ECE faculty Jorge Ortiz and his students won Best Paper Award at the ACM Conference on AI and Agentic Systems

 

Rutgers ECE Ph.D. student Shuren Xia and co-authors Qiwei Li, Taqiya Ehsan, and Jorge Ortiz received a Best Paper Award at the ACM Conference on AI and Agentic Systems for their paper, “TraceFix: Repairing Agent Coordination Protocols with TLA+ Counterexamples.”

The paper presents TraceFix, a verification-first pipeline for Large Language Model multi-agent coordination. TraceFix synthesizes a protocol topology as a structured intermediate representation from a task description, generates PlusCal coordination logic, and iteratively repairs the protocol using counterexamples from the TLA+ model checker until verification succeeds. Verified process bodies are then compiled into per-agent system prompts and executed under a runtime monitor that rejects out-of-topology coordination operations. Across 48 tasks spanning 16 scenario families, all tasks reached full TLC verification, with 62.5% passing on the first attempt and none requiring more than four repair iterations.

 A 3,456-run runtime comparison showed that topology-monitored execution achieved the highest task completion, and a paired ablation showed that TLC-verified protocols substantially reduced deadlock and livelock compared with unverified protocols.

More information is available here:
https://ortiz.rutgers.edu/blog/tracefix/

Congratulations to Jorge and the students!