Liyan Tang, Cyrus Rashtchian, Chun-Sung Ferng +3cs.AI cs.CL
Agent skills package specialized knowledge and workflows into reusable resources that extend AI agent capabilities. Recent work automatically discovers such skills from agent experience, which enables agents to progressively adapt through interaction. However, the insights that guide skill development typically remain scattered across optimization histories, limiting their systematic reuse across iterations. We introduce WikiSkill, a framework that co-evolves agent skills with a persistent knowledge base (wiki). At a high level, WikiSkill separates raw execution experience, accumulated knowledge, and executable skills, while continuously consolidating experience into the wiki, which subsequent skill updates can build on. Across diverse benchmarks and models, WikiSkill consistently outperforms state-of-the-art skill-evolution methods and improves over no-skill baselines in most model-benchmark settings. We find that skill evolution complements model scaling: larger models generally benefit more from evolved skills, while smaller models with skills can outperform substantially larger models without them. We also find that evolved skills transfer effectively across models and model families, and skills evolved by other models can outperform self-evolved skills. Finally, our ablation studies confirm that persistent knowledge accumulation in the wiki is critical for effective skill evolution. These results demonstrate the benefits of systematically accumulating and refining agent experience for developing reusable and transferable skills.
Scientific papers contain fine-grained records of problem solving: authors mention technical obstacles and methods that were used to address them, often along with reasoning on why those methods were chosen. We introduce MUSE (Mining Underlying Scientific Explanations), a full-text, multi-domain resource of scientific Problem-Solution-Rationale (P-S-R) triplets. We curate 579 expert-annotated full-text paragraphs, with a rich annotation schema covering salient problem, solution, and rationale spans, solves and rationale_of links and conceptual coreference. A modular extraction pipeline scales this annotation to build a high-quality knowledge base of 37K source-grounded P-S-R triplets. We evaluate the extraction components and include a preliminary experiment training a rationale-supervised LLM for scientific problem solving. Interestingly, we find that rationale supervision improves performance on complex, multi-constraint problems but can harm performance on simpler ones.
Yujia Hu, Tuan-Phong Nguyen, Simon Razniewskics.CL cs.AI cs.DB
We present a web demo for exploring a large-scale disambiguated knowledge base (KB) materialized from a large language model (LLM). GPTKB 2.0 contains 38.4M triples over 1.6M canonical entities, together with 207.6K consolidated relations and 66K consolidated classes. Unlike prior LLM-derived knowledge bases that largely identify entities by surface strings, GPTKB 2.0 performs context-guided disambiguation during recursive KB construction, separating homonyms and merging synonymous mentions as facts are elicited. The demo makes this process inspectable: users can browse entities, follow links across the KB, and audit the provenance of individual facts, including surface forms, candidate matches, source triples, and disambiguation decisions. The interface further supports structured SPARQL queries, natural-language questions translated to SPARQL, and entity linking from user-provided text to canonical GPTKB 2.0 entries. GPTKB 2.0 is available at https://gptkb.org/, with the full KB downloadable for offline use.
Event-centric intelligent analytical systems heavily depend on explicit causal event knowledge for risk early warning, decision-making support and narrative comprehension. Nevertheless, existing instance-level causal pairs suffer severe generalization deficits on low-frequency long-tail and unseen event combinations. To address this limitation, this work proposes Abstract Event Causal Rule (AECR), a novel relation-level causal abstraction paradigm that transforms concrete cause-effect pairs into generalized abstract causal logic while retaining their intrinsic causal relationships. We design a multi-agent Concrete-to-Abstract Causal Induction (CACI) system coupled with similarity-constrained clustering to distill trustworthy AECRs from noisy raw causal data, based on which two complete AECR knowledge bases are built. To validate the practical utility of abstract causal knowledge, we propose an Abstract Rule-Guided Causal Attention Encoder (AR-GCAE), which injects the retrieved AECRs into the causality Graph Event Prediction (CGEP) benchmark task via rule-guided attention layers and gated representation fusion. Quantitative experimental results reveal that applying AECRs substantially strengthens the generalization capacity of event causal reasoning and brings consistent performance improvements to event prediction, with the most prominent gains observed on rare and unseen event samples.
Biomedical entity linking grounds mentions in clinical and scientific text to entities in a curated knowledge base (KB) with ontological structure, which supports downstream applications such as literature-scale information extraction and patient-record normalization. The task has several challenges at once: the KB contains large numbers of entities, mentions are often ambiguous, and gold labels follow annotation conventions specific to each corpus. To address these challenges, we propose PILOT, a three-stage framework made up of neighborhood-aware retrieval, dual reranking, and score fusion. The retriever injects ontological structure from both the query and KB side, by reformulating mentions and pooling entity embeddings. The retrieved pool is then scored from two complementary views, one over surface forms and one over context, and fused together. PILOT achieves the state of the art on average across five widely-used benchmarks and remains efficient at inference.
Hilaf Hasson, Aditya Chakravarty, Jayant Thomas +1cs.AI cs.LG
Recent advances in RAG aim to optimize for performance by paying high ingestion costs for knowledge ingestion: building knowledge graphs or extracting SQL tables. In this work we show that the operations that such knowledge bases allow can be replicated with zero ingestion costs (not even a vector database); in fact our solution, Zero-Ingestion ScalableRAG, handily out-performs all baselines (including knowledge graph approaches) in three out of the six corpora considered here, and only marginally missing maximum performance on the other three, with average accuracy across all six datasets 7.36% above the next most competitive baseline. It achieves this by keeping a workspace of document sets and values sets that it can write into and read from, allowing for on-the-fly aggregative reasoning in all situations where grouping is required on a primary key that is in one to one correspondence with a subset of the total document set. Capping the number of LLM calls by a constant independent of the corpus size, we also introduce Limited-Ingestion ScalableRAG, which does use a minimal vector database as well as an automated pattern discovery from a sample of documents, to further improve accuracy at scale. Our code is available at https://github.com/cohesity/ScalableRAG .
Understanding the brain increasingly depends on integrating evidence across scales, modalities, and disciplines. Addressing a single research question therefore requires a coordinated sequence of operations, from surveying prior work to executing analyses and interpreting results in light of domain knowledge. AI agents promise to accelerate this process, but current agents lack domain expertise in brain science, may fabricate claims, drift during multi-step reasoning, and offer few defined points for expert intervention. These failures are especially costly in brain science, where conclusions feed into downstream scientific claims and depend on laboratory-specific expertise and careful human judgment. We present \textbf{BrainPilot} a \textbf{fully open-source} multi-agent system that accelerates brain science research with traceable logs and agent-verified results. A principal investigator (PI) agent coordinates specialist agents grounded in curated domain knowledge: a unified brain science knowledge base containing 7{,}233 indexed items and a skill library of 72 reusable methodology units across seven research domains. Every major step is recorded in the Graph of Trace, an auditable record that links subgoals, tool use, evidence, and claims and allows researchers to follow and inspect the workflow. An Auditor agent further integrates fabrication checking into the workflow. For evaluation, we run three brain science tasks from Agents' Last Exam, introduce our own benchmark, \textbf{BrainPilotBench-v0}, and present additional end-to-end case studies. Across these evaluations, BrainPilot with an open-source backbone model attains performance comparable to state-of-the-art agent framework with less costs.
Matthijs Jansen op de Haar, Tobias Stähle, Lorenzo Gattics.IR cs.AI
In this work, we propose GuidedRAG, a novel extension to traditional Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) that introduces a dedicated selection stage and semantic steering during retrieval. In contrast to current state-of-the-art RAG approaches, which depend on increasingly complex retrieval and knowledge structures, GuidedRAG constrains the knowledge base using semantics before retrieval, aligning the retrieval space with user intent while substantially reducing the search space. Our evaluation shows that GuidedRAG improves retrieval relevance by 14.0-15.8%, mitigates a 19.7-27.4% loss in retrieval precision, and reduces retrieval overhead by orders of magnitude. Moreover, relevant chunks are consistently retrieved earlier in the ranking process, while alignment with user intent improves by 31.8-36.8%. We further show that GuidedRAG achieves full coverage across 15 diverse RAG variants, demonstrating generalizability across the literature. Together, these findings establish semantic steering and selections as a powerful and generalizable paradigm for improving the current state-of-the-art in RAG.
Limited memory language models (LMLMs) externalize factual knowledge during pretraining to a knowledge base (KB), rather than memorizing it in their weights. During generation, the model then fetches knowledge from the KB as needed. This recently introduced paradigm provides multiple advantages, including knowledge control capabilities that remain beyond conventional LLMs. We propose continuous-query LMLM (CO-LMLM), where the KB pairs continuous keys with textual knowledge values, a significant departure from prior reliance on relational KB and queries. CO-LMLM generates flexible vector queries at minimal cost, while still integrating human-readable and attributable retrieved knowledge into its generation. We pair this design with an annotation pipeline that tags free-form factual spans in arbitrary text, removing prior work's restriction to Wikipedia. Across pretraining on Wikipedia and FineWeb-Edu and at multiple model scales, CO-LMLM outperforms prior LMLMs and vanilla LLMs in both perplexity and factual precision. At 360M scale, this includes lower perplexity than models pretrained on 40x more data, and SimpleQA-verified performance that is in line with gpt-4o-mini and higher than Claude Sonnet 4.5.
Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering (KB-VQA) requires models to retrieve visual entities matching the query image from large-scale encyclopedic knowledge bases and answer related questions. Existing multimodal Retrieval Augmented Generation (mRAG) methods rely on global visual features to match candidate entities, yet when the knowledge base contains numerous visually similar entities, the retriever struggles to distinguish them, populating the candidate set with visually similar but factually mismatched distractors. Since subsequent processing steps such as noise filtering are also confined to this fixed candidate set, errors from failed retrieval inevitably propagate to the final answer. To address these challenges, we propose MMAgent-R$^2$, an agentic mRAG framework that integrates visual reranking and active rejection as its internal verification mechanism. Visual reranking directly compares query and candidate images, capturing discriminative details beyond textual descriptions to precisely identify the target entity among similar candidates; active rejection discards unreliable results and retrieves additional candidates when no confident match is found, moving beyond the fixed candidate pool. We design a composite reward function with step-level verification rewards and achieve joint optimization of external retrieval, internal verification, and answer generation via GRPO training. Experiments on InfoSeek, E-VQA, and MMhops demonstrate that \ours{} achieves state-of-the-art performance, with particularly notable advantages in challenging retrieval scenarios and complex multi-image multi-hop reasoning tasks.
LLM agents increasingly answer questions against knowledge bases they help maintain. A common intuition holds that progressive disclosure, a compact catalog plus a one-line summary per page so the agent loads only what it needs, should make this cheaper than consulting a large monolithic index. We test that on a real 709-page markdown wiki maintained by an LLM. We retrofit it for progressive disclosure and run a preregistered ablation in which four versions of the corpus differ only in how the agent reaches the content: page bodies are byte-identical across arms, frozen as immutable git tags, so any measured difference is due to access structure alone. We cross the arms with three access conditions (a protocol-constrained agent, a free self-routing agent, and a catalog-preload regime) and grade answers blind against verified gold references with a cross-family judge. A pilot upended the premise: a capable tool-using agent never loads the index, inferring a page's path from the question and reading it directly, so the specific saving the retrofit targets does not materialize. We therefore made answer quality primary and cost secondary. Quality is non-inferior (the retrieval arm matches the index baseline within the preregistered margin) while cost falls in every regime, from about a third for a self-routing agent to well over half under catalog-preload, all confidence intervals excluding zero. The saving comes not from avoiding the index load but from more targeted access: the retrieval arm cites fewer pages and takes fewer tool turns. The study doubles as a case study in evaluation validity, applying threat-to-validity discipline to the tooling that produced it.
Francois Crespin, Fabian M. Suchanek, Nils Holzenbergercs.AI cs.CL
We propose a new method that allows an LLM to automatically pull in factual knowledge from a knowledge base during token generation. This means that (1)~factual knowledge in the LLM output can be updated without retraining the LLM, (2)~facts in the LLM output can be traced to the knowledge base for transparency and explainability, and (3)~smaller models can achieve the same factual accuracy as larger models. Our core idea is to train the model to produce special tokens that trigger a query to the knowledge base. Our experiments show that our method improves factual grounding in both short and long-form generation, and allows factual revisions to take effect through KB edits rather than parameter updates.
Mohammad Azarijafari, Luisa Mich, Michele Missikoffcs.AI
Agentic AI opens new opportunities for automating Business Process (BP), enabling autonomous decision-making and dynamic adaptation. However, realising this potential requires BP entities and their interactions to be defined with formal precision. This paper presents a formal framework for Agentic BP analysis through the AGO methodology. AGO captures the modelling perspective in terms of who is acting (Agents), why it is carried out (Goals), and what the relevant entities are (Objects). Grounded in set theory and mathematical logic, we formally define the AGO entity types and their interactions, organising all definitions into a BP Knowledge Base (BPKB). The resulting BPKB supports structured querying, incremental updates, and automatic generation of BP workflows, while ensuring soundness and completeness of the derived paths.
Affordance reasoning, the inference of an object's action possibilities from its physical properties (e.g., shape and material), is fundamental to human physical understanding and increasingly critical for Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing affordance benchmarks largely expose explicit object identities in the evaluation setup, allowing models to rely on memorized object-affordance mappings rather than reasoning over physical properties. To address this gap, we introduce Affordance20Q, a novel affordance reasoning benchmark formulated as a 20-Questions game without exposing the object's identity. In each game, the model identifies a hidden object's affordance from a candidate set by asking yes/no questions about its physical properties. Affordance20Q comprises 1,009 games over 454 objects and 59 affordances, all manually filtered, refined, and annotated. We conduct comprehensive experiments with 15 state-of-the-art LLMs and find a substantial gap (~20 points) compared to human performance. A KL-based information-gain (IG) analysis further shows that models fail to ask discriminating questions as the game progresses. To close the gap, we develop KB-Anchored Rule Induction (KARI), a pipeline based on LLMs that generates affordance rules grounded in evidence from knowledge bases (KBs). KARI improves open-source LLMs by up to 15.2 points, while the limited coverage of KBs hinders further gains. We release all our code and data at https://github.com/1171-jpg/Affordance20Q.git.