A Matter of TASTE: Improving Coverage and Difficulty of Agent Benchmarks
arXiv:2605. 28556v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As agent capabilities advance, existing benchmarks, such as $\tau^2$-Bench, are becoming increasingly saturated.
The paper introduces the concept of an agent’s "taste"—its ability to make effective long‑horizon decisions—and presents Taste‑Bench, a new benchmark that automatically generates decision‑fork questions from agent trajectories. Taste‑Bench evaluates models on choosing the best path without seeing future outcomes, revealing that top models answer only about 60% of questions correctly and that later‑appearing evidence makes forks harder. The authors also demonstrate that training a student model to mimic a teacher’s judgment improves decision quality and overall success on held‑out software engineering tasks.
arXiv:2605. 28556v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As agent capabilities advance, existing benchmarks, such as $\tau^2$-Bench, are becoming increasingly saturated.
arXiv:2609.37236v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: An agent that uses tools typically responds to what the user explicitly asks, yet completing the task may require information the user never requested....
arXiv:2607. 08964v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents have become capable of autonomously completing short, well-specified tasks.
arXiv:2608. 06933v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Today, we improve models by training and evaluating them on problems at the frontier of their abilities.
The paper investigates how reinforcement learning can cause large language model agents to adopt shortcut policies for tool use, relying on superficial prompt cues rather than actual task needs. By creating synthetic environments that mix factual QA and math reasoning, the authors show that agents often invoke tools when cues are present, even when those tools are unnecessary, with spurious invocation rates rising up to 39%. They find that shortcut learning occurs mainly when agents have already mastered the target tool and that semantic alignment between cues and tools amplifies the effect. To counter this, they propose a dense, decision-level reward where an LLM judge assesses tool necessity, which reduces cue-driven tool use while maintaining performance.
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.
arXiv:2601. 02854v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As an agent-level reasoning and coordination paradigm, Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) orchestrates multiple agents through structured debate to improve answer quality and support complex reasoning.
arXiv:2607. 28609v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Computer-using agents (CUAs) are advancing rapidly across the digital world.
arXiv:2607.28225v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agentic vision-language models (VLMs), which interleave textual reasoning with explicit tool calls such as cropping and code-based image manipulati...
arXiv:2607. 23263v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deciding whether a trajectory actually fulfills its instruction governs how we measure computer-use agents on long-horizon graphical-user-interface tasks and how we train them with reinforcement learning.
arXiv:2607. 22682v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a vocabulary for automated research systems built from one or more agents to make their design choices easier to describe and compare.
arXiv:2606. 02871v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large reasoning models improve performance by generating extended chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, but this behavior becomes inefficient when applied to LLM agents.