arXiv Computation and Language

Tmax: A simple recipe for terminal agents

TMax is an open reinforcement‑learning recipe that trains terminal‑using agents from small language models, achieving 33% on Terminal‑Bench 2.0 with only 9B parameters and outperforming larger prior models. The approach generates training data via a novel taxonomy that blends difficulty control, personas, and verifier diversification, enabling cheap creation of many terminal environments for both RL and supervised fine‑tuning. The recipe is applicable to models ranging from 2B to 27B across different families, dominating the Pareto curve for open terminal‑agent performance at smaller sizes.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

Learning Generalizable Behaviors for Terminal Agents

The paper introduces the Agentic Compositional Generalization hypothesis, suggesting that reinforcement learning (RL) primarily refines high‑level decision‑making behaviors that orchestrate pre‑trained low‑level skills, rather than teaching new domain‑specific skills from scratch. It proposes River, a training recipe that enhances reward quality by filtering low‑quality synthetic environments and adding process‑level behavior regularization. Using River, RL‑trained agents outperform other open‑source 8B models on four terminal‑agent benchmarks, achieving significant gains with fewer than 30% of the training environments.

By Yihang Yao, Bo Pang, Xuan Phi Nguyen, Ding Zhao, Shafiq Joty, Semih Yavuz
arXiv AI
Jul 14

SETA: Scaling Environments for Terminal Agents

arXiv:2607. 10891v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly shifting toward agents that solve tasks through diverse interfaces, including web and graphical user interfaces (GUIs).

By Qijia Shen, Zhiqi Huang, Vamsidhar Kamanuru, Aznaur Aliev, Jay Rainton, Ahmed Awelkair, Zhichen Zeng, Jiajun Li, Shi Dong, Yueming Yuan, Boyuan Ma, Qizheng Zhang, Jiwei Fu, Yuzhen Mao, Wendong Fan, Ping Nie, Philip Torr, Bernard Ghanem, Changran Hu, Jonathan Lingjie Li, Urmish Thakker, Guohao Li
arXiv AI
Oct 2

It Takes Workflows to Evolve Better Workflows

The paper "It Takes Workflows to Evolve Better Workflows" introduces FloWright, a method that uses a hierarchical, structure‑aware reward system to allow one or more roles in a multi‑agent workflow to self‑evolve without extra models or data. It also proposes DataWright, an adaptive data hardening technique that transforms existing datasets into more challenging workflow‑level tasks. Experiments on document, slide, chart, code, math, and finance tasks show that small open models trained with FloWright can improve performance by up to +7.41%, with co‑evolving multiple roles yielding the largest gains. "whyItMatters":"The work demonstrates that optimizing beyond the workflow generator—by enabling multiple agents to co‑evolve—can substantially enhance the effectiveness of multi‑agent workflows for complex real‑world tasks."

By Xuehang Guo, Haoyu Wang, Haifeng Chen, Yangyi Chen, Zhenhailong Wang, Qingyun Wang
arXiv AI
Aug 12

SKILLER: Language-Level Reinforcement Learning for Reusable Skill Extraction in Small Language Models

arXiv:2608. 10538v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills represent a standardized format for packaging procedural knowledge and domain expertise, serving within agent harness systems as an essential mechanism to continually constrain a language model's behavior space for repeatable, high-quality task execution.

By Chenhao Dang, Siyuan Xiong, Conghui He, Weijia Li
arXiv AI
Jun 24

OpenThoughts-Agent: Data Recipes for Agentic Models

arXiv:2606. 24855v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic language models dramatically expand the applications of AI yet little is publicly known about how to curate training data for broadly capable agents.

By Negin Raoof, Richard Zhuang, Marianna Nezhurina, Etash Guha, Atula Tejaswi, Ryan Marten, Charlie F. Ruan, Tyler Griggs, Alexander Glenn Shaw, Hritik Bansal, E. Kelly Buchanan, Artem Gazizov, Reinhard Heckel, Chinmay Hegde, Sankalp Jajee, Daanish Khazi, Emmanouil Koukoumidis, Xiangyi Li, Hange Liu, Shlok Natarajan, Harsh Raj, Nicholas Roberts, Ethan Shen, Nishad Singhi, Michael Siu, Ashima Suvarna, Hanwen Xing, Patrick Yubeaton, Robert Zhang, Leon Liangyu Chen, Xiaokun Chen, Steven Dillmann, Saadia Gabriel, Xunyi Jiang, Anurag Kashyap, Boxuan Li, Yein Park, Minh Pham, Sujay Sanghavi, Lin Shi, Ke Sun, Yixin Wang, Zhiwei Xu, Erica Zhang, Siyan Zhao, Wanjia Zhao, Jenia Jitsev, Alex Dimakis, Benjamin Feuer, Ludwig Schmidt
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 11

SKILLER: Language-Level Reinforcement Learning for Reusable Skill Extraction in Small Language Models

Agent skills represent a standardized format for packaging procedural knowledge and domain expertise, serving within agent harness systems as an essential mechanism to continually constrain a language model's behavior space for repeatable, high-quality task execution. However, because strong closed-source models entail high inference costs, current popular agent harnesses, such as Codex and OpenClaw, remain prohibitively expensive when deploying these skills to accomplish real-world tasks.

arXiv AI
Sep 7

Harbor Adapters and Harbor-Index: Infrastructure and a Curated Meta-Dataset for Large-Scale Agentic Evaluation

Harbor Adapters is a unified evaluation infrastructure that ports over 80 agentic benchmarks, enabling arbitrary agents to be tested across complex environments. The authors performed a large‑scale evaluation of 8 models on 54 benchmarks, using Terminus‑2 and three native harnesses, revealing detailed agent capabilities and failure modes. They also created Harbor‑Index, a curated set of 82 challenging tasks from 29 benchmarks, designed to be affordable yet comprehensive, with the best model achieving a 28.0% pass rate.

By Lin Shi (Audrey), Haowei Lin (Audrey), Zixuan Zhu (Audrey), Xiaoyue Zhou (Audrey), Xiang Li (Audrey), Xiangning Lin (Audrey), Yaxuan Deng (Audrey), Han Xu (Audrey), Yuangang Li (Audrey), Shanda Li (Audrey), Zizhao Chen (Audrey), Hanwen Xing (Audrey), Harsh Raj (Audrey), Bo Chen (Audrey), Quan Shi (Audrey), Steven Dillmann (Audrey), Yipeng Gao (Audrey), Puneesh Khanna (Audrey), Ruofan Lu (Audrey), Chao Beyond Zhou (Audrey), Michael Yang (Audrey), Robert Zhang (Audrey), Siyuan Chai (Audrey), Jiayu Chang (Audrey), Yizhao Chen (Audrey), Xiaokun Chen (Audrey), Yiwei Dai (Audrey), Wenting Yang (Audrey), Hange Liu (Audrey), Minghao Liu (Audrey), Zihan Wang (Audrey), Adnan El Assadi (Audrey), Benedikt Stroebl (Audrey), E. Kelly Buchanan (Audrey), Han Meng (Audrey), Junwei He (Audrey), Longxuan Yu (Audrey), Radin Shayanfar (Audrey), Yukyung Lee (Audrey), Zhikang Dong (Audrey), Allen G Hart (Audrey), Anjiang Wei (Audrey), Anurag Kashyap (Audrey), Arpandeep Khatua (Audrey), Audrey Jixin Zheng (Audrey), Chengrui Ma (Audrey), David Heineman (Audrey), Dubing Chen (Audrey), Hai-Anh Trinh (Audrey), Haishuo Fang (Audrey), Hefan Zhang (Audrey), Hui Shen (Audrey), Issa Sugiura (Audrey), Jiankai Sun (Audrey), Jiechao Gao (Audrey), Junhong Lin (Audrey), Junnan Li (Audrey), Kai Yang (Audrey), Lei Hsiung (Audrey), Maoyu Wang (Audrey), Mengze Tang (Audrey), Nabil Omi (Audrey), Negin Raoof (Audrey), Nicholas Edwards (Audrey), Octavia Guo (Audrey), Orfeas Menis Mastromichalakis (Audrey), Pengliang Ji (Audrey), Przemys{\l}aw Hejman (Audrey), Qi Qi (Audrey), Qunshu Lin (Audrey), Richard Zhuang (Audrey), Rui Yang (Audrey), Ruichen Zheng (Audrey), Ryan Marten (Audrey), Shaghayegh Fazliani (Audrey), Shizheng Hou (Audrey), Sicong Jiang (Audrey), Sijie Li (Audrey), Song Bian (Audrey), Terry Yue Zhuo (Audrey), Tianqing Wu (Audrey), Tom Tang (Audrey), Wanjia Zhao (Audrey), Weihao Xuan (Audrey), Wenhua Liang (Audrey), Xian Liu (Audrey), Xin Lan (Audrey), Xuan Zhang (Audrey), Xuandong Zhao (Audrey), Yanchuan Tang (Audrey), Yifan Jiang (Audrey), Yijiang Li (Audrey), Yitong Guan (Audrey), Yizhi Li (Audrey), Yonghui Liu (Audrey), Yuheng Tang (Audrey), Yujun (Audrey), Mao, Yunfei Zhao, Yuxin Wang, Yuxuan Tang, Zhenheng Tang, Zhifei Li, Ziruo Wang, Ziyu She, Kaiyuan Liu, Iheb Chaabane, Yuxin Tang, Xiangyi Li, Andy Konwinski, Boxuan Li, Leon Liangyu Chen, Alex Dimakis, Nicholas Carlini, Soroush Vosoughi, Di He, Etash Guha, Benjamin Feuer, Mike Merrill, Ludwig Schmidt, Alex Shaw
arXiv AI
Jul 28

Nanbeige4.2-3B: Unlocking Agentic Capabilities in a Compact Model

arXiv:2607. 22083v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present Nanbeige4.

By Nanbeige Lab, :, Chen Yang, Chengrui Huang, Fufeng Lan, Hanhui Chen, Hao Zhou, Huatong Song, Jiaqi Cao, Jiaying Zhu, Jinlin Niu, Kai Wang, Lisheng Huang, Qiliang Liang, Ran Le, Ruixiang Feng, Shuang Sun, Tao Gu, Tao Zhang, Tianyu Luo, Yang Song, Yun Xing, Yuntao Wen, Ziyao Xu, Zongchao Chen, Zongqiang Li
arXiv AI
Jun 9

SearchSwarm: Towards Delegation Intelligence in Agentic LLMs for Long-Horizon Deep Research

arXiv:2606. 09730v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are increasingly expected to handle complex, long-horizon real-world tasks whose context demands can grow without bound, yet model context windows remain inherently finite.

By Pu Ning, Quan Chen, Kun Tao, Xinyu Tang, Tianshu Wang, Qianggang Cao, Xinyu Kong, Zujie Wen, Zhiqiang Zhang, Jun Zhou