LLM‑BabyBench transforms the BabyAI gridworld into a fully observable, purely textual setting that isolates planning as the sole source of failure. By serialising the entire grid, providing formal instructions, and validating actions deterministically, the benchmark introduces the PPD suite—Predict, Plan, and Decompose tasks—each scored with metrics that separate mission understanding from sequencing. Across a range of large language models, simulation accuracy is high while planning success drops sharply beyond a model‑specific horizon, revealing that plan length—not grid size—drives failure and that models often commit to a single corridor‑shaped route without backtracking.
By Idriss Malek, Omar Choukrani, Daniil Orel, Anh Duy Le Dinh, Zhuohan Xie, Zangir Iklassov, Martin Tak\'a\v{c}, Salem Lahlou
Agentick is a unified benchmark for sequential decision‑making agents that evaluates RL, LLM, VLM, hybrid, and human agents on 37 procedurally generated tasks across six capability categories, four difficulty levels, and five observation modalities via a single Gymnasium‑compatible interface. It includes a Coding API, oracle reference policies, pre‑built SFT datasets, a composable agent harness, and a live leaderboard. An evaluation of 27 configurations and over 90,000 episodes shows no single approach dominates, with GPT‑5 mini leading overall, PPO excelling in planning and multi‑agent tasks, and the reasoning harness boosting LLM performance by 3‑10×, while ASCII observations outperform natural language.
By Roger Creus Castanyer, Pablo Samuel Castro, Glen Berseth
arXiv:2610.09858v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Large language model agents tackle multi-step tasks by interleaving reasoning and tool calls with observations from the environment. Prior work has s...
By Sergei Polezhaev, Barys Liskavets, Ori Press, Alexander Golubev
PIVOT (Plan-Inspect-eVOlve Trajectories) is a self‑supervised framework that refines large‑language‑model agent plans by treating trajectories as optimizable objects. It operates in four stages—PLAN, INSPECT, EVOLVE, and VERIFY—using structured losses and textual gradients to iteratively improve trajectories and ensure compliance with task constraints. Experiments on DeepPlanning and GAIA show that PIVOT achieves up to 94% relative improvement in constraint satisfaction with human‑in‑the‑loop feedback and still delivers significant gains autonomously, while using 3x to 5x fewer tokens than competing methods.
By Tuo Zhang, Alin-Ionut Popa, Yan Xu, Rui Song, Dimitrios Dimitriadis
The paper introduces System 1 models—fast, single‑pass decision engines that map inputs directly to structured outputs, addressing the latency, cost, and calibration issues of large language models. It presents a five‑family taxonomy (encoder‑based classifiers, reward models, non‑autoregressive engines, contrastive models, and extraction models) and discusses training, deployment trade‑offs, and calibration theory, including proper scoring rules and RLCD. The guide also covers integration into agentic workflows, System 1+System 2 cascades, 18 application domains, an open‑source ecosystem, and practical resources such as code, a model zoo, and assessment questions.
By Haggai Roitman
CAST is a critique‑aware training framework that transforms sparse task outcomes into action‑level supervision for both critique learning and policy optimization. By analyzing agent trajectories, CAST synthesizes structured rationales that explain action validity under partial observability, enabling the creation of richer training data. Fine‑tuned Qwen3‑family models trained with CAST show significant reliability gains, outperforming GPT‑OSS‑120B by over 10% on Retail tasks and improving Telehealth performance by 9% in an out‑of‑domain setting.
By Amir Saeidi, Zehua Zhang, Rishitosh Singh, Naman Ahuja, Vivek Gupta, Ali Payani, Gaowen Liu, Jayanth Srinivasa, Chitta Baral
arXiv:2607. 03953v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This study independently replicates and extends the Natural Language Tools (NLT) framework of Johnson et al.
By Alexander Somma, Isabelle Plante, Fred Premji
arXiv:2607. 17082v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model agents solve tasks by generating trajectories that interleave planning, tool calls, and intermediate results.
By Babak Barazandeh, Subhabrata Majumdar, George Michailidis
arXiv:2610.15708v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Coding agents based on frozen language models can improve their performance by refining the external context they rely on, without updating model weigh...
By Yutong Cheng, Haifeng Chen, Peng Gao, Wei Cheng
Translating natural-language planning intent into verified plans is a longstanding challenge: people communicate goals in language, while classical planners require formal PDDL specifications. Recent agentic frameworks bridge this gap by orchestrating a pool of specialized repair agents inside a verifier-checked refinement loop, but the orchestrator at the centre is itself a prompted frontier LLM, paying a frontier-LLM API call at every refinement step.
arXiv:2606. 27009v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent large language model (LLM) loops, for example a Writer that drafts and a Critic that revises, are almost always terminated by a fixed iteration cap (max_iterations).
By Sahil Shrivastava
GRASP is a multi-stage planning framework that improves the reliability of large language models on complex tasks. It separates planning into three specialized modules—GenPlan for global macro-guidelines, RevPlan for exploring localized strategies, and VerPlan for multi-criteria evaluation—allowing context isolation and strict macro-regularization. Experiments show GRASP outperforms direct LLM planners by significant margins on datasets such as Natural Plan Calendar Scheduling, ZebraLogic, and SciBench Math, and it mitigates performance collapse in multi-task and dual-task settings.
By Arunabh Srivastava (Amir), Mohammad A. (Amir), Khojastepour, Srimat Chakradhar, Sennur Ulukus