[2603.24768] Supervising Ralph Wiggum: Exploring a Metacognitive Co-Regulation Agentic AI Loop for Engineering Design

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence arXiv:2603.24768 (cs) [Submitted on 25 Mar 2026] Title:Supervising Ralph Wiggum: Exploring a Metacognitive Co-Regulation Agentic AI Loop for Engineering Design Authors:Zeda Xu, Nikolas Martelaro, Christopher McComb View a PDF of the paper titled Supervising Ralph Wiggum: Exploring a Metacognitive Co-Regulation Agentic AI Loop for Engineering Design, by Zeda Xu and Nikolas Martelaro and Christopher McComb View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:The engineering design research community has studied agentic AI systems that use Large Language Model (LLM) agents to automate the engineering design process. However, these systems are prone to some of the same pathologies that plague humans. Just as human designers, LLM design agents can fixate on existing paradigms and fail to explore alternatives when solving design challenges, potentially leading to suboptimal solutions. In this work, we propose (1) a novel Self-Regulation Loop (SRL), in which the Design Agent self-regulates and explicitly monitors its own metacognition, and (2) a novel Co-Regulation Design Agentic Loop (CRDAL), in which a Metacognitive Co-Regulation Agent assists the Design Agent in metacognition to mitigate design fixation, thereby improving system performance for engineering design tasks. In the battery pack design problem examined here, we found that the novel CRDAL system generates designs with better performance, without significantly increasing the computational c...