The paper investigates how a higher‑level controller in a hierarchical latent reasoner decides whether to preserve or replace a lower‑level strategy. Experiments across different training seeds show that learned revision timing can produce varied policies, but none surpasses a fixed, forced timing policy on the same checkpoint. The study highlights that state‑dependent control can alter actions without improving task performance, and that timing decisions are order‑sensitive and largely captured by a strong fixed schedule.
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...
The paper introduces Hindsight Meta-Experience Distillation (HMED), a method that lets self‑improving agents evaluate how revisions to their Meta‑Skills affect skill discovery by re‑executing both the original and revised Meta‑Skills from the same initial state. By comparing these outcomes, HMED creates structured Meta‑Experiences that provide learning signals even for revisions that are not ultimately kept. Experiments on three interactive benchmarks show that HMED consistently outperforms strong baselines, improving skill discovery by focusing on the consequences of the improvement process rather than just branch outcomes.
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.
The paper introduces Reliability‑Aware Future Conditioning (RAFC), a method that dynamically estimates how much to trust a generated future video clip and selects the most appropriate temporal hypothesis for robot manipulation tasks. By treating temporal misalignment as a control problem rather than a generation problem, RAFC improves success rates on the CALVIN benchmark and a Franka robot under various timing mismatches, outperforming static and uniform‑averaging baselines. The approach builds on Future‑Experience Conditioning (FEC) and learns solely from task reward without explicit alignment supervision.
arXiv:2609.08589v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent large language models can emit task-progress signals that agent frameworks use to decide whether a task should continue or stop, yet whether a...
The paper introduces the concept of intervention fidelity in latent world models, measuring whether a model’s open‑loop transitions align with actual environment interventions. Experiments on TD‑MPC2, Cheetah, and DreamerV3 show that high reward fit does not guarantee fidelity, and that self‑supervised models can outperform task‑anchored ones in preserving intervention effects. The authors propose a capture‑gated audit to localize failures and argue that fidelity must be directly audited on the model’s native interface.
Software engineering (SWE) agents resolve repository-level issues through long trajectories that grow increasingly expensive as context accumulates. Failed runs tend to be longer and exhibit redundant exploration or looping, suggesting that some failures may be detectable before completion.
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:2609.13543v1 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...
arXiv:2606. 28939v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Behavior-cloned diffusion policies are expressive but remain vulnerable to covariate shift: small deviations from demonstrated states can compound into task failure.
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.
The paper introduces a self‑healing harness that enforces admission control over language‑model agents’ self‑modifications. The harness runs a Detect‑Notice‑Heal‑Validate loop, allowing agents to propose rule changes that are only granted persistent authority after demonstrating improvement on a failure case without regressing on protected cases. Across 16 benchmark runs, the harness rejected many locally beneficial proposals that caused collateral regressions, while improving task‑completion scores and reliability.