The effect of introducing the manager-worker scaffold over a shared filesystem workspace, with no training and no per-benchmark tuning, measured against the same model answering in a single pass is investigated, finding several mechanisms behind the gains.
Abstract
Multi-agent large language model systems are widely reported to beat single-model baselines, but the evidence is mixed, and comparisons are usually confounded: pipelines change token budgets, tool calls, and prompts simultaneously, so an aggregate gain rarely reveals what actually helped. We investigate the effect of introducing the manager-worker scaffold over a shared filesystem workspace, with no training and no per-benchmark tuning, measured against the same model answering in a single pass. Across nine models -- five open-weight, spanning 9B to ~2.8T parameters, and four frontier closed models -- on the 100 latest hard LiveCodeBench problems, the scaffold's benefit is real but conditional: large and statistically significant for some (Qwen3.8-27B +23.4, GPT-5.6-Luna +10.6 and GPT-5.6-Terra +8.0, each over five paired passes; Kimi-K3 +30.4 and Minimax-M3 +11.0 over five paired passes with reasoning off, both at $p<10^{-4}$, and +42 and +12 in a single pass at a 128k cap) and null or negative for others (Qwen3.6-35B -1 to -9 with reasoning off). With the manager, Opus-5 achieves the highest score in the study at 91% in one pass. Running a manager roughly triples the token bill, but it buys accuracy more cheaply than moving to a larger model does: GPT-5.6-Terra with a manager nearly matches Fable 5's single-call accuracy (85.0 against 87.4, $p = 0.59$) at a fifth of the price (\$11.71 against \$61.11 per 100-problem pass, $p<10^{-4}$), and the Qwen-27B arm does it for \$51.75 on weights anyone can self-host. Our transcript analysis finds several mechanisms behind the gains, of which two recur: context management, in which short worker calls and shared notes organize state and reduce truncation, and problem decomposition. Improvements are modest for large models with reasoning enabled, but larger for some models with reasoning disabled and for smaller models with reasoning enabled.
FLARE is proposed, a novel framework that endows VLAs with robust error recovery capabilities through a ``Retry" and ``Reset" Paradigm, and significantly improves task success and robustness.
Ganlong Zhao, Zijia Tang, Xingping Chen et al.· 3 citations
LifeSciBench is introduced, a benchmark of 750 expert-authored tasks designed to evaluate whether language models can handle realistic life science research work, with each constituent task paired with a human expert-written rubric.
Amelia Liu, Andrew Ho, Anne Marie Droste et al.· bioRxiv· 2 citations
General-purpose language models can reason and synthesize knowledge, but complex work also requires sustained interaction with files, information sources, and executable code, together with state maintenance, failure recovery, and verifiable delivery. We call this \emph{working capability}: sustained, verifiable progress toward a real-world objective. Apodex 1.1 develops this capability along two complementary dimensions. \emph{Environment Scaling} expands the diversity and verifiability of executable file, search, and code environments, while \emph{Agentic Coordination Scaling} trains agents to decompose long-horizon tasks, delegate parallel work, integrate asynchronous results, and replan. A shared execution harness and AgentOS maintain task state and provenance across tools and agents, and training turns environment trajectories and coordination traces into reliable behavior. Across complex professional work, finance, scientific research, mathematics, coding, and search, Apodex 1.1 reaches the leading performance band despite using a substantially smaller model than many frontier systems. The 35B-parameter Apodex 1.1 Mini further retains strong working capability in a locally deployable form. These results ground agentic intelligence in useful, verifiable work completed over time and advance our goal of building a \emph{Heavy-Duty Solver} for ambitious, long-running tasks.
Apodex Team B. An, B. Li, B. Wang et al.· 1 citation
A rapidly advancing precision-therapy pipeline-including antisense oligonucleotides to upregulate the intact allele, AAV-based gene replacement, CRISPR-mediated transcriptional activation, epigenetic modulators, and rational pathway-targeted small molecules-offers realistic prospects for disease modification.
The complex multi-energy coupling characteristics inherent to integrated energy system (IES) present unprecedented challenges for the implementation of low-carbon scheduling. Existing optimization methods often exhibit limitations in system scalability, algorithm adaptivity, and carbon reduction efficacy for complex IES. This paper proposes a Large Language Model (LLM)-Embedded Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (LEMARL) to address the aforementioned issues. The proposed method integrates the global perception capability of LLMs with the dynamic optimization capability of MARL. Specifically, the LLM-Embedded module generates high-quality reward functions and policy frameworks from a global perspective, while the MARL module leverages these LLM-generated strategies for distributed interactive iterations—greatly enhancing computation efficiency and scalability. Simulation results demonstrate that LEMARL reduces carbon emissions by 7.76% and simultaneously decreases operating costs by 4.49% in a small-scale IES. Furthermore, LEMARL also exhibits superior applicability and scalability in large-scale IES of the IEEE 141-bus power grid integrated with 51-node thermal system.
Chen Xia, Tong Gou, Yinliang Xu et al.· IEEE Transactions on Smart G...· 1 citation
TestifAI, a deep learning testing framework for efficient and accurate estimation of robustness against combinations of perturbations, is proposed and partial model tomography is introduced, a novel approach to reconstructing model behaviour in a multi-perturbation space from tests that apply only a small number of perturbations.
Arooj Arif, T. Hartung, E. Botoeva et al.· 1 citation
A new method for surgically removing training examples from a model reveals that as datasets grow, the link between what a model learns and what it produces dissolves.