arXiv:2604. 12147v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Agents are commonly instructed to follow a task-specific plan for guidance.
Agent skills are the de facto mechanism for extending LLM agents with reusable guidance. A skill can shape the agent's task execution, including planning, tool use, problem-solving, and validation.
arXiv:2608. 05519v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent benchmarks usually measure task completion and treat resource use as an auxiliary statistic.
The paper argues that evaluating agents as fixed models is insufficient, proposing instead to treat them as configurable systems. Using a new benchmark of four scientific tasks, the authors analyze how five configuration aspects—task information, reasoning, self‑verification, time budget, and backbone model—affect performance, noting that about 54% of outcome variance arises from run‑to‑run differences even with the same settings. The study finds that providing more task information has the strongest impact, while interactions among settings (e.g., extra time only helps with adequate information or model capability) and the choice of verification tools significantly shape agent behavior.
arXiv:2607. 05775v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly evaluated on their ability to use tools, plan multi-step tasks, coordinate with other agents, and operate over extended horizons.
arXiv:2608. 11888v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are the de facto mechanism for extending LLM agents with reusable guidance.
arXiv:2608. 06714v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent systems for optimizing prompts, programs, and ML workflows typically rely on explicit outer-loop controllers such as evolutionary search, bandits, or textual-gradient methods.
arXiv:2606. 19787v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents for multi-step tasks in executable environments, yet their ability to perform realistic operations research (OR) work remains unclear.
The paper re‑evaluates memory‑based self‑improving agents by adding multiple runs to measure variance and by randomizing task order. It finds that agent performance is noisy in complex, multi‑step environments and that improvement depends heavily on the sequence of tasks, revealing a hidden curriculum effect. The authors suggest that underspecification of tasks and environments contributes to this fragility and demonstrate that adding detailed rubrics and feedback can partially mitigate performance drops, though gaps remain.
arXiv:2606. 16988v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Benchmark scores tell you what an agent got right; they do not tell you how it got there.
arXiv:2606. 13003v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prevailing wisdom posits that Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are superior to Single-Agent Systems (SAS), citing advantages like context protection, parallel processing and distributed decision-making.
arXiv:2603. 14465v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) have evolved into tool-using agents, they remain brittle in long-horizon interactions.
The paper investigates whether a language‑model agent can autonomously study an unfamiliar environment without prior task instructions or examples, and decide how to prepare for future tasks. It formalizes task‑agnostic environment preprocessing, where a studying system explores under a budget to produce reusable artifacts for a later solver. Experiments on six diverse benchmarks show that a meta‑agent variant often outperforms fixed methods, though larger budgets do not consistently boost downstream reward, yet the artifacts still reduce test‑time sampling needed to achieve a target score.