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Agents Are Going Async

Async subagents let an agent stay responsive while background workers run long tasks. How the orchestrator, notifications and approvals work in Deep Agents.

chDB Durable Layer for agent memory

The chDB Durable Layer keeps agent memory fast to query locally while making its analytical state recoverable across laptops, CI jobs, and short-lived sandboxes.

Prospective Memory for Proactive LLM Agents

arXiv:2611.05731v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most memory systems for LLM agents are retrospective, preserving and retrieving past information to inform current decisions. Proactive agents, however, also require prospective memory: retaining future-directed intentions and realizing them when appropriate opportunities arise, even without explicit requests. Crucially, remembering the right intention does not guarantee acting at the right time: a related observation may call for waiting, while a later cue may make the same intention actionable. Inspired by cognitive theories of human prospective memory, we introduce Pro-Memory, a memory framework that separates maintaining future intentions from deciding when and how to realize them. Pro-Memory preserves pending objectives linked to their supporting evidence, assesses new observations against their original goals and activation conditions, and coordinates appropriate contributions with the agent's ongoing actions. It further updates intention states based on actions actually issued or evidence of resolution, while an experience memory distills feedback from completed episodes into guidance for future decisions. Experiments on two benchmarks spanning delayed-intention tasks and open-ended proactive assistance demonstrate consistent improvements in proactive task performance over representative memory approaches across multiple LLM backbones, while limiting unnecessary interventions.

Show HN: Cerea – yet another self-hosted LLM chat front end

Here is Cerea, a self-hostable, open-source (Apache 2.0) chat+agent frontend for LLMs. It works alone with any OpenAI-compatible inference provider, but it's way better when coupled with the model gateway I'm also developing, Pystino (https://github.com/paoloviviani/Pystino).I came to this after struggling to find a hosted chat interface that was truly open source, that I really enjoyed to use, and that was simple enough to be shared and used by family. In particular, I was looking for something that could provide the smooth and integrated user experience of commercial products for the tasks needed by family (e.g., document editing, form filling, notes and knowledge management), but backed by open models hosted wherever I decide.Then it became richer, now supporting: remote coding agents (wrapping Opencode), delegation and coordination between agents, integration between chat/projects and code agents (this one to me is a pain point for Claude, which I use at work), projects, RAG, rich artifacts support, schedules, and more.You can try it yourself, either cloning the full repo and head to Cerea/kit, or just the deploy kit with a script (https://github.com/paoloviviani/Cerea#quick-start).It's just a docker compose with a ./configure script that helps to generate a sensible .env for the specific scenario. It works in the browser and as a PWA on mobile.I hope you'll enjoy, feel free to reach out for questions. Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50384502 Points: 1 # Comments: 0

Show HN: Umbel – Remote-control agent CLIs over tmux

Been using this in all my sessions the last months. Opus 5.5 (over MCP) spawns Deepseek flash agents - and codex for audits etc. Very curious to hear what the HN crowd thinks/makes of it. Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50383189 Points: 1 # Comments: 0

VirtualTrialHarness: Coordinating Agentic Operationalization of Virtual Trial Protocols Across Complex Clinical Schemas

arXiv:2611.05551v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Virtual trials use routinely collected clinical data to evaluate treatment strategies, but translating a study protocol into an executable analysis requires determining how clinical concepts and study requirements should be represented in the available data and applied consistently across the workflow. These decisions depend on local data representations and operational conventions and can involve source selection, patient and encounter identity, linkage, and temporal interpretation. Here we introduce VirtualTrialHarness (VTHarness), an agent framework that coordinates virtual-trial operationalization by selecting reusable procedural skills for each workflow stage and uses explicit contracts to maintain consistent study decisions across stages. We also introduce VTBenchmark for evaluating source selection and cohort construction. Across three complex synthetic environments, VTHarness successfully produced all required cohort outputs matching the references in 95.1% of workflows after requirement clarification, compared with 60.4% using retrieval from the same procedural corpus. Procedural skills improved source recovery across three language models and increased source overlap with analyst code in 13 Mayo Clinic cases. Site-specific adaptation enabled reference-matched cohort execution across eight MIMIC-IV tasks. Within the Mayo Clinic Virtual Trials Program, the framework supported investigator review of cohort construction and endpoint analysis. These findings support coordinating procedural guidance with workflow decisions to improve virtual-trial implementation across complex clinical schemas.

A Controlled Experimental Evaluation of Configuration and Cache Architecture in LLM Serving Engines

arXiv:2611.05991v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent LLM applications repeat most of their prompt tokens across requests, and serving engines reuse the cached state of shared prefixes. vLLM and SGLang reuse it at different granularities, and benchmarks of their default deployments report large performance gaps, usually credited to the cache. Such comparisons rarely control for other configuration differences. One of them, whether a long prompt is prefilled in chunks, is set by each engine's defaults from the hardware and the release, and it confounds the comparison. We built a reproducible testbed on Kubernetes and a seeded multi-agent workload generator, and compared the two engines under vendor defaults and with chunked prefill matched. SGLang's configuration is the same in both arms, which makes it an internal control across independently provisioned deployments. Under defaults, vLLM's median time to first token is up to 64x SGLang's. Matching one setting removes 78% of the capacity gap where that gap is largest and 30 to 67% of the latency gap. Near saturation the remaining latency gap reflects queue growth. A fluid queue model driven only by a 4.4% throughput shortfall reproduces it, and shows that such a gap scales with the length of the benchmark run. What survives matching is a tail-latency advantage of 2.4 to 6.4x at equal throughput, consistent with cache-aware ordering of waiting requests. We derive six recommendations for comparing serving engines.

El Agente F\'armaco: A Scalable AI Scientist for Drug Discovery

arXiv:2611.03832v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Computational drug discovery offers a growing range of tools for proposing and evaluating molecules, but combining them and deciding what to do next still requires substantial expert effort. Here, we introduce El Agente F\'armaco, an AI scientist that uses modern large language model (LLM) technology to turn discovery goals expressed in everyday language into complex, scalable computational screening workflows. The agentic harness selects scientific tools, reviews their results, and adjusts subsequent steps to the target and the user's objectives. Our approach centers on a shared scientific memory: F\'armaco Atlas, which stores molecules, structures, and results together with their provenance -- a record of how they were obtained. The agent uses targeted database queries to retrieve the evidence needed for each decision. A single request can launch calculations for an entire collection of molecules, without requiring a separate LLM decision for every compound. This design limits the information the model must process as screening collections grow, while keeping the underlying results available for inspection and further analysis. The integrated tools support molecule generation, prediction of binding and molecular properties, and searches for compounds available for purchase. In a retrospective comparison with an expert-led campaign, the agent proposed chemically distinct candidates with competitive docking scores and higher calculated drug-likeness under explicitly imposed selection criteria. In a 22-task benchmark against plain tool calls and Codex, the agent achieved the highest observed mean model-judged score, with lower median cumulative token use and peak context. F\'armaco provides a foundation for flexible, scalable drug discovery workflows that connect scientific reasoning with an enduring, traceable record of computational work.

Generalizing an LLM from 8k to 1M Context using Qwen-Agent

We’ve created an agent using Qwen2 models with an 8k context size to understand documents with 1M tokens, surpassing RAG and native long-context models. This agent was also used to generate data for training new long-context Qwen models.

How Indegene is modernizing and scaling enterprise data quality in life sciences

This post explores how Indegene built a production-grade, LLM-powered Data Quality Agent in its NEXT Unified Data Platform on AWS. The agent generates context-aware data quality rules, validates them, and produces ready-to-run SQL and Python under human-in-the-loop governance, helping life sciences organizations scale enterprise data quality.

ScienceVision: Can AI Observe and Reason Like a Scientist?

arXiv:2611.04087v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scientific discovery builds on accurate observations interpreted through domain knowledge and reasoning. For scientific 3D data, this requires understanding structures and spatial relationships, from protein contacts to anatomical organization. Existing multimodal benchmarks largely evaluate text and 2D images, while scientific 3D evaluations vary in representations and protocols across disciplines, limiting cross-disciplinary comparison. To assess these foundational capabilities, we introduce ScienceVision, a cross-domain benchmark for scientific 3D understanding and reasoning through expert-level visual question answering (VQA). We construct 250 questions, with 50 each from Biology, Chemistry, Medical Imaging, Mechanical CAD, and Architecture, through a pipeline combining synthetic question generation with domain-expert review and annotation. Each task pairs a native 3D artifact with a scientific question, a specified response format, and a task-specific reference answer, requiring domain knowledge to be applied to geometric or topological evidence. We evaluate 12 models on the same questions in three settings: visual question answering with native 3D artifacts accessed through an agent harness's file and code-execution tools; the same workflow augmented with expert-inspired viewer inspection and measurement tools exposed through the Model Context Protocol (MCP); and visual question answering from prescribed rendered 2D images using an agent harness. All settings use the same task-specific deterministic final-answer scoring. The inspection environment supports view changes, target isolation, and slice inspection. In this main comparison, the best mean answer score is 0.53 out of 1. Mean scores in the native-artifact workflow without additional MCP tools exceed those in the rendered-image workflow for every model, by 17.2 percentage points on average.