The paper presents a unified framework for proactive service agents, defining proactivity as an agent’s ability to infer service opportunities from incomplete signals and decide whether to remain silent, ask, assist, or act. It models this as a partially observable sequential decision process constrained by authorization and risk, integrating timing, content, and delivery into a single structured action. The authors categorize existing methods along a decision pipeline—state and need estimation, intervention gating, action construction, and feedback adaptation—and propose standardized metrics for evaluating triggering, timing, calibration, user burden, safety, and policy value across diverse interaction modalities.
arXiv:2608. 14132v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mobile GUI Agents powered by multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show promise in human-computer intelligence.
arXiv:2609.07741v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Persistent AI assistants are intended to extend human attention, memory, and coordination across changing digital and physical environments. To be trul...
arXiv:2606. 02965v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Benchmarks for autonomous agents measure whether agents complete tasks, yet this framing is systematically blind to whether an agent should have proceeded at all.
The paper investigates how agentic systems decide between acting and abstaining, focusing on the fidelity of their reasoning explanations. Using Qwen3‑8B in a multi‑party conversation setting, the authors compare direct decision policies, reasoning policies, supervised fine‑tuning, and reinforcement learning, finding a trade‑off: strong direct policies yield higher performance but no traceable reasoning, while reasoning policies provide an audit trail at the cost of lower recall. The study also uncovers that exposing reasoning can alter the agent’s policy and that common faithfulness metrics may overstate the alignment between reasoning and decisions.
arXiv:2607. 17701v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Proactive agents are expected to anticipate user needs and provide autonomous assistance by perceiving environmental context without explicit instructions.
The paper introduces a framework for designing proactive large‑language‑model agents, centered on three joint principles—Task Capability, Temporal Allocation, and Trust—alongside a five‑dimensional design space. It proposes PROACTIVITY‑GYM, a simulation testbed for evaluating proactive assistance across multi‑day scenarios, and presents empirical findings that highlight performance gaps and the importance of aligning interventions with user trust. Human studies show that misaligned interventions can sharply reduce trust, even when outcomes are correct, underscoring the need for careful joint optimization of the 3T principles.
arXiv:2606. 02965v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As large language models gain tool access and are deployed as autonomous agents capable of editing records, executing transactions, and modifying infrastructure, we still evaluate them based on the sole metric of task completion.
PRISM is a framework for proactive agents that decides when to intervene by using a cost‑sensitive decision gate and a dual‑process reasoning architecture. The agent only engages a resource‑intensive slow reasoning mode near the decision boundary, guided by a calibrated probability of user acceptance and asymmetric costs for missed help versus false alarms. Training employs gate‑aligned distillation, allowing the response policy to be decoupled from the gate for tunable, auditable control, and on the ProactiveBench benchmark PRISM reduces false alarms by 22.78% while improving F1 by 20.14% over strong baselines.
StepSafe introduces a training framework called ASPO that focuses on step‑level timely intervention in agentic systems. It aligns decisions with their respective prefixes, rewards actions that fit the current stage, and uses adaptive feedback self‑distillation to credit reasoning. The resulting StepSafe guardrail achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on five agent‑safety benchmarks, improving the safety‑utility Pareto curve with a Youden’s J of 53.0 for a 4B model.
The paper introduces JevAct, a runtime verification framework that intercepts selected actions of large language model (LLM) agents before execution. JevAct compiles domain policies into executable state checks and uses a prefill-only decision model to provide probability‑based judgments, enabling feedback‑driven correction without modifying the underlying agent. Evaluations on eleven LLM agents across Airline, Telecom, and BFCL benchmarks show that JevAct improves agent reliability, especially on Telecom and BFCL tasks.
Consilience is an inference‑time orchestration framework that steers and certifies communication among multi‑agent large language models in hidden‑profile settings. It summarizes each discussion turn with a compact state of uncertainty, disagreement, evidence gain, redundancy, and premature consensus, then selects a communication intervention (challenge, clarify, seek evidence, or route) and speaker. A round‑wise conformal calibration procedure guarantees that the controller’s proposed action has bounded one‑step regret with high probability, and an acceptance mechanism enforces this guarantee for the executed action. Experiments on HiddenBench‑style tasks show that Consilience improves decision accuracy and communication efficiency over fixed and unstructured protocols, sometimes outperforming a full‑information baseline.
The paper introduces NAQD‑Env, a synthetic benchmark designed to test language agents’ ability to selectively withdraw and resume actions when new evidence, permissions, or stop instructions arise. It evaluates models against a deterministic reference policy across eleven dependency families, measuring policy agreement, task value, withdrawal, resumption, and event reporting. Experiments on 350 scenarios show low withdrawal recall, no valid resumption, and limited policy alignment, highlighting the need to treat selective withdrawal as a distinct reliability component.