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: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.
By Chao Yao, Yangbo Wei, Zhen Huang, Junhong Qian, Chenle Chen, Shaoqiang Lu, Chen Wu, Lei He
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.
By Yixiong Chen, Xinyi Bai, Alan Yuille
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.
By Jiahao Zhang, Yifan Zhang, Yu Huang
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:2608. 03222v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Software engineering (SWE) agents resolve repository-level issues through long trajectories that grow increasingly expensive as context accumulates.
By Chenyu Wang, Yunbo Lyu, Junda He, Zhou Yang, Chenxing Zhong, Yaniv Harel, David Lo