Internet of Things (IoT) systems are inherently vulnerable due to constrained hardware, outdated firmware, and insecure default configurations, creating a need for scalable and adaptive security testing approaches. While recent adoptions of Large Language Model (LLM) agents have demonstrated promise in penetration testing and Capture-the-Flag (CTF) environments, their application to IoT specific vulnerabilities remains unexplored. This paper presents an autonomous multi-agent framework, referred to as Vulnerability EXploitation using AI Agents (VEXAIoT), for vulnerability discovery and exploitation in IoT environments using LLM-based reasoning and offensive security tools. The framework combines a vulnerability detection agent and an attack execution agent to perform reconnaissance, plan attack sequences, and execute exploits against vulnerable IoT services. The system is evaluated in IoTGoat and Metasploitable environments across ten attack scenarios mapped to OWASP IoT vulnerabilities. Experimental results show attack success rate of up to 100% with low token overhead and average execution times under two minutes for most attacks. Across 260 attack executions, VEXAIoT achieves a 95.0% overall success rate, including 94.5% success in IoTGoat and 96.7% success in Metasploitable2. These results demonstrate the potential for LLM-driven agents to automate IoT vulnerability assessment and offensive security workflows in controlled environments
Financial anomaly detection suffers from extreme class imbalance, causing traditional single-objective algorithms to exhibit ``fraud collapse'', defaulting to the majority class and failing to balance anomaly interdiction with customer friction. To overcome this without distortive data resampling, we propose the Semantic Pareto-DQN, a multi-objective reinforcement learning framework. Our approach synthesizes heterogeneous transaction features into cohesive natural-language narratives, encoded by large language models, thereby producing a robust, scale-invariant state representation. The agent optimizes a vectorial reward that explicitly decouples financial efficacy, operational friction, and semantic discovery. By mapping the continuous Pareto frontier, the system dynamically navigates the asymmetric costs of missed anomalies versus false positives. Empirical evaluations across E-Commerce fraud and UCI Credit datasets show that semantic Pareto-DQN successfully shatters the zero-recall trap. It achieves superior minority-class recall compared to scalarized baselines, providing an alternative to trade bounded operational friction for financial anomaly discovery.
We present our submission to the QANTA 2026 shared challenge at the ICML 2026 Workshop on Efficient Multimodal Question Answering (EMM-QA). Quanta evaluates multimodal quizbowl systems that answer pyramid-style questions from incrementally revealed text and accompanying images while operating under realistic efficiency constraints. The challenge consists of two distinct tasks: Tossup questions, which require deciding when to answer under uncertainty, and Bonus questions, which emphasize accurate answer selection and human adoption. To address these differing objectives, we develop a task-specific two-agent architecture. Our Tossup agent utilizes a GPT-4o-mini-class model (referred to as GPT-4.1-mini in the competition logs) with confidence-calibrated answering and a domain-specific numeric reasoning policy that reduces overconfident predictions from isolated quantitative clues. Our Bonus agent uses GPT-4o-class model (referred to as GPT-4.1) with leadin-aware reasoning, structured relational reasoning, and multimodal evidence integration to improve exact answer selection. Rather than relying on a retrieval pipeline or model ensembles, our approach emphasizes efficient reasoning policies and confidence calibration within a hosted-only environment. Our system achieved the highest overall leaderboard score of 0.402, including a Tossup score of 0.238 and a Bonus Effect score of 0.164. The results demonstrate that lightweight, task-specific reasoning strategies can provide strong performance on resource-constrained multimodal question answering benchmarks.
Enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language model (LLM) agents requires effective orchestration of diverse expert models and tools. However, existing frameworks typically call APIs based on coarse-grained matching between tasks and the functions of expert models or tools, while overlooking critical factors such as performance variability and cost efficiency among functionally similar alternatives. To address this, we propose Agora, a framework that introduces an incentive-compatible auction mechanism for dynamically allocating tasks to expert models and tools. By treating reasoning steps as tradeable items, Agora enables agents to bid based on their rectified competence-ensuring that critical logic is routed to the most capable solver rather than the most overconfident one. Evaluations across five benchmarks show that Agora improves over matched single-model, routing, and cascade baselines under comparable candidate pools, while exposing a controllable cost-quality trade-off through a single auction parameter.
Precision industrial contact manipulation requires reliable robot policies under pose perturbations and contact-force constraints. Vision-language-action models offer broad generalization but often introduce high inference latency and GPU-memory cost, while vision-action chunking policies are more suitable for real-time industrial control. However, these policies are usually trained by behavior cloning and suffer from distribution shift in contact-rich tasks. This paper proposes PAC-ACT, a reinforcement-learning post-training framework for pretrained Action Chunking Transformer policies. PAC-ACT reformulates policy optimization at the chunk level, constructs an ACT-transferred actor-critic architecture, and introduces a hybrid behavior-prior constraint to preserve the pretrained action distribution during online fine-tuning. Experiments on industrial precision-contact benchmarks show that PAC-ACT improves task success, contact stability, and force safety while retaining low latency and low GPU-memory usage. On the Contour task, PAC-ACT significantly reduces peak contact force and decreases the proportion of force readings above 60 N by 46 times. Sparse-reward ablations further show that the proposed behavior-prior constraint enables effective exploration under randomized initial poses.
The proliferation of agentic AI systems across enterprise and public-sector contexts has outpaced the capacity of general-purpose AI risk frameworks to classify and govern them. In this paper, we introduce the TrustX Agent Risk Classification Framework, a structured, repeatable instrument that can be applied to seven types of agentic AI systems and is grounded in foundational pre-existing AI governance frameworks. At the core of the framework is a twelve-dimension scoring rubric that robustly quantifies the risk. This rubric is combined with other components, such as the GPA + IAT classification model and the five-level autonomy framework derived from existing literature. These inputs produce a three-tier governance output with mapped control recommendations. A specialised Coding Assistant extension is also included to account for nuances specific to this type of agentic AI system. We then use an illustrative example to show our framework in practice. ARC is intended for AI governance practitioners, risk officers, developers, and regulators, and it will regularly undergo iteration as we continue to expand it and make it more robust. The community can access the interactive framework here: https://arc.responsible.ai/
Decision-making is posing an increasingly formidable challenge to investors because of the growing number of alternatives available in financial markets. A hot area of research over the past few decades has been portfolio optimization that seeks to determine how much an investor should invest in which asset. Introducing real-world conditions to the optimization model turns the problem into an NP-hard one for whose solution exact methods become inefficient; hence, researchers have turned to evolutionary algorithms to approximate solutions. In this paper, strengthening strategies are presented for multi-objective evolutionary algorithms that can provide a faster convergence rate and extensive search ability in the portfolio optimization problem under the cardinality constraint. To implement those features, a unique solution representation, a novel operator, and new repair mechanisms are introduced for solving the aforementioned problem in which lower and upper limits are set on the number of assets in the portfolio. For this purpose, new mating strategies along with the aforesaid package are implemented in well-known multi-objective evolutionary algorithms to solve the problem. The customized algorithms are subsequently tested against traditional ones using well-known market indices as benchmarks. Results indicate that the proposed strategy not only provides better approximations but also converges faster as well at no loss of performance with an increasing number of assets in the market.
Modern AI systems are increasingly being evaluated for their ability to reason, code, prove theorems, use tools, and long-horizon research tasks. These are powerful capabilities, but they share a structural limitation: the representational frame within which the model operates, including its conceptual vocabulary, the space of admissible solutions it can search, and the criteria by which success is evaluated, is typically fixed and supplied in advance. This paper argues that building stronger intelligent systems capable of open-ended innovation requires additional classes of operations: the creation, stabilization, and reuse of new representational primitives, which alter the space being searched rather than simply searching within it. We characterize the distance between current AI systems and genuinely open-ended intelligence through two gaps. The first is the vocabulary gap, the difficulty of inventing and stabilizing new representational primitives rather than merely recombining existing ones. The second is the verifier gap, the difficulty of judging the value of a new primitive when its full payoff may be visible only after future reuse. We interpret both gaps through a unified framework of intelligence as cognitive discrepancy reduction. By viewing intelligent behaviors as a sequence of cognitive transformations, we distinguish intra-space transformations which operate within a fixed representational frame, from generative transformations which may modify the frame itself. On this basis, we propose a ladder of innovation autonomy and outline several directions for advancing open-ended AI, including objectives that reward useful representational change, persistent memory architectures for invented primitives, and adaptive verification mechanisms capable of evolving alongside the representations they evaluate.
Despite strong performance on many multimodal tasks, vision-language models (VLMs) still struggle with basic object counting. We investigate whether this reflects missing internal knowledge or a gap between internal representations and verbalized outputs. Training simple probes on activations from four VLMs across five counting datasets reveals that nonlinear probes can reliably detect counting errors, suggesting that VLMs often encode the correct count even when they output the wrong answer. SVCCA analysis shows that probes trained on ground-truth counts and probes trained on model outputs occupy a partially shared activation subspace but read out along misaligned directions. We further validate our findings using a causal steering intervention, proving that strengthening the direction of count-identified probes does improve model counting performance. Motivated by this result, we propose a detector-guided self-correction method that selectively re-prompts the model only when an internal error detector predicts failure. This simple inference-time intervention improves counting accuracy by up to 15.6 absolute percentage points, without any parameter updates. Our results establish activation-based error probing as both a practical tool for improving VLM counting and a mechanistic lens on the gap between internal knowledge and model outputs.
Does every cancer patient truly need a complete diagnostic workup for accurate survival prediction? In multimodal clinical oncology, diagnostic modalities follow a clinically mandated order of escalating burden -- from demographics collected at intake to genomic profiling requiring specialized tissue analysis. Current multimodal survival methods either assume all modalities are available or passively handle missing data, but none actively reason about whether acquiring the next modality is justified for a given patient along this ordered workflow. We formulate this as a sequential decision problem and propose SAGEAgent (Sequential Acquisition Guided by Experience), a self-evolving LLM-based clinical agent that decides which diagnostic modalities to acquire for each patient, balancing predictive accuracy against clinical invasiveness. SAGEAgent reasons about each patient's evolving diagnostic state through clinical tools that translate numerical predictions into text, an episodic memory that retrieves similar past cases, and a semantic memory that accumulates reusable decision patterns from experience. Experiments on a glioma cohort combining TCGA-LGG, TCGA-GBM, and BraTS with four diagnostic modalities demonstrate that SAGEAgent achieves competitive survival prediction accuracy while reducing average acquisition burden by 55%.
Large language model (LLM) coding agents are increasingly deployed to autonomously perform software engineering tasks in terminal-based environments, making their reliability a growing concern. Existing empirical studies investigate why coding agents fail, yet they largely treat failure as a final outcome rather than a temporal process, providing limited insight into how failures emerge, evolve, and become unrecoverable. We present the first large-scale empirical study of CLI coding-agent failure trajectories, introducing a process-oriented framework that analyzes failure through its onset, evolution, and recovery across execution trajectories. We first collect 3,843 execution trajectories generated by seven frontier models across three coding-agent scaffolds (OpenHands, MiniSWE, and Terminus2) on Terminal-Bench, then carefully filter them to obtain 1,794 complete and valid trajectories for manual annotation (over 63,000 execution steps), from which we derive 14 findings spanning failure occurrence, root causes, recovery, and cross-system consistency. Our findings show that coding-agent failures are predominantly driven by epistemic errors, typically begin within the first few execution steps, and often remain hidden until recovery is no longer possible, suggesting that improving coding-agent reliability requires earlier validation and intervention rather than relying solely on final-outcome evaluation.
Explaining machine-learning models is increasingly important for decision-making and consumer trust, yet it is widely believed to come at a cost: existing Explainable AI (XAI) methods suffer from a persistent accuracy-explainability trade-off. We argue that this trade-off is not fundamental, but an artifact of treating explanation and prediction as separate objectives; when properly coupled, they become complementary, so that equipping a model to explain itself improves, rather than degrades, its accuracy. We introduce the Rashomon Explanation paradigm, which builds a set of faithful, prediction-guiding explanations rather than a single one, and prove that this set is generally non-empty and that explanation fidelity bounds the performance of the models it guides. To explore this set, we propose RashomonLLM, an Explanation-Prediction-Reflection agentic workflow that generates explanations in natural language by iteratively aligning them with predictions, and we prove it converges and recovers the full set. Across customer-churn classification, clinical survival regression, and industrial click-through prediction on large-scale live-streaming logs, RashomonLLM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art prediction and XAI baselines on both accuracy and explanation quality, with gains driven by explanation fidelity and robust to distribution shifts, temporal splits, and seeds. Our framework thus advances business performance while laying the groundwork for consumer trust.