Agentic Systems

Memory, Bias, and the Mind of Machines: How Agentic LLMs Mislearn

Opening — Why this matters now AI models are no longer passive text engines. They remember, reason, and improvise — sometimes poorly. As large language models (LLMs) gain memory and autonomy, we face a paradox: they become more useful because they act more like humans, and more dangerous for the same reason. This tension lies at the heart of a new paper, “When Memory Leads Us Astray: A Study of Bias and Mislearning in Agentic LLMs” (arXiv:2511.08585). ...

Two Minds in One Machine: How Agentic AI Splits—and Reunites—the Field

Opening — Why this matters now Agentic AI is the latest obsession in artificial intelligence: systems that don’t just respond but decide. They plan, delegate, and act—sometimes without asking for permission. Yet as hype grows, confusion spreads. Many conflate these new multi-agent architectures with the old, symbolic dream of reasoning machines from the 1980s. The result? Conceptual chaos. A recent comprehensive survey—Agentic AI: A Comprehensive Survey of Architectures, Applications, and Future Directions—cuts through the noise. It argues that today’s agentic systems are not the heirs of symbolic AI but the offspring of neural, generative models. In other words: we’ve been speaking two dialects of intelligence without realizing it. ...

Right Tool, Right Thought: Difficulty-Aware Orchestration for Agentic LLMs

The punchline Static multi‑agent pipelines are expensive on easy questions and underpowered on hard ones. DAAO (Difficulty‑Aware Agentic Orchestration) proposes a controller that first estimates the difficulty of each query, then composes a workflow (operators like CoT, ReAct, Multi‑Agent Debate, Review/Ensemble) and finally routes each operator to the most suitable model in a heterogeneous LLM pool. The result: higher accuracy and lower cost on suite benchmarks. Why this matters (business lens) Spend less on routine queries. Easy tickets don’t need five agents and GPT‑Ultra—DAAO keeps them shallow and cheap. Don’t whiff on the edge cases. When the question is gnarly, DAAO deepens the DAG and upgrades the models only where it pays. Procurement leverage. Mixing open‑weights (Llama/Qwen) with commercial APIs lets you arbitrage price–performance per step. What DAAO actually does DAAO is three tightly coupled decisions per query: ...

From Blobs to Blocks: Componentizing LLM Output for Real Work

TL;DR Most LLM tools hand you a blob. Componentization treats an answer as parts—headings, paragraphs, code blocks, steps, or JSON subtrees—with stable IDs and links. You can edit, switch on/off, or regenerate any part, then recompose the final artifact. In early tests, this aligns with how teams actually work: outline first, keep the good bits, surgically fix the bad ones, and reuse components across docs. It’s a small idea with big downstream benefits for control, auditability, and collaboration. ...

Textual Gradients and Workflow Evolution: How AdaptFlow Reinvents Meta-Learning for AI Agents

From Static Scripts to Living Workflows The AI agent world has a scaling problem: most automated workflow builders generate one static orchestration per domain. Great in benchmarks, brittle in the wild. AdaptFlow — a meta-learning framework from Microsoft and Peking University — proposes a fix: treat workflow design like model training, but swap numerical gradients for natural language feedback. This small shift has a big implication: instead of re-engineering from scratch for each use case, you start from a meta-learned workflow skeleton and adapt it on the fly for each subtask. ...

Search When It Hurts: How UR² Teaches Models to Retrieve Only When Needed

Most “smart” RAG stacks are actually compulsive googlers: they fetch first and think later. UR² (“Unified RAG and Reasoning”) flips that reflex. It trains a model to reason by default and retrieve only when necessary, using reinforcement learning (RL) to orchestrate the dance between internal knowledge and external evidence. Why this matters for builders: indiscriminate retrieval is the silent cost center of LLM systems—extra latency, bigger bills, brittle answers. UR² shows a way to make retrieval selective, structured, and rewarded, yielding better accuracy on exams (MMLU‑Pro, MedQA), real‑world QA (HotpotQA, Bamboogle, MuSiQue), and even math. ...

Mind Over Modules: How Smart Agents Learn What to See—and What to Be

In the race to build more autonomous, more intelligent AI agents, we’re entering an era where “strategy” isn’t just about picking the next move—it’s about choosing the right mind for the job and deciding which version of the world to trust. Two recent arXiv papers—one on state representation in dynamic routing games, the other on self-generating agentic systems with swarm intelligence—show just how deeply this matters in practice. We’re no longer only asking: What should the agent do? We now must ask: ...