Microsoft Research

Orchard: An open framework for scalable agentic AI

Orchard is an open-source framework for the research community to train and evaluate AI agents across task types. It reduces complexity while supporting strong performance from smaller models by enabling researchers to reuse the same infrastructure.

arXiv AI
Sep 12

Defining AI Agents: A Compendium of Criteria, Metrics, and Benchmarks

The article "Defining AI Agents: A Compendium of Criteria, Metrics, and Benchmarks" surveys the lack of a standard definition for AI agents and organizes this ambiguity into five dimensions: environmental interaction, learning and adaptation, autonomy, goal‑directed behavior, and temporal coherence. It reviews how each dimension has been conceptualized in prior work and compiles the metrics, benchmarks, and evaluation frameworks used to assess them. The authors also introduce the Agent Compendium, a public digital resource that extends these evaluation methods, aiming to provide a common structure for evaluating and comparing agent capabilities across AI systems.

By Mia Lassiter, Brinnae Bent
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Emergence of Agentic AI: A Review on Evolution, Background, Working Principles, Applications, Adoption Factors, and Future Research Directions

The article reviews the emergence of Agentic AI, covering its evolution, theoretical foundations, working principles, and architectural aspects. It surveys recent scholarly contributions across various domains, highlighting real‑world applications, current research findings, and existing challenges. The review also proposes a framework for stakeholder adoption and outlines future research directions to guide researchers and practitioners.

By AKM Bahalul Haque, Al Amin Islam Ridoy, Mohammad Rayhan, Ivan Porres
Microsoft Research
Jul 30

Echoverse: Deep, evolving environments for computer-use agents

Computer-use AI agents struggle with multi-step workflows like email and customer support. Echoverse trains agents in realistic environments rather than simply providing more training tasks, helping them improve as the tasks, tests, and environments evolve.

By Akshay Nambi, Yash Pandya, Sahil Gupta, Sarthak Harne, Kavyansh Chourasia, Yash Lara, Ahmed Awadallah, Ece Kamar
arXiv AI
Aug 3

OpenClaw and Ollama in Agentic AI: Toward Fully Autonomous and Scalable AI Agent Systems

arXiv:2607. 28629v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rapid transition from reactive large language models (LLMs) to persistent, action-capable systems has exposed critical gaps in the architectural understanding of Agentic AI, particularly in separating inference, orchestration, and execution layers for autonomous AI agents.

By Konstantinos I. Roumeliotis, Ranjan Sapkota
arXiv AI
4d ago

LLM-based Agentic Reasoning Frameworks: A Survey from Methods to Scenarios

The article surveys LLM-based agentic reasoning frameworks, presenting a unified formal language that categorizes them into single-agent, tool-based, and multi-agent methods. It reviews application scenarios in scientific discovery, healthcare, software engineering, society, economics, and general-purpose tasks, and compares the distinct features and evaluation strategies of each category. The survey highlights the rapid development of complex agentic systems in real-world contexts.

By Bingxi Zhao, Lin Geng Foo, Ping Hu, Christian Theobalt, Hossein Rahmani, Jun Liu
OpenAI Blog
Sep 6

Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI

The article discusses how coding agents are transforming AI research within OpenAI. It presents early data on agent usage, experiment velocity, task complexity, and the resulting acceleration of research. The piece highlights the growing role of these agents in speeding up development and experimentation.