1st Workshop: Assessing and Improving the Capabilities and Safety of Agents

This workshop brings together two critical threads in the development of autonomous agents: their growing capabilities and the imperative to ensure their safe and aligned deployment. As agents become increasingly capable of long-horizon reasoning, goal-directed behavior, and autonomous decision-making, understanding how to measure and extend these capabilities remains a central research challenge. At the same time, these advances raise urgent questions about robustness, misalignment, risk mitigation, and unintended behaviors.

The workshop will explore current bottlenecks to agent development—including the challenge of collecting meaningful agentic data (via human interaction or synthetic generation) and ensuring generalization without mode collapse—as well as cutting-edge approaches to building agents that are safe by design. By bringing together researchers working on both the capabilities and safety of agents, this workshop aims to foster cross-pollination between communities and develop a shared research agenda for the next generation of autonomous systems.

Aishwarya Agrawal (Université de Montréal), Prithviraj “Raj” Ammanabrolu (UCSD), Andrea Bajcsy (Carnegie Mellon University), Joyce Chai (University of Michigan), Alexandre Drouin (ServiceNow & Université Laval), Krishanmurthy “DJ” Dvijotham (ServiceNow), Daniel Fried (Carnegie Mellon University), Zhijing Jin (University of Toronto), Bo Li (UIUC), Graham Neubig (Carnegie Mellon University), Ofir Press (Princeton University), Abhik Roychoudhury (National University of Singapore), Ruslan “Russ” Salakhutdinov (Carnegie Mellon University), Huan Sun (The Ohio State University), Ivan Titov (University of Edinburgh), Xin Eric Wang (UCSB, Simular), Tao Yu (University of Hong Kong).

More to be announced.