Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly combine reasoning, tool use, and action, but most evidence comes from episodic tasks with relatively immediate feedback and reset failures. Long-running physical control operates in a different regime: actions alter future states, errors compound across decisions, and an agent must improve from experience without being allowed to rewrite the physical rules that make exe…
Agent evaluations increasingly go beyond a single success rate, reporting metrics such as cost, consistency, and robustness. Yet they typically treat the agent itself as fixed. In practice, an agent is a configurable system: users decide what to tell it, how long to let it run, and which model to use, and each of these choices can change how well and how consistently it performs. We study these choices on a new benc…
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms increasingly rely on language-model agents to provide adaptive mission-level reasoning in uncertain environments. Fully distributed control, in which each UAV hosts an independent Small Language Model (SLM), removes reliance on a centralized coordinator but introduces an information-management problem: long-running interaction histories can degrade the reasoning context, while in…
Nature Machine Intelligence, Published online: 01 October 2026; doi:10.1038/s42256-026-01307-8 Huatian Gong and colleagues developed LACE, a large language model-based framework that designs optimization algorithms. It builds a verified problem contract, then evolves a portfolio of complementary heuristics that together solve problems that no single method can handle.
Nature Machine Intelligence, Published online: 30 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s42256-026-01309-6 Alonso-Monsalve et al. demonstrate that self-supervised pretraining helps deep learning models to interpret complex neutrino detector events, improving classification, reconstruction and data efficiency while enabling transfer across different neutrino detector technologies.
Nature Machine Intelligence, Published online: 28 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s42256-026-01308-7 A generative AI framework called GenFocal is introduced for climate downscaling, producing realistic fine-scale weather from coarse projections and improving regional risk estimates of compound extremes such as heatwaves and tropical cyclones.
OpenAI is partnering with America’s SBDC to expand hands-on AI training and local support for small businesses, alongside a new report on how small teams are using AI.
