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byAK and the research community

Jul 13

The Blind Curator: How a Biased Judge Silently Disables Skill Retirement in Self-Evolving Agents

A self-evolving agent retires its bad skills by watching them fail, so what happens when the judge cannot see the failures? Skill retirement is the structural constraint that keeps a growing library from drifting below the no-skill baseline, but its guarantee assumes an unbiased reward, which is false for the LLM judges that reference-free tasks force upon us. We show that a biased judge does not merely add noise; it silently switches off the curator. We make this precise with a corrupted-reward analysis and, isolating the causal channel by injecting corruption on top of a deterministic reward, a behavioral study on a reference-free report-writing testbed with a code-generation cross-check. Symmetric noise leaves retirement intact, but false-pass bias (failures slipping through as passes) disables contribution-based retirement past a sharp threshold that no amount of data can cross. Separating genuine retirement from cap-eviction churn shows this mechanism failure is universal, holding across domains and failure rates and sparing only near-zero-false-pass, verifier-like graders. The downstream outcome, though, is regime-dependent: eval quality degrades only where the same corruption also starves skill synthesis, and otherwise holds steady, so the disabled curator is silent, surfacing in no aggregate metric. The contribution is a behavioral safety result, not a performance one. A cheap defect-injection audit then tells an operator, before deployment, which side of the threshold their judge occupies.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 7

Agentic Risk-Aware Set-Based Engineering Design

This paper introduces a multi-agent framework guided by Large Language Models (LLMs) to assist in the early stages of engineering design, a phase often characterized by vast parameter spaces and inherent uncertainty. Operating under a human-in-the-loop paradigm and demonstrated on the canonical problem of aerodynamic airfoil design, the framework employs a team of specialized agents: a Coding Assistant, a Design Agent, a Systems Engineering Agent, and an Analyst Agent - all coordinated by a human Manager. Integrated within a set-based design philosophy, the process begins with a collaborative phase where the Manager and Coding Assistant develop a suite of validated tools, after which the agents execute a structured workflow to systematically explore and prune a large set of initial design candidates. A key contribution of this work is the explicit integration of formal risk management, employing the Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) as a quantitative metric to filter designs that exhibit a high probability of failing to meet performance requirements, specifically the target coefficient of lift. The framework automates labor-intensive initial exploration through a global sensitivity analysis conducted by the Analyst agent, which generates actionable heuristics to guide the other agents. The process culminates by presenting the human Manager with a curated final set of promising design candidates, augmented with high-fidelity Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations. This approach effectively leverages AI to handle high-volume analytical tasks, thereby enhancing the decision-making capability of the human expert in selecting the final, risk-assessed design.

  • 2 authors
·
Apr 16