arXiv Computation and Language

When Agents Slow Down: Understanding LLM Agents' Test-Time Strategies via Elo-per-token Analysis

arXiv AI
Oct 27

CTXAgent - Self-Controlled Context Management of LLM Agents

The paper introduces CTXAgent, a self‑controlled context management system for large language model agents that compacts conversation history when a token threshold is reached. It evaluates seven frontier models, comparing their ability to manage context with and without dedicated tools, and benchmarks performance across coding, scientific, and software engineering tasks. Results show that well‑managed models keep live context below 100k tokens, maintain high benchmark scores, and achieve significant cost reductions, with Claude Opus 5.5 outperforming its explicit configuration by 34% lower cost.

By Matthias Busch, Marius Tacke, Roland C. Aydin, Christian Feiler, Christian J. Cyron
arXiv AI
Oct 12

Humanize MLE Agents: Multi-Agent Session Alternation Beyond Single-Agent Limits

The paper introduces Humanize MLE Agents (HMA), a workflow that alternates two agents across sessions on a shared workspace, limiting each session to at most k experiments and resetting context between sessions. This approach, modeled as a context‑reset semi‑Markov decision process, outperforms single‑agent baselines, achieving a 78.2% any‑medal rate on 75 Kaggle MLE‑bench tasks—8.0 points higher than the best open‑source baseline and using only a quarter of its time budget. Across six heterogeneous agent pairs, HMA improves the any‑medal rate by an average of 6.4 points, and a supplementary kernel‑optimization case reaches 878 cycles, within 1.6% of the community leaderboard leader.

By Changye Li, Zijian Zhang, Muheng Li, Yiduo Pang, Tingjun Wu, Menghan Li, Yitong Liu, Hongkai Guo, Mengchi Chen, Chenyu He, Kaisheng Ma, Wei Xu, Song Han, Sihao Liu, Ligeng Zhu
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 3

How Much Can Language Models Gain from Test-Time Computation?

The paper investigates how test‑time computation can enhance language models and at what cost, introducing the SELF‑POT benchmark to evaluate this across competition mathematics, competitive programming, and agentic workflows. SELF‑POT separates candidate coverage from final accuracy, tracks correctness transitions under revision, and measures protocol completion alongside task success. Using a unified budget rule, the study compares direct inference, parallel sampling, and self‑revision across five low‑cost reasoning models, revealing that selection rules and failure handling significantly influence gains and cost savings.

By Bangji Yang, Jingyuan Li, Jiajun Fan, Yi Evie Zhang, Ruihan Guo, Hongba Ma, Neil He, Chumeng Liang, Qinglong Zheng, Zhanghan Ni, Ge Liu
arXiv AI
Oct 12

Do More Agents Help? Evaluating Accuracy and Cost in LLM Multi-Agent Workflows

The paper introduces BenchAgent, a framework for evaluating multi‑agent large language model (LLM) workflows against a single‑agent baseline, BenchAgent Core. Using GPT‑4.1 across ten reasoning, coding, and tool‑use benchmarks, the study compares six multi‑agent configurations, finding that EvoAgent achieves the highest mean pooled accuracy (79.70%) while other agents lag by 1.71–8.76 percentage points. The analysis also highlights trade‑offs in token consumption and accuracy, offering guidance for selecting and optimizing LLM multi‑agent workflows.

By Yuhang Fu, Ruishan Fang, Jiaqi Shao, Huiyu Zheng, Zhengtao Zhu, Bing Luo, Zhenyu Wen, Tao Lin
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Learning What Not to Forget: Long-Horizon Agent Memory from a Few Kilobytes of Learning

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.

By Nusrat Jahan Lia, Aritra Mazumder
arXiv AI
Jul 13

KV-PRM: Efficient Process Reward Modeling via KV-Cache Transfer for Multi-Agent Test-Time Scaling

arXiv:2607. 09153v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Process Reward Models (PRMs) have been proven to be highly effective in guiding test-time scaling (TTS) methods, which significantly boost the capabilities of LLM-based multi-agent systems.

By Peng Kuang, Haibo Jin, Xiaoyu Han, Yanli Wang, Xiaopeng Yuan, Ye Yu, Kaidi Xu, Haohan Wang
arXiv AI
Oct 16

EMO: A Closed-Loop Test-Time Computation Framework via Alternating Context Optimization and Logits Steering

EMO is a training‑free, closed‑loop framework that alternates context estimation and distribution refinement to steer frozen language models during test time. It uses textual gradients from an external judge to update the system context (E‑step) and then applies a confidence‑constrained logit correction based on next‑token distribution differences (M‑step). Empirical results show EMO improves zero‑shot performance across eight models and six benchmarks, outperforming both baseline and context‑only methods such as TextGrad.

By Wei Xia, Yehui Tang, Zhi-Hong Deng
arXiv AI
Oct 19

EvalResearchBench: Can AI Agents Build Their Own Feedback for Recursive Self-Improvement?

EvalResearchBench (ERB) is a benchmark that tests whether AI agents can autonomously design evaluation tasks for recursive self‑improvement. In ERB, a researcher agent selects or synthesizes tasks, builds graders, and refines them through pilot tests before producing a final evaluator that runs within fixed time and API budgets. Experiments with nine researchers and thirteen candidate models show that the best automated evaluators achieve about 75% concordance with target benchmarks, below the 91% ceiling set by target disagreements, and that human‑designed task samples still outperform many automated approaches.

By Yaolun Zhang, Tianyi Xu, Yujie Zhao, Jishen Zhao, Qingyun Wu, Huazheng Wang