Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2609.30291

Bringing AI to Autonomous Systems -- From Cognition to Collective Intelligence

Joseph Sifakis
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to highlight the central role of autonomous systems as the ultimate stage in the development of AI, to explain the underlying technical challenges that require a combination of connectionist AI and symbolic AI, and to integrate AI and systems engineering. We present a comprehensive framework for the design and evaluation of autonomous systems, based on a generic agent architecture that characterizes their behavior as the composition of cognitive functions organized around a long-term memory containing the agent's evolving knowledge. We address the challenges posed by the implementation of the fundamental features of the agent architecture, in particular the link between sensory data and structured data stored in memory, decision-making related to the achievement of the agent's goals and their planning, as well as the coordination of agents to combine individual and collective intelligence. We explain that agent trustworthiness, unlike that of traditional systems, is not limited to behavioral properties. It includes an essential dimension related to cognitive properties, the validity of which depends on how the agent uses its knowledge in decision-making. We present avenues for the development of methods for evaluating agent trustworthiness. We conclude with a critical assessment of the substantial gap between the aspirational vision of autonomous multi-agent systems and the current state of the art.

Explore related subjects

cs.AI

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Joseph Sifakis. 2026-09-11. Bringing AI to Autonomous Systems -- From Cognition to Collective Intelligence. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30291

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

SkillFlow: Scalable and Efficient Agent Skill Retrieval System

AI agents can extend their capabilities at inference time by loading reusable skills into context, yet equipping an agent with too many skills, particularly irrelevant ones, degrades performance. As community-driven skill repositories grow, agents need a way to selectively retrieve only the most relevant skills from a large library. We present SkillFlow, the first open, multi-stage retrieval system for agent skill discovery that frames skill acquisition as an information retrieval problem over a corpus of ~35K community-contributed SKILL.md definitions indexed from GitHub. The pipeline progressively narrows a large candidate set through four stages (dense retrieval, two rounds of cross-encoder reranking, and LLM-based selection), balancing recall and precision at each stage. We evaluate SkillFlow on two coding benchmarks: SkillsBench, a benchmark of 87 tasks and 229 matched skills; and Terminal-Bench, a benchmark that provides only 89 tasks, and no matched skills. On SkillsBench, SkillFlow-retrieved skills raise Pass@1 from 9.2% to 16.4% (+78.3%, $p_{adj} = 3.64 \times 10^{-2}$), reaching 84.1% of the oracle ceiling, while on Terminal-Bench, agents readily use the retrieved skills (70.1% use rate) yet show no performance gain, revealing that retrieval alone is insufficient when the corpus lacks high-quality, executable skills for the target domain. SkillFlow demonstrates that framing skill acquisition as an information retrieval task is an effective strategy, and that the practical impact of skill-augmented agents hinges on corpus coverage and skill quality, particularly the density of runnable code and bundled artifacts. (GitHub: https://github.com/IBPA/skill-flow)

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Evaluation is All You Need: Strategic Overclaiming of LLM Reasoning Capabilities Through Evaluation Design

Reasoning models represented by the Deepseek-R1-Distill series have been widely adopted by the open-source community due to their strong performance in mathematics, science, programming, and other domains. However, our study reveals that their benchmark evaluation results are subject to significant fluctuations caused by various factors. Subtle differences in evaluation conditions can lead to substantial variations in results. Similar phenomena are observed in other open-source inference models fine-tuned based on the Deepseek-R1-Distill series, as well as in the QwQ-32B model, making their claimed performance improvements difficult to reproduce reliably. Therefore, we advocate for the establishment of a more rigorous paradigm for model performance evaluation and present our empirical assessments of the Deepseek-R1-Distill series models.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

The Plot Twist: Jailbreaking Unified Multimodal Models with a Three-Act NarrativeAttack

Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation Models (UMMs) increasingly combine visual understanding and image generation within a single interactive workflow, making generated visual content available as later reasoning context. However, existing jailbreak evaluations mostly study text rewriting or isolated visual prompts, leaving the safety risk of narrative cross-turn visual grounding underexplored. We propose NarrativeAttack, a semantic-preserving visual narrative jailbreak framework. NarrativeAttack employs a three-act narrative structure in which the UMM's own generator produces images for the setup (pre-event) and resolution (post-event) stages, making the full attack workflow self-contained while concealing the malicious event as a hidden climax. The attack concludes with an image-based "guessing game" that embeds the original malicious query among benign candidates, compelling the model to select and answer the most relevant one based on the established narrative context. A dynamic difficulty mechanism further enhances attack stability. Experiments show NarrativeAttack consistently surpasses prior approaches, achieving up to 88.25% ASR on Gemini-2.5-Flash. These results uncover an underdeveloped vulnerability and highlight the urgent need for safety alignment in UMMs.

cs.AI↗