model) and 36.7\% to 62.9\% (7B model) through uncertainty-weighted GRPO training. These results establish structured uncertainty as a principled, efficient approach for tool-augmented agents, improving both task success and interaction efficiency in real-world scenarios.

Recently, there has been increasing interest in using Large Language Models (LLMs) to construct complex multi-agent systems to perform tasks such as compiling literature reviews, drafting consumer reports, and planning vacations. Many tools and libraries exist for helping create such systems, however none support recursive multi-agent systems -- where the models themselves flexibly decide when to delegate tasks and how to organize their delegation structure. In this work, we introduce ReDel: a toolkit for recursive multi-agent systems that supports custom tool-use, delegation schemes, event-based logging, and interactive replay in an easy-to-use web interface. We show that, using ReDel, we are able to achieve significant performance gains on agentic benchmarks and easily identify potential areas of improvements through the visualization and debugging tools. Our code, documentation, and PyPI package are open-source and free to use under the MIT license.

Scientific data visualization is pivotal for transforming raw data into comprehensible visual representations, enabling pattern recognition, forecasting, and the presentation of data-driven insights. However, novice users often face difficulties due to the complexity of selecting appropriate tools and mastering visualization techniques. Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated potential in assisting code generation, though they struggle with accuracy and require iterative debugging. In this paper, we propose PlotGen, a novel multi-agent framework aimed at automating the creation of precise scientific visualizations. PlotGen orchestrates multiple LLM-based agents, including a Query Planning Agent that breaks down complex user requests into executable steps, a Code Generation Agent that converts pseudocode into executable Python code, and three retrieval feedback agents - a Numeric Feedback Agent, a Lexical Feedback Agent, and a Visual Feedback Agent - that leverage multimodal LLMs to iteratively refine the data accuracy, textual labels, and visual correctness of generated plots via self-reflection. Extensive experiments show that PlotGen outperforms strong baselines, achieving a 4-6 percent improvement on the MatPlotBench dataset, leading to enhanced user trust in LLM-generated visualizations and improved novice productivity due to a reduction in debugging time needed for plot errors.

Adapting LLM agents to domain-specific tool calling remains notably brittle under evolving interfaces. Prompt and schema engineering is easy to deploy but often fragile under distribution shift and strict parsers, while continual parameter-efficient fine-tuning improves reliability at the cost of training, maintenance, and potential forgetting. We identify a critical Lazy Agent failure mode where tool necessity is nearly perfectly decodable from mid-layer activations, yet the model remains conservative in entering tool mode, revealing a representation-behavior gap. We propose Activation Steering Adapter (ASA), a training-free, inference-time controller that performs a single-shot mid-layer intervention and targets tool domains via a router-conditioned mixture of steering vectors with a probe-guided signed gate to amplify true intent while suppressing spurious triggers. On MTU-Bench with Qwen2.5-1.5B, ASA improves strict tool-use F1 from 0.18 to 0.50 while reducing the false positive rate from 0.15 to 0.05, using only about 20KB of portable assets and no weight updates.

The dream to create AI assistants as capable and versatile as the fictional J.A.R.V.I.S from Iron Man has long captivated imaginations. With the evolution of (multi-modal) large language models ((M)LLMs), this dream is closer to reality, as (M)LLM-based Agents using computing devices (e.g., computers and mobile phones) by operating within the environments and interfaces (e.g., Graphical User Interface (GUI)) provided by operating systems (OS) to automate tasks have significantly advanced. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of these advanced agents, designated as OS Agents. We begin by elucidating the fundamentals of OS Agents, exploring their key components including the environment, observation space, and action space, and outlining essential capabilities such as understanding, planning, and grounding. We then examine methodologies for constructing OS Agents, focusing on domain-specific foundation models and agent frameworks. A detailed review of evaluation protocols and benchmarks highlights how OS Agents are assessed across diverse tasks. Finally, we discuss current challenges and identify promising directions for future research, including safety and privacy, personalization and self-evolution. This survey aims to consolidate the state of OS Agents research, providing insights to guide both academic inquiry and industrial development. An open-source GitHub repository is maintained as a dynamic resource to foster further innovation in this field. We present a 9-page version of our work, accepted by ACL 2025, to provide a concise overview to the domain.

While research on AI agents focuses on enabling them to operate graphical user interfaces, the most effective and widely adopted agent tools in practice are terminal-based. We argue that this convergence is not coincidental. It reflects three design properties central to effective human-AI-UI collaboration: representational compatibility between agent and interface, transparency of agent actions within the interaction medium, and low barriers to entry for human participants. We ground each property in established HCI theory, show how terminal-based tools satisfy them by default, and argue that any modality, including graphical and spatial interfaces, must be deliberately engineered to achieve them. Rather than a legacy artifact, the terminal serves as a design exemplar whose properties any agent-facing modality must replicate.

This Perspective explores the transformative potential of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) in the geosciences. Users of geoscientific data repositories face challenges due to the complexity and diversity of data formats, inconsistent metadata practices, and a considerable number of unprocessed datasets. MAS possesses transformative potential for improving scientists' interaction with geoscientific data by enabling intelligent data processing, natural language interfaces, and collaborative problem-solving capabilities. We illustrate this approach with "PANGAEA GPT", a specialized MAS pipeline integrated with the diverse PANGAEA database for Earth and Environmental Science, demonstrating how MAS-driven workflows can effectively manage complex datasets and accelerate scientific discovery. We discuss how MAS can address current data challenges in geosciences, highlight advancements in other scientific fields, and propose future directions for integrating MAS into geoscientific data processing pipelines. In this Perspective, we show how MAS can fundamentally improve data accessibility, promote cross-disciplinary collaboration, and accelerate geoscientific discoveries.

Tool-augmented large language model (LLM) agents promise to unify scientific reasoning with computation, yet their deployment in high-stakes domains like drug discovery is bottlenecked by two critical barriers: unconstrained tool-use governance and poor long-horizon reliability. In dependency-heavy pharmaceutical pipelines, autonomous agents often drift into irreproducible trajectories, where early-stage hallucinations multiplicatively compound into downstream failures. To overcome this, we present Mozi, a dual-layer architecture that bridges the flexibility of generative AI with the deterministic rigor of computational biology. Layer A (Control Plane) establishes a governed supervisor--worker hierarchy that enforces role-based tool isolation, limits execution to constrained action spaces, and drives reflection-based replanning. Layer B (Workflow Plane) operationalizes canonical drug discovery stages -- from Target Identification to Lead Optimization -- as stateful, composable skill graphs. This layer integrates strict data contracts and strategic human-in-the-loop (HITL) checkpoints to safeguard scientific validity at high-uncertainty decision boundaries. Operating on the design principle of ``free-form reasoning for safe tasks, structured execution for long-horizon pipelines,'' Mozi provides built-in robustness mechanisms and trace-level audibility to completely mitigate error accumulation. We evaluate Mozi on PharmaBench, a curated benchmark for biomedical agents, demonstrating superior orchestration accuracy over existing baselines. Furthermore, through end-to-end therapeutic case studies, we demonstrate Mozi's ability to navigate massive chemical spaces, enforce stringent toxicity filters, and generate highly competitive in silico candidates, effectively transforming the LLM from a fragile conversationalist into a reliable, governed co-scientist.

Multi-agent systems powered by large language models (LLMs) are transforming enterprise automation, yet systematic evaluation methodologies for assessing tool-use reliability remain underdeveloped. We introduce a comprehensive diagnostic framework that leverages big data analytics to evaluate procedural reliability in intelligent agent systems, addressing critical needs for SME-centric deployment in privacy-sensitive environments. Our approach features a 12-category error taxonomy capturing failure modes across tool initialization, parameter handling, execution, and result interpretation. Through systematic evaluation of 1,980 deterministic test instances spanning both open-weight models (Qwen2.5 series, Functionary) and proprietary alternatives (GPT-4, Claude 3.5/3.7) across diverse edge hardware configurations, we identify actionable reliability thresholds for production deployment. Our analysis reveals that procedural reliability, particularly tool initialization failures, constitutes the primary bottleneck for smaller models, while qwen2.5:32b achieves flawless performance matching GPT-4.1. The framework demonstrates that mid-sized models (qwen2.5:14b) offer practical accuracy-efficiency trade-offs on commodity hardware (96.6\% success rate, 7.3 s latency), enabling cost-effective intelligent agent deployment for resource-constrained organizations. This work establishes foundational infrastructure for systematic reliability evaluation of tool-augmented multi-agent AI systems.

Reusing and invoking existing code remains costly and unreliable, as most practical tools are embedded in heterogeneous code repositories and lack standardized, executable interfaces. Although large language models (LLMs) and Model Context Protocol (MCP)-based tool invocation frameworks enable natural language task execution, current approaches rely heavily on manual tool curation and standardization, which fundamentally limits scalability. In this paper, we propose ToolRosetta, a unified framework that automatically translates open-source code repositories and APIs into MCP-compatible tools that can be reliably invoked by LLMs. Given a user task, ToolRosetta autonomously plans toolchains, identifies relevant codebases, and converts them into executable MCP services, enabling end-to-end task completion with minimal human intervention. In addition, ToolRosetta incorporates a security inspection layer to mitigate risks inherent in executing arbitrary code. Extensive experiments across diverse scientific domains demonstrate that ToolRosetta can automatically standardize a large number of open-source tools and reduce the human effort required for code reproduction and deployment. Notably, by seamlessly leveraging specialized open-source tools, ToolRosetta-powered agents consistently improve task completion performance compared to commercial LLMs and existing agent systems.

Large language model based agents are increasingly deployed in complex, tool augmented environments. While reinforcement learning provides a principled mechanism for such agents to improve through interaction, its effectiveness critically depends on the availability of structured training tasks. In many realistic settings, however, no such tasks exist a challenge we term task scarcity, which has become a key bottleneck for scaling agentic RL. Existing approaches typically assume predefined task collections, an assumption that fails in novel environments where tool semantics and affordances are initially unknown. To address this limitation, we formalize the problem of Task Generation for Agentic RL, where an agent must learn within a given environment that lacks predefined tasks. We propose CuES, a Curiosity driven and Environment grounded Synthesis framework that autonomously generates diverse, executable, and meaningful tasks directly from the environment structure and affordances, without relying on handcrafted seeds or external corpora. CuES drives exploration through intrinsic curiosity, abstracts interaction patterns into reusable task schemas, and refines them through lightweight top down guidance and memory based quality control. Across three representative environments, AppWorld, BFCL, and WebShop, CuES produces task distributions that match or surpass manually curated datasets in both diversity and executability, yielding substantial downstream policy improvements. These results demonstrate that curiosity driven, environment grounded task generation provides a scalable foundation for agents that not only learn how to act, but also learn what to learn. The code is available at https://github.com/modelscope/AgentEvolver/tree/main/research/CuES.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents, powered by Large Foundation Models, have emerged as a transformative approach to automating human-computer interaction. These agents autonomously interact with digital systems or software applications via GUIs, emulating human actions such as clicking, typing, and navigating visual elements across diverse platforms. Motivated by the growing interest and fundamental importance of GUI agents, we provide a comprehensive survey that categorizes their benchmarks, evaluation metrics, architectures, and training methods. We propose a unified framework that delineates their perception, reasoning, planning, and acting capabilities. Furthermore, we identify important open challenges and discuss key future directions. Finally, this work serves as a basis for practitioners and researchers to gain an intuitive understanding of current progress, techniques, benchmarks, and critical open problems that remain to be addressed.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents possess significant commercial and social value, and GUI agents powered by advanced multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential. Currently, existing GUI agents usually utilize sequential episodes of multi-step operations across pages as the prior GUI knowledge, which fails to capture the complex transition relationship between pages, making it challenging for the agents to deeply perceive the GUI environment and generalize to new scenarios. Therefore, we design an automated pipeline to transform the sequential episodes into page graphs, which explicitly model the graph structure of the pages that are naturally connected by actions. To fully utilize the page graphs, we further introduce Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technology to effectively retrieve reliable perception guidelines of GUI from them, and a tailored multi-agent framework PG-Agent with task decomposition strategy is proposed to be injected with the guidelines so that it can generalize to unseen scenarios. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of PG-Agent, even with limited episodes for page graph construction.

Deep research agents have emerged as powerful tools for automating complex intellectual tasks through multi-step reasoning and web-based information seeking. While recent efforts have successfully enhanced these agents by scaling depth through increasing the number of sequential thinking and tool calls, the potential of scaling width via parallel tool calling remains largely unexplored. In this work, we propose the Wide and Deep research agent, a framework designed to investigate the behavior and performance of agents when scaling not only depth but also width via parallel tool calling. Unlike existing approaches that rely on complex multi-agent orchestration to parallelize workloads, our method leverages intrinsic parallel tool calling to facilitate effective coordination within a single reasoning step. We demonstrate that scaling width significantly improves performance on deep research benchmarks while reducing the number of turns required to obtain correct answers. Furthermore, we analyze the factors driving these improvements through case studies and explore various tool call schedulers to optimize parallel tool calling strategy. Our findings suggest that optimizing the trade-off between width and depth is a critical pathway toward high-efficiency deep research agents. Notably, without context management or other tricks, we obtain 62.2% accuracy with GPT-5-Medium on BrowseComp, surpassing the original 54.9% reported by GPT-5-High.

Tool-augmented LLM agents raise new security risks: tool executions can introduce runtime-only behaviors, including prompt injection and unintended exposure of external inputs (e.g., environment secrets or local files). While existing scanners often focus on static artifacts, analyzing runtime behavior is challenging because directly executing untrusted tools can itself be dangerous. We present MCP-SandboxScan, a lightweight framework motivated by the Model Context Protocol (MCP) that safely executes untrusted tools inside a WebAssembly/WASI sandbox and produces auditable reports of external-to-sink exposures. Our prototype (i) extracts LLM-relevant sinks from runtime outputs (prompt/messages and structured tool-return fields), (ii) instantiates external-input candidates from environment values, mounted file contents, and output-surfaced HTTP fetch intents, and (iii) links sources to sinks via snippet-based substring matching. Case studies on three representative tools show that MCP-SandboxScan can surface provenance evidence when external inputs appear in prompt/messages or tool-return payloads, and can expose filesystem capability violations as runtime evidence. We further compare against a lightweight static string-signature baseline and use a micro-benchmark to characterize false negatives under transformations and false positives from short-token collisions.

This survey paper examines the recent advancements in AI agent implementations, with a focus on their ability to achieve complex goals that require enhanced reasoning, planning, and tool execution capabilities. The primary objectives of this work are to a) communicate the current capabilities and limitations of existing AI agent implementations, b) share insights gained from our observations of these systems in action, and c) suggest important considerations for future developments in AI agent design. We achieve this by providing overviews of single-agent and multi-agent architectures, identifying key patterns and divergences in design choices, and evaluating their overall impact on accomplishing a provided goal. Our contribution outlines key themes when selecting an agentic architecture, the impact of leadership on agent systems, agent communication styles, and key phases for planning, execution, and reflection that enable robust AI agent systems.

Agentic AI marks a major shift in how autonomous systems reason, plan, and execute multi-step tasks. Unlike traditional single model prompting, agentic workflows integrate multiple specialized agents with different Large Language Models(LLMs), tool-augmented capabilities, orchestration logic, and external system interactions to form dynamic pipelines capable of autonomous decision-making and action. As adoption accelerates across industry and research, organizations face a central challenge: how to design, engineer, and operate production-grade agentic AI workflows that are reliable, observable, maintainable, and aligned with safety and governance requirements. This paper provides a practical, end-to-end guide for designing, developing, and deploying production-quality agentic AI systems. We introduce a structured engineering lifecycle encompassing workflow decomposition, multi-agent design patterns, Model Context Protocol(MCP), and tool integration, deterministic orchestration, Responsible-AI considerations, and environment-aware deployment strategies. We then present nine core best practices for engineering production-grade agentic AI workflows, including tool-first design over MCP, pure-function invocation, single-tool and single-responsibility agents, externalized prompt management, Responsible-AI-aligned model-consortium design, clean separation between workflow logic and MCP servers, containerized deployment for scalable operations, and adherence to the Keep it Simple, Stupid (KISS) principle to maintain simplicity and robustness. To demonstrate these principles in practice, we present a comprehensive case study: a multimodal news-analysis and media-generation workflow. By combining architectural guidance, operational patterns, and practical implementation insights, this paper offers a foundational reference to build robust, extensible, and production-ready agentic AI workflows.

Geologic map, as a fundamental diagram in geology science, provides critical insights into the structure and composition of Earth's subsurface and surface. These maps are indispensable in various fields, including disaster detection, resource exploration, and civil engineering. Despite their significance, current Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often fall short in geologic map understanding. This gap is primarily due to the challenging nature of cartographic generalization, which involves handling high-resolution map, managing multiple associated components, and requiring domain-specific knowledge. To quantify this gap, we construct GeoMap-Bench, the first-ever benchmark for evaluating MLLMs in geologic map understanding, which assesses the full-scale abilities in extracting, referring, grounding, reasoning, and analyzing. To bridge this gap, we introduce GeoMap-Agent, the inaugural agent designed for geologic map understanding, which features three modules: Hierarchical Information Extraction (HIE), Domain Knowledge Injection (DKI), and Prompt-enhanced Question Answering (PEQA). Inspired by the interdisciplinary collaboration among human scientists, an AI expert group acts as consultants, utilizing a diverse tool pool to comprehensively analyze questions. Through comprehensive experiments, GeoMap-Agent achieves an overall score of 0.811 on GeoMap-Bench, significantly outperforming 0.369 of GPT-4o. Our work, emPowering gEologic mAp holistiC undErstanding (PEACE) with MLLMs, paves the way for advanced AI applications in geology, enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of geological investigations.

Tool calling has emerged as a critical capability for AI agents to interact with the real world and solve complex tasks. While the Model Context Protocol (MCP) provides a powerful standardized framework for tool integration, there is a significant gap in benchmarking how well AI agents can effectively solve multi-step tasks using diverse MCP tools in realistic, dynamic scenarios. In this work, we present LiveMCP-101, a benchmark of 101 carefully curated real-world queries, refined through iterative LLM rewriting and manual review, that require coordinated use of multiple MCP tools including web search, file operations, mathematical reasoning, and data analysis. Moreover, we introduce a novel evaluation approach that leverages ground-truth execution plans rather than raw API outputs, better reflecting the evolving nature of real-world environments. Experiments show that even frontier LLMs achieve a success rate below 60\%, highlighting major challenges in tool orchestration. Detailed ablations and error analysis further reveal distinct failure modes and inefficiencies in token usage, pointing to concrete directions for advancing current models. LiveMCP-101 sets a rigorous standard for evaluating real-world agent capabilities, advancing toward autonomous AI systems that reliably execute complex tasks through tool use.