arXiv AI

Learning When and How to Intervene: A Hindsight-Distilled Sentinel for Coding Agents

arXiv AI
Sep 21

DENSE: Distilling Agent Trajectories into Evidence-Grounded Shortcut Trees for Self-Refinement

arXiv:2609.21423v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Online agent deployments produce abundant execution traces, while task-specific verification and expert annotation are costly to scale. We study how to...

By Siyuan Liu (Fudan University, Meituan Longcat Team), Fan Yu (Fudan University, Meituan Longcat Team), Dongyu Ru (Meituan Longcat Team), Yizhu Liu (Meituan Longcat Team), Yifan Yang (Meituan Longcat Team), Xuezhi Cao (Meituan Longcat Team), Xunliang Cai (Meituan Longcat Team), Yixin Cao (Fudan University)
Hugging Face Trending Papers
5d ago

Shockingly Simple Self-retrospection Improves Agentic Models Without RL

The paper explores Retrospection-Only Fine-Tuning (ROFT), a method where a language-model agent improves its behavior by generating and training on explanations of its own experiences, without external teachers or reward signals. In software‑engineering tasks with Qwen3.5‑4B, ROFT achieves comparable or better solve rates than GRPO while requiring fewer updates and training time, and can learn from failures alone. Behavioral analysis shows ROFT indirectly assigns credit to actions and can produce shorter, more direct solutions when prompted to focus on direct solutions.

arXiv AI
Jul 24

AI Assistants Overassist

arXiv:2607. 21306v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as tutors and thought partners, helping users reason through problems.

By Verona Teo, Raghav Jain, Tobias Gerstenberg, Max Kleiman-Weiner
arXiv AI
Jun 4

Plan, Watch, Recover: A Benchmark and Architectures for Proactive Procedural Assistance

arXiv:2606. 04970v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We envision a proactive multi-modal assistant system which gives users real-time step-by-step guidance on a procedural task, autonomously deciding \textit{when} to interrupt, and \textit{how} to coach.

By Kaustav Kundu, Ritvik Shrivastava, Maxim Arap, Nanshu Wang, Xianhui Zhu, Quintin Fettes, Gautam Tiwari, Parth Suresh, Th\'eo Moutakanni, Alejandro Castillejo Munoz, Allen Bolourchi, Pascale Fung, Pinar Donmez, Babak Damavandi, Anuj Kumar, Seungwhan Moon
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 16

Spurious Tool Use: When RL Agents Learn the Wrong Reason to Act

The paper investigates how reinforcement learning can cause large language model agents to adopt shortcut policies for tool use, relying on superficial prompt cues rather than actual task needs. By creating synthetic environments that mix factual QA and math reasoning, the authors show that agents often invoke tools when cues are present, even when those tools are unnecessary, with spurious invocation rates rising up to 39%. They find that shortcut learning occurs mainly when agents have already mastered the target tool and that semantic alignment between cues and tools amplifies the effect. To counter this, they propose a dense, decision-level reward where an LLM judge assesses tool necessity, which reduces cue-driven tool use while maintaining performance.

By Yiwei Yang, Haoxiang Zhang, Bingbing Wen, Yao Lu, Yuchen Wu, Lei Zhang, Julian McAuley, Pan Lu, Bill Howe
arXiv AI
Jul 14

AgentAbstain: Do LLM Agents Know When Not to Act?

arXiv:2607. 10059v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent systems based on large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed for autonomous tasks, yet existing evaluations mostly focus on task success rather than whether agents know when to abstain.

By Xun Liu, Yi Evie Zhang, Vira Kasprova, Parisa Rabbani, Pardis Sadat Zahraei, Tianyu Zhang, Ali Ebrahimpour-Boroojeny, Varun Chandrasekaran
arXiv AI
Aug 11

FailForge: Distilling Procedural Competence from Persistent Failures into Code Agents

arXiv:2608. 08570v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Rejection sampling fine-tuning (RFT) is widely used to train code agents by generating trajectories on verifiable software engineering tasks, retaining those that pass the tests, and fine-tuning on the successful rollouts.

By Dongyi Lv, Fushun E, Aichen Cai, Liang Huang, Ya Zhang, Qiuyu Ding, Canhui Wu, Zhi Wang, Yuesong Zhang, Jiaqi Wang, Nan Duan
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

Studying Without a Syllabus: Task-Agnostic Environment Preprocessing

The paper investigates whether a language‑model agent can autonomously study an unfamiliar environment without prior task instructions or examples, and decide how to prepare for future tasks. It formalizes task‑agnostic environment preprocessing, where a studying system explores under a budget to produce reusable artifacts for a later solver. Experiments on six diverse benchmarks show that a meta‑agent variant often outperforms fixed methods, though larger budgets do not consistently boost downstream reward, yet the artifacts still reduce test‑time sampling needed to achieve a target score.

By Vinay Samuel, Varun Ursekar, Vijay S. Kalmath, Apaar Shanker, Veronica Chatrath, Yuan Xue
arXiv AI
Jun 4

Can Generalist Agents Automate Data Curation?

arXiv:2606. 04261v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Curating training data is among the most consequential yet labor-intensive parts of modern AI development: practitioners iteratively propose, implement, evaluate, and revise data policies against noisy benchmark feedback.

By Feiyang Kang, Hanze Li, Adam Nguyen, Mahavir Dabas, Jiaqi W. Ma, Frederic Sala, Dawn Song, Ruoxi Jia