The study examines how three context‑engineering techniques—semantic layers, orchestration, and compaction—affect data agents that answer questions over heterogeneous data. Using seven large language models on 1,514 long‑horizon tasks, the authors identify three agent behavior groups (investigators, premature answerers, early stoppers) and show that each technique benefits only the group it aligns with, while sometimes harming others. Combining the techniques yields smaller net gains than the sum of individual effects, leading to guidance on selecting techniques based on agent behavior, task demands, and accuracy‑cost trade‑offs.
By Zhivar Sourati, Marianne Menglin Liu, Zheng Wang, Rongguang Wang, Sai Ashish Somayajula, Tao Sheng, Kyu J. Han, Sujith Ravi, Dan Roth
Harbor Adapters is a unified evaluation infrastructure that ports over 80 agentic benchmarks, enabling arbitrary agents to be tested across complex environments. The authors performed a large‑scale evaluation of 8 models on 54 benchmarks, using Terminus‑2 and three native harnesses, revealing detailed agent capabilities and failure modes. They also created Harbor‑Index, a curated set of 82 challenging tasks from 29 benchmarks, designed to be affordable yet comprehensive, with the best model achieving a 28.0% pass rate.
By Lin Shi (Audrey), Haowei Lin (Audrey), Zixuan Zhu (Audrey), Xiaoyue Zhou (Audrey), Xiang Li (Audrey), Xiangning Lin (Audrey), Yaxuan Deng (Audrey), Han Xu (Audrey), Yuangang Li (Audrey), Shanda Li (Audrey), Zizhao Chen (Audrey), Hanwen Xing (Audrey), Harsh Raj (Audrey), Bo Chen (Audrey), Quan Shi (Audrey), Steven Dillmann (Audrey), Yipeng Gao (Audrey), Puneesh Khanna (Audrey), Ruofan Lu (Audrey), Chao Beyond Zhou (Audrey), Michael Yang (Audrey), Robert Zhang (Audrey), Siyuan Chai (Audrey), Jiayu Chang (Audrey), Yizhao Chen (Audrey), Xiaokun Chen (Audrey), Yiwei Dai (Audrey), Wenting Yang (Audrey), Hange Liu (Audrey), Minghao Liu (Audrey), Zihan Wang (Audrey), Adnan El Assadi (Audrey), Benedikt Stroebl (Audrey), E. Kelly Buchanan (Audrey), Han Meng (Audrey), Junwei He (Audrey), Longxuan Yu (Audrey), Radin Shayanfar (Audrey), Yukyung Lee (Audrey), Zhikang Dong (Audrey), Allen G Hart (Audrey), Anjiang Wei (Audrey), Anurag Kashyap (Audrey), Arpandeep Khatua (Audrey), Audrey Jixin Zheng (Audrey), Chengrui Ma (Audrey), David Heineman (Audrey), Dubing Chen (Audrey), Hai-Anh Trinh (Audrey), Haishuo Fang (Audrey), Hefan Zhang (Audrey), Hui Shen (Audrey), Issa Sugiura (Audrey), Jiankai Sun (Audrey), Jiechao Gao (Audrey), Junhong Lin (Audrey), Junnan Li (Audrey), Kai Yang (Audrey), Lei Hsiung (Audrey), Maoyu Wang (Audrey), Mengze Tang (Audrey), Nabil Omi (Audrey), Negin Raoof (Audrey), Nicholas Edwards (Audrey), Octavia Guo (Audrey), Orfeas Menis Mastromichalakis (Audrey), Pengliang Ji (Audrey), Przemys{\l}aw Hejman (Audrey), Qi Qi (Audrey), Qunshu Lin (Audrey), Richard Zhuang (Audrey), Rui Yang (Audrey), Ruichen Zheng (Audrey), Ryan Marten (Audrey), Shaghayegh Fazliani (Audrey), Shizheng Hou (Audrey), Sicong Jiang (Audrey), Sijie Li (Audrey), Song Bian (Audrey), Terry Yue Zhuo (Audrey), Tianqing Wu (Audrey), Tom Tang (Audrey), Wanjia Zhao (Audrey), Weihao Xuan (Audrey), Wenhua Liang (Audrey), Xian Liu (Audrey), Xin Lan (Audrey), Xuan Zhang (Audrey), Xuandong Zhao (Audrey), Yanchuan Tang (Audrey), Yifan Jiang (Audrey), Yijiang Li (Audrey), Yitong Guan (Audrey), Yizhi Li (Audrey), Yonghui Liu (Audrey), Yuheng Tang (Audrey), Yujun (Audrey), Mao, Yunfei Zhao, Yuxin Wang, Yuxuan Tang, Zhenheng Tang, Zhifei Li, Ziruo Wang, Ziyu She, Kaiyuan Liu, Iheb Chaabane, Yuxin Tang, Xiangyi Li, Andy Konwinski, Boxuan Li, Leon Liangyu Chen, Alex Dimakis, Nicholas Carlini, Soroush Vosoughi, Di He, Etash Guha, Benjamin Feuer, Mike Merrill, Ludwig Schmidt, Alex Shaw