arXiv AI

Operator Packages, Proposer Strength, and Construction-Family Plateaus in Office-Scale Verified Search

The paper reports on a large‑scale verified search experiment using a 30B language model on a laptop, evaluating three operator packages—schematic notebooks, named obstacles, and behavioural repulsion—in a factorial design across nine construction problems. Results show that the full composition of operators closes the seed‑to‑record gap more effectively than any single component, increases construction‑hash diversity, and that memory plus repulsion consistently avoids collapse. A frontier proposer achieves similar gains in far fewer samples, but the search ultimately stalls near a plateau where the reference family is adopted and optimized only when provided as code.

arXiv AI
Aug 20

Metrics That Write Themselves: Evolving an Evaluator from Its Own Blind Spots

The paper introduces EvalCEGAR, a method that automatically evolves a metric for evaluating AI-generated answers by iteratively refining a pool of small Python operators that flag potential defects. By using counterexample-guided abstraction refinement, the system identifies pairs of answers that score identically but differ in correctness, prompting the metric to broaden its scope rather than resample. On benchmark datasets, the evolved 55‑line operator closes a significant portion of the performance gap compared to hand‑written metrics and outperforms a large‑language‑model judge that incurs a cost per candidate.

By Xing Zhang, Yanwei Cui, Guanghui Wang, Zhihao Lin, Peiyang He
arXiv AI
Sep 7

SiLR: Structure-Preserving Admission and Process Reward for LLM Tool Agents

SiLR introduces a structure‑preserving admission and process reward mechanism for large language model (LLM) tool agents. Unlike traditional scalar‑score gates that can trap agents in plateau trajectories, SiLR shadow‑executes each proposal and admits it based on a product order over branch‑level violation states, ensuring safe and recoverable actions. Experiments on Gym‑ANM and CityLearn benchmarks show SiLR consistently recovers all multi‑action episodes and outperforms scalar gates, while also providing a robust reward signal for policy learning.

By Chenyu Zhou, Qiliang Jiang, Shuning Wu, Xu Zhou
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

ATLAS: Agentic Test-time Learning-to-Allocate Scaling

arXiv:2606. 01667v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Test-time scaling has become a major way to improve large language model reasoning, but its orchestration has remained designer-engineered: a fixed sample budget, a fixed refinement loop, a fixed scoring rule, or a fixed search policy decides how compute is spent, leaving the model in charge of solving but not of orchestration.

By Peijia Qin, Qi Cao, Pengtao Xie
arXiv AI
Sep 2

APEX-EM: Non-Parametric Online Learning for Autonomous Agents via Structured Procedural-Episodic Experience Replay

APEX-EM is a non‑parametric experience memory that stores full procedural‑episodic traces in a typed Procedural Knowledge Graph and retrieves them via semantic search, structural‑signature matching, and graph traversal. It uses a Plan‑Retrieve‑Generate‑Iterate‑Ingest workflow to produce, quality‑gate, and commit experiences, indexing both successes and failures so the agent learns what to reuse and what to avoid. Evaluations on five benchmarks with a shared GPT‑4o backbone show significant performance gains, such as +7.6 pp on BigCodeBench transfer and +1.4 pp on Lifelong Agent Bench, demonstrating that the memory adds to model capability rather than replacing it.

By Pratyay Banerjee, Masud Moshtaghi, Ankit Chadha
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 14

LLM-BabyBench: Can Language Models Plan in Worlds They Can Simulate?

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
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Agents Don't Paginate: First-Chunk Selection for LLM Tool Responses

The paper investigates why large‑language‑model coding agents rarely request a second chunk of tool output, focusing on the precision‑at‑1 rate ($p_1$) of the gold item appearing first in the first chunk. In a benchmark of 500 software‑engineering tasks, the authors compare six value functions and find that increasing $p_1$ does not systematically improve downstream accuracy; the agent can recover the correct answer from any position within the chunk. Adding file‑metadata signals to a keyword scorer actually reduces $p_1$, while a parameter‑free keyword scorer improves $p_1$ but still fails to boost overall accuracy.

By Tatiana Petrova, Andrei Mazniak, Radu State
arXiv AI
Jun 29

When Is an LLM Worth It for Hyperparameter Optimization? A Budget-Matched Study on Tabular Data Finds the Warm-Start Is a Default Configuration, Not the Model

arXiv:2606. 21641v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have been proposed as hyperparameter-optimization (HPO) advisors that "warm-start" search from prior knowledge, proposing strong configurations in very few evaluations.

By Carson Rodrigues, Oysturn Vas, Isaiah Abner DCosta, Nithish Kumar Prabhakaran