Abstract:We present MAESTRO, an evaluation suite for the testing, reliability, and observability of LLM-based MAS. MAESTRO standardizes MAS configuration and execution through a unified interface, supports integrating both native and third-party MAS via a repository of examples and lightweight adapters, and exports framework-agnostic execution traces together with system-level signals (e.g., latency, cost, and failures). We instantiate MAESTRO with 12 representative MAS spanning popular agentic frameworks and interaction patterns, and conduct controlled experiments across repeated runs, backend models, and tool configurations. Our case studies show that MAS executions can be structurally stable yet temporally variable, leading to substantial run-to-run variance in performance and reliability. We further find that MAS architecture is the dominant driver of resource profiles, reproducibility, and cost-latency-accuracy trade-off, often outweighing changes in backend models or tool settings. Overall, MAESTRO enables systematic evaluation and provides empirical guidance for designing and optimizing agentic systems.
Abstract:Kernel power $k$-means (KPKM) leverages a family of means to mitigate local minima issues in kernel $k$-means. However, KPKM faces two key limitations: (1) the computational burden of the full kernel matrix restricts its use on extensive data, and (2) the lack of authentic centroid-sample assignment learning reduces its noise robustness. To overcome these challenges, we propose RFF-KPKM, introducing the first approximation theory for applying random Fourier features (RFF) to KPKM. RFF-KPKM employs RFF to generate efficient, low-dimensional feature maps, bypassing the need for the whole kernel matrix. Crucially, we are the first to establish strong theoretical guarantees for this combination: (1) an excess risk bound of $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{k^3/n})$, (2) strong consistency with membership values, and (3) a $(1+\varepsilon)$ relative error bound achievable using the RFF of dimension $\mathrm{poly}(\varepsilon^{-1}\log k)$. Furthermore, to improve robustness and the ability to learn multiple kernels, we propose IP-RFF-MKPKM, an improved possibilistic RFF-based multiple kernel power $k$-means. IP-RFF-MKPKM ensures the scalability of MKPKM via RFF and refines cluster assignments by combining the merits of the possibilistic membership and fuzzy membership. Experiments on large-scale datasets demonstrate the superior efficiency and clustering accuracy of the proposed methods compared to the state-of-the-art alternatives.