arXiv AI

Lost in the Flow with Code Talkers: Unveiling the Instruction-Tuning Tax of Large Language Models in Code Tasks

arXiv:2606. 08676v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI coding assistants have significantly improved developer productivity by automatically suggesting code that aligns with user intent, and many of these tools are now integrated directly into Integrated Development Environments (IDEs).

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

An Empirical Study of Automating Agent Evaluation

The paper presents EvalAgent, an AI assistant that automates agent evaluation by encoding domain expertise into evaluation skills such as procedural instructions, reusable code, and dynamic API retrieval. EvalAgent constructs a trace-based pipeline that outputs metrics, executable code, and reports, and is evaluated using a new meta-evaluation framework and AgentEvalBench. Results show that EvalAgent improves the Eval@1 metric from 17.5% to 65% and receives 79.5% human expert preference, while ablation studies confirm the importance of evaluation skills.

By Kang Zhou, Sangmin Woo, Haibo Ding, Kiran Ramnath, Subramanian Chidambaram, Aosong Feng, Vinayak Arannil, Muhyun Kim, Ishan Singh, Darren Wang, Zhichao Xu, Megha Gandhi, Nirmal Prabhu, Soumya Smruti Mishra, Smeet Dhakecha, Vivek Singh, Gouri Pandeshwar, Lin Lee Cheong
arXiv AI
6d ago

Up and Down the Abstraction Ladder: Code-Based Skills for Language Agents

The paper introduces CodeHack, a library of code-based skills with natural-language descriptions designed to improve language agents in complex environments like NetHack. By allowing agents to invoke reusable skills instead of selecting individual actions, the study shows that skill-based agents nearly triple game progression and cut inference cost by 86% in zero‑shot settings, while still retaining the option to fall back on primitive actions. In reinforcement learning, skill-based agents learn faster, achieving a 7.2× larger average gain in dungeon level within the same training budget.

By Bart{\l}omiej Cupia{\l}, Jens Tuyls, Maciej Wo{\l}czyk, Davide Paglieri, Martin Klissarov, Benjamin Eysenbach, Piotr Mi{\l}o\'s, Karthik R. Narasimhan
arXiv AI
3d ago

EngramBench: A Capability-Grounded Benchmark for Skill-Evolution Harnesses

EngramBench is a new benchmark designed to evaluate skill evolution in autonomous agents by focusing on genuine capability abstraction rather than solution copying. It includes 30 learning tasks and 13 unseen transfer tasks that require agents to manage complex, multi-hour development cycles with LLM‑simulated users. The study shows that while static skill banks cannot eliminate the need for precise code implementation, they effectively reduce redundant context and cut overall coding time by more than 55%.

By Zhixuan Tan, Pengjie Gu, Zhao Li, Yihan Hu, Xu He, Dong Li, Jianye Hao
arXiv AI
Jul 22

Don't Blame the Large Language Model: How Agent Harness Evolution Shapes Coding Agent Quality

arXiv:2607. 03691v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Coding agents, autonomous systems that use large language models (LLMs) to resolve software engineering tasks, rely on agent harness: a middleware layer in between a developer and a large language model that orchestrates system prompts, tool execution, context management, and iterative reasoning loops.

By Oussama Ben Sghaier, Hao Li, Bram Adams, Ahmed E. Hassan