arXiv:2606. 11522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autoresearch agents now propose, evaluate, and select scientific candidates against a metric, and that metric is usually an aggregate reduced over a heterogeneous space of regions, slices, or cohorts.
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The paper introduces Traverse, a benchmark of 2,518 agent trajectories and 6,967 annotated mistakes across software engineering, computer use, and science tasks, revealing that failures often go unrecovered and can cause irreversible harm before a run is deemed successful. It shows that human judges struggle to detect the first mistake in most runs, while a 4‑billion‑parameter verifier called Scout can locate failures more effectively and improve task success when used to select among candidate runs. The study demonstrates that making failure detection inexpensive and reliable can enable long‑horizon agents to learn from their own mistakes and increase trustworthiness in autonomous AI.
The article argues that agentic auto‑research should be guided by dense, intermediate signals of epistemic progress rather than by sparse final benchmarks. It compares this approach to fuzz testing, where coverage provides continuous feedback that directs input mutation. The authors propose controlled experiments to test whether such signals improve discovery efficiency and reduce false positives, and demonstrate in a simulated physics setting that an AI agent using feedback‑driven search uncovers a hidden law while optimization‑driven baselines fail.
The paper argues that using a large language model (LLM) as the sole judge in self‑improving agent pipelines is problematic, as the judge can be biased or manipulated, leading to false confidence in system performance. The authors propose a new framework, PROCTOR, which replaces the oracle judge with a deterministic, teacher‑student loop that enforces guardrails such as sandboxing, role separation, and acceptance checks to prevent cheating and ensure reliable evaluation. Experiments across contract analysis, compliance review, and code quality demonstrate that PROCTOR mitigates eleven identified failure modes that previously allowed agents to achieve perfect scores while hiding significant capability gaps.
arXiv:2609.27051v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language-model agents now run the whole of quantitative factor research: they propose investment factors, backtest them, select the survivors and retir...
The paper introduces Belief-Calibrated Optimization (BCO), a method that records and updates a persistent in‑context document representing an agent’s belief about how the environment responds to edits. By continually revising this world model as new candidates are evaluated, BCO improves the performance of frozen LLM agents across five benchmarks, outperforming a control lacking the world model. An offline ablation shows that the document’s content provides reusable, accurate predictions of environmental responses, beyond mere form.
arXiv:2608. 05212v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep search agents tackle challenging questions through long-horizon web interactions, a process that is both complex and fragile: small reasoning errors may propagate through long, noisy trajectories into fluent but incorrect answers.