arXiv AI By Zhexi Feng, Ruiyi Zhang, Yongbo Yang, Pengtao Xie

The Missing Complement: State-Conditioned Minimal Sufficient Evidence for Coding Agents

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The paper introduces State‑Conditioned Minimal Sufficient Evidence Recovery (SER), a method that, given a coding agent’s current state, reconstructs a compact set of evidence passages that collectively provide all facts needed for the agent’s next decision. Using the SERBench dataset of 500 held‑out states from 45 repositories, the authors show that their MSS‑Complement approach recovers a complete evidence set for 73.0 % of states with five items and 80.6 % with eight, outperforming baseline ranking methods. The study also demonstrates that this set‑level policy improves downstream performance on AMA‑Bench and highlights the importance of retrieving missing facts rather than merely re‑ranking similar passages.

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arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Agents Don't Paginate: First-Chunk Selection for LLM Tool Responses

The paper investigates why large‑language‑model coding agents rarely request a second chunk of tool output, focusing on the precision‑at‑1 rate ($p_1$) of the gold item appearing first in the first chunk. In a benchmark of 500 software‑engineering tasks, the authors compare six value functions and find that increasing $p_1$ does not systematically improve downstream accuracy; the agent can recover the correct answer from any position within the chunk. Adding file‑metadata signals to a keyword scorer actually reduces $p_1$, while a parameter‑free keyword scorer improves $p_1$ but still fails to boost overall accuracy.

By Tatiana Petrova, Andrei Mazniak, Radu State