GURU: A Hierarchical Neuro-Symbolic Multi-Agent System for Verification-Aware Automation of Mission-Critical Digital Engineering and Operations

arXiv:2611.01001v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: An AI can find a safe action faster than any human, but it must never decide what counts as safe. We present GURU, a hierarchical neuro-symbolic multi-agent system for mission-critical digital engineering and operations, built on one partition of authority: learned models propose, rank, and accelerate; a symbolic rules engine checks every consequential action against hard limits before it executes; and validated physics confirms and decides. GURU runs a workflow as a closed control loop, with Navigation, Action, and Planning agents sharing one Common Internal Language and one training factory. Nuclear, aviation, and national-security guidance now requires this pattern; a harnessed language model keeps the model at the center, GURU puts a validated reference there. In computational fluid dynamics, the workflow raised the converged-simulation rate on unseen aircraft geometries from under 1 percent to 74 percent over 100 single-attempt cases, ran 54 live cases to Mach 6 on three facilities, and an ablation put the symbolic layer at 13 points of boundary-layer capture. Knowledge-graph retrieval and role adapters raised ParaView control success from 55 to 75 percent. In space domain awareness, where a language model cannot be trusted to decide, a frozen self-supervised world model under validated propagation scored highest of five methods at conjunction risk, including fully fine-tuned language models, with several-times-lower seed variance: the trustworthy design gives up nothing in accuracy, and the recipe transferred to reactor anomaly detection. A radar-to-avoidance debris pipeline was demonstrated in stages on a 2026 reentry; the hierarchy coordinates simulated teams of 200 aircraft. Training scaled near-linearly past 1,000 Aurora nodes and ran at 8,000. The approach extends to a control-grade microreactor digital twin with validated physics, not a learned model, as the safety basis.