arXiv Machine Learning By Zishan Xu, Enjun Du, Mingqi Gao, Cheng Yang, Junhao Shen, Zirong Chen, Zhiyuan Yao, Yifu Guo, Yuquan Lu, Jinyang Huang, Zhengxi Lu, Siyi Liu, Ziyu Zheng, Yongqi Zhang, Difan Zou, Weiwen Liu

Work Agents: Systems, Capabilities, and Optimization

Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →

The paper introduces a work-centric framework for understanding and optimizing work agents, which combine foundation models with runtime harnesses to perform tasks in stateful workspaces. It defines two key dimensions—work persistence and work openness—to characterize working conditions and classifies digital work into five forms based on task scope and organization. The authors identify five core capability families necessary for reliable execution, explore optimization strategies for models and harnesses, and evaluate existing metrics from the perspective of verifiable work outcomes.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv Machine Learning.

arXiv AI
Oct 9

Scaling Verifiable Environments for Long-horizon Work Agents

The paper introduces WorkForge, a scalable synthesis framework that builds verifiable work‑agent environments from real‑world resources. By extracting factual anchors from expert workflows and associated files, WorkForge generates task instructions, solution plans, and verifiers that remain traceable to observable workspace evidence. The authors constructed 16.7K environments across 40 professional domains, demonstrating significant performance gains for large language models such as Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-Base and Qwen3.5-27B.

By Jiazheng Zhang, Long Ma, Yunxian Yang, Zhiheng Xi, Zhikai Lei, Yajie Yang, Chenyang Liao, Enyu Zhou, Yang Nan, Yuchen Tian, Senjie Jin, Yibo Wang, Wei He, Boyang Liu, Jixuan Huang, Xin Guo, Zhezheng Hao, Xinbing Liang, Zhihao Zhang, Changzhi Zhou, Wiggin Zhou, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Clarenceai, Aiden Adams
arXiv AI
Aug 25

Designing Benchmarks for Knowledge Work

The paper proposes a new way to describe benchmarks for AI systems that perform knowledge work, outlining four explicit fields: represented activity, tested setting, required work product, and evaluated result. It builds an inventory of 18 work activities from O*NET to enable activity-level reporting across occupations, and evaluates these activities for semantic coherence, algorithm sensitivity, ontology legibility, and human interpretability. The authors apply their framework to three existing benchmarks—GDPval, OfficeQA Pro, and APEX-SWE—to show how different aspects of work can be captured within the same representation.

By Yining Hua, Hongbin Na, Cyrus Ayubcha, Levi Lian
arXiv AI
Oct 16

Harness-Bench: Evaluating Agent Harnesses across Models and Realistic Workflows

Harness-Bench is a diagnostic benchmark that evaluates how different harness configurations affect LLM agent performance in realistic workflows. It tests 106 sandboxed offline tasks across multiple model backends, recording artifacts, execution traces, and usage statistics to analyze completion, process quality, efficiency, and failure behavior. The study finds significant variation in outcomes across model-harness pairings, indicating that agent capability should be reported at the configuration level rather than solely by the base model.

By Yilun Yao, Xinyu Tan, Chao-Hsuan Liu, Yaoming Li, Zhengyang Wang, Zongwei Lv, Wenhan Yu, Zhewen Tan, Yuxuan Tian, Lin Sun, Xiangzheng Zhang, Guangxiang Zhao, Tong Yang
arXiv AI
Sep 28

The Hard Part Comes After Search: Benchmarking Web Agents on Synthesizing, Organizing, and Displaying Knowledge

The paper introduces KNOWS, a benchmark for evaluating web agents that act as assistants by retrieving, synthesizing, and presenting information across complex, multi-step browser tasks. It outlines a task design rubric, evaluation protocol combining deterministic checks with LLM judgments, and reports that current agents achieve only modest success, with the best performing agent succeeding on less than 3% of tasks. The study highlights significant gaps in agents’ tool use, visual understanding, and long‑horizon reasoning.

By Alexander Gill, Md Farhan Ishmam, Xuyen Nguyen, Neha Bhat, Parker Henry DeYoung, Fateme Hashemi Chaleshtori, Nathan Stringham, Kenneth Marino, Ana Marasovi\'c