Tool-using language-model agents are governed not only by task prompts but also by persistent system-side instructions that specify tools, arguments, policies, execution protocols, and recovery. Compressing these agent control contexts (ACCs) can reduce input cost and context use, yet existing prompt-compression evaluations do not reveal whether the resulting control remains operationally reliable.
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:2607. 20499v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models generate plausible backend code, but a single-pass paradigm provides no guarantee of correctness or runtime reliability.
By Sai Deekshith Lekkala, Jothi Prabha Appadurai, Rohith Reddy Bellibatlu, Manpreet Singh
arXiv:2607. 02911v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based coding agents solve software-engineering tasks through iterative interactions with development environments, where returned observations accumulate in the context and become a major source of inference cost.
By Haorui Chen, Yuancheng Zhu, Yitong Zhang, Jia Li
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
The paper introduces Dynamic Tool Output Compression (DTOC), a framework that manages context in large‑language‑model agents by storing full tool outputs in external memory and inserting compact placeholders into the active context. DTOC treats context updates as explicit, reversible operations within the agent’s reasoning loop, allowing selective reconstruction of compressed outputs when needed. Experiments on the DeepSWE benchmark show that for responsive models such as Sonnet 4.6 and GPT‑5.4, DTOC reduces input tokens and agent steps while significantly improving solve rates and lowering cost per solved task, with ablation studies confirming the importance of reversibility for maintaining performance.
By Abhay Chaturvedi, Shreya Bhattacharya, Rashmika Gopalkrishnan, Peter van der Putten
arXiv:2607. 20468v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents are increasingly used to automate research and development tasks, yet existing benchmarks typically evaluate them on prescribed workflows or narrow action spaces.
By Jehyeok Yeon, Ben Rank, Maksym Andriushchenko
SWE-VERIFIER is a lightweight generative model that selectively triggers candidate sampling and verification for coding agents, scoring proposed actions to decide when additional sampling is needed and ranking the resulting actions before execution. Trained on Qwen3.5-4B with preference data, it improves resolution on MiniMax-M2.7 from 75.47% to 77.20% at 1.09× cost and on DeepSeek-V4-Flash from 72.60% to 74.27% at 1.13× cost, while verifying fewer than 4% of steps. The approach demonstrates that selective sampling and lightweight verification can enhance coding‑agent performance and inference efficiency with minimal overhead.
By Kaijian Zou, Vaibhav Chennareddy, Yunxiang Zhang, Naihao Deng, Longju Bai, Jiaxin Pei, Rada Mihalcea, Lu Wang
RSI-Opt introduces Recursive Self-Improvement Optimizer Agents that evolve their own training policies by accumulating knowledge from previous runs, including prompts, playbooks, optimizer code, and decision cadences. A meta‑agent rewrites and archives these policies, enabling reusable procedures and code that adapt to new tasks. Across multiple generations and tasks, RSI‑Opt improves optimizer performance, achieving higher z‑scores on evolution suites, better cross‑model transfer, and significant error reductions on PDE benchmarks compared to fixed‑prompt baselines.
By Binghang Lu, Yige Sun, Guang Lin
arXiv:2606. 11045v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reusing a held-out benchmark adaptively should, in principle, invite overfitting.
By Martin Andres Bertran, Aaron Roth, Zhiwei Steven Wu
arXiv:2606. 22678v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Agentic coding harnesses - such as Agent-Skills, Superpowers, and Agent-Rigor - are increasingly deployed to augment underlying LLMs for real-world software engineering tasks.
By Meher Bhaskar Madiraju, Meher Sai Preetam Madiraju
arXiv:2608. 19662v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic language models repeatedly encode tool and skill schemas that recur across requests in different combinations and orders, preventing standard prefix caching from reusing their key--value (KV) states.
By Yichu Fang, Sitong Wei, Haozhe Hu, Xiaoyu Shen