The paper investigates whether small large language model agents can operate within explicit wall‑clock time budgets while using the allotted time productively. Experiments with Qwen3.6‑27B on MLE‑Bench Lite and Qwen3‑4B on Zork I show that agents fail to translate budget statements into controlled time use, largely due to lack of timing feedback and poor anticipation of action durations. Interventions such as harness‑based timing exposure, enforcement hooks, and reinforcement learning with budget‑aware rewards improve budget adherence but do not lead to better task performance, revealing a persistent gap between respecting time limits and effectively allocating extra time.
By Aaron Wang, Neelabh Madan, Vlad Sobal, Matthew Trager, Michael Kleinman, Elman Mansimov, Wei Xia, Stefano Soatto
arXiv:2607. 28399v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Computer-use agents often fail on transient GUI events because they produce the correct action only after the relevant window has already closed.
By Zihan Dong, Rui Qian, Qishi Zhan, Dongshen Peng, Kaixin Li, Yu Li
Computer-use agents often fail on transient GUI events because they produce the correct action only after the relevant window has already closed. We identify the main cause as expensive autoregressive decoding on the decision-time critical path.
arXiv:2609.17416v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Voice agents built on LLMs follow a rigid listen-think-speak loop that inserts seconds of dead air before every reply. We show that continuous-time cog...
By Bojie Li, Noah Shi
The paper introduces NP‑Bench, a benchmark and a proactive scheduling planner that coordinates parallel large‑language‑model coding agents. By partitioning work scopes and ordering merges ahead of time, the planner improves clean‑integration rates from 1/9 to 9/9 and eliminates merge conflicts, outperforming both no‑coordination and reactive‑detection baselines. It also demonstrates that cross‑session memory can eliminate repeated mistakes and that routing facts to agents does not improve long‑context accuracy at scale.
By Sumanyu Muku
ReLiveGym is a diagnostic environment that evaluates long‑lived language‑model agents over weeks of chronologically replayed real‑world streams such as news, market data, and social media. The tasks vary in time sensitivity, reasoning depth, and recurrence, and the study tests eight base language models to see how model choice and harness design—especially action timing—affect performance. Continuous learning from hindsight feedback is also examined to address failure modes in these long‑term tasks.
By Xisen Jin, Jingheng Li, Zhenglun Chen, Junyi Du, Xiang Ren
AgentTime is a benchmark that tests whether AI agents can manage their own runtime by working for a specified duration, predicting their wall‑clock time, and estimating elapsed time afterward. It includes 222 tasks from 18 sources across coding, computer use, agentic work, and automated research, with duration‑following experiments that append a single instruction specifying how long to work. Results show significant variability in accuracy, with some agents deviating from requested runtimes by up to 2.9×, and many agents stopping prematurely even after completing a task.
By Michael Ofengenden, Maksym Andriushchenko
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
SCLATE is a new execution substrate that allows continual‑learning benchmarks and agents to share a single event scheduler via adapters, enabling tasks, session events, and memory consolidation to run on a compressed, real‑time timeline. It also functions as a rollout engine that records every model call’s tokens and log probabilities without modifying the agent’s harness or memory. Using SCLATE, the authors ported seven benchmarks, compared ten harness‑memory configurations across ten models, and demonstrated that post‑training Qwen3.5‑4B can effectively leverage both harness and memory, improving performance on multiple metrics.
By Youngmok Jung, Sirajul Salekin, Henry Tran, Javier Movellan, Zhao Huang, Manjot Bilkhu
Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed as personal assistants. Existing evaluations, however, mostly use short, self-contained requests in static environments.
arXiv:2609.00874v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: As agentic systems become compound systems, increasingly important decisions move above task execution itself: when should a higher-level controller pr...
By Ayushi Chadha
arXiv:2609.13543v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: LLM agents are predominantly benchmarked on short, single-task trajectories, yet real deployments run for hours under contention, surfacing a different...
By Grace Chang Yuan, Xiaoman Zhang, Sung Eun Kim, Luyang Luo, Pranav Rajpurkar