arXiv AI

Tracing the Thoughts of a Coding Agent Playing ARC-AGI-3: Lessons for Continual Learning

The paper investigates how a coding agent learns across a sequence of abstract reasoning tasks in the ARC-AGI-3 benchmark. The agent, operating on a frozen foundation model, writes and runs Python and shell scripts, retaining only its written artifacts as state. The authors develop a measurement protocol that traces each thought—any belief, rule, or plan committed to a file—through its lifecycle, revealing that most task-specific scripts are discarded at task boundaries and that the agent selectively forgets by rewriting knowledge into new scripts while accumulating unedited notes.

arXiv AI
Sep 30

StateTape: Action-Conditioned Evidence Lifecycle Modeling for Long-Horizon Coding Agents

StateTape introduces a new framework for long‑horizon coding agents that rewrites the agent’s context as the code repository changes, rather than letting the context grow with every observation. It models the repository as a symbol‑level code graph, using a tape to mark symbols altered by each write and a manager model to resolve stale records. The authors provide theoretical analysis, a new benchmark called TraceBench, and empirical results showing higher resolve rates across six agents and three edit‑heavy benchmarks with minimal computational overhead.

By Ziyang Yu, Liang Zhao, Bowen Zhu, Hasibul Haque
arXiv AI
Oct 9

Memento 3: Model-Based Recursive Self-Improvement through Reflective Rulebooks

Memento 3 is a frozen large‑language‑model agent that learns explicit world models by maintaining a natural‑language rulebook in external memory. The agent iteratively observes, reflects, revises the rulebook, compiles it into executable code, and verifies updates through prediction error and replay, accepting only code that the LLM deems faithful to the rulebook. In experiments, a single‑model version solved all 25 public ARC‑AGI‑3 games with perfect efficiency, and a learned feedback controller achieved perfect scores in Atari Pong without further LLM calls.

By Haoyu Zhao, Zhengxu Yu, Zhiyuan He, Meng Fang, Rasul Tutunov, Haitham Bou-Ammar, Weilin Luo, Jun Wang
arXiv AI
Sep 3

Belief-Calibrated Optimization: An Explicit World Model for Agentic Optimization

The paper introduces Belief-Calibrated Optimization (BCO), a method that records and updates a persistent in‑context document representing an agent’s belief about how the environment responds to edits. By continually revising this world model as new candidates are evaluated, BCO improves the performance of frozen LLM agents across five benchmarks, outperforming a control lacking the world model. An offline ablation shows that the document’s content provides reusable, accurate predictions of environmental responses, beyond mere form.

By Yuhan Chen, Zhihua Tian, Mahavir Dabas, Charith Peris, Rahul Gupta, Ming Jin, Feiyang Kang, Siyuan Zhang, Nan Wang, Ruoxi Jia
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

Locating Hidden Failures Makes Long-Horizon Agents More Reliable

The paper introduces Traverse, a benchmark of 2,518 agent trajectories and 6,967 annotated mistakes across software engineering, computer use, and science tasks, revealing that failures often go unrecovered and can cause irreversible harm before a run is deemed successful. It shows that human judges struggle to detect the first mistake in most runs, while a 4‑billion‑parameter verifier called Scout can locate failures more effectively and improve task success when used to select among candidate runs. The study demonstrates that making failure detection inexpensive and reliable can enable long‑horizon agents to learn from their own mistakes and increase trustworthiness in autonomous AI.

By Salman Rahman, Yubin Kim, Mihir Parmar, A. Ali Heydari, Genglin Liu, Simon A. Lee, Weizhi Zhang, Arian Hosseini, Ahmed A. Metwally, Yuzhe Yang, Baharan Mirzasoleiman, Xin Liu, Pavel Izmailov, Saadia Gabriel, Mark Malhotra, Shwetak Patel, Daniel McDuff, Hamid Palangi
arXiv AI
Sep 24

Verifiable Hidden Dynamics Play: Generating Agentic RL Environments from Solved Mechanisms

The paper introduces VHD-Play, a pipeline that first samples and solves a mathematical model before generating agentic reinforcement learning environments, ensuring that dynamics and evaluation are aligned from the outset. This approach yields 3,300 diverse environments at a low cost and significantly improves the performance of a large language‑model agent (Qwen3.6‑35B‑A3B) across multiple diagnostic families and external benchmarks. The study demonstrates that stateful interaction is a key factor in learning gains and that scaling the training substrate can further enhance performance.

By Xinjie Shen, Wei Fan, Xudong Guo, Jianhong Tu, Yang Su, Chuqiao Kuang, Yinger Zhang, Dayiheng Liu
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Neuro-Symbolic Computer Use: Learning Reusable Policies for Reliable and Efficient Execution

The paper introduces neuro‑symbolic computer use, a method that learns reusable policies to execute recurring computer workflows efficiently. Instead of re‑planning each run, the learned policy encodes stable decisions (ordering, variables, loops, branches) into executable code while delegating observation‑dependent decisions to neural models. Using neuro‑symbolic policy iteration, the approach iteratively refines the policy from a single agent trajectory, diagnoses failures, and revises the code with a coding model, achieving superior Pass^3 scores and significant reductions in per‑run cost and latency on OSWorld‑Verified and ScienceBoard benchmarks.

By Hyewon Suh, Thanh Minh Nguyen, Chih-Lun Lee, Darrow Hartman, Lizhao Liu, Xin Eric Wang, Ang Li, Jiachen Yang