arXiv AI

Substrate-Aware AI Agents: Execution Context as a First-Class Input

The paper introduces the concept of substrate blindness, where AI agents lack execution context in their planning. By providing a 128 MB RAM and 10 s wall‑time contract to large language models, the authors show that agents generate code that uses less memory, runs faster, and incorporates structural changes such as bounded blocking and in‑place buffers. Across three leading models, contract disclosure improved resource usage and correctness, demonstrating that minimal execution contracts can guide agents to produce more efficient programs.

arXiv AI
Sep 30

Thinking Before Thinking: Scaling Agentic Inference Through Meta-Reasoning

The paper introduces agentic meta‑reasoning, a structured inference‑time framework that explicitly manages control decisions—such as selecting partial work, restarting, or stopping—during long‑horizon agentic tasks. By delegating task execution to workers and consolidating decisions through a lightweight controller that references persistent memory, the method reduces the need to replay full histories. Experiments on ProgramBench and other benchmarks show that meta‑reasoning improves performance over direct control baselines, especially as computation budgets increase, and reveals greater reuse of earlier work and higher solution coverage.

By Paras Dahal, Anton Bakhtin, Taco Cohen, Zhengxing Chen, Carole-Jean Wu, Rob Fergus, Scott Yih, Gabriel Synnaeve, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Sanjeev Arora, Jason Weston, Anirudh Goyal
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Coding Agents for Generalized Task and Motion Planning Problems

The paper investigates whether large language model–based coding agents can automatically synthesize programs that solve generalized task and motion planning (TAMP) problems across diverse instances. Using Claude Code and Codex, the authors evaluate 980 generated programs on 100 held‑out environments from KinDER and PDDLStream, achieving mean success rates between 56 % and 95 %—higher than hand‑engineered planners and other baselines—while requiring an order of magnitude less computation per instance. The study demonstrates that coding agents can calibrate physical models, test edge cases, and refine strategies, suggesting they are a strong baseline for generalized TAMP.

By Matteo Merler, Bowen Li, Josh Roy, Yichao Liang, Qianwei Wang, Yixuan Huang, Tom Silver
arXiv AI
Oct 16

PREPING: Zero-Task Agent Memory Construction via Self-Practice

PREPING introduces a proposer-guided framework for constructing agent memory before encountering target tasks, using self-generated synthetic practice. The method employs a proposer memory to shape synthetic tasks, a solver to execute them, and a validator to filter useful trajectories, thereby avoiding redundancy and infeasibility. Experiments on AppWorld, BFCL v3, and MCP-Universe demonstrate that PREPING outperforms a no-memory baseline and rivals playbook-based approaches while reducing deployment costs by 2.99× and 2.23× respectively.

By Yumin Choi, Sangwoo Park, Minki Kang, Jinheon Baek, Sung Ju Hwang
arXiv AI
Oct 26

Benchmarks Are Surprisingly Compaction-Friendly

The paper investigates how context compaction—losing information to free up a language model’s context window—affects performance on long‑horizon agentic tasks. Using the OpenCode scaffold and five compaction strategies, the authors evaluate three frontier models on PaperBench, ProgramBench, and PostTrainBench, finding that compaction thresholds largely do not hurt performance for 1M‑context models, but can degrade GPT‑5.3‑Codex on certain benchmarks. The study also shows that compaction can silently drop critical task constraints, especially on ProgramBench and real user‑agent sessions from SWE‑chat, yet current benchmarks remain largely compaction‑friendly because objectives are fixed and progress is stored externally.

By Jeanne Salle, Hardik Bhatnagar, Matthias Bethge, Sahar Abdelnabi, Maksym Andriushchenko
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 24

Coding Agents for Generalized Task and Motion Planning Problems

The paper investigates whether coding agents can automate the synthesis of programs that solve generalized Task and Motion Planning (TAMP) problems. By evaluating Claude Code and Codex on 28 simulated environments, the authors find that these agents outperform hand-engineered planners and other baselines, achieving higher success rates and lower computation per instance. The agents also demonstrate adaptive behaviors such as calibrating physical models and refining strategies during interaction.

arXiv AI
Oct 31

Learning to Formulate: Agentic Hardware-Software Co-Design of AI Infrastructure through Progressive Optimization and Verification

The paper introduces Formulaic, a workflow that separates the tasks of an agentic language-model agent, a mathematical solver, and verification to co-design AI hardware and software. The agent iteratively refines problem formulations from the computation graph down to the chip, using templates that guarantee correctness. Experiments on NVIDIA GB10 and a simulated Ventus GPU show significant speedups for Qwen models and faster verification through proof reuse.

By Yi Ding, Li Shang
arXiv AI
Oct 26

RSI-Opt: Recursive Self-Improvement Optimizer Agents For Model Training

RSI-Opt introduces Recursive Self-Improvement Optimizer Agents that evolve their own training policies by accumulating knowledge from previous runs, including prompts, playbooks, optimizer code, and decision cadences. A meta‑agent rewrites and archives these policies, enabling reusable procedures and code that adapt to new tasks. Across multiple generations and tasks, RSI‑Opt improves optimizer performance, achieving higher z‑scores on evolution suites, better cross‑model transfer, and significant error reductions on PDE benchmarks compared to fixed‑prompt baselines.

By Binghang Lu, Yige Sun, Guang Lin