The paper investigates why some tasks in the Terminal‑Bench/Frontier‑Bench datasets fail for all agents, distinguishing genuine difficulty from artifacts such as missing context, broken solutions, infrastructure failures, or verifier bypasses. Analyzing 125 all‑fail tasks, only 78 are certified as genuinely unsolved after applying a validity screen; the rest are attributable to broken oracles, infrastructure issues, bypassable verifiers, or insufficient evidence. The study concludes that a zero pass rate does not automatically indicate a hard task and recommends that frontier benchmarks provide evidence for all‑fail tasks before claiming capability gaps.
By Edward Lue Chee Lip, Boden Moraski, Tim Knappe, Lang Xiong, Sarvesh Gharat, Antonio Mari, Ivan Bercovich
arXiv:2609.01271v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Agentic software engineering benchmarks are typically summarized by nominal category labels such as "bug fix" or "feature implementation," yet benchm...
By Radin Shayanfar, Keheliya Gallaba, Ahmed E. Hassan
The paper investigates why large language model (LLM) agents fail on long, multi‑step production workflows despite high benchmark success. By testing nine models (1.2 B–671 B parameters) across six task families and multiple horizons, the authors find that task success follows a geometric decay governed by a per‑step reliability that never reaches 1, leading to inevitable collapse for long horizons. The degradation is driven mainly by step count rather than context length, and the study quantifies a significant gap between benchmark and production performance, especially for agentic tool‑use tasks.
By Shubhra Mittal
arXiv:2610.01026v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Tackling complex real-world tasks can exceed the capabilities of a single large language model (LLM), motivating the use of multi-agent workflows tha...
By Xuehang Guo, Haoyu Wang, Haifeng Chen, Yangyi Chen, Zhenhailong Wang, Qingyun Wang
arXiv:2607. 05297v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent LLM agents tackle increasingly long-horizon, open-ended tasks, and external skills, reusable procedural knowledge supplied to the agent, further extend this capability.
By Zefeng Wang, Minxi Yan, Jinhe Bi, Sikuan Yan, Volker Tresp, Yunpu Ma
arXiv:2606. 17454v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agent performance is not just a modeling problem, it is fundamentally a systems problem.
By Gaurav Gupta, Vatshank Chaturvedi, Jun Huan, Anoop Deoras
arXiv:2607. 01571v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning enables large language models (LLMs) to solve complex problems by generating intermediate reasoning steps.
By Aria Masoomi, Mahsa Bazzaz, Adel Javanmard, Vahab Mirrokni
arXiv:2607. 08964v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents have become capable of autonomously completing short, well-specified tasks.
By Zongxia Li, Zhongzhi Li, Yucheng Shi, Ruhan Wang, Junyao Yang, Zhichao Liu, Xiyang Wu, Anhao Li, Yue Yu, Ninghao Liu, Lichao Sun, Haotao Mi, LeoweiLiang
The paper investigates how test‑time computation can enhance language models and at what cost, introducing the SELF‑POT benchmark to evaluate this across competition mathematics, competitive programming, and agentic workflows. SELF‑POT separates candidate coverage from final accuracy, tracks correctness transitions under revision, and measures protocol completion alongside task success. Using a unified budget rule, the study compares direct inference, parallel sampling, and self‑revision across five low‑cost reasoning models, revealing that selection rules and failure handling significantly influence gains and cost savings.
By Bangji Yang, Jingyuan Li, Jiajun Fan, Yi Evie Zhang, Ruihan Guo, Hongba Ma, Neil He, Chumeng Liang, Qinglong Zheng, Zhanghan Ni, Ge Liu
arXiv:2607. 13034v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly automate multi-step engineering and informatics workflows, yet they rarely ask how much effort a task actually requires.
By Junjie Yin, Xinyu Feng
The paper introduces SMITH, a reinforcement learning framework that jointly trains large language models to create and use tools within a single policy. By alternating between build and use tasks and employing separate reward signals for schema, code, and outcome failures, SMITH enables a 4B Qwen3 model to achieve state‑of‑the‑art accuracy on procedural reasoning benchmarks, outperforming larger untrained models and improving performance on downstream tasks when its tools are applied.
By Zhi Rui Tam, Chieh-Yen Lin, Yun-Nung Chen, Shao-Hua Sun, Hung-yi Lee
arXiv:2608. 07885v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning modes of language models outperform their non-reasoning counterparts on multi-step agentic tasks, but pay a 3-6x premium in output tokens on every episode -- much of it spent re-deriving procedures that are shared across episodes of the same domain.
By Agamdeep Singh, Srishti Gautam, Priyanshu Gupta, Nikita Mehrotra, Tanmay Bakshi, Sumit Gulwani