arXiv AI

On Turn-Level Best-of-N Sampling for Scaling LLM Agents

arXiv:2611. 06868v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, we evaluate a simple inference-time scaling approach based on \textit{turn-level best-of-N sampling} (\method) for large language model (LLM) agents on complex, long-horizon tasks.

arXiv AI
Sep 4

AgentRM: Enhancing Agent Generalization with Reward Modeling

AgentRM proposes a generalizable reward model to guide LLM-based agents during test-time search, outperforming direct policy fine-tuning. Three reward modeling strategies—explicit, implicit, and LLM-as-a-judge—are explored, and AgentRM improves base policy performance by an average of 8.8 points across nine tasks, surpassing top general agents by 4.0 points. It also shows strong weak-to-strong generalization and can boost specialized agents, with plans to release code for further research.

By Yu Xia, Jingru Fan, Weize Chen, Siyu Yan, Xin Cong, Zhong Zhang, Yaxi Lu, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
arXiv AI
Sep 25

The Fellowship of the Query: Learning Retrieval Actions

The paper investigates how trajectory fine‑tuning can enhance small language models (SLMs) as next‑action controllers in retrieval‑augmented question answering. By building a seven‑way action‑prediction task from teacher search traces, the authors fine‑tune SLMs and cross‑lingual SLMs (xSLMs) using LoRA and evaluate on 1,646 held‑out examples, achieving a macro‑F1 of 0.6536 with Granite 4.1 3B. In an end‑to‑end controller/generator swap experiment on 149 trajectories, the fine‑tuned model improves Exact Match from 0.7530 to 0.7946 and token F1 from 0.7783 to 0.8295, demonstrating that trajectory supervision boosts action prediction and evidence‑recording behavior.

By Mohammed Al-Maamari, Saber Zerhoudi, Michael Granitzer, Jelena Mitrovi\'c
arXiv AI
Sep 24

Agent-Editing World Model: Rethinking World Modeling for LLM Agents

The paper introduces the Agent-Editing World Model (AEWM), a new approach that models how reasoning and actions influence future task progress instead of simulating tool responses. AEWM includes an Action Judge that classifies decisions as Critical, Exploratory, or Noisy, and a State Revision mechanism that edits noisy reasoning–action continuations from the same observed history. The integrated system, EditAct, directly updates the underlying state during real execution, leading to significant performance gains across multiple benchmarks and agent backbones.

By Shuang Sun, Guoxin Chen, Fanzhe Meng, Jia Deng, Huatong Song, Jinhao Jiang, Wayne Xin Zhao, Hongteng Xu, Ji-Rong Wen
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

Strategy Accumulation and Guided Execution for Automated LLM Fine-Tuning

The paper introduces Strategy Accumulation and Guided Execution (SAGE), a two-stage framework that makes automated fine-tuning of large language models cumulative. In the first stage, a multi-agent pipeline uses Monte Carlo Tree Search to explore training strategies while a Distillation Agent records task-specific insights and cross-task confidence scores into a structured repository. In the second stage, SAGE retrieves relevant experience from this repository to guide training on new tasks, achieving a 12.4‑percentage‑point improvement over a baseline pipeline without accumulated experience on nine unseen tasks.

By Haoran Zhao, Wei Du, Dingwen Yang, Jixuan Huang, Junlin Shang, Lingyong Fang, Ya Guo, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 3

CRISP: Critical Step Perception for Training Efficient Deep Search Agents

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly extended into deep search agents that solve complex questions through multi-step interaction with external search and browsing tools. However, existing agents often incur substantial computational and interaction costs, generating lengthy trajectories that contain redundant queries, inefficient exploration, and irrelevant observations.

arXiv AI
Oct 23

Steering Black-Box Large Language Model Agents with Pitfall Anticipation World Model

The paper introduces the Pitfall Anticipation World Model (PAWM), a selective guidance system for black-box large language model agents. PAWM predicts imminent failures in a bounded multi-step future and intervenes only when a potential pitfall is detected, reducing costly and often uninformative step-by-step predictions. Trained first with supervised fine-tuning on synthetic pitfall-labeled data and then co-trained with a black-box LLM, PAWM boosts Claude Sonnet 4.5’s performance by 24.3% on ScienceWorld and 7.7% on WebArena-Lite, outperforming several baselines.

By Jiongxiao Wang, Han Ding, Youzhi Luo, Yawei Wang, Yun Zhou, Linbo Liu, Panpan Xu
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 28

GEPA-Curator: Curated Learning for Self Improving Agents

GEPA-Curator is a framework that enhances prompt optimization for large language model agents by selecting which agent experiences should inform the optimizer. It includes task curation to filter out noisy or unreliable tasks and prior success retrieval to provide successful trajectories as context. Experiments on GoBrowse, ALFWorld, AppWorld, and τ‑bench show that GEPA-Curator matches or surpasses baseline performance, achieving up to 20.7% improvement over GEPA and 21.2% over ACE.

By Zack Yu, Nicholas Lee, Minjae Lee, Lakshya Agarwal, Luca Manolache, Wonjun Kang, Matei Zaharia, Michael W. Mahoney, Kurt Keutzer, Sehoon Kim, Amir Gholami