arXiv AI
4d ago

Probe-and-Resume: When and How to Evaluate Agent Execution

The paper investigates the use of test‑time search, specifically Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS), to improve agent performance in terminal‑based computer‑use environments. It finds that conventional MCTS does not significantly boost task success due to limited critic information and poor intermediate state evaluation. The authors propose a new strategy called Probe‑and‑Resume, where a critic is invoked only when the agent believes it has finished, and it is given read, write, and execute access to a forked copy of the environment to probe hidden state. This approach raises success rates by 8.4 percentage points over standard MCTS and nearly matches a more expensive Codex CLI agent.

By Jiakai Xu, Tiancheng Ge, Tujie Guan, Yusheng Li, Rohan Timmaraju, Eugene Wu, Kostis Kaffes
arXiv AI
Sep 21

DENSE: Distilling Agent Trajectories into Evidence-Grounded Shortcut Trees for Self-Refinement

arXiv:2609.21423v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Online agent deployments produce abundant execution traces, while task-specific verification and expert annotation are costly to scale. We study how to...

By Siyuan Liu (Fudan University, Meituan Longcat Team), Fan Yu (Fudan University, Meituan Longcat Team), Dongyu Ru (Meituan Longcat Team), Yizhu Liu (Meituan Longcat Team), Yifan Yang (Meituan Longcat Team), Xuezhi Cao (Meituan Longcat Team), Xunliang Cai (Meituan Longcat Team), Yixin Cao (Fudan University)