Large language model (LLM) agents solving multi-step tasks frequently commit to trajectories that are doomed to fail, yet continue to consume substantial inference compute before the failure becomes observable. We show that failure is predictable early from the agent's internal representations: lightweight per-round probes on hidden activations anticipate eventual episode failure as early as the first interaction round, where scorers reading only the agent's observable behavior are barely better than chance.
arXiv:2607. 06503v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents solving multi-step tasks frequently commit to trajectories that are doomed to fail, yet continue to consume substantial inference compute before the failure becomes observable.
arXiv:2609. 04875v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-running LLM agents are stateful: beyond the transcript they accrete compressed summaries, plaintext memory, pending tool plans, and, under every serving API, a KV cache.
arXiv:2607. 10608v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Memory is becoming a core component of long-horizon AI agents, allowing agents to reuse past experience when operating web browsers, software tools, and other interactive environments.
arXiv:2608. 06811v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Resolving a real software issue with a large language model (LLM) agent is a long repair episode, often tens to hundreds of steps spanning exploration, hypothesis, implementation, and verification.
The paper introduces LRE (Learned Relevance Eviction), a lightweight, CPU‑only, language‑model‑free scorer that learns which parts of an agent’s interaction history are task‑critical and preserves them verbatim. In experiments, LRE matches or surpasses baseline eviction policies on accuracy‑cost trade‑offs, recovers 93% of full‑history accuracy, reduces worst‑case prompt size by 52%, and outperforms dense and token‑pruning encoders in conversational memory while being 295–1569× smaller. The method also achieves superior budgeted answer quality on LoCoMo reading and can be trained annotation‑free, recovering 95% of supervised scorer performance.
arXiv:2607. 08716v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In long-horizon tasks, decision-relevant state is often scattered across an expanding trajectory, while the action agent must surface it and act.
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.
arXiv:2605.12978v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning from past experience benefits from two complementary forms of memory: episodic traces -- raw trajectories of what happened -- and consolid...
In long-horizon tasks, decision-relevant state is often scattered across an expanding trajectory, while the action agent must surface it and act. As trajectories grow, task requirements, environment facts, prior attempts, diagnoses, and open subgoals can be buried in the context window or pushed beyond it, failing to influence decisions when needed.
arXiv:2609.09115v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long horizon Large Language Model (LLM) agents rely on external memory systems to preserve user preferences and task knowledge across extended interact...
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:2606. 23195v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on memory systems to maintain long-term coherence.