The paper introduces the concept of an agent’s "taste"—its ability to make effective long‑horizon decisions—and presents Taste‑Bench, a new benchmark that automatically generates decision‑fork questions from agent trajectories. Taste‑Bench evaluates models on choosing the best path without seeing future outcomes, revealing that top models answer only about 60% of questions correctly and that later‑appearing evidence makes forks harder. The authors also demonstrate that training a student model to mimic a teacher’s judgment improves decision quality and overall success on held‑out software engineering tasks.
By Wenbo Pan, Zhichao Liu, Shujie Liu, Jingying Zeng, Chin-Yew Lin, Xianfeng Tang, Yan Lu, Qi He, Xiaohua Jia
The paper introduces a self‑evolving harness framework where a frozen language‑model agent first solves tasks and then edits its own harness based on run records. Using a 49‑line seed harness, the evolved harness improves average scores on in‑distribution benchmarks by 4.48 points and on out‑of‑distribution benchmarks by 12.64 points, surpassing Codex on the former and matching it on the latter. Continued evolution on a specific out‑of‑distribution benchmark further raises performance, and the study analyzes emergent mechanisms such as output truncation and history compaction.
By Qiankai Xu
arXiv:2608. 15071v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning from experience is critical for developing capable, self-improving large language model (LLM) agents.
By Tianxin Wei, Zhan Shi, Minhua Lin, Bing He, Zewen Liu, Yisi Sang, Yuanchen Bei, Xuying Ning, Jiaru Zou, Ting-Wei Li, Xiao Lin, Yanjun Zhao, Chi Wang, Benoit Dumoulin, Dakuo Wang, Jingrui He, Hanqing Lu
arXiv:2604. 18543v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Constructing environments for training and evaluating claw-like agents remains a manual, human-intensive process that does not scale.
By Xirui Li, Ming Li, Ion Stoica, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Tianyi Zhou
Self-evolving agents can continually improve their behavior, while tools define the executable action space through which they interact with the environment. However, exposing the full tool library to...
The paper investigates how reinforcement learning can cause large language model agents to adopt shortcut policies for tool use, relying on superficial prompt cues rather than actual task needs. By creating synthetic environments that mix factual QA and math reasoning, the authors show that agents often invoke tools when cues are present, even when those tools are unnecessary, with spurious invocation rates rising up to 39%. They find that shortcut learning occurs mainly when agents have already mastered the target tool and that semantic alignment between cues and tools amplifies the effect. To counter this, they propose a dense, decision-level reward where an LLM judge assesses tool necessity, which reduces cue-driven tool use while maintaining performance.
By Yiwei Yang, Haoxiang Zhang, Bingbing Wen, Yao Lu, Yuchen Wu, Lei Zhang, Julian McAuley, Pan Lu, Bill Howe
arXiv:2409. 11363v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI agents have the potential to aid users on a variety of consequential tasks, including conducting scientific research.
By Zachary S. Siegel, Sayash Kapoor, Nitya Nadgir, Benedikt Stroebl, Arvind Narayanan
arXiv:2607. 06764v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent progress on ARC-AGI-1 from disclosed architectures has come broadly from two regimes: heavy test-time compute over frontier models (evolutionary search, exhaustive sampling, extended chain-of-thought), or benchmark-specific training in which small models are fine-tuned on ARC data, often with task-specialized architectures.
By Kabir Moghe, Peter Chin
The paper introduces Strategy Accumulation and Guided Execution (SAGE), a two-stage framework that makes automated fine-tuning of large language models cumulative. In the first stage, a multi-agent pipeline uses Monte Carlo Tree Search to explore training strategies while a Distillation Agent records task-specific insights and cross-task confidence scores into a structured repository. In the second stage, SAGE retrieves relevant experience from this repository to guide training on new tasks, achieving a 12.4‑percentage‑point improvement over a baseline pipeline without accumulated experience on nine unseen tasks.
By Haoran Zhao, Wei Du, Dingwen Yang, Jixuan Huang, Junlin Shang, Lingyong Fang, Ya Guo, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
arXiv:2601. 21754v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in language-based agentic tasks, their applicability to unseen, nonlinguistic environments (e.
By Haoyu Wang, Guozheng Ma, Shugang Cui, Yilun Kong, Haotian Luo, Li Shen, Mengya Gao, Yichao Wu, Xiaogang Wang, Dacheng Tao
UniToolCall introduces a unified framework for tool-use in large language model agents, standardizing toolset construction, dataset generation, and evaluation. The framework aggregates over 22,000 tools and creates a hybrid training corpus of more than 390,000 instances by combining ten public datasets with synthetically generated, structurally controlled trajectories. It models diverse interaction patterns—single‑hop vs. multi‑hop, single‑turn vs. multi‑turn, serial vs. parallel execution—and adds an Anchor Linkage mechanism to enforce cross‑turn dependencies, while converting seven public benchmarks into a common Query–Action–Observation–Answer format for fine‑grained evaluation.
By Yijuan Liang, Xinghao Chen, Yifan Ge, Ziyi Wu, Hao Wu, Changyu Zeng, Wei Xing, Xiaoyu Shen
OS-Marathon is a new benchmark that tests computer‑use agents on vast‑horizon, repetitive tasks, covering 100 tasks across five scenarios and ten domains. The study shows that current state‑of‑the‑art agents perform poorly on these tasks, and that simply decomposing workflows into subtasks does not solve the problem. Introducing a cost‑friendly personalization method called GraphDemo, which adapts agents from a single human demonstration, improves performance, highlighting the value of human guidance for these challenging tasks.
By Jing Wu, Wenjie Ai, Daphne Barretto, Yiye Chen, Qingyu Chen, Yuhang He, Pranit Chawla, Nicholas Gyd\'e, Yanan Jian, Vibhav Vineet