arXiv:2607. 17947v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing AI measurement frameworks quantify cognitive capability, task automation, or catastrophic risk, but none measure autonomous agency: the extent to which a system behaves in a self-directed way.
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:2609.37501v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose RegLLM, a diagnostic harness for bounded autonomy in regulated agentic workflows. It instruments six trustworthiness signals: citation val...
The paper introduces a new multi‑agent micro‑benchmark called Delay‑of‑Gratification, modeled after the Stanford marshmallow experiment, to evaluate large language models (LLMs) in long‑horizon, multi‑turn interactions. In the benchmark, ReAct agents use a per‑step “raise a question” tool under various constraints—social context (broadcast vs. isolated), persona traits (age, hedonic drive), and tool‑use policy (mandatory vs. optional). Across 19,200 trajectories, the study finds that most agents exhibit an early impulse to “eat,” only 75.9% persist to the end, and factors such as isolation and hedonic drive significantly influence survival and questioning behavior, with ablations showing that removing hedonic drive and age can improve completion rates.
arXiv:2606. 23991v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: What is an agent?
arXiv:2607. 15883v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models are broadly capable, yet in sustained one-to-one conversation they still read as flat: competent, responsive, and somehow not quite the presence of a mind.
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 argues that evaluating agents as fixed models is insufficient, proposing instead to treat them as configurable systems. Using a new benchmark of four scientific tasks, the authors analyze how five configuration aspects—task information, reasoning, self‑verification, time budget, and backbone model—affect performance, noting that about 54% of outcome variance arises from run‑to‑run differences even with the same settings. The study finds that providing more task information has the strongest impact, while interactions among settings (e.g., extra time only helps with adequate information or model capability) and the choice of verification tools significantly shape agent behavior.
The paper re‑evaluates memory‑based self‑improving agents by adding multiple runs to measure variance and by randomizing task order. It finds that agent performance is noisy in complex, multi‑step environments and that improvement depends heavily on the sequence of tasks, revealing a hidden curriculum effect. The authors suggest that underspecification of tasks and environments contributes to this fragility and demonstrate that adding detailed rubrics and feedback can partially mitigate performance drops, though gaps remain.
arXiv:2607. 10059v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent systems based on large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed for autonomous tasks, yet existing evaluations mostly focus on task success rather than whether agents know when to abstain.
arXiv:2608. 10875v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed as personal assistants.
The paper introduces the Agentic Adoption Index (AAI), a new measure of delegated exposure that captures whether workers actually commit tasks to AI within structured workflows. Using semantic embeddings of 888,000 agent skill specifications from GitHub and 18,000 O*NET task statements, the authors find that occupations with high delegation differ from those most vulnerable to pre-AI automation, that AAI correlates more with technical capability than with current LLM use, and that for lower‑educated occupations AAI rises with wages while it falls for higher‑educated, high‑earning workers. These patterns also appear in an independent corpus from the Manus Skills Marketplace.
arXiv:2607. 29405v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic AI systems act through multi-step trajectories that combine planning, tool use, memory, interaction, and adaptation.