arXiv AI

BAGEN: Are LLM Agents Budget-Aware?

arXiv:2606. 00198v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While agents are increasingly spending more resources, today agent cost is mostly measured only after execution.

arXiv AI
2d ago

Agents Are Systems, Not Models: Rethinking Agentic Evaluation

The paper argues that evaluating agents as fixed models is insufficient, proposing instead to treat them as configurable systems. Using a new benchmark of four scientific tasks, the authors analyze how five configuration aspects—task information, reasoning, self‑verification, time budget, and backbone model—affect performance, noting that about 54% of outcome variance arises from run‑to‑run differences even with the same settings. The study finds that providing more task information has the strongest impact, while interactions among settings (e.g., extra time only helps with adequate information or model capability) and the choice of verification tools significantly shape agent behavior.

By Luis Wiedmann, Leander Girrbach, Cordelia Schmid, Zeynep Akata
arXiv AI
Sep 25

ERRAND: Budgeted Maintenance of Agent Memory

ERRAND is a new method for budgeted maintenance of agent memory that treats revalidation of stored knowledge as a priced errand competing for scarce actions. It uses an errand index that is single‑peaked, allowing certainty in either direction to cost nothing, and repairs by writing new versions rather than deleting old ones. In experiments across two drifting tool‑use worlds, ERRAND outperforms non‑oracle policies, achieving up to 10.0 percentage points improvement over eager revalidation while using only 11.0% of steps, and it self‑terminates when no budget is imposed.

By Beining Wu, Zihao Ding, Jun Huang
arXiv AI
Sep 3

How Fast Do Agents Rot? An Empirical Study of Long-Horizon Degradation in LLM Agents for Production Decision-Making

The paper investigates why large language model (LLM) agents fail on long, multi‑step production workflows despite high benchmark success. By testing nine models (1.2 B–671 B parameters) across six task families and multiple horizons, the authors find that task success follows a geometric decay governed by a per‑step reliability that never reaches 1, leading to inevitable collapse for long horizons. The degradation is driven mainly by step count rather than context length, and the study quantifies a significant gap between benchmark and production performance, especially for agentic tool‑use tasks.

By Shubhra Mittal
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 7

How to Speculate about Uncertainty in Agentic Coding? A Draft-Model Gate Method

The paper introduces Speculative Uncertainty (SU), a technique that infers a failure likelihood for black‑box LLM agents by evaluating their generated token sequences with a lightweight draft model, without needing internal model details. SU extracts phase‑aware features from reasoning and action spans, calibrates them against verifiable outcomes, and produces a failure‑likelihood score usable by downstream policies. Applying a pre‑execution veto gate based on SU to software‑engineering agents such as Qwen3‑Coder‑480B and Claude 3.5 Sonnet reduced execution error rates by 6‑8 percentage points and token costs by 14‑19 %, while maintaining performance on out‑of‑distribution benchmarks and across different agent models.

By Konstantin Grotov, Valentin Malykh