Task difficulty dictates an agent's likelihood of success, and estimating it without rollouts means forecasting this directly from a task description before executing costly simulations in stateful environments. Reliable estimates would therefore allow environment designers to calibrate evaluation benchmarks and construct progressive training curricula.
arXiv:2608. 05797v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Task difficulty dictates an agent's likelihood of success, and estimating it without rollouts means forecasting this directly from a task description before executing costly simulations in stateful environments.
arXiv:2604. 00594v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As the focus in LLM-based coding shifts from static single-step code generation to multi-step agentic interaction with tools and environments, understanding which tasks will challenge agents and why becomes increasingly difficult.
The paper investigates what makes software issue resolution tasks difficult for agents by proposing a measurement framework and conducting a large‑scale empirical study on the CoderForge‑Preview dataset. It extracts static features from task patches, repositories, and prompts, and uses ensemble methods, SHAP attribution, and effect size analysis to predict task outcomes. The study finds that task difficulty is largely predictable from static features (AU C = 0.863), driven mainly by patch fragmentation and repository scale, with prompt linguistic features contributing for mid‑band tasks, suggesting a layered difficulty structure.
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.
arXiv:2602. 07267v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Evaluating the real-world capabilities of AI systems requires grounding benchmark performance in human-interpretable measures of task difficulty.
Agentick is a unified benchmark for sequential decision‑making agents that evaluates RL, LLM, VLM, hybrid, and human agents on 37 procedurally generated tasks across six capability categories, four difficulty levels, and five observation modalities via a single Gymnasium‑compatible interface. It includes a Coding API, oracle reference policies, pre‑built SFT datasets, a composable agent harness, and a live leaderboard. An evaluation of 27 configurations and over 90,000 episodes shows no single approach dominates, with GPT‑5 mini leading overall, PPO excelling in planning and multi‑agent tasks, and the reasoning harness boosting LLM performance by 3‑10×, while ASCII observations outperform natural language.
EarlyEval introduces a lightweight framework that predicts an LLM agent’s final outcome early in its execution, allowing the run to halt when a LightGBM classifier reaches a calibrated confidence threshold. By training success and failure classifiers on behavioral, textual, and reference-solution features, EarlyEval can cut 13%-26% of agent steps and up to 44.1% of input tokens while maintaining 89%-97% prediction accuracy. Across three benchmarks—SWE-bench Verified, TerminalBench, and Toolathlon—this approach reduces evaluation costs with minimal impact on per-agent resolve rates.
arXiv:2607. 05188v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A coding agent solving a software-engineering task spends dozens of steps reasoning, editing code, and running tests, yet little is known about what the underlying language model internally represents about the program it is working on.
arXiv:2606. 07682v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI agents are increasingly expected to complete long-horizon workflows that require sustained progress over hours, millions of tokens, and complex environments.
arXiv:2606. 04455v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current AI benchmarks evaluate agents on task execution within human-designed workflows.
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.
The paper examines whether internal representations of agentic systems can better indicate task success than traditional confidence measures. It introduces two methods—Latent Trajectory Dynamics (LTD) and Action Representation Probe (ARP)—that analyze changes in residual-stream representations and action-level representations, respectively. Experiments on Bash, SQL, and Python benchmarks with Qwen and DeepSeek models show these methods outperform conventional surface-level and sequence-based calibration baselines, offering a zero‑overhead reliability monitor without prompt changes or multiple rollouts.