Multi-agent systems research

The frontier

Codetta protocol enables high-capacity, keyless, undetectable steganography for LLM agents

Qi Pang, Virginia Smith, and Wenting Zheng propose Codetta, a steganographic protocol that allows independently deployed LLM agents to communicate covertly without a pre-shared key. The protocol achieves high capacity while maintaining provable undetectability. On three agent workloads, Codetta transmits up to 94 times more bits per visible token than the prior state-of-the-art asymmetric protocol.

Qi Pang, Virginia Smith, Wenting Zheng

Agents

Adaptive agent teams improve consistency in long-form subtitle translation

Jin et al. developed SMART, a multi-agent subtitle translation system that adapts its workflow to each series without changing the underlying language models. It achieved the lowest translation-error penalty across all 15 directions in the authors’ new benchmark, improving by 6.9% on average over the strongest competing agent system.

yesterday

Safety & security

Learned latent links can undermine safety in multi-agent systems

Huzaifa, Mavali and Eisenhofer test whether latent communication, where agents exchange internal representations rather than text, creates a distinct safety risk. Across several attacks, they find that lightweight links connecting otherwise aligned agents can be optimized to elicit harmful responses while retaining useful performance, and can also be repaired without retraining the agents.

yesterday

Agents

AI agent teams coordinate worse than a single shared agent

Paliskara, Namchittai and Lampinen test whether AI agents can coordinate when they represent different users competing over a shared resource. Across five frontier models and 77 scenarios, multi-agent teams underperformed a single coordinating agent in every environment, even when teammates could communicate.

yesterday

Agents

Revision-aware agent graphs reuse valid work while avoiding stale answers

Luo and colleagues study dynamic task routing, where an agent must identify which version of a document applied at a query time and then answer the associated problem. Across 373,428 queries derived from six established benchmarks, their Revision-Aware Independent Agent Graph achieved higher joint routing-and-answer accuracy than comparison methods while using substantially fewer model calls.

yesterday

Robotics & embodied AI

Semantic messaging helps distributed robots coordinate long manipulation tasks

Zhou and colleagues present DuoMind, a hierarchical system in which each robot independently plans, communicates with peers and executes detailed actions. Across the new RoboPoly benchmark and the existing RoboTwin benchmark, the authors report that this combination improves coordinated task performance, while ablations indicate that both semantic communication and hierarchical control contribute to the gains.

yesterday

Agents

Local clinical agents learn to consult remote models without identifying patients

Wang and colleagues developed a multi-agent clinical system in which a local model selectively consults remote specialists while controlling what patient information leaves the institution. On an emergency-department benchmark derived from MIMIC-IV-ED, the system improved task accuracy while sharply reducing both direct disclosure and re-identification from combinations of otherwise indirect clues.

2 days ago

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Every paper read and written up by the research desk from the daily arXiv scan · threads are maintained lines of inquiry with running syntheses