QUACK: Questioning, Understanding, and Auditing Communicated Knowledge in Multimodal Social Deduction Agents

Social deduction games have become a popular testbed for probing reasoning, deception, coordination, and belief modeling in Large Language Model (LLM) agents. However, most environments are scored only by game outcomes such as win rates and largely remain to text-only interaction, making it difficult to tell whether an agent's language is actually grounded in what it perceived and did, or to identify the failure modes underlying its behavior. To address this gap, we introduce QUACK, an open-source environment and evaluation framework for auditing the grounding of agent language in multimodal social reasoning. QUACK evaluates agents at three levels: game outcomes, behavioral trajectories, and utterance-level consistency. Its core Statement Verification Pipeline reconstructs each agent's ground-truth trajectory from engine logs and checks every discussion claim against it, automatically flagging spatial hallucination, unsupported accusation, deception collapse, and language-action inconsistency. Evaluating three frontier VLMs in both homogeneous and cross-model adversarial settings, we find that even the strongest agent hallucinates 15.1% of its verifiable spatial claims and makes over half of its accusations without grounded evidence. We release the full engine, evaluation framework, toolkit, and logs at https://github.com/AAAAA-Academia-Attractions/QUACK.

Herculean: An Agentic Benchmark for Financial Intelligence

As AI agents improve, the central question is no longer whether they can solve isolated well-defined financial tasks, but whether they can reliably carry out financial professional work. Existing financial benchmarks offer only a partial view of this ability, as they primarily evaluate static competencies such as question answering, retrieval, summarization, and classification. We introduce Herculean, the first skilled benchmark for agentic financial intelligence spanning four representative workflows, including Trading, Hedging, Market Insights, and Auditing. Each workflow is instantiated as a standardized MCP-based skill environment with its own tools, interaction dynamics, constraints, and success criteria, enabling consistent end-to-end assessment of heterogeneous agent systems. Across frontier agents, we find agents perform relatively well on Trading and Market Insights, but struggle substantially on Hedging and Auditing, where long-horizon coordination, state consistency, and structured verification are critical. Overall, our results point to a key gap in current agents in turning financial reasoning into dependable workflow execution in high-stakes financial workflows.