arXiv AI
Steer, Don't Solve: Training Small Critic Models for Large Code Agents
Read the original on arXiv AI →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
Related stories
arXiv AI
Sep 28
Agentick: A Unified Benchmark for General Sequential Decision-Making Agents
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 Computation and Language
Sep 1
CAST: Critique-Aware Supervision for Training Reliable Long-Horizon Tool-Calling Agents
CAST is a critique‑aware training framework that transforms sparse task outcomes into action‑level supervision for both critique learning and policy optimization. By analyzing agent trajectories, CAST synthesizes structured rationales that explain action validity under partial observability, enabling the creation of richer training data. Fine‑tuned Qwen3‑family models trained with CAST show significant reliability gains, outperforming GPT‑OSS‑120B by over 10% on Retail tasks and improving Telehealth performance by 9% in an out‑of‑domain setting.
arXiv AI
Oct 9
Code Understanding is a Bottleneck for Coding Agents
The paper introduces CABRA, a synthetic benchmark that constructs coding tasks from scratch using call‑graph transformations and scales difficulty along four axes: function traversal, search, runtime resolution, and instruction following. Experiments with eight large language models and six coding agents on 6,840 CABRA tasks show that while LLM accuracy degrades with task size, agents maintain high performance by leveraging tools; larger tasks trigger more tool calls, and a separate study on SWE‑bench verifies that tool‑call counts better predict agent accuracy than lines of code edited. The authors argue that CABRA exposes weaknesses in LLMs that are hidden by tool use and highlights the importance of code‑understanding abilities beyond mere editing. whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that coding agents’ performance is more dependent on code‑understanding than on the amount of code edited, revealing a critical bottleneck for current coding agents."
arXiv AI
Jul 23
In-the-Flow Agentic System Optimization for Effective Planning and Tool Use
arXiv:2510. 05592v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Outcome-driven reinforcement learning has advanced reasoning in large language models (LLMs), but prevailing tool-augmented approaches train a single, monolithic policy that interleaves thoughts and tool calls under full context; this scales poorly with long horizons and diverse tools and generalizes weakly to new scenarios.
arXiv AI
Jul 9
Terminus-4B: Can a Smaller Model Replace Frontier LLMs at Agentic Execution Tasks?
arXiv:2605. 03195v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Modern coding agents increasingly delegate specialized subtasks to subagents, which are smaller, focused agentic loops that handle narrow responsibilities like search, debugging or terminal execution.
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 8
Training Advisors for LLM Agents from Task Outcomes
arXiv:2610.09858v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model agents tackle multi-step tasks by interleaving reasoning and tool calls with observations from the environment. Prior work has s...