arXiv AI

ARGUS: An Agenda-Driven Framework for Reliable User Simulation

ARGUS is a neuro‑symbolic, agenda‑driven framework designed to improve the reliability of user simulators in interactive environments. It separates state tracking from natural language generation by using a dynamic agenda stack and symbolic operations to enforce goal progression and constraint‑aligned interactions. The authors distill the model into compact versions via evaluator‑guided SFT and online RL, and evaluate its behavioral fidelity with a new Composite Behavioral Score metric on $ au^3$‑Bench and MultiWOZ, showing significant performance gains.

arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 5

CUEing User Simulators: Calibrated User Embeddings for Multi-Turn Benchmarking

The paper introduces Calibrated User Embeddings (CUE), a framework that encodes real user sessions into continuous representations and decodes them into persona commands to steer large language models (LLMs) as user simulators without additional training. CUE enables user-conditioned replay of past interactions and generates novel personas that better align with real-user success rates and failure patterns. Evaluations on the τ²‑Bench dataset show that CUE‑driven simulators commit fewer simulator‑attributed errors, more accurately reproduce real‑user failure modes, and maintain competitive user fidelity across various tasks and LLMs.

By Anjali Kantharuban, Jonas Mueller
arXiv AI
Jun 16

State-Grounded Multi-Agent Synthetic Data Generation for Tool-Augmented LLMs

arXiv:2606. 16307v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training tool-augmented LLM agents requires large corpora of multi-turn, tool-grounded conversational data that is expensive to annotate, privacy-constrained in production settings, and largely absent from public datasets.

By Rahul Khedar, Eshita, Sneha Teja Sree Reddy Thondapu, Mayank Malhotra, Arup Das, Jitesh Chandra, Yun-Shiuan Chuang, Chaitanya Kulkarni, Arun Menon, Linsey Pang, Avinash Karn, Mouli V, Prakhar Mehrotra
arXiv AI
Sep 28

Agentick: A Unified Benchmark for General Sequential Decision-Making Agents

Agentick is a unified benchmark for sequential decision‑making agents that evaluates RL, LLM, VLM, hybrid, and human agents on 37 procedurally generated tasks across six capability categories, four difficulty levels, and five observation modalities via a single Gymnasium‑compatible interface. It includes a Coding API, oracle reference policies, pre‑built SFT datasets, a composable agent harness, and a live leaderboard. An evaluation of 27 configurations and over 90,000 episodes shows no single approach dominates, with GPT‑5 mini leading overall, PPO excelling in planning and multi‑agent tasks, and the reasoning harness boosting LLM performance by 3‑10×, while ASCII observations outperform natural language.

By Roger Creus Castanyer, Pablo Samuel Castro, Glen Berseth
arXiv AI
Aug 28

Verify Smarter, Evolve Further: Efficient Harness Evolution through Behavior-Aware Verification

The paper introduces HarnessLens, a budget‑aware framework that evolves language‑model agent harnesses by jointly exploring task spaces and user‑configurable components. It derives candidate modifications from execution trajectories and selectively verifies them on behavior‑relevant tasks using an attributable‑evidence gate, thereby avoiding wasteful rollouts on unrelated behaviors. Experiments on three harnesses and four benchmarks show that HarnessLens improves held‑out performance by 7.6‑13.6% while using less evaluation budget than existing methods.

By Jinghan Xu, Yikai Zhang, Aili Chen, Weiyuan Li, Jiaqing Liang, Deqing Yang