Advances and Challenges in Foundation Agents: From Brain-Inspired Intelligence to Evolutionary, Collaborative, and Safe Systems

The advent of large language models (LLMs) has catalyzed a transformative shift in artificial intelligence, paving the way for advanced intelligent agents capable of sophisticated reasoning, robust perception, and versatile action across diverse domains. As these agents increasingly drive AI research and practical applications, their design, evaluation, and continuous improvement present intricate, multifaceted challenges. This survey provides a comprehensive overview, framing intelligent agents within a modular, brain-inspired architecture that integrates principles from cognitive science, neuroscience, and computational research. We structure our exploration into four interconnected parts. First, we delve into the modular foundation of intelligent agents, systematically mapping their cognitive, perceptual, and operational modules onto analogous human brain functionalities, and elucidating core components such as memory, world modeling, reward processing, and emotion-like systems. Second, we discuss self-enhancement and adaptive evolution mechanisms, exploring how agents autonomously refine their capabilities, adapt to dynamic environments, and achieve continual learning through automated optimization paradigms, including emerging AutoML and LLM-driven optimization strategies. Third, we examine collaborative and evolutionary multi-agent systems, investigating the collective intelligence emerging from agent interactions, cooperation, and societal structures, highlighting parallels to human social dynamics. Finally, we address the critical imperative of building safe, secure, and beneficial AI systems, emphasizing intrinsic and extrinsic security threats, ethical alignment, robustness, and practical mitigation strategies necessary for trustworthy real-world deployment.

Inorganic synthesis recommendation by machine learning materials similarity from scientific literature

Synthesis prediction is a key accelerator for the rapid design of advanced materials. However, determining synthesis variables such as the choice of precursor materials, operations, and conditions is challenging for inorganic materials because the sequence of reactions during heating is not well understood. In this work, we use a knowledge base of 29,900 solid-state synthesis recipes, text-mined from the scientific literature, to automatically learn which precursors to recommend for the synthesis of a novel target material. The data-driven approach learns chemical similarity of materials and refers the synthesis of a new target to precedent synthesis procedures of similar materials, mimicking human synthesis design. When proposing five precursor sets for each of 2,654 unseen test target materials, the recommendation strategy achieves a success rate of at least 82%. Our approach captures decades of heuristic synthesis data in a mathematical form, making it accessible for use in recommendation engines and autonomous laboratories.

ULSA: Unified Language of Synthesis Actions for Representation of Synthesis Protocols

Applying AI power to predict syntheses of novel materials requires high-quality, large-scale datasets. Extraction of synthesis information from scientific publications is still challenging, especially for extracting synthesis actions, because of the lack of a comprehensive labeled dataset using a solid, robust, and well-established ontology for describing synthesis procedures. In this work, we propose the first Unified Language of Synthesis Actions (ULSA) for describing ceramics synthesis procedures. We created a dataset of 3,040 synthesis procedures annotated by domain experts according to the proposed ULSA scheme. To demonstrate the capabilities of ULSA, we built a neural network-based model to map arbitrary ceramics synthesis paragraphs into ULSA and used it to construct synthesis flowcharts for synthesis procedures. Analysis for the flowcharts showed that (a) ULSA covers essential vocabulary used by researchers when describing synthesis procedures and (b) it can capture important features of synthesis protocols. This work is an important step towards creating a synthesis ontology and a solid foundation for autonomous robotic synthesis.

COVIDScholar: An automated COVID-19 research aggregation and analysis platform

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has had far-reaching effects throughout society, and science is no exception. The scale, speed, and breadth of the scientific community's COVID-19 response has lead to the emergence of new research literature on a remarkable scale -- as of October 2020, over 81,000 COVID-19 related scientific papers have been released, at a rate of over 250 per day. This has created a challenge to traditional methods of engagement with the research literature; the volume of new research is far beyond the ability of any human to read, and the urgency of response has lead to an increasingly prominent role for pre-print servers and a diffusion of relevant research across sources. These factors have created a need for new tools to change the way scientific literature is disseminated. COVIDScholar is a knowledge portal designed with the unique needs of the COVID-19 research community in mind, utilizing NLP to aid researchers in synthesizing the information spread across thousands of emergent research articles, patents, and clinical trials into actionable insights and new knowledge. The search interface for this corpus, https://covidscholar.org, now serves over 2000 unique users weekly. We present also an analysis of trends in COVID-19 research over the course of 2020.