arXiv AI

Terminal Agents: A Survey of AI Agents in Command-Line Environments

The paper surveys AI agents that operate primarily through command-line terminals, defining them as systems whose main action loop involves executing terminal commands, receiving textual feedback, and interacting with a stateful environment. It introduces a seven‑dimensional terminal competence profile to link system architecture, learning, and evaluation, and highlights how behavior is jointly shaped by the model, interface, harness, runtime, and environment. The authors argue for explicit reporting of system and runtime conditions, supported by replayable traces and process‑level evidence, to better understand and benchmark terminal‑mediated agency.

arXiv AI
Jun 30

TUA-Bench: A Benchmark for General-Purpose Terminal-Use Agents

arXiv:2606. 28480v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As large language models and harness frameworks continue to advance, agents operating in terminals are increasingly capable of performing a broader range of general computer-use tasks beyond coding.

By Shoufa Chen, Luyuan Wang, Xuan Yang, Zhiheng Liu, Yuren Cong, Yuanfeng Ji, Feiyan Zhou, Xiaohui Zhang, Fanny Yang, Belinda Zeng
arXiv AI
Aug 20

FACET: Preserving Source Intent and Executable State in Terminal Task Synthesis

FACET is a framework for synthesizing terminal tasks that preserves source intent and ensures cross‑artifact consistency. It reconstructs agent skills into coherent scenarios, repairs the execution environment, and uses the resulting container state as shared grounding for the instruction, solution, and verifier. By validating and repairing artifacts through execution, FACET produces complex tasks with dense executable checks and data‑efficient supervision, improving performance on Terminal‑Bench 2.1.

By Kou Shi, Zun Wang, Qisheng Su, Shiting Huang, Ziao Zhang, Zhen Fang, Qingnan Ren, Jin Liu, Yu Zeng, Yiming Zhao, Lin Chen, Zehui Chen, Feng Zhao
arXiv AI
6d ago

Terminal-Universe: Turning Agent Trajectories into Scalable Terminal Environments

Terminal-Universe is a framework that transforms large collections of terminal‑based agent trajectories into reusable, executable environments. By replaying recorded file operations and completing missing files, it reconstructs the original workspace and task, then synthesizes new tasks and multi‑round interactions. The resulting 37.3k task‑sufficient environments enable significant performance gains when fine‑tuning language models on terminal‑based benchmarks.

By Jie Wu, Zhenru Zhang, Beichen Zhang, Xuwu Wang, Yuhui Su, Mouxiang Chen, Peng Wang, Zhihai Wang, Que Shen, Hao Zhou, An Yang, Fei Huang, Yujiu Yang, Dayiheng Liu
arXiv AI
Jun 3

What Makes Interaction Trajectories Effective for Training Terminal Agents?

arXiv:2606. 03461v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Stronger code agents are commonly assumed to be superior teachers for post-training, yet this assumption remains poorly disentangled from task difficulty, harness design, and student capacity.

By Sidi Yang, Chaofan Tao, Jierun Chen, Tiezheng Yu, Ruoyu Wang, Yuxin Jiang, Yiming Du, Wendong Xu, Jing Xiong, Taiqiang Wu, Lifeng Shang, Xiaohui Li, Ngai Wong, Haoli Bai