Daily Papers

While agent evaluation has shifted toward long-horizon tasks, most benchmarks still emphasize local, step-level reasoning rather than the global constrained optimization (e.g., time and financial budgets) that demands genuine planning ability. Meanwhile, existing LLM planning benchmarks underrepresent the active information gathering and fine-grained local constraints typical of real-world settings. To address this, we introduce DeepPlanning, a challenging benchmark for practical long-horizon agent planning. It features multi-day travel planning and multi-product shopping tasks that require proactive information acquisition, local constrained reasoning, and global constrained optimization. Evaluations on DeepPlanning show that even frontier agentic LLMs struggle with these problems, highlighting the importance of reliable explicit reasoning patterns and parallel tool use for achieving better effectiveness-efficiency trade-offs. Error analysis further points to promising directions for improving agentic LLMs over long planning horizons. We open-source the code and data to support future research.

Long-horizon agentic LLMs are increasingly limited by finite context windows, as extended interaction trajectories can exceed the maximum context length before a task is completed. Context compaction offers a natural solution by summarizing previous interaction states and continuing the rollout under a compressed context, but incorporating compaction into reinforcement learning remains underexplored. We propose CompactionRL, a reinforcement learning strategy to train long-horizon agentic LLMs with context compaction. Our approach jointly optimizes task execution and summary generation with token-level loss normalization and cross-trajectory generalized advantage estimation. This design enables the LLM agents to learn from compacted long-horizon trajectories. We train CompactionRL on top of open models and observe consistent performance gains on agentic coding tasks. CompactionRL enables the open GLM-4.5-Air model (106B-A30B) to achieve Pass@1 scores of 66.8% on SWE-bench Verified and 24.5% on Terminal-Bench 2.0, with absolute gains of 7.0 and 3.1 points, respectively. Built upon GLM-4.7-Flash (30B-A3B), CompactionRL improves Pass@1 by 5.5 and 6.8 points, reaching 56.0% on SWE-bench Verified and 20.2% on Terminal-Bench 2.0, respectively. CompactionRL is thus deployed in the RL pipeline for training the open GLM-5.2 model (750B-A40B).

Large language models are increasingly expected to handle complex, long-horizon real-world tasks whose context demands can grow without bound, yet model context windows remain inherently finite. Recent work explores a paradigm where a main agent decomposes tasks and dispatches subtasks to subagents, which execute and return only summarized results, conserving the main agent's context budget. However, performing this well requires delegation intelligence: the ability to decompose complex tasks, determine when and what to delegate, and integrate returned results into the ongoing workflow. Training data for this capability is scarce in naturally occurring text, and to our knowledge, how to synthesize such data and train models to acquire this capability remains largely unexplored in the open-source community. To bridge this gap, we present a preliminary exploration targeting deep research, a representative long-horizon agent task. Specifically, we design a harness that guides the model toward high-quality task decomposition and delegation, while constraining subagents to return results properly to support the main agent's workflow. The harness-guided trajectories naturally encode correct delegation decisions, which we use as supervised fine-tuning data to internalize delegation intelligence into model weights. Our resulting model, SearchSwarm-30B-A3B, achieves 68.1 on BrowseComp and 73.3 on BrowseComp-ZH, the best results among all models of comparable scale. We will release our harness, model weights, and training data to facilitate future research.

The advancement of artificial intelligence toward agentic science is currently bottlenecked by the challenge of ultra-long-horizon autonomy, the ability to sustain strategic coherence and iterative correction over experimental cycles spanning days or weeks. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated prowess in short-horizon reasoning, they are easily overwhelmed by execution details in the high-dimensional, delayed-feedback environments of real-world research, failing to consolidate sparse feedback into coherent long-term guidance. Here, we present ML-Master 2.0, an autonomous agent that masters ultra-long-horizon machine learning engineering (MLE) which is a representative microcosm of scientific discovery. By reframing context management as a process of cognitive accumulation, our approach introduces Hierarchical Cognitive Caching (HCC), a multi-tiered architecture inspired by computer systems that enables the structural differentiation of experience over time. By dynamically distilling transient execution traces into stable knowledge and cross-task wisdom, HCC allows agents to decouple immediate execution from long-term experimental strategy, effectively overcoming the scaling limits of static context windows. In evaluations on OpenAI's MLE-Bench under 24-hour budgets, ML-Master 2.0 achieves a state-of-the-art medal rate of 56.44%. Our findings demonstrate that ultra-long-horizon autonomy provides a scalable blueprint for AI capable of autonomous exploration beyond human-precedent complexities.

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have enabled agentic search systems that interleave multi-step reasoning with external tool use. However, existing frameworks largely rely on unstructured natural-language reasoning and accumulate raw intermediate traces in the context, which often leads to unstable reasoning trajectories, context overflow, and degraded performance on complex multi-hop queries. In this study, we introduce Laser, a general framework for stabilizing and scaling agentic search. Laser defines a symbolic action protocol that organizes agent behaviors into three spaces: planning, task-solving, and retrospection. Each action is specified with explicit semantics and a deterministic execution format, enabling structured and logical reasoning processes and reliable action parsing. This design makes intermediate decisions interpretable and traceable, enhancing explicit retrospection and fine-grained control over reasoning trajectories. In coordination with parsable actions, Laser further maintains a compact context register that stores only essential states of the reasoning process, allowing the agent to reason over long horizons without uncontrolled context expansion. Experiments on Qwen2.5/3-series models across challenging multi-hop QA datasets show that Laser consistently outperforms existing agentic search baselines under both prompting-only and fine-tuning settings, demonstrating that Laser provides a principled and effective foundation for robust, scalable agentic search.

Recent advancements in LLM-based agents have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in handling complex, knowledge-intensive tasks by integrating external tools. Among diverse choices of tools, search tools play a pivotal role in accessing vast external knowledge. However, open-source agents still fall short of achieving expert-level Search Intelligence, the ability to resolve ambiguous queries, generate precise searches, analyze results, and conduct thorough exploration. Existing approaches fall short in scalability, efficiency, and data quality. For example, small turn limits in existing online RL methods, e.g. <=10, restrict complex strategy learning. This paper introduces ASearcher, an open-source project for large-scale RL training of search agents. Our key contributions include: (1) Scalable fully asynchronous RL training that enables long-horizon search while maintaining high training efficiency. (2) A prompt-based LLM agent that autonomously synthesizes high-quality and challenging QAs, creating a large-scale QA dataset. Through RL training, our prompt-based QwQ-32B agent achieves substantial improvements, with 46.7% and 20.8% Avg@4 gains on xBench and GAIA, respectively. Notably, our agent exhibits extreme long-horizon search, with tool calls exceeding 40 turns and output tokens exceeding 150k during training time. With a simple agent design and no external LLMs, ASearcher-Web-QwQ achieves Avg@4 scores of 42.1 on xBench and 52.8 on GAIA, surpassing existing open-source 32B agents. We open-source our models, training data, and codes in https://github.com/inclusionAI/ASearcher.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at short-term tasks, scaling them to long-horizon agentic workflows remains challenging. The core bottleneck lies in the scarcity of training data that captures authentic long-dependency structures and cross-stage evolutionary dynamics--existing synthesis methods either confine to single-feature scenarios constrained by model distribution, or incur prohibitive human annotation costs, failing to provide scalable, high-quality supervision. We address this by reconceptualizing data synthesis through the lens of real-world software evolution. Our key insight: Pull Request (PR) sequences naturally embody the supervision signals for long-horizon learning. They decompose complex objectives into verifiable submission units, maintain functional coherence across iterations, and encode authentic refinement patterns through bug-fix histories. Building on this, we propose daVinci-Agency, which systematically mines structured supervision from chain-of-PRs through three interlocking mechanisms: (1) progressive task decomposition via continuous commits, (2) long-term consistency enforcement through unified functional objectives, and (3) verifiable refinement from authentic bug-fix trajectories. Unlike synthetic trajectories that treat each step independently, daVinci-Agency's PR-grounded structure inherently preserves the causal dependencies and iterative refinements essential for teaching persistent goal-directed behavior and enables natural alignment with project-level, full-cycle task modeling. The resulting trajectories are substantial--averaging 85k tokens and 116 tool calls--yet remarkably data-efficient: fine-tuning GLM-4.6 on 239 daVinci-Agency samples yields broad improvements across benchmarks, notably achieving a 47% relative gain on Toolathlon. Beyond benchmark performance, our analysis confirms...

As LLM agents transition from short, static problem solving to executing complex, long-horizon tasks in dynamic environments, the ability to handle user interruptions, such as adding requirement or revising goals, during mid-task execution is becoming a core requirement for realistic deployment. However, existing benchmarks largely assume uninterrupted agent behavior or study interruptions only in short, unconstrained language tasks. In this paper, we present the first systematic study of interruptible agents in long-horizon, environmentally grounded web navigation tasks, where actions induce persistent state changes. We formalize three realistic interruption types, including addition, revision, and retraction, and introduce InterruptBench, a benchmark derived from WebArena-Lite that synthesizes high-quality interruption scenarios under strict semantic constraints. Using a unified interruption simulation framework, we evaluate six strong LLM backbones across single- and multi-turn interruption settings, analyzing both their effectiveness in adapting to updated intents and their efficiency in recovering from mid-task changes. Our results show that handling user interruptions effectively and efficiently during long-horizon agentic tasks remains challenging for powerful large-scale LLMs. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/HenryPengZou/InterruptBench.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has re-emerged as a natural approach for training interactive LLM agents in real-world environments. However, directly applying the widely used Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) algorithm to multi-turn tasks exposes notable limitations, particularly in scenarios requiring long-horizon reasoning. To address these challenges, we investigate more stable and effective advantage estimation strategies, especially for multi-turn settings. We first explore Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) as an alternative and find it to be more robust than GRPO. To further enhance PPO in multi-turn scenarios, we introduce turn-PPO, a variant that operates on a turn-level MDP formulation, as opposed to the commonly used token-level MDP. Our results on the WebShop and Sokoban datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of turn-PPO, both with and without long reasoning components.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is becoming increasingly important for post-training large language models (LLMs). Previous RL pipelines for LLMs were mostly synchronous and batch-interleaved, which is inefficient for long-horizon agentic tasks. Recently, asynchronous RL has emerged as a more efficient alternative by updating the model as rollouts arrive. However, existing asynchronous RL systems often emphasize throughput, while leaving training stability and task effectiveness largely underexplored. For example, a key challenge is that group-wise sampling in the widely-used GRPO framework does not naturally fit asynchronous agentic training. In this paper, we present Single-rollout Asynchronous Optimization (SAO) to address the stability and off-policy challenges in asynchronous RL. To reduce off-policy effects and improve generalization, we replace group-wise sampling with single-rollout sampling, that is, using one rollout per prompt. We further improve this single-rollout strategy with practical value-model training designs. To improve optimization stability, we introduce a strict double-side token-level clipping strategy. SAO is able to train stably for one thousand steps and consistently outperform GRPO and its variants on agentic coding and reasoning benchmarks, such as SWE-Bench Verified, BeyondAIME, and IMOAnswerBench. We also demonstrate that single-rollout RL is particularly effective in a simulated online learning setting, where the model must adapt to changing evolving environments. To this end, SAO is successfully deployed in the agentic RL pipeline for training the open GLM-5.2 model (750B-A40B).

LLM agents have incredible potential for scientific discovery applications. However, the performance of LLM agents on real-world, small molecule drug design (SMDD) tasks across diverse chemistries and targets is unclear. Current evaluation methods are either ad hoc, too simple for real-world discovery, limited in scale, or restricted to single-turn question answering. In effort to standardize the evaluation of LLM agents on small molecule design, we introduce SMDD-Bench, a challenging, multi-turn, long-horizon agentic benchmark consisting of 502 guaranteed-solvable task instances spanning 5 task types: 2D Pharmacophore Identification, Interaction Point Discovery, Scaffold Hopping, Lead Optimization, and Fragment Assembly. SMDD-Bench tasks span a wide region of chemical space and involve 102 unique protein targets. Completely solving the benchmark would require having strong chemical and biological reasoning and 3D intuition, understanding specialized tool use, and displaying planning expertise over a limited number of oracle calls. We benchmark 7 frontier open and closed source LLMs and find even the most performant LLM, GPT5.4, solves only 40.2\% of tasks. We hope SMDD-Bench provides a standardized testbed to invigorate the field towards training and evaluating LLM agents for fully autonomous computational drug design. We host a public leaderboard at smddbench.com .

Large Language Models (LLMs) are deployed as autonomous agents in increasingly complex applications, where enabling long-horizon memory is critical for achieving strong performance. However, a significant gap exists between practical applications and current evaluation standards for agent memory: existing benchmarks primarily focus on dialogue-centric, human-agent interactions. In reality, agent memory consists of a continuous stream of agent-environment interactions that are primarily composed of machine-generated representations. To bridge this gap, we introduce AMA-Bench (Agent Memory with Any length), which evaluates long-horizon memory for LLMs in real agentic applications. It features two key components: (1) a set of real-world agentic trajectories across representative agentic applications, paired with expert-curated QA, and (2) a set of synthetic agentic trajectories that scale to arbitrary horizons, paired with rule-based QA. Our comprehensive study shows that existing memory systems underperform on AMA-Bench primarily because they lack causality and objective information and are constrained by the lossy nature of similarity-based retrieval employed by many memory systems. To address these limitations, we propose AMA-Agent, an effective memory system featuring a causality graph and tool-augmented retrieval. Our results demonstrate that AMA-Agent achieves 57.22% average accuracy on AMA-Bench, surpassing the strongest memory system baselines by 11.16%.

Large language models (LLMs) often fail when answering requires identifying a small but decisive piece of evidence within a long or complex context, such as a single line in a tool trace or a subtle detail in an image. We propose ContextRL, a context-aware reinforcement learning (RL) method that improves long-horizon reasoning and multimodal performance through an indirect auxiliary objective. Instead of supervising only the final answer, ContextRL presents the model with a query, an answer, and two highly similar contexts, and rewards it for selecting the context that supports the query--answer pair, thereby encouraging fine-grained grounding. We construct contrastive context data in two domains: for coding agents, trajectories serve as contexts, yielding 1k pairs built via condition filtering; for multimodal reasoning, images serve as contexts, yielding 7K pairs built via generative editing and similarity search. ContextRL achieves average gains of +2.2% over standard GRPO on 5 long-horizon benchmarks, and +1.8% across 12 diverse visual question answering benchmarks. To disentangle the effect of the proposed objective from that of additional data, we compare against data-augmentation baselines that repurpose the same contrastive contexts as standard query--context--answer examples. These baselines provide little to no improvement, showing that the gains arise from the proposed context-selection objective rather than from the contrastive data alone.

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable problem-solving capabilities by autonomously integrating with external tools for collaborative reasoning. However, due to the inherently complex and diverse nature of multimodal information, enabling multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to flexibly and efficiently utilize external tools during reasoning remains an underexplored challenge. In this work, we introduce ToolScope, an agentic framework designed to unify global planning with local multimodal perception, adopting a specialized Perceive tool to mitigates visual context degradation in long-horizon VQA task. ToolScope comprises three primary components: the Global Navigator, the Agentic Executor, and the Response Synthesizer. The Global Navigator functions as a "telescope", offering high-level strategic guidance. The Agentic Executor operates iteratively to augment MLLM with local perception through the integration of external tools-Search, Code, and Perceive. Finally, the Response Synthesizer consolidates and organizes the reasoning process into a coherent, user-friendly output. We evaluate ToolScope on four VQA benchmarks across diverse domains, including VQA 2.0, ScienceQA, MAT-Search and MathVista. It demonstrates strong generalization capabilities, achieving an average performance improvement of up to +6.69% across all datasets.

The paradigm of Large Language Models (LLMs) has increasingly shifted toward agentic applications, where web browsing capabilities are fundamental for retrieving information from diverse online sources. However, existing open-source web agents either demonstrate limited information-seeking abilities on complex tasks or lack transparent implementations. In this work, we identify that the key challenge lies in the scarcity of challenging data for information seeking. To address this limitation, we introduce WebExplorer: a systematic data generation approach using model-based exploration and iterative, long-to-short query evolution. This method creates challenging query-answer pairs that require multi-step reasoning and complex web navigation. By leveraging our curated high-quality dataset, we successfully develop advanced web agent WebExplorer-8B through supervised fine-tuning followed by reinforcement learning. Our model supports 128K context length and up to 100 tool calling turns, enabling long-horizon problem solving. Across diverse information-seeking benchmarks, WebExplorer-8B achieves the state-of-the-art performance at its scale. Notably, as an 8B-sized model, WebExplorer-8B is able to effectively search over an average of 16 turns after RL training, achieving higher accuracy than WebSailor-72B on BrowseComp-en/zh and attaining the best performance among models up to 100B parameters on WebWalkerQA and FRAMES. Beyond these information-seeking tasks, our model also achieves strong generalization on the HLE benchmark even though it is only trained on knowledge-intensive QA data. These results highlight our approach as a practical path toward long-horizon web agents.

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on agentic capabilities-iterative retrieval, tool use, and decision-making-to overcome the limits of static, parametric knowledge. Yet existing agentic frameworks treat external information as unstructured text and fail to leverage the topological dependencies inherent in real-world data. To bridge this gap, we introduce Agentic Graph Learning (AGL), a paradigm that reframes graph learning as an interleaved process of topology-aware navigation and LLM-based inference. Specifically, we propose AgentGL, the first reinforcement learning (RL)-driven framework for AGL. AgentGL equips an LLM agent with graph-native tools for multi-scale exploration, regulates tool usage via search-constrained thinking to balance accuracy and efficiency, and employs a graph-conditioned curriculum RL strategy to stabilize long-horizon policy learning without step-wise supervision. Across diverse Text-Attributed Graph (TAG) benchmarks and multiple LLM backbones, AgentGL substantially outperforms strong GraphLLMs and GraphRAG baselines, achieving absolute improvements of up to 17.5% in node classification and 28.4% in link prediction. These results demonstrate that AGL is a promising frontier for enabling LLMs to autonomously navigate and reason over complex relational environments. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/sunyuanfu/AgentGL.

Long-horizon interactions between users and LLM-based assistants necessitate effective memory management, yet current approaches face challenges in training and evaluation of memory. Existing memory benchmarks rely on static, off-policy data as context, limiting evaluation reliability and scalability. To address these gaps, we introduce AMemGym, an interactive environment enabling on-policy evaluation and optimization for memory-driven personalization. AMemGym employs structured data sampling to predefine user profiles, state-dependent questions, and state evolution trajectories, enabling cost-effective generation of high-quality, evaluation-aligned interactions. LLM-simulated users expose latent states through role-play while maintaining structured state consistency. Comprehensive metrics based on structured data guide both assessment and optimization of assistants. Extensive experiments reveal performance gaps in existing memory systems (e.g., RAG, long-context LLMs, and agentic memory) and corresponding reasons. AMemGym not only enables effective selection among competing approaches but also can potentially drive the self-evolution of memory management strategies. By bridging structured state evolution with free-form interactions, our framework provides a scalable, diagnostically rich environment for advancing memory capabilities in conversational agents.

As large language models (LLMs) evolve into autonomous agents that execute long-horizon workflows, invoking a high-capability model at every step becomes economically unsustainable. While model routing is effective for single-turn queries, agentic routing is a sequential, path-dependent problem: early mistakes compound, feedback is often at the end of the episode, and deployments often demand strict per-task spending limits. We propose Budget-Aware Agentic Routing, which selects between a cheap and an expensive model at each step to optimize the cost--success frontier and to operate under strict per-task budgets. We propose Boundary-Guided Training, which leverages two boundary policies (always-small vs.\ always-large) to build a difficulty taxonomy and to anchor learning under sparse rewards. Our approach warms start with boundary-guided SFT data synthesis via stratified sampling of cost-efficient trajectories, then applies Boundary-Guided Policy Optimization (BoPO), combining boundary-relative rewards with a reference-guided advantage to avoid degenerate cheap-failure solutions. Experiment results show that our method improves the efficiency frontier, matching strong routing baselines at substantially lower cost while demonstrating generalization to strict inference-time budget constraints. Overall, our work establishes a foundational framework for agentic routing, shifting the paradigm from static model selection to dynamic, budget-aware sequential decision-making.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as interactive agents, but optimizing them for long-horizon decision making remains difficult because current methods are largely purely reactive, which weakens both exploration and credit assignment over extended trajectories. In this work, we present Strategic Trajectory Abstraction (StraTA), a simple framework that introduces an explicit trajectory-level strategy into agentic reinforcement learning (RL). StraTA samples a compact strategy from the initial task state, conditions subsequent actions on that strategy, and trains strategy generation and action execution jointly with a hierarchical GRPO-style rollout design, further enhanced by diverse strategy rollout and critical self-judgment. Experiments on ALFWorld, WebShop, and SciWorld show that StraTA consistently improves both sample efficiency and final performance over strong baselines. StraTA reaches success rates of 93.1% on ALFWorld and 84.2% on WebShop. On SciWorld, StraTA attains a 63.5% overall score, outperforming frontier closed-source models.

The paradigm of agentic science requires AI systems to conduct robust reasoning and engage in long-horizon, autonomous exploration. However, current scientific benchmarks remain confined to domain knowledge comprehension and complex reasoning, failing to evaluate the exploratory nature and procedural complexity of real-world research. In this work, we present research-oriented evaluations in theoretical and computational physics, a natural testbed with comprehensive domain knowledge, complex reasoning, and verifiable end-to-end workflows without reliance on experiments. Here we introduce PRL-Bench (Physics Research by LLMs), a benchmark designed to systematically map the capability boundaries of LLMs in executing end-to-end physics research. Constructed from 100 curated papers from the latest issues of Physical Review Letters since August 2025 and validated by domain experts, PRL-Bench covers five major theory- and computation-intensive subfields of modern physics: astrophysics, condensed matter physics, high-energy physics, quantum information, and statistical physics. Each task in the benchmark is designed to replicate the core properties of authentic scientific research, including exploration-oriented formulation, long-horizon workflows, and objective verifiability, thereby reconstructing the essential reasoning processes and research workflows of real physics research. Evaluation across frontier models shows that performance remains limited, with the best overall score below 50, revealing a pronounced gap between current LLM capabilities and the demands of real scientific research. PRL-Bench serves a reliable testbed for accessing next generation AI scientists advancing AI systems toward autonomous scientific discovery.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a dominant paradigm for eliciting long-horizon reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, scaling Tool-Integrated Reasoning (TIR) via RL remains challenging due to interaction collapse: a pathological state where models fail to sustain multi-turn tool usage, instead degenerating into heavy internal reasoning with only trivial, post-hoc code verification. We systematically study three questions: (i) how cold-start SFT induces an agentic, tool-using behavioral prior, (ii) how the interaction density of cold-start trajectories shapes exploration and downstream RL outcomes, and (iii) how the RL interaction budget affects learning dynamics and generalization under varying inference-time budgets. We then introduce ASTER (Agentic Scaling with Tool-integrated Extended Reasoning), a framework that circumvents this collapse through a targeted cold-start strategy prioritizing interaction-dense trajectories. We find that a small expert cold-start set of just 4K interaction-dense trajectories yields the strongest downstream performance, establishing a robust prior that enables superior exploration during extended RL training. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that ASTER-4B achieves state-of-the-art results on competitive mathematical benchmarks, reaching 90.0% on AIME 2025, surpassing leading frontier open-source models, including DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp.

Large Language Models (LLMs) empowered with Tool-Integrated Reasoning (TIR) can iteratively plan, call external tools, and integrate returned information to solve complex, long-horizon reasoning tasks. Agentic Reinforcement Learning (Agentic RL) optimizes such models over full tool-interaction trajectories, but two key challenges hinder effectiveness: (1) Sparse, non-instructive rewards, such as binary 0-1 verifiable signals, provide limited guidance for intermediate steps and slow convergence; (2) Gradient degradation in Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), where identical rewards within a rollout group yield zero advantage, reducing sample efficiency and destabilizing training. To address these challenges, we propose two complementary techniques: Progressive Reward Shaping (PRS) and Value-based Sampling Policy Optimization (VSPO). PRS is a curriculum-inspired reward design that introduces dense, stage-wise feedback - encouraging models to first master parseable and properly formatted tool calls, then optimize for factual correctness and answer quality. We instantiate PRS for short-form QA (with a length-aware BLEU to fairly score concise answers) and long-form QA (with LLM-as-a-Judge scoring to prevent reward hacking). VSPO is an enhanced GRPO variant that replaces low-value samples with prompts selected by a task-value metric balancing difficulty and uncertainty, and applies value-smoothing clipping to stabilize gradient updates. Experiments on multiple short-form and long-form QA benchmarks show that PRS consistently outperforms traditional binary rewards, and VSPO achieves superior stability, faster convergence, and higher final performance compared to PPO, GRPO, CISPO, and SFT-only baselines. Together, PRS and VSPO yield LLM-based TIR agents that generalize better across domains.

Recent advances in agentic Large Language Models (LLMs) have positioned them as generalist planners capable of reasoning and acting across diverse tasks. However, existing agent benchmarks largely focus on symbolic or weakly grounded environments, leaving their performance in physics-constrained real-world domains underexplored. We introduce AstroReason-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating agentic planning in Space Planning Problems (SPP), a family of high-stakes problems with heterogeneous objectives, strict physical constraints, and long-horizon decision-making. AstroReason-Bench integrates multiple scheduling regimes, including ground station communication and agile Earth observation, and provides a unified agent-oriented interaction protocol. Evaluating on a range of state-of-the-art open- and closed-source agentic LLM systems, we find that current agents substantially underperform specialized solvers, highlighting key limitations of generalist planning under realistic constraints. AstroReason-Bench offers a challenging and diagnostic testbed for future agentic research.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is the dominant paradigm for sharpening strategic tool use capabilities of LLMs on long-horizon, sparsely-rewarded agent tasks, yet it faces a fundamental challenge of exploration-exploitation trade-off. Existing studies stimulate exploration through the lens of policy entropy, but such mechanical entropy maximization is prone to RL training instability due to the multi-turn distribution shifting. In this paper, we target the progressive exploration-exploitation balance under the guidance of the agent own experiences without succumbing to either entropy collapsing or runaway divergence. We propose SPEAR, a curriculum-based self-imitation learning (SIL) recipe for training agentic LLMs. It extends the vanilla SIL framework, where a replay buffer stores self-generated promising trajectories for off-policy update, by gradually steering the policy evolution within a well-balanced range of entropy across stages. Specifically, our approach incorporates a curriculum to manage the exploration process, utilizing intrinsic rewards to foster skill-level exploration and facilitating action-level exploration through SIL. At first, the auxiliary tool call reward plays a critical role in the accumulation of tool-use skills, enabling broad exposure to the unfamiliar distributions of the environment feedback with an upward entropy trend. As training progresses, self-imitation gets strengthened to exploit existing successful patterns from replayed experiences for comparative action-level exploration, accelerating solution iteration without unbounded entropy growth. To further stabilize training, we recalibrate the advantages of experiences in the replay buffer to address the potential policy drift. Reugularizations such as the clipping of tokens with high covariance between probability and advantage are introduced to the trajectory-level entropy control to curb over-confidence.

Recent advances in task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems, driven by large language models (LLMs) with extensive API and tool integration, have enabled conversational agents to coordinate interleaved goals, maintain long-horizon context, and act proactively through asynchronous execution. These capabilities extend beyond traditional TOD systems, yet existing benchmarks lack systematic support for evaluating such agentic behaviors. To address this gap, we introduce ATOD, a benchmark and synthetic dialogue generation pipeline that produces richly annotated conversations requiring long-term reasoning. ATOD captures key characteristics of advanced TOD, including multi-goal coordination, dependency management, memory, adaptability, and proactivity. Building on ATOD, we propose ATOD-Eval, a holistic evaluation framework that translates these dimensions into fine-grained metrics and supports reproducible offline and online evaluation. We further present a strong agentic memory-based evaluator for benchmarking on ATOD. Experiments show that ATOD-Eval enables comprehensive assessment across task completion, agentic capability, and response quality, and that the proposed evaluator offers a better accuracy-efficiency tradeoff compared to existing memory- and LLM-based approaches under this evaluation setting.

Training large language models (LLMs) to reason via reinforcement learning (RL) significantly improves their problem-solving capabilities. In agentic settings, existing methods like ReAct prompt LLMs to explicitly plan before every action; however, we demonstrate that always planning is computationally expensive and degrades performance on long-horizon tasks, while never planning further limits performance. To address this, we introduce a conceptual framework formalizing dynamic planning for LLM agents, enabling them to flexibly decide when to allocate test-time compute for planning. We propose a simple two-stage training pipeline: (1) supervised fine-tuning on diverse synthetic data to prime models for dynamic planning, and (2) RL to refine this capability in long-horizon environments. Experiments on the Crafter environment show that dynamic planning agents trained with this approach are more sample-efficient and consistently achieve more complex objectives. Additionally, we demonstrate that these agents can be effectively steered by human-written plans, surpassing their independent capabilities. To our knowledge, this work is the first to explore training LLM agents for dynamic test-time compute allocation in sequential decision-making tasks, paving the way for more efficient, adaptive, and controllable agentic systems.

Large language model (LLM)-based agents are increasingly expected to negotiate, coordinate, and transact autonomously, yet existing benchmarks lack principled settings for evaluating language-mediated economic interaction among multiple agents. We introduce AgenticPay, a benchmark and simulation framework for multi-agent buyer-seller negotiation driven by natural language. AgenticPay models markets in which buyers and sellers possess private constraints and product-dependent valuations, and must reach agreements through multi-round linguistic negotiation rather than numeric bidding alone. The framework supports a diverse suite of over 110 tasks ranging from bilateral bargaining to many-to-many markets, with structured action extraction and metrics for feasibility, efficiency, and welfare. Benchmarking state-of-the-art proprietary and open-weight LLMs reveals substantial gaps in negotiation performance and highlights challenges in long-horizon strategic reasoning, establishing AgenticPay as a foundation for studying agentic commerce and language-based market interaction. Code and dataset are available at the link: https://github.com/SafeRL-Lab/AgenticPay.

Process reward models enable fine-grained, step-level evaluation of LLMs, yet building them for agentic settings remains prohibitively difficult: long-horizon interactions, irreversible actions, and stochastic environment feedback make both human annotation and Monte Carlo estimation infeasible at scale. In this work, we show that reinforcement learning (RL) post-training already provides the ingredients for effective step-level scoring, eliminating the need for dedicated reward model training altogether. Concretely, we derive an implicit advantage under a general stochastic Markov decision process, which we term progress advantage -- log-probability ratio between the RL-trained policy and its reference policy exactly recovers the optimal advantage function. This formulation makes the resulting signal annotation-free, domain-agnostic, and available as a byproduct of the standard RL post-training pipeline. We validate the effectiveness of the progress advantage across three different applications: test-time scaling, uncertainty quantification, and failure attribution on five benchmarks and four model families. Across all settings, it consistently outperforms confidence-based baselines and, despite requiring no task-specific training, surpasses dedicated trained reward models. We complement these results with deeper analyses on characteristics of progress advantage, offering practical guidance for adoption in real-world agentic systems.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly trained with reinforcement learning (RL) as autonomous agents that reason and act over long horizons in interactive environments. However, sparse and sometimes unverifiable rewards make temporal credit assignment extremely challenging. Recent work attempts to integrate process supervision into agent learning but suffers from biased annotation, reward hacking, high-variance from overly fine-grained signals or failtures when state overlap is rare. We therefore introduce Online Process Reward Learning (OPRL), a general credit-assignment strategy for agentic RL that integrates seamlessly with standard on-policy algorithms without relying on additional rollouts or explicit step labels. In OPRL, we optimize an implicit process reward model (PRM) alternately with the agent's policy to transform trajectory preferences into implicit step rewards through a trajectory-based DPO objective. These step rewards are then used to compute step-level advantages, which are combined with episode-level advantages from outcome rewards for policy update, creating a self-reinforcing loop. Theoretical findings guarantee that the learned step rewards are consistent with trajectory preferences and act as potential-based shaping rewards, providing bounded gradients to stabilize training. Empirically, we evaluate OPRL on three distinct agent benmarks, including WebShop and VisualSokoban, as well as open-ended social interactions with unverfiable rewards in SOTOPIA. Crucially, OPRL shows superior performance over frontier LLMs and strong RL baselines across domains, achieving state-of-the-art results with higher sample-efficiency and lower variance during training. Further analysis also demonstrates the efficient exploration by OPRL using fewer actions, underscoring its potential for agentic learning in real-world scenarios.

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. Agentic systems offer a promising alternative by decomposing work across specialized modules, yet most remain training-free or rely on offline training decoupled from the live dynamics of multi-turn interaction. We introduce AgentFlow, a trainable, in-the-flow agentic framework that coordinates four modules (planner, executor, verifier, generator) through an evolving memory and directly optimizes its planner inside the multi-turn loop. To train on-policy in live environments, we propose Flow-based Group Refined Policy Optimization (Flow-GRPO), which tackles long-horizon, sparse-reward credit assignment by converting multi-turn optimization into a sequence of tractable single-turn policy updates. It broadcasts a single, verifiable trajectory-level outcome to every turn to align local planner decisions with global success and stabilizes learning with group-normalized advantages. Across ten benchmarks, AgentFlow with a 7B-scale backbone outperforms top-performing baselines with average accuracy gains of 14.9% on search, 14.0% on agentic, 14.5% on mathematical, and 4.1% on scientific tasks, even surpassing larger proprietary models like GPT-4o. Further analyses confirm the benefits of in-the-flow optimization, showing improved planning, enhanced tool-calling reliability, and positive scaling with model size and reasoning turns.

Large language model (LLM)-based agents have emerged as powerful autonomous controllers for digital environments, including mobile interfaces, operating systems, and web browsers. Web navigation, for example, requires handling dynamic content and long sequences of actions, making it particularly challenging. Existing LLM-based agents struggle with long-horizon planning in two main ways. During online execution, they often lose track as new information arrives, lacking a clear and adaptive path toward the final goal. This issue is further exacerbated during reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning, where sparse and delayed rewards make it difficult for agents to identify which actions lead to success, preventing them from maintaining coherent reasoning over extended tasks. To address these challenges, we propose two contributions. First, we introduce an agent framework that leverages proprietary models for online planning through subgoal decomposition. Second, we present MiRA (Milestoning your Reinforcement Learning Enhanced Agent), an RL training framework that uses dense, milestone-based reward signals. The real-time planning mechanism improves proprietary models such as Gemini by approximately a 10% absolute increase in success rate (SR) on the WebArena-Lite benchmark. Meanwhile, applying MiRA to the open Gemma3-12B model increases its success rate from 6.4% to 43.0%. This performance surpasses proprietary systems such as GPT-4-Turbo (17.6%) and GPT-4o (13.9%), as well as the previous open-model state of the art, WebRL (38.4%). Overall, our findings demonstrate that combining explicit inference-time planning with milestone-based rewards significantly improves an agent's long-horizon capabilities, paving the way for more robust and general-purpose autonomous systems.

LLM agents are increasingly deployed in long-horizon, complex environments to solve challenging problems, but this expansion exposes them to long-horizon attacks that exploit multi-turn user-agent-environment interactions to achieve objectives infeasible in single-turn settings. To measure agent vulnerabilities to such risks, we present AgentLAB, the first benchmark dedicated to evaluating LLM agent susceptibility to adaptive, long-horizon attacks. Currently, AgentLAB supports five novel attack types including intent hijacking, tool chaining, task injection, objective drifting, and memory poisoning, spanning 28 realistic agentic environments, and 644 security test cases. Leveraging AgentLAB, we evaluate representative LLM agents and find that they remain highly susceptible to long-horizon attacks; moreover, defenses designed for single-turn interactions fail to reliably mitigate long-horizon threats. We anticipate that AgentLAB will serve as a valuable benchmark for tracking progress on securing LLM agents in practical settings. The benchmark is publicly available at https://tanqiujiang.github.io/AgentLAB_main.

Most evaluations of LLM agents look like exams: a discrete task, a clean environment, a score in minutes or hours. We argue that this approach is mismatched with the deployment conditions of autonomous systems, where the relevant timescale can be weeks to months, and where the dynamics that matter most, such as behavioral drift, governance in diverse environmental contexts, and cross-influence between agents from different model families, only emerge over time. We introduce Emergence World, a continuously running multi-agent simulation platform designed to make those dynamics measurable. The platform hosts populations of LLM-driven agents in a shared spatial world grounded in live external data (e.g. real-time weather, news APIs, internet access), equips each agent with 120+ specialized tools and three persistent memory systems, and lets them govern themselves through democratic mechanisms with consequential outcomes. The platform is model-agnostic at the reasoning layer and supports heterogeneous populations in which agents from different vendors share the same world. To illustrate the kinds of questions the platform makes tractable, we present a 15-day cross-vendor study with five parallel worlds powered by Claude Sonnet 4.6, Grok 4.1 Fast, Gemini 3 Flash, GPT-5-mini, and a mixed population. Identical roles and starting conditions produced radically different outcomes, ranging from stable deliberative governance to total population collapse. We release the prompts, log data and configurations to support further research on long-horizon multi-agent autonomy.

Long-horizon large language model (LLM) agents are fundamentally limited by context. As interactions become longer, tool descriptions, retrieved memories, and raw environmental feedback accumulate and push out the information needed for decision-making. At the same time, useful experience gained from tasks is often lost across episodes. We argue that long-horizon performance is determined not by context length, but by how much decision-relevant information is maintained within a finite context budget. We present GenericAgent (GA), a general-purpose, self-evolving LLM agent system built around a single principle: context information density maximization. GA implements this through four closely connected components: a minimal atomic tool set that keeps the interface simple, a hierarchical on-demand memory that only shows a small high-level view by default, a self-evolution mechanism that turns verified past trajectories into reusable SOPs and executable code, and a context truncation and compression layer that maintains information density during long executions. Across task completion, tool use efficiency, memory effectiveness, self-evolution, and web browsing, GA consistently outperforms leading agent systems while using significantly fewer tokens and interactions, and it continues to evolve over time. Project: https://github.com/lsdefine/GenericAgent

Large language model (LLM) agents perform strongly on short- and mid-horizon tasks, but often break down on long-horizon tasks that require extended, interdependent action sequences. Despite rapid progress in agentic systems, these long-horizon failures remain poorly characterized, hindering principled diagnosis and comparison across domains. To address this gap, we introduce HORIZON, an initial cross-domain diagnostic benchmark for systematically constructing tasks and analyzing long-horizon failure behaviors in LLM-based agents. Using HORIZON, we evaluate state-of-the-art (SOTA) agents from multiple model families (GPT-5 variants and Claude models), collecting 3100+ trajectories across four representative agentic domains to study horizon-dependent degradation patterns. We further propose a trajectory-grounded LLM-as-a-Judge pipeline for scalable and reproducible failure attribution, and validate it with human annotation on trajectories, achieving strong agreement (inter-annotator κ=0.61; human-judge κ=0.84). Our findings offer an initial methodological step toward systematic, cross-domain analysis of long-horizon agent failures and offer practical guidance for building more reliable long-horizon agents. We release our project website at https://xwang2775.github.io/horizon-leaderboard/{HORIZON Leaderboard} and welcome contributions from the community.

Long-horizon agentic reasoning requires large language models to act over long interaction histories containing thoughts, tool calls, observations, and partial conclusions. The challenge is not merely that these histories grow long, but that information needed for the current decision may be scattered across distant steps and only become relevant later. Existing approaches address this difficulty by truncating the interaction history, compressing it into shorter surrogates, or retrieving selected parts of it for reuse, but they do not explicitly model how access to past interaction should adapt to the agent's evolving state. We instead cast long-horizon reasoning as a problem of state-adaptive memory. To this end, we propose State-Adaptive Memory~(SAM), a standalone framework that consolidates ongoing interaction into compact memory cues while preserving raw trajectory pages for intent-driven recall. These cues are not treated as replacements for history; rather, they serve as lightweight handles that allow the agent to reconstruct temporally distant information according to its current needs, without retraining the underlying backbone. We further optimize the memory module through expert-guided supervision and reinforcement learning, aligning it with trajectory-level utility. Across BrowseComp, BrowseComp-ZH, WideSearch, and HLE, SAM consistently outperforms strong baselines over diverse agent backbones. Our results suggest that explicit memory modeling provides a simple and effective foundation for long-horizon agentic reasoning.

Large Language Model (LLM)-empowered multi-agent systems extend the cognitive boundaries of individual agents through disciplined collaboration and interaction, while constructing these systems often requires labor-intensive manual designs. Despite the availability of methods to automate the design of agentic workflows, they typically seek to identify a static, complex, one-size-fits-all system, which, however, fails to dynamically allocate inference resources based on the difficulty and domain of each query. To address this challenge, we shift away from the pursuit of a monolithic agentic system, instead optimizing the agentic supernet, a probabilistic and continuous distribution of agentic architectures. We introduce MaAS, an automated framework that samples query-dependent agentic systems from the supernet, delivering high-quality solutions and tailored resource allocation (e.g., LLM calls, tool calls, token cost). Comprehensive evaluation across six benchmarks demonstrates that MaAS (I) requires only 6sim45% of the inference costs of existing handcrafted or automated multi-agent systems, (II) surpasses them by 0.54%sim11.82%, and (III) enjoys superior cross-dataset and cross-LLM-backbone transferability.

This paper introduces KLong, an open-source LLM agent trained to solve extremely long-horizon tasks. The principle is to first cold-start the model via trajectory-splitting SFT, then scale it via progressive RL training. Specifically, we first activate basic agentic abilities of a base model with a comprehensive SFT recipe. Then, we introduce Research-Factory, an automated pipeline that generates high-quality training data by collecting research papers and constructing evaluation rubrics. Using this pipeline, we build thousands of long-horizon trajectories distilled from Claude 4.5 Sonnet (Thinking). To train with these extremely long trajectories, we propose a new trajectory-splitting SFT, which preserves early context, progressively truncates later context, and maintains overlap between sub-trajectories. In addition, to further improve long-horizon task-solving capability, we propose a novel progressive RL, which schedules training into multiple stages with progressively extended timeouts. Experiments demonstrate the superiority and generalization of KLong, as shown in Figure 1. Notably, our proposed KLong (106B) surpasses Kimi K2 Thinking (1T) by 11.28% on PaperBench, and the performance improvement generalizes to other coding benchmarks like SWE-bench Verified and MLE-bench.

The ability of Language Models (LMs) to understand natural language makes them a powerful tool for parsing human instructions into task plans for autonomous robots. Unlike traditional planning methods that rely on domain-specific knowledge and handcrafted rules, LMs generalize from diverse data and adapt to various tasks with minimal tuning, acting as a compressed knowledge base. However, LMs in their standard form face challenges with long-horizon tasks, particularly in partially observable multi-agent settings. We propose an LM-based Long-Horizon Planner for Multi-Agent Robotics (LLaMAR), a cognitive architecture for planning that achieves state-of-the-art results in long-horizon tasks within partially observable environments. LLaMAR employs a plan-act-correct-verify framework, allowing self-correction from action execution feedback without relying on oracles or simulators. Additionally, we present MAP-THOR, a comprehensive test suite encompassing household tasks of varying complexity within the AI2-THOR environment. Experiments show that LLaMAR achieves a 30% higher success rate than other state-of-the-art LM-based multi-agent planners in MAP-THOR and Search \& Rescue tasks. Code can be found at https://github.com/nsidn98/LLaMAR

Large language model (LLM) agents face fundamental limitations in long-horizon reasoning due to finite context windows, making effective memory management critical. Existing methods typically handle long-term memory (LTM) and short-term memory (STM) as separate components, relying on heuristics or auxiliary controllers, which limits adaptability and end-to-end optimization. In this paper, we propose Agentic Memory (AgeMem), a unified framework that integrates LTM and STM management directly into the agent's policy. AgeMem exposes memory operations as tool-based actions, enabling the LLM agent to autonomously decide what and when to store, retrieve, update, summarize, or discard information. To train such unified behaviors, we propose a three-stage progressive reinforcement learning strategy and design a step-wise GRPO to address sparse and discontinuous rewards induced by memory operations. Experiments on five long-horizon benchmarks demonstrate that AgeMem consistently outperforms strong memory-augmented baselines across multiple LLM backbones, achieving improved task performance, higher-quality long-term memory, and more efficient context usage.

Large Language Models (LLMs) can serve as world models to enhance agent decision-making in digital environments by simulating future states and predicting action outcomes, potentially eliminating costly trial-and-error exploration. However, this capability is fundamentally limited by LLMs' tendency toward hallucination and their reliance on static training knowledge, which can lead to compounding errors that inhibit long-horizon simulations. To systematically investigate whether LLMs are appropriate for world modeling, we probe two core capabilities of world models--future state prediction and reward estimation--through three tasks: next-state identification, full-procedure planning alignment, and milestone transition recognition. Our analysis shows that while LLMs effectively capture immediate next states and identify meaningful state transitions, their performance rapidly degrades in full-procedure planning. This highlights LLMs' limitations in reliably modeling environment dynamics over long horizons. To address these limitations, we propose the Retrieval-augmented World Model (R-WoM), which grounds LLM simulations by incorporating factual, up-to-date knowledge retrieved from external tutorials. Experiments show that R-WoM achieves substantial improvements of up to 25.3% (OSWorld) and 18.1% (WebArena) compared to baselines, with particular advantages in longer-horizon simulations.

With the recent emergence of revolutionary autonomous agentic systems, research community is witnessing a significant shift from traditional static, passive, and domain-specific AI agents toward more dynamic, proactive, and generalizable agentic AI. Motivated by the growing interest in agentic AI and its potential trajectory toward AGI, we present a comprehensive survey on Agentic Multimodal Large Language Models (Agentic MLLMs). In this survey, we explore the emerging paradigm of agentic MLLMs, delineating their conceptual foundations and distinguishing characteristics from conventional MLLM-based agents. We establish a conceptual framework that organizes agentic MLLMs along three fundamental dimensions: (i) Agentic internal intelligence functions as the system's commander, enabling accurate long-horizon planning through reasoning, reflection, and memory; (ii) Agentic external tool invocation, whereby models proactively use various external tools to extend their problem-solving capabilities beyond their intrinsic knowledge; and (iii) Agentic environment interaction further situates models within virtual or physical environments, allowing them to take actions, adapt strategies, and sustain goal-directed behavior in dynamic real-world scenarios. To further accelerate research in this area for the community, we compile open-source training frameworks, training and evaluation datasets for developing agentic MLLMs. Finally, we review the downstream applications of agentic MLLMs and outline future research directions for this rapidly evolving field. To continuously track developments in this rapidly evolving field, we will also actively update a public repository at https://github.com/HJYao00/Awesome-Agentic-MLLMs.

Long-horizon workflow agents that operate effectively over extended periods are essential for truly autonomous systems. Their reliable execution critically depends on the ability to reason through ambiguous situations in which clarification seeking is necessary to ensure correct task execution. However, progress is limited by the lack of scalable, task-agnostic frameworks for systematically curating and measuring the impact of ambiguity across custom workflows. We address this gap by introducing LHAW (Long-Horizon Augmented Workflows), a modular, dataset-agnostic synthetic pipeline that transforms any well-specified task into controllable underspecified variants by systematically removing information across four dimensions - Goals, Constraints, Inputs, and Context - at configurable severity levels. Unlike approaches that rely on LLM predictions of ambiguity, LHAW validates variants through empirical agent trials, classifying them as outcome-critical, divergent, or benign based on observed terminal state divergence. We release 285 task variants from TheAgentCompany, SWE-Bench Pro and MCP-Atlas according to our taxonomy alongside formal analysis measuring how current agents detect, reason about, and resolve underspecification across ambiguous settings. LHAW provides the first systematic framework for cost-sensitive evaluation of agent clarification behavior in long-horizon settings, enabling development of reliable autonomous systems.

The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) into autonomous agents necessitates the management of extensive, dynamic contexts. Current benchmarks, however, remain largely static, relying on passive retrieval tasks that fail to simulate the complexities of agent-environment interaction, such as non-linear reasoning and iterative feedback. To address this, we introduce AgentLongBench, which evaluates agents through simulated environment rollouts based on Lateral Thinking Puzzles. This framework generates rigorous interaction trajectories across knowledge-intensive and knowledge-free scenarios. Experiments with state-of-the-art models and memory systems (32K to 4M tokens) expose a critical weakness: while adept at static retrieval, agents struggle with the dynamic information synthesis essential for workflows. Our analysis indicates that this degradation is driven by the minimum number of tokens required to resolve a query. This factor explains why the high information density inherent in massive tool responses poses a significantly greater challenge than the memory fragmentation typical of long-turn dialogues.

The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) from passive text generators to autonomous, goal-driven systems represents a fundamental shift in artificial intelligence. This chapter examines the emergence of agentic AI systems that integrate planning, memory, tool use, and iterative reasoning to operate autonomously in complex environments. We trace the architectural progression from statistical models to transformer-based systems, identifying capabilities that enable agentic behavior: long-range reasoning, contextual awareness, and adaptive decision-making. The chapter provides three contributions: (1) a synthesis of how LLM capabilities extend toward agency through reasoning-action-reflection loops; (2) an integrative framework describing core components perception, memory, planning, and tool execution that bridge LLMs with autonomous behavior; (3) a critical assessment of applications and persistent challenges in safety, alignment, reliability, and sustainability. Unlike existing surveys, we focus on the architectural transition from language understanding to autonomous action, emphasizing the technical gaps that must be resolved before deployment. We identify critical research priorities, including verifiable planning, scalable multi-agent coordination, persistent memory architectures, and governance frameworks. Responsible advancement requires simultaneous progress in technical robustness, interpretability, and ethical safeguards to realize potential while mitigating risks of misalignment and unintended consequences.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable advancements in tackling agent-oriented tasks. Despite their potential, existing work faces challenges when deploying LLMs in agent-based environments. The widely adopted agent paradigm ReAct centers on integrating single-step reasoning with immediate action execution, which limits its effectiveness in complex tasks requiring long-term strategic planning. Furthermore, the coordination between the planner and executor during problem-solving is also a critical factor to consider in agent design. Additionally, current approaches predominantly rely on supervised fine-tuning, which often leads models to memorize established task completion trajectories, thereby restricting their generalization ability when confronted with novel problem contexts. To address these challenges, we introduce an adaptive global plan-based agent paradigm AdaPlan, aiming to synergize high-level explicit guidance with execution to support effective long-horizon decision-making. Based on the proposed paradigm, we further put forward PilotRL, a global planning-guided training framework for LLM agents driven by progressive reinforcement learning. We first develop the model's ability to follow explicit guidance from global plans when addressing agent tasks. Subsequently, based on this foundation, we focus on optimizing the quality of generated plans. Finally, we conduct joint optimization of the model's planning and execution coordination. Experiments indicate that PilotRL could achieve state-of-the-art performances, with LLaMA3.1-8B-Instruct + PilotRL surpassing closed-sourced GPT-4o by 3.60%, while showing a more substantial gain of 55.78% comparing to GPT-4o-mini at a comparable parameter scale.

Agentic multimodal large language models (MLLMs) (e.g., OpenAI o3 and Gemini Agentic Vision) achieve remarkable reasoning capabilities through iterative visual tool invocation. However, the cascaded perception, reasoning, and tool-calling loops introduce significant sequential overhead. This overhead, termed agentic depth, incurs prohibitive latency and seriously limits system-level concurrency. To this end, we propose SpecEyes, an agentic-level speculative acceleration framework that breaks this sequential bottleneck. Our key insight is that a lightweight, tool-free MLLM can serve as a speculative planner to predict the execution trajectory, enabling early termination of expensive tool chains without sacrificing accuracy. To regulate this speculative planning, we introduce a cognitive gating mechanism based on answer separability, which quantifies the model's confidence for self-verification without requiring oracle labels. Furthermore, we design a heterogeneous parallel funnel that exploits the stateless concurrency of the small model to mask the stateful serial execution of the large model, maximizing system throughput. Extensive experiments on V* Bench, HR-Bench, and POPE demonstrate that SpecEyes achieves 1.1-3.35x speedup over the agentic baseline while preserving or even improving accuracy (up to +6.7%), thereby boosting serving throughput under concurrent workloads.

Long-horizon LLM agents leave traces that could become reusable experience, but raw trajectories are noisy and hard to govern. We treat Agent Skills as an experience schema that couples executable scripts, with non-executable guidance on procedures. Yet open skill ecosystems contain redundant, uneven, environment-sensitive artifacts, and indiscriminate updates can pollute future context. We present SkillsVote, a lifecycle-governance framework for Agent Skills from collection and recommendation to evolution. SkillsVote profiles a million-scale open-source corpus for environment requirements, quality, and verifiability, then synthesizes tasks for verifiable skills. Before execution, SkillsVote performs agentic library search over structured skill library to expose instructional skill context. After execution, it decomposes trajectories into skill-linked subtasks, attributes outcomes to skill use, agent exploration, environment, and result signals, and admits only successful reusable discoveries to evidence-gated updates. In our evaluation, offline evolution improves GPT-5.2 on Terminal-Bench 2.0 by up to 7.9 pp, while online evolution improves SWE-Bench Pro by up to 2.6 pp. Overall, governed external skill libraries can improve frozen agents without model updates when systems control exposure, credit, and preservation.

Long-horizon planning is widely recognized as a core capability of autonomous LLM-based agents; however, current evaluation frameworks suffer from being largely episodic, domain-specific, or insufficiently grounded in persistent economic dynamics. We introduce EcoGym, a generalizable benchmark for continuous plan-and-execute decision making in interactive economies. EcoGym comprises three diverse environments: Vending, Freelance, and Operation, implemented in a unified decision-making process with standardized interfaces, and budgeted actions over an effectively unbounded horizon (1000+ steps if 365 day-loops for evaluation). The evaluation of EcoGym is based on business-relevant outcomes (e.g., net worth, income, and DAU), targeting long-term strategic coherence and robustness under partial observability and stochasticity. Experiments across eleven leading LLMs expose a systematic tension: no single model dominates across all three scenarios. Critically, we find that models exhibit significant suboptimality in either high-level strategies or efficient actions executions. EcoGym is released as an open, extensible testbed for transparent long-horizon agent evaluation and for studying controllability-utility trade-offs in realistic economic settings.

We introduce Youtu-LLM, a lightweight yet powerful language model that harmonizes high computational efficiency with native agentic intelligence. Unlike typical small models that rely on distillation, Youtu-LLM (1.96B) is pre-trained from scratch to systematically cultivate reasoning and planning capabilities. The key technical advancements are as follows: (1) Compact Architecture with Long-Context Support: Built on a dense Multi-Latent Attention (MLA) architecture with a novel STEM-oriented vocabulary, Youtu-LLM supports a 128k context window. This design enables robust long-context reasoning and state tracking within a minimal memory footprint, making it ideal for long-horizon agent and reasoning tasks. (2) Principled "Commonsense-STEM-Agent" Curriculum: We curated a massive corpus of approximately 11T tokens and implemented a multi-stage training strategy. By progressively shifting the pre-training data distribution from general commonsense to complex STEM and agentic tasks, we ensure the model acquires deep cognitive abilities rather than superficial alignment. (3) Scalable Agentic Mid-training: Specifically for the agentic mid-training, we employ diverse data construction schemes to synthesize rich and varied trajectories across math, coding, and tool-use domains. This high-quality data enables the model to internalize planning and reflection behaviors effectively. Extensive evaluations show that Youtu-LLM sets a new state-of-the-art for sub-2B LLMs. On general benchmarks, it achieves competitive performance against larger models, while on agent-specific tasks, it significantly surpasses existing SOTA baselines, demonstrating that lightweight models can possess strong intrinsic agentic capabilities.

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly applied to long-horizon tasks such as scientific discovery and machine learning engineering (MLE), where sustained self-evolution becomes a key capability. However, existing MLE agents suffer from inter-branch information isolation, memoryless search, and lack of hierarchical control, which together hinder long-horizon optimization. We present MLEvolve, an LLM-based self-evolving multi-agent framework for end-to-end machine learning algorithm discovery. By extending tree search to Progressive MCGS, MLEvolve enables cross-branch information flow through graph-based reference edges and gradually shifts the search from broad exploration to focused exploitation with an entropy-inspired progressive schedule. To allow the agent to evolve with accumulated experience, we introduce Retrospective Memory, which combines a cold-start domain knowledge base with a dynamic global memory for task-specific experience retrieval and reuse. For stable long-horizon iteration, we further decouple strategic planning from code generation with adaptive coding modes. Evaluation on MLE-Bench shows that MLEvolve achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple dimensions including average medal rate and valid submission rate under a 12-hour budget (half the standard runtime). Moreover, MLEvolve also outperforms specialized algorithm discovery methods including AlphaEvolve on mathematical algorithm optimization tasks, demonstrating strong cross-domain generalization. Our code is available at https://github.com/InternScience/MLEvolve.

The convergence of embodied agents and large language models (LLMs) has brought significant advancements to embodied instruction following. Particularly, the strong reasoning capabilities of LLMs make it possible for robots to perform long-horizon tasks without expensive annotated demonstrations. However, public benchmarks for testing the long-horizon reasoning capabilities of language-conditioned robots in various scenarios are still missing. To fill this gap, this work focuses on the tabletop manipulation task and releases a simulation benchmark, LoHoRavens, which covers various long-horizon reasoning aspects spanning color, size, space, arithmetics and reference. Furthermore, there is a key modality bridging problem for long-horizon manipulation tasks with LLMs: how to incorporate the observation feedback during robot execution for the LLM's closed-loop planning, which is however less studied by prior work. We investigate two methods of bridging the modality gap: caption generation and learnable interface for incorporating explicit and implicit observation feedback to the LLM, respectively. These methods serve as the two baselines for our proposed benchmark. Experiments show that both methods struggle to solve some tasks, indicating long-horizon manipulation tasks are still challenging for current popular models. We expect the proposed public benchmark and baselines can help the community develop better models for long-horizon tabletop manipulation tasks.

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents have fundamentally reshaped artificial intelligence by integrating external tools and planning capabilities. While memory mechanisms have emerged as the architectural cornerstone of these systems, current research remains fragmented, oscillating between operating system engineering and cognitive science. This theoretical divide prevents a unified view of technological synthesis and a coherent evolutionary perspective. To bridge this gap, this survey proposes a novel evolutionary framework for LLM agent memory mechanisms, formalizing the development process into three stages: Storage (trajectory preservation), Reflection (trajectory refinement), and Experience (trajectory abstraction). We first formally define these three stages before analyzing the three core drivers of this evolution: the necessity for long-range consistency, the challenges in dynamic environments, and the ultimate goal of continual learning. Furthermore, we specifically explore two transformative mechanisms in the frontier Experience stage: proactive exploration and cross-trajectory abstraction. By synthesizing these disparate views, this work offers robust design principles and a clear roadmap for the development of next-generation LLM agents.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents, while proficient in the digital realm, face a significant gap in physical-world deployment due to the challenge of forming and maintaining a robust spatial mental model. We identify three core cognitive challenges hindering this transition: spatial reasoning, long-horizon state tracking via mental simulation, and active exploration under partial observation. To isolate and evaluate these faculties, we introduce CubeBench, a novel generative benchmark centered on the Rubik's Cube. CubeBench uses a three-tiered diagnostic framework that progressively assesses agent capabilities, from foundational state tracking with full symbolic information to active exploration with only partial visual data. Our experiments on leading LLMs reveal critical limitations, including a uniform 0.00% pass rate on all long-horizon tasks, exposing a fundamental failure in long-term planning. We also propose a diagnostic framework to isolate these cognitive bottlenecks by providing external solver tools. By analyzing the failure modes, we provide key insights to guide the development of more physically-grounded intelligent agents.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated advanced capabilities in real-world agentic applications. Growing research efforts aim to develop LLM-based agents to address practical demands, introducing a new challenge: agentic scenarios often involve lengthy instructions with complex constraints, such as extended system prompts and detailed tool specifications. While adherence to such instructions is crucial for agentic applications, whether LLMs can reliably follow them remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce AgentIF, the first benchmark for systematically evaluating LLM instruction following ability in agentic scenarios. AgentIF features three key characteristics: (1) Realistic, constructed from 50 real-world agentic applications. (2) Long, averaging 1,723 words with a maximum of 15,630 words. (3) Complex, averaging 11.9 constraints per instruction, covering diverse constraint types, such as tool specifications and condition constraints. To construct AgentIF, we collect 707 human-annotated instructions across 50 agentic tasks from industrial application agents and open-source agentic systems. For each instruction, we annotate the associated constraints and corresponding evaluation metrics, including code-based evaluation, LLM-based evaluation, and hybrid code-LLM evaluation. We use AgentIF to systematically evaluate existing advanced LLMs. We observe that current models generally perform poorly, especially in handling complex constraint structures and tool specifications. We further conduct error analysis and analytical experiments on instruction length and meta constraints, providing some findings about the failure modes of existing LLMs. We have released the code and data to facilitate future research.

Large language model (LLM) agents have recently demonstrated strong capabilities in interactive decision-making, yet they remain fundamentally limited in long-horizon tasks that require structured planning and reliable execution. Existing approaches predominantly rely on flat autoregressive policies, where high-level reasoning and low-level actions are generated within a single token sequence, leading to inefficient exploration and severe error propagation over extended trajectories. In this work, we propose HiMAC, a hierarchical agentic RL framework that explicitly decomposes long-horizon decision-making into macro-level planning and micro-level execution. HiMAC models reasoning as a structured blueprint generation process followed by goal-conditioned action execution, enabling robust long-horizon planning within LLM-based agents. To train this hierarchy efficiently, we introduce a critic-free hierarchical policy optimization paradigm that extends group-based reinforcement learning to bi-level structures through hierarchical relative advantage estimation. Furthermore, we propose an iterative co-evolution training strategy that alternates between planner exploration and executor adaptation, mitigating the non-stationarity inherent in hierarchical learning. Extensive experiments on ALFWorld, WebShop, and Sokoban demonstrate that HiMAC consistently outperforms strong prompting and reinforcement learning baselines, achieving state-of-the-art performance and substantially improved sample efficiency across both text-based and visually grounded environments. Our results show that introducing structured hierarchy, rather than increasing model scale alone, is a key factor for enabling robust long-horizon agentic intelligence.

Large Language Models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse domains, yet significant challenges persist when deploying them as AI agents for real-world long-horizon tasks. Existing LLM agents suffer from a critical limitation: they are test-time static and cannot learn from experience, lacking the ability to accumulate knowledge and continuously improve on the job. To address this challenge, we propose MUSE, a novel agent framework that introduces an experience-driven, self-evolving system centered around a hierarchical Memory Module. MUSE organizes diverse levels of experience and leverages them to plan and execute long-horizon tasks across multiple applications. After each sub-task execution, the agent autonomously reflects on its trajectory, converting the raw trajectory into structured experience and integrating it back into the Memory Module. This mechanism enables the agent to evolve beyond its static pretrained parameters, fostering continuous learning and self-evolution. We evaluate MUSE on the long-horizon productivity benchmark TAC. It achieves new SOTA performance by a significant margin using only a lightweight Gemini-2.5 Flash model. Sufficient Experiments demonstrate that as the agent autonomously accumulates experience, it exhibits increasingly superior task completion capabilities, as well as robust continuous learning and self-evolution capabilities. Moreover, the accumulated experience from MUSE exhibits strong generalization properties, enabling zero-shot improvement on new tasks. MUSE establishes a new paradigm for AI agents capable of real-world productivity task automation.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently gained much attention in building autonomous agents. However, the performance of current LLM-based web agents in long-horizon tasks is far from optimal, often yielding errors such as repeatedly buying a non-refundable flight ticket. By contrast, humans can avoid such an irreversible mistake, as we have an awareness of the potential outcomes (e.g., losing money) of our actions, also known as the "world model". Motivated by this, our study first starts with preliminary analyses, confirming the absence of world models in current LLMs (e.g., GPT-4o, Claude-3.5-Sonnet, etc.). Then, we present a World-model-augmented (WMA) web agent, which simulates the outcomes of its actions for better decision-making. To overcome the challenges in training LLMs as world models predicting next observations, such as repeated elements across observations and long HTML inputs, we propose a transition-focused observation abstraction, where the prediction objectives are free-form natural language descriptions exclusively highlighting important state differences between time steps. Experiments on WebArena and Mind2Web show that our world models improve agents' policy selection without training and demonstrate our agents' cost- and time-efficiency compared to recent tree-search-based agents.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved considerable performance across various agentic planning tasks. However, traditional agent planning approaches adopt a "flood irrigation" methodology that indiscriminately injects gold trajectories, external feedback, and domain knowledge into agent models. This practice overlooks the fundamental human cognitive principle of situational self-awareness during decision-making-the ability to dynamically assess situational demands and strategically employ resources during decision-making. We propose agentic knowledgeable self-awareness to address this gap, a novel paradigm enabling LLM-based agents to autonomously regulate knowledge utilization. Specifically, we propose KnowSelf, a data-centric approach that applies agents with knowledgeable self-awareness like humans. Concretely, we devise a heuristic situation judgement criterion to mark special tokens on the agent's self-explored trajectories for collecting training data. Through a two-stage training process, the agent model can switch between different situations by generating specific special tokens, achieving optimal planning effects with minimal costs. Our experiments demonstrate that KnowSelf can outperform various strong baselines on different tasks and models with minimal use of external knowledge. Code is available at https://github.com/zjunlp/KnowSelf.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to take actions in the real world and support human decision-making, yet most agents rely on parametric knowledge, fixed post-training data, retrieval, or search. This paradigm breaks down in novel domains and for sophisticated queries that cannot be answered from prior knowledge alone. Knowing the laws of physics, for instance, does not by itself enable LLMs to answer queries or complete long-horizon tasks in a complex physical system. To address this, we introduce Hierarchical Experimentalist Agents (HExA), an in-context self-improvement framework to learn from active experimentation. HExA iteratively designs and refines query-relevant experiments, learns a reusable library of composable skills from experience, and integrates experimental evidence to answer queries or take actions. HExA is training-free, compatible with any black-box model, and does not require external supervision, oracles, or offline data. To evaluate active experimentation, we introduce Interphyre, a tool-calling benchmark built on the PHYRE 2D procedural physics environment, where agents propose interventions and test hypotheses through simulation APIs. Experiments show that current LLM agents struggle in these settings, especially on the hardest levels of Interphyre. Claude Sonnet 4.6 achieves only 2% success, while HExA improves the same model to up to 77% success. HExA also improves open-weight models and outperforms agentic baselines such as ReAct and Reflexion. Moreover, using only skills learned from easier levels and transferred without active experimentation, HExA achieves 44% success, demonstrating the reusability and generalization of its learned skills. Overall, HExA shows that learning through active experimentation can help agents discover useful knowledge, acquire reusable skills, and make efficient progress on novel long-horizon tasks.

Autonomous agents have long been a prominent research focus in both academic and industry communities. Previous research in this field often focuses on training agents with limited knowledge within isolated environments, which diverges significantly from human learning processes, and thus makes the agents hard to achieve human-like decisions. Recently, through the acquisition of vast amounts of web knowledge, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in achieving human-level intelligence. This has sparked an upsurge in studies investigating LLM-based autonomous agents. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of these studies, delivering a systematic review of the field of LLM-based autonomous agents from a holistic perspective. More specifically, we first discuss the construction of LLM-based autonomous agents, for which we propose a unified framework that encompasses a majority of the previous work. Then, we present a comprehensive overview of the diverse applications of LLM-based autonomous agents in the fields of social science, natural science, and engineering. Finally, we delve into the evaluation strategies commonly used for LLM-based autonomous agents. Based on the previous studies, we also present several challenges and future directions in this field. To keep track of this field and continuously update our survey, we maintain a repository of relevant references at https://github.com/Paitesanshi/LLM-Agent-Survey.

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has ushered in a transformative paradigm in artificial intelligence, Agentic AI, where intelligent agents exhibit goal-directed autonomy, contextual reasoning, and dynamic multi-agent coordination. This paper provides a systematic review and comparative analysis of leading Agentic AI frameworks, including CrewAI, LangGraph, AutoGen, Semantic Kernel, Agno, Google ADK, and MetaGPT, evaluating their architectural principles, communication mechanisms, memory management, safety guardrails, and alignment with service-oriented computing paradigms. Furthermore, we identify key limitations, emerging trends, and open challenges in the field. To address the issue of agent communication, we conduct an in-depth analysis of protocols such as the Contract Net Protocol (CNP), Agent-to-Agent (A2A), Agent Network Protocol (ANP), and Agora. Our findings not only establish a foundational taxonomy for Agentic AI systems but also propose future research directions to enhance scalability, robustness, and interoperability. This work serves as a comprehensive reference for researchers and practitioners working to advance the next generation of autonomous AI systems.

Large language model (LLM) based agents have recently attracted much attention from the research and industry communities. Compared with original LLMs, LLM-based agents are featured in their self-evolving capability, which is the basis for solving real-world problems that need long-term and complex agent-environment interactions. The key component to support agent-environment interactions is the memory of the agents. While previous studies have proposed many promising memory mechanisms, they are scattered in different papers, and there lacks a systematical review to summarize and compare these works from a holistic perspective, failing to abstract common and effective designing patterns for inspiring future studies. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we propose a comprehensive survey on the memory mechanism of LLM-based agents. In specific, we first discuss ''what is'' and ''why do we need'' the memory in LLM-based agents. Then, we systematically review previous studies on how to design and evaluate the memory module. In addition, we also present many agent applications, where the memory module plays an important role. At last, we analyze the limitations of existing work and show important future directions. To keep up with the latest advances in this field, we create a repository at https://github.com/nuster1128/LLM_Agent_Memory_Survey.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across a wide array of tasks. Due to the impressive planning and reasoning abilities of LLMs, they have been used as autonomous agents to do many tasks automatically. Recently, based on the development of using one LLM as a single planning or decision-making agent, LLM-based multi-agent systems have achieved considerable progress in complex problem-solving and world simulation. To provide the community with an overview of this dynamic field, we present this survey to offer an in-depth discussion on the essential aspects of multi-agent systems based on LLMs, as well as the challenges. Our goal is for readers to gain substantial insights on the following questions: What domains and environments do LLM-based multi-agents simulate? How are these agents profiled and how do they communicate? What mechanisms contribute to the growth of agents' capacities? For those interested in delving into this field of study, we also summarize the commonly used datasets or benchmarks for them to have convenient access. To keep researchers updated on the latest studies, we maintain an open-source GitHub repository, dedicated to outlining the research on LLM-based multi-agent systems.

Large language model (LLM) based multi-agent systems enable complex problem solving through coordinated reasoning and action, but their distributed structure also introduces new challenges in diagnosing system-level failures. When an execution fails, identifying which agent is responsible and at what point the trajectory first becomes irreversibly misdirected is difficult due to long-horizon interactions and tightly coupled agent behaviors. In this paper, we study the problem of failure localization in LLM-based multi-agent systems and present AgentLocate, a framework that attributes failures to both a specific agent and the earliest decisive step. AgentLocate combines an LLM-based judging mechanism with multi-perspective verification by independent evaluators, whose assessments are aggregated using a confidence-aware strategy. The resulting feedback is further used to adapt the judge through lightweight fine-tuning, improving attribution quality. We evaluate AgentLocate on two complementary benchmarks covering diverse tasks, agent configurations, and trajectory lengths. Experimental results show that AgentLocate consistently outperforms existing failure localization methods in identifying both responsible agents and failure steps, while remaining efficient in terms of token usage and running time.

Long horizon interactive environments are a testbed for evaluating agents skill usage abilities. These environments demand multi step reasoning, the chaining of multiple skills over many timesteps, and robust decision making under delayed rewards and partial observability. Games are a good testbed for evaluating agent skill usage in environments. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising alternative as game playing agents, but they often struggle with consistent long horizon decision making because they lack a mechanism to discover, retain, and reuse structured skills across episodes. We present COSPLAY, a co evolution framework in which an LLM decision agent retrieves skills from a learnable skill bank to guide action taking, while an agent managed skill pipeline discovers reusable skills from the agents unlabeled rollouts to form a skill bank. Our framework improves both the decision agent to learn better skill retrieval and action generation, while the skill bank agent continually extracts, refines, and updates skills together with their contracts. Experiments across six game environments show that COSPLAY with an 8B base model achieves over 25.1 percent average reward improvement against four frontier LLM baselines on single player game benchmarks while remaining competitive on multi player social reasoning games.

Large language model (LLM)-based agents that reason, plan, and act through tools, memory, and structured interaction are emerging as a promising paradigm for automating complex workflows. Recent systems such as OpenClaw and Claude Code exemplify a broader shift from passive response generation to action-oriented task execution. Yet as agents move toward open-ended, real-world deployment, relying on from-scratch reasoning and low-level tool calls for every task become increasingly inefficient, error-prone, and hard to maintain. This survey examines this challenge through the lens of agent skills, which we define as reusable procedural artifacts that coordinate tools, memory, and runtime context under task-specific constraints. Under this view, agents and skills play complementary roles: agents handle high-level reasoning and planning, while skills form the operational layer that enables reliable, reusable, and composable execution. Skills are therefore central to the scalability, robustness, and maintainability of modern agent systems. We organize the literature around four stages of the agent skill lifecycle -- representation, acquisition, retrieval, and evolution -- and review representative methods, ecosystem resources, and application settings across each stage. We conclude by discussing open challenges in quality control, interoperability, safe updating, and long-term capability management. All related resources, including research papers, open-source data, and projects, are collected for the community in blue{https://github.com/JayLZhou/Awesome-Agent-Skills}.

The remarkable progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) opens up new avenues for addressing planning and decision-making problems in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). However, as the number of agents increases, the issues of hallucination in LLMs and coordination in MAS have become increasingly prominent. Additionally, the efficient utilization of tokens emerges as a critical consideration when employing LLMs to facilitate the interactions among a substantial number of agents. In this paper, we develop a modular framework called LLaMAC to mitigate these challenges. LLaMAC implements a value distribution encoding similar to that found in the human brain, utilizing internal and external feedback mechanisms to facilitate collaboration and iterative reasoning among its modules. Through evaluations involving system resource allocation and robot grid transportation, we demonstrate the considerable advantages afforded by our proposed approach.

In this paper, we introduce a novel learning paradigm for adaptive Large Language Model (LLM) agents that eliminates the need for fine-tuning the underlying LLMs. Existing approaches are often either rigid, relying on static, handcrafted reflection workflows, or computationally intensive, requiring gradient updates of LLM model parameters. In contrast, our method enables low-cost continual adaptation via memory-based online reinforcement learning. We formalise this as a Memory-augmented Markov Decision Process (M-MDP), equipped with a neural case-selection policy to guide action decisions. Past experiences are stored in an episodic memory, either differentiable or non-parametric. The policy is continually updated based on environmental feedback through a memory rewriting mechanism, whereas policy improvement is achieved through efficient memory reading (retrieval). We instantiate our agent model in the deep research setting, namely AgentFly, which attains top-1 on GAIA validation (87.88% Pass@3) and 79.40% on the test set. It reaches 66.6% F1 and 80.4% PM on the DeepResearcher dataset, outperforming the state-of-the-art training-based method, while case-based memory adds 4.7% to 9.6% absolute points on out-of-distribution tasks. Our approach offers a scalable and efficient pathway for developing generalist LLM agents capable of continuous, real-time learning without gradient updates, advancing machine learning towards open-ended skill acquisition and deep research scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/Agent-on-the-Fly/AgentFly.

Large language models (LLMs) have evolved into agentic systems capable of autonomous tool use and multi-step reasoning for complex problem-solving. However, post-training approaches building upon general-purpose foundation models consistently underperform in agentic tasks, particularly in open-source implementations. We identify the root cause: the absence of robust agentic foundation models forces models during post-training to simultaneously learn diverse agentic behaviors while aligning them to expert demonstrations, thereby creating fundamental optimization tensions. To this end, we are the first to propose incorporating Agentic Continual Pre-training (Agentic CPT) into the deep research agents training pipeline to build powerful agentic foundational models. Based on this approach, we develop a deep research agent model named AgentFounder. We evaluate our AgentFounder-30B on 10 benchmarks and achieve state-of-the-art performance while retains strong tool-use ability, notably 39.9% on BrowseComp-en, 43.3% on BrowseComp-zh, and 31.5% Pass@1 on HLE.

LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems ( LLM-MAS ) have become a research hotspot since the rise of large language models (LLMs). However, with the continuous influx of new related works, the existing reviews struggle to capture them comprehensively. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of these studies. We first discuss the definition of LLM-MAS, a framework encompassing much of previous work. We provide an overview of the various applications of LLM-MAS in (i) solving complex tasks, (ii) simulating specific scenarios, and (iii) evaluating generative agents. Building on previous studies, we also highlight several challenges and propose future directions for research in this field.

This paper reviews the architecture and implementation methods of agents powered by large language models (LLMs). Motivated by the limitations of traditional LLMs in real-world tasks, the research aims to explore patterns to develop "agentic" LLMs that can automate complex tasks and bridge the performance gap with human capabilities. Key components include a perception system that converts environmental percepts into meaningful representations; a reasoning system that formulates plans, adapts to feedback, and evaluates actions through different techniques like Chain-of-Thought and Tree-of-Thought; a memory system that retains knowledge through both short-term and long-term mechanisms; and an execution system that translates internal decisions into concrete actions. This paper shows how integrating these systems leads to more capable and generalized software bots that mimic human cognitive processes for autonomous and intelligent behavior.

Intelligent agents stand out as a potential path toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). Thus, researchers have dedicated significant effort to diverse implementations for them. Benefiting from recent progress in large language models (LLMs), LLM-based agents that use universal natural language as an interface exhibit robust generalization capabilities across various applications -- from serving as autonomous general-purpose task assistants to applications in coding, social, and economic domains, LLM-based agents offer extensive exploration opportunities. This paper surveys current research to provide an in-depth overview of LLM-based intelligent agents within single-agent and multi-agent systems. It covers their definitions, research frameworks, and foundational components such as their composition, cognitive and planning methods, tool utilization, and responses to environmental feedback. We also delve into the mechanisms of deploying LLM-based agents in multi-agent systems, including multi-role collaboration, message passing, and strategies to alleviate communication issues between agents. The discussions also shed light on popular datasets and application scenarios. We conclude by envisioning prospects for LLM-based agents, considering the evolving landscape of AI and natural language processing.

Open-source pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong language understanding and generation capabilities, making them highly successful in a variety of tasks. However, when used as agents for dealing with complex problems in the real world, their performance is far inferior to large commercial models such as ChatGPT and GPT-4. As intelligent agents, LLMs need to have the capabilities of task planning, long-term memory, and the ability to leverage external tools to achieve satisfactory performance. Various methods have been proposed to enhance the agent capabilities of LLMs. On the one hand, methods involve constructing agent-specific data and fine-tuning the models. On the other hand, some methods focus on designing prompts that effectively activate the reasoning abilities of the LLMs. We explore both strategies on the 7B and 13B models. We propose a comprehensive method for constructing agent-specific data using GPT-4. Through supervised fine-tuning with constructed data, we find that for these models with a relatively small number of parameters, supervised fine-tuning can significantly reduce hallucination outputs and formatting errors in agent tasks. Furthermore, techniques such as multi-path reasoning and task decomposition can effectively decrease problem complexity and enhance the performance of LLMs as agents. We evaluate our method on five agent tasks of AgentBench and achieve satisfactory results.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated powerful decision-making and planning capabilities in solving complicated real-world problems. LLM-based autonomous agents can interact with diverse tools (e.g., functional APIs) and generate solution plans that execute a series of API function calls in a step-by-step manner. The multitude of candidate API function calls significantly expands the action space, amplifying the critical need for efficient action space navigation. However, existing methods either struggle with unidirectional exploration in expansive action spaces, trapped into a locally optimal solution, or suffer from exhaustively traversing all potential actions, causing inefficient navigation. To address these issues, we propose ToolChain*, an efficient tree search-based planning algorithm for LLM-based agents. It formulates the entire action space as a decision tree, where each node represents a possible API function call involved in a solution plan. By incorporating the A* search algorithm with task-specific cost function design, it efficiently prunes high-cost branches that may involve incorrect actions, identifying the most low-cost valid path as the solution. Extensive experiments on multiple tool-use and reasoning tasks demonstrate that ToolChain* efficiently balances exploration and exploitation within an expansive action space. It outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on planning and reasoning tasks by 3.1% and 3.5% on average while requiring 7.35x and 2.31x less time, respectively.

Agentic memory systems enable large language model (LLM) agents to maintain state across long interactions, supporting long-horizon reasoning and personalization beyond fixed context windows. Despite rapid architectural development, the empirical foundations of these systems remain fragile: existing benchmarks are often underscaled, evaluation metrics are misaligned with semantic utility, performance varies significantly across backbone models, and system-level costs are frequently overlooked. This survey presents a structured analysis of agentic memory from both architectural and system perspectives. We first introduce a concise taxonomy of MAG systems based on four memory structures. Then, we analyze key pain points limiting current systems, including benchmark saturation effects, metric validity and judge sensitivity, backbone-dependent accuracy, and the latency and throughput overhead introduced by memory maintenance. By connecting the memory structure to empirical limitations, this survey clarifies why current agentic memory systems often underperform their theoretical promise and outlines directions for more reliable evaluation and scalable system design.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant capabilities in natural language processing and reasoning, yet their effectiveness in autonomous planning has been under debate. While existing studies have utilized LLMs with external feedback mechanisms or in controlled environments for planning, these approaches often involve substantial computational and development resources due to the requirement for careful design and iterative backprompting. Moreover, even the most advanced LLMs like GPT-4 struggle to match human performance on standard planning benchmarks, such as the Blocksworld, without additional support. This paper investigates whether LLMs can independently generate long-horizon plans that rival human baselines. Our novel enhancements to Algorithm-of-Thoughts (AoT), which we dub AoT+, help achieve state-of-the-art results in planning benchmarks out-competing prior methods and human baselines all autonomously.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as agents, expected to decompose goals, invoke tools, and verify results in dynamic environments. Realizing these capabilities requires access to agentic data-structured interaction records that couple user intents with tool specifications, argument-grounded calls, and verifiable execution traces. However, collecting such data from human annotators is costly, time-consuming, and difficult to scale. We present a unified framework for synthesizing agentic data using only LLMs, without any human-in-the-loop supervision. This framework decomposes generation into modular pipelines that produce complete interaction records spanning task specifications, tool definitions, policy pseudocode, natural language exchanges, and execution traces. Records conform to strict syntactic and semantic constraints, ensuring machine-parseability and faithful alignment across inputs, outputs, and tool calls. Beyond single tasks, there is support for both multi-task and multi-turn agent interactions, enabling the construction of datasets that reflect the full spectrum of tool-use competencies. To ensure quality and consistency, the framework integrates constrained generation formats, JSON-schema validation, and judge-based filtering. This paper formalizes the schema for agentic records, details the prompt design principles that guide generation, and introduces scalable pipelines for high-quality synthetic data. By providing a reproducible, LLM-only alternative to manual collection, hence advancing the development of agentic LLMs capable of robust tool use.

Effective asynchronous planning, or the ability to efficiently reason and plan over states and actions that must happen in parallel or sequentially, is essential for agents that must account for time delays, reason over diverse long-horizon tasks, and collaborate with other agents. While large language model (LLM) agents show promise in high-level task planning, current benchmarks focus primarily on short-horizon tasks and do not evaluate such asynchronous planning capabilities. We introduce Robotouille, a challenging benchmark environment designed to test LLM agents' ability to handle long-horizon asynchronous scenarios. Our synchronous and asynchronous datasets capture increasingly complex planning challenges that go beyond existing benchmarks, requiring agents to manage overlapping tasks and interruptions. Our results show that ReAct (gpt4-o) achieves 47% on synchronous tasks but only 11% on asynchronous tasks, highlighting significant room for improvement. We further analyze failure modes, demonstrating the need for LLM agents to better incorporate long-horizon feedback and self-audit their reasoning during task execution. Code is available at https://github.com/portal-cornell/robotouille.

LLM-based multi-agent systems decompose complex tasks into interacting roles, but most remain manually orchestrated by prompts, tools, and control rules, while agents are rarely optimized through a unified reinforcement learning interface. Existing RL post-training frameworks mainly target single-policy optimization and lack abstractions for user-defined multi-agent workflows, structured interaction, role-specific credit assignment, and configurable parameter sharing. We present UnityMAS-O, a general RL optimization framework for LLM-based multi-agent systems. UnityMAS-O treats the complete workflow as the optimization unit, rather than a single response or policy trajectory. It represents workflows through four first-class objects: logical agent roles, graph trajectories, user-defined rewards, and agent--model mappings. This decouples logical agents from physical model parameters, supporting full sharing, full separation, and partial sharing, with rewards assigned at role, turn, and trajectory levels. UnityMAS-O extends verl with a Ray-based star-topology runtime. A central controller executes workflows, invokes tools, records structured trajectories, and assembles rewards; model-local worker groups handle rollout, buffering, advantage computation, and distributed PPO-style updates. Users can define agents, workflows, model mappings, and rewards without rewriting the optimization infrastructure. We instantiate UnityMAS-O on retrieval-augmented QA, iterative agentic search, and reflective code generation. Across Natural Questions, HotpotQA, and held-out code tasks, multi-agent RL improves manually specified workflows after optimization, with especially large gains for smaller models and strict code all-passed metrics. These results show that UnityMAS-O can serve as a reusable substrate for converting diverse LLM-based multi-agent workflows into trainable multi-agent RL systems.

In Agentic AI, Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in the orchestration layer to coordinate multiple agents and to interact with external services, retrieval components, and shared memory. In this setting, failures are not limited to incorrect final outputs. They also arise from long-horizon interaction, stochastic decisions, and external side effects (such as API calls, database writes, and message sends). Common failures include non-termination, role drift, propagation of unsupported claims, and attacks via untrusted context or external channels. This paper presents an assurance framework for such Agentic AI systems. Executions are instrumented as Message-Action Traces (MAT) with explicit step and trace contracts. Contracts provide machine-checkable verdicts, localize the first violating step, and support deterministic replay. The framework includes stress testing, formulated as a budgeted counterexample search over bounded perturbations. It also supports structured fault injection at service, retrieval, and memory boundaries to assess containment under realistic operational faults and degraded conditions. Finally, governance is treated as a runtime component, enforcing per-agent capability limits and action mediation (allow, rewrite, block) at the language-to-action boundary. To support comparative evaluations across stochastic seeds, models, and orchestration configurations, the paper defines trace-based metrics for task success, termination reliability, contract compliance, factuality indicators, containment rate, and governance outcome distributions. More broadly, the framework is intended as a common abstraction to support testing and evaluation of multi-agent LLM systems, and to facilitate reproducible comparison across orchestration designs and configurations.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have sparked growing interest in building fully autonomous agents. However, fully autonomous LLM-based agents still face significant challenges, including limited reliability due to hallucinations, difficulty in handling complex tasks, and substantial safety and ethical risks, all of which limit their feasibility and trustworthiness in real-world applications. To overcome these limitations, LLM-based human-agent systems (LLM-HAS) incorporate human-provided information, feedback, or control into the agent system to enhance system performance, reliability and safety. This paper provides the first comprehensive and structured survey of LLM-HAS. It clarifies fundamental concepts, systematically presents core components shaping these systems, including environment & profiling, human feedback, interaction types, orchestration and communication, explores emerging applications, and discusses unique challenges and opportunities. By consolidating current knowledge and offering a structured overview, we aim to foster further research and innovation in this rapidly evolving interdisciplinary field. Paper lists and resources are available at https://github.com/HenryPengZou/Awesome-LLM-Based-Human-Agent-Systems.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong zero-shot reasoning capabilities, their deployment as embodied agents still faces fundamental challenges in long-horizon planning. Unlike open-ended text generation, embodied agents must decompose high-level intents into actionable sub-goals while adhering to the constraints of a dynamic environment. Standard LLM planners frequently fail to maintain strategy coherence over extended horizons due to context window limitations or hallucinate state transitions that violate environment constraints. We propose GiG, a planning framework that structures embodied agents' memory using a Graph-in-Graph architecture. Our approach employs a Graph Neural Network (GNN) to encode environmental states into embeddings, organizing these embeddings into action-connected execution trace graphs within an experience memory bank. GiG enables retrieval of structurally-similar priors, allowing agents to ground current decisions in relevant past structural patterns. Furthermore, we introduce a bounded lookahead module that leverages symbolic transition logic to enhance the agent's planning capabilities through grounded action projections. We evaluate our framework on three embodied planning benchmarks-Robotouille Synchronous, Robotouille Asynchronous, and ALFWorld. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving Pass@1 performance gains of up to 22% on Robotouille Synchronous, 37% on Asynchronous, and 15% on ALFWorld while maintaining comparable or lower computational cost.

Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated strong capabilities across diverse domains. However, designing high-performing agentic systems remains challenging. Existing agent search methods suffer from three major limitations: (1) an emphasis on optimizing agentic workflows while under-utilizing proven human-designed components such as memory, planning, and tool use; (2) high evaluation costs, as each newly generated agent must be fully evaluated on benchmarks; and (3) inefficient search in large search space. In this work, we introduce a comprehensive framework to address these challenges. First, We propose a hierarchical search space that jointly models agentic workflow and composable functional components, enabling richer agentic system designs. Building on this structured design space, we introduce a predictive value model that estimates agent performance given agentic system and task description, allowing for efficient, low-cost evaluation during the search process. Finally, we present a hierarchical Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) strategy informed by uncertainty to guide the search. Experiments on seven benchmarks, covering embodied, math, web, tool, and game, show that our method achieves an average performance gain of 8.34\% over state-of-the-art baselines and exhibits faster search progress with steeper improvement trajectories. Code repo is available at https://github.com/Ericccc02/AgentSwift.

The emergence of LLMs has catalyzed a paradigm shift in autonomous agent development, enabling systems capable of reasoning, planning, and executing complex multi-step tasks. However, existing agent frameworks often suffer from architectural rigidity, vendor lock-in, and prohibitive complexity that impedes rapid prototyping and deployment. This paper presents AgentForge, a lightweight, open-source Python framework designed to democratize the construction of LLM-driven autonomous agents through a principled modular architecture. AgentForge introduces three key innovations: (1) a composable skill abstraction that enables fine-grained task decomposition with formally defined input-output contracts, (2) a unified LLM backend interface supporting seamless switching between cloud-based APIs and local inference engines, and (3) a declarative YAML-based configuration system that separates agent logic from implementation details. We formalize the skill composition mechanism as a directed acyclic graph (DAG) and prove its expressiveness for representing arbitrary sequential and parallel task workflows. Comprehensive experimental evaluation across four benchmark scenarios demonstrates that AgentForge achieves competitive task completion rates while reducing development time by 62% compared to LangChain and 78% compared to direct API integration. Latency measurements confirm sub-100ms orchestration overhead, rendering the framework suitable for real-time applications. The modular design facilitates extension: we demonstrate the integration of six built-in skills and provide comprehensive documentation for custom skill development. AgentForge addresses a critical gap in the LLM agent ecosystem by providing researchers and practitioners with a production-ready foundation for constructing, evaluating, and deploying autonomous agents without sacrificing flexibility or performance.

Long-horizon tasks that require sustained reasoning and multiple tool interactions remain challenging for LLM agents: small errors compound across steps, and even state-of-the-art models often hallucinate or lose coherence. We identify context management as the central bottleneck -- extended histories cause agents to overlook critical evidence or become distracted by irrelevant information, thus failing to replan or reflect from previous mistakes. To address this, we propose COMPASS (Context-Organized Multi-Agent Planning and Strategy System), a lightweight hierarchical framework that separates tactical execution, strategic oversight, and context organization into three specialized components: (1) a Main Agent that performs reasoning and tool use, (2) a Meta-Thinker that monitors progress and issues strategic interventions, and (3) a Context Manager that maintains concise, relevant progress briefs for different reasoning stages. Across three challenging benchmarks -- GAIA, BrowseComp, and Humanity's Last Exam -- COMPASS improves accuracy by up to 20% relative to both single- and multi-agent baselines. We further introduce a test-time scaling extension that elevates performance to match established DeepResearch agents, and a post-training pipeline that delegates context management to smaller models for enhanced efficiency.

The pursuit of human-level artificial intelligence (AI) has significantly advanced the development of autonomous agents and Large Language Models (LLMs). LLMs are now widely utilized as decision-making agents for their ability to interpret instructions, manage sequential tasks, and adapt through feedback. This review examines recent developments in employing LLMs as autonomous agents and tool users and comprises seven research questions. We only used the papers published between 2023 and 2025 in conferences of the A* and A rank and Q1 journals. A structured analysis of the LLM agents' architectural design principles, dividing their applications into single-agent and multi-agent systems, and strategies for integrating external tools is presented. In addition, the cognitive mechanisms of LLM, including reasoning, planning, and memory, and the impact of prompting methods and fine-tuning procedures on agent performance are also investigated. Furthermore, we evaluated current benchmarks and assessment protocols and have provided an analysis of 68 publicly available datasets to assess the performance of LLM-based agents in various tasks. In conducting this review, we have identified critical findings on verifiable reasoning of LLMs, the capacity for self-improvement, and the personalization of LLM-based agents. Finally, we have discussed ten future research directions to overcome these gaps.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable planning abilities across various domains, including robotics manipulation and navigation. While recent efforts in robotics have leveraged LLMs both for high-level and low-level planning, these approaches often face significant challenges, such as hallucinations in long-horizon tasks and limited adaptability due to the generation of plans in a single pass without real-time feedback. To address these limitations, we propose a novel multi-agent LLM framework, Multi-Agent Large Language Model for Manipulation (MALMM) that distributes high-level planning and low-level control code generation across specialized LLM agents, supervised by an additional agent that dynamically manages transitions. By incorporating observations from the environment after each step, our framework effectively handles intermediate failures and enables adaptive re-planning. Unlike existing methods, our approach does not rely on pre-trained skill policies or in-context learning examples and generalizes to a variety of new tasks. We evaluate our approach on nine RLBench tasks, including long-horizon tasks, and demonstrate its ability to solve robotics manipulation in a zero-shot setting, thereby overcoming key limitations of existing LLM-based manipulation methods.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant intelligence, the progress to leverage LLMs as planning modules of autonomous agents has attracted more attention. This survey provides the first systematic view of LLM-based agents planning, covering recent works aiming to improve planning ability. We provide a taxonomy of existing works on LLM-Agent planning, which can be categorized into Task Decomposition, Plan Selection, External Module, Reflection and Memory. Comprehensive analyses are conducted for each direction, and further challenges for the field of research are discussed.

Modern language agents must operate over long-horizon, multi-turn histories, yet deploying such agents with Small Language Models (SLMs) remains fundamentally difficult. Full-context prompting causes context overflow, flat retrieval exposes the model to noisy evidence, and open-ended agentic loops are unreliable under limited reasoning capacity. We argue that a substantial portion of SLM memory failure arises from mismatched memory operations: different query types demand categorically different retrieval strategies, evidence transformations, and context budgets that SLMs cannot reliably self-orchestrate through open-ended reasoning. We introduce MemFlow, a training-free memory orchestration framework that externalizes memory planning from the SLM. A Router Agent classifies each query by intent and dispatches it to the Memory Agent, which executes one of three specialized tiers (Profile Lookup, Targeted Retrieval, or Deep Reasoning) and assembles the resulting evidence under a dynamic, tier-aware token budget. An Answer Agent then generates a response from this compact context, and a Validator Agent optionally retries with a heavier memory tier when the response is not supported by the provided evidence. This route-then-compile design avoids tool-selection hallucination and reasoning loops while keeping the answer context compact. Evaluated on a frozen Qwen3-1.7B backbone across long-horizon memory benchmarks - LongMemEval, LoCoMo, and LongBench - MemFlow improves accuracy by nearly 2x over full-context SLM baselines. These results suggest that structured intent routing and deterministic evidence preparation can make limited-capacity models substantially more effective in resource-constrained long-horizon agents.

Large language model (LLM) multi-agent systems can scale along two distinct dimensions: by increasing the number of agents and by improving through accumulated experience over time. Although prior work has studied these dimensions separately, their interaction under realistic cost constraints remains unclear. In this paper, we introduce a conceptual scaling view of multi-agent systems that jointly considers team size and lifelong learning ability, and we study how memory design shares this landscape. To this end, we propose LLMA-Mem, a lifelong memory framework for LLM multi-agent systems under flexible memory topologies. We evaluate LLMA-Mem on MultiAgentBench across coding, research, and database environments. Empirically, LLMA-Mem consistently improves long-horizon performance over baselines while reducing cost. Our analysis further reveals a non-monotonic scaling landscape: larger teams do not always produce better long-term performance, and smaller teams can outperform larger ones when memory better supports the reuse of experience. These findings position memory design as a practical path for scaling multi-agent systems more effectively and more efficiently over time.

With the rapid advancement of post-training techniques for reasoning and information seeking, large language models (LLMs) can incorporate a large quantity of retrieved knowledge to solve complex tasks. However, the limited context window of LLMs obstructs scaling the amount of external knowledge input, prohibiting further improvement, especially for tasks requiring significant amount of external knowledge. Existing context window extension methods inevitably cause information loss. LLM-based multi-agent methods emerge as a new paradigm to handle massive input in a distributional manner, where we identify two core bottlenecks in existing knowledge synchronization and reasoning processes. In this work, we develop a multi-agent framework, ExtAgents, to overcome the bottlenecks and enable better scalability in inference-time knowledge integration without longer-context training. Benchmarked with our enhanced multi-hop question answering test, $boldsymbol{inftyBench+}, and other public test sets including long survey generation, ExtAgents significantly enhances the performance over existing non-training methods with the same amount of external knowledge input, regardless of whether it falls within or exceeds the context window$. Moreover, the method maintains high efficiency due to high parallelism. Further study in the coordination of LLM agents on increasing external knowledge input could benefit real-world applications.

The era of intelligent agents is upon us, driven by revolutionary advancements in large language models. Large Language Model (LLM) agents, with goal-driven behaviors and dynamic adaptation capabilities, potentially represent a critical pathway toward artificial general intelligence. This survey systematically deconstructs LLM agent systems through a methodology-centered taxonomy, linking architectural foundations, collaboration mechanisms, and evolutionary pathways. We unify fragmented research threads by revealing fundamental connections between agent design principles and their emergent behaviors in complex environments. Our work provides a unified architectural perspective, examining how agents are constructed, how they collaborate, and how they evolve over time, while also addressing evaluation methodologies, tool applications, practical challenges, and diverse application domains. By surveying the latest developments in this rapidly evolving field, we offer researchers a structured taxonomy for understanding LLM agents and identify promising directions for future research. The collection is available at https://github.com/luo-junyu/Awesome-Agent-Papers.

Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising basis for creating agents that can tackle complex tasks through iterative environmental interaction. Existing methods either require these agents to mimic expert-provided trajectories or rely on definitive environmental feedback for reinforcement learning which limits their application to specific scenarios like gaming or code generation. This paper introduces a novel training method for LLM-based agents using weakly supervised signals from a critic LLM, bypassing the need for expert trajectories or definitive feedback. Our agents are trained in iterative manner, where they initially generate trajectories through environmental interaction. Subsequently, a critic LLM selects a subset of good trajectories, which are then used to update the agents, enabling them to generate improved trajectories in the next iteration. Extensive tests on the API-bank dataset show consistent improvement in our agents' capabilities and comparable performance to GPT-4, despite using open-source models with much fewer parameters.

Artificial Intelligence is moving from models that only generate text to Agentic AI, where systems behave as autonomous entities that can perceive, reason, plan, and act. Large Language Models (LLMs) are no longer used only as passive knowledge engines but as cognitive controllers that combine memory, tool use, and feedback from their environment to pursue extended goals. This shift already supports the automation of complex workflows in software engineering, scientific discovery, and web navigation, yet the variety of emerging designs, from simple single loop agents to hierarchical multi agent systems, makes the landscape hard to navigate. In this paper, we investigate architectures and propose a unified taxonomy that breaks agents into Perception, Brain, Planning, Action, Tool Use, and Collaboration. We use this lens to describe the move from linear reasoning procedures to native inference time reasoning models, and the transition from fixed API calls to open standards like the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Native Computer Use. We also group the environments in which these agents operate, including digital operating systems, embodied robotics, and other specialized domains, and we review current evaluation practices. Finally, we highlight open challenges, such as hallucination in action, infinite loops, and prompt injection, and outline future research directions toward more robust and reliable autonomous systems.

The emergence of LLM-based agents represents a paradigm shift in AI, enabling autonomous systems to plan, reason, use tools, and maintain memory while interacting with dynamic environments. This paper provides the first comprehensive survey of evaluation methodologies for these increasingly capable agents. We systematically analyze evaluation benchmarks and frameworks across four critical dimensions: (1) fundamental agent capabilities, including planning, tool use, self-reflection, and memory; (2) application-specific benchmarks for web, software engineering, scientific, and conversational agents; (3) benchmarks for generalist agents; and (4) frameworks for evaluating agents. Our analysis reveals emerging trends, including a shift toward more realistic, challenging evaluations with continuously updated benchmarks. We also identify critical gaps that future research must address-particularly in assessing cost-efficiency, safety, and robustness, and in developing fine-grained, and scalable evaluation methods. This survey maps the rapidly evolving landscape of agent evaluation, reveals the emerging trends in the field, identifies current limitations, and proposes directions for future research.

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong potential as agents for tool invocation due to their advanced comprehension and planning capabilities. Users increasingly rely on LLM-based agents to solve complex missions through iterative interactions. However, existing benchmarks predominantly access agents in single-mission scenarios, failing to capture real-world complexity. To bridge this gap, we propose the Multi-Mission Tool Bench. In the benchmark, each test case comprises multiple interrelated missions. This design requires agents to dynamically adapt to evolving demands. Moreover, the proposed benchmark explores all possible mission-switching patterns within a fixed mission number. Specifically, we propose a multi-agent data generation framework to construct the benchmark. We also propose a novel method to evaluate the accuracy and efficiency of agent decisions with dynamic decision trees. Experiments on diverse open-source and closed-source LLMs reveal critical factors influencing agent robustness and provide actionable insights to the tool invocation society.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive planning abilities in single-agent embodied tasks across various domains. However, their capacity for planning and communication in multi-agent cooperation remains unclear, even though these are crucial skills for intelligent embodied agents. In this paper, we present a novel framework that utilizes LLMs for multi-agent cooperation and tests it in various embodied environments. Our framework enables embodied agents to plan, communicate, and cooperate with other embodied agents or humans to accomplish long-horizon tasks efficiently. We demonstrate that recent LLMs, such as GPT-4, can surpass strong planning-based methods and exhibit emergent effective communication using our framework without requiring fine-tuning or few-shot prompting. We also discover that LLM-based agents that communicate in natural language can earn more trust and cooperate more effectively with humans. Our research underscores the potential of LLMs for embodied AI and lays the foundation for future research in multi-agent cooperation. Videos can be found on the project website https://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/Co-LLM-Agents/.

Large language models (LLMs) are catalyzing the development of autonomous AI research agents for scientific and engineering discovery. We present FM Agent, a novel and general-purpose multi-agent framework that leverages a synergistic combination of LLM-based reasoning and large-scale evolutionary search to address complex real-world challenges. The core of FM Agent integrates several key innovations: 1) a cold-start initialization phase incorporating expert guidance, 2) a novel evolutionary sampling strategy for iterative optimization, 3) domain-specific evaluators that combine correctness, effectiveness, and LLM-supervised feedback, and 4) a distributed, asynchronous execution infrastructure built on Ray. Demonstrating broad applicability, our system has been evaluated across diverse domains, including operations research, machine learning, GPU kernel optimization, and classical mathematical problems. FM Agent reaches state-of-the-art results autonomously, without human interpretation or tuning -- 1976.3 on ALE-Bench (+5.2\%), 43.56\% on MLE-Bench (+4.0pp), up to 20x speedups on KernelBench, and establishes new state-of-the-art(SOTA) results on several classical mathematical problems. Beyond academic benchmarks, FM Agent shows considerable promise for both large-scale enterprise R\&D workflows and fundamental scientific research, where it can accelerate innovation, automate complex discovery processes, and deliver substantial engineering and scientific advances with broader societal impact.

Enabling effective collaboration among LLMs is a crucial step toward developing autonomous systems capable of solving complex problems. While LLMs are typically used as single-model generators, where humans critique and refine their outputs, the potential for jointly-trained collaborative models remains largely unexplored. Despite promising results in multi-agent communication and debate settings, little progress has been made in training models to work together on tasks. In this paper, we present a first step toward "Multi-agent LLM training" (MALT) on reasoning problems. Our approach employs a sequential multi-agent setup with heterogeneous LLMs assigned specialized roles: a generator, verifier, and refinement model iteratively solving problems. We propose a trajectory-expansion-based synthetic data generation process and a credit assignment strategy driven by joint outcome based rewards. This enables our post-training setup to utilize both positive and negative trajectories to autonomously improve each model's specialized capabilities as part of a joint sequential system. We evaluate our approach across MATH, GSM8k, and CQA, where MALT on Llama 3.1 8B models achieves relative improvements of 14.14%, 7.12%, and 9.40% respectively over the same baseline model. This demonstrates an early advance in multi-agent cooperative capabilities for performance on mathematical and common sense reasoning questions. More generally, our work provides a concrete direction for research around multi-agent LLM training approaches.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable capabilities in reasoning, planning, and decision-making. Building upon these strengths, researchers have begun incorporating LLMs into multi-agent systems (MAS), where agents collaborate or compete through natural language interactions to tackle tasks beyond the scope of single-agent setups. In this survey, we present a communication-centric perspective on LLM-based multi-agent systems, examining key system-level features such as architecture design and communication goals, as well as internal mechanisms like communication strategies, paradigms, objects and content. We illustrate how these communication elements interplay to enable collective intelligence and flexible collaboration. Furthermore, we discuss prominent challenges, including scalability, security, and multimodal integration, and propose directions for future work to advance research in this emerging domain. Ultimately, this survey serves as a catalyst for further innovation, fostering more robust, scalable, and intelligent multi-agent systems across diverse application domains.

LLM-based agents show strong potential for long-horizon reasoning, yet their context size is limited by deployment factors (e.g., memory, latency, and cost), yielding a constrained context budget. As interaction histories grow, this induces a trade-off between retaining past information and staying within the context limit. To address this challenge, we propose Budget-Aware Context Management (BACM), which formulates context management as a sequential decision problem with a context budget constraint. It enables agents to assess the available budget before incorporating new observations and decide when and how much of the interaction history to compress. We further develop BACM-RL, an end-to-end curriculum-based reinforcement learning approach that learns compression strategies under varying context budgets. Experiments on compositional multi-objective QA and long-horizon web browsing benchmarks show that BACM-RL consistently outperforms prior methods across model scales and task complexities, achieving over 1.6times gains over strong baselines in high-complexity settings, while maintaining strong advantages as budgets shrink, where most methods exhibit a downward performance trend.

Large language models (LLMs) possess extensive knowledge bases and strong reasoning capabilities, making them promising tools for complex, multi-agent planning in embodied environments. However, despite LLMs' advanced abilities and the sophisticated modular design of agentic methods, existing LLM-based planning algorithms remain limited by weak adaptation capabilities to multi-agent embodied scenarios. We address this limitation by introducing a framework that enables LLM agents to learn and evolve both before and during test time, equipping them with environment-relevant knowledge for better planning and enhanced communication for improved cooperation. Inspired by centralized training with decentralized execution in multi-agent reinforcement learning, we propose a Learn as Individuals, Evolve as a Team (LIET) paradigm for multi-agent LLMs adaptation. At the individual level, LLM agents learn a local utility function from exploratory datasets to better comprehend the embodied environment, which is then queried during test time to support informed decision-making. At the team level, LLM agents collaboratively and iteratively maintain and update a shared cooperation knowledge list based on new experiences, using it to guide more effective communication. By combining individual learning with team evolution, LIET enables comprehensive and flexible adaptation for LLM agents. Our experiments on Communicative Watch-And-Help and ThreeD-World Multi-Agent Transport benchmarks demonstrate that LIET, instantiated with both LLaMA and GPT-4o, outperforms existing baselines and exhibits strong cooperative planning abilities.

Long-horizon decision-making tasks present significant challenges for LLM-based agents due to the need for extensive planning over multiple steps. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical framework that decomposes complex tasks into manageable subgoals, utilizing separate LLMs for subgoal prediction and low-level action generation. To address the challenge of creating training signals for unannotated datasets, we develop a reward model that leverages multimodal environment feedback to automatically generate reward signals. We introduce Environment Preference Optimization (EPO), a novel method that generates preference signals from the environment's feedback and uses them to train LLM-based agents. Extensive experiments on ALFRED demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our framework, achieving first place on the ALFRED public leaderboard and showcasing its potential to improve long-horizon decision-making in diverse environments.

Long-term memory is essential for persistent LLM agents, yet prevailing architectures store historical interactions as unstructured, flat text. This unconstrained storage induces provenance-role collapse, a critical failure mode where agents suffer from source-monitoring errors. To resolve this cognitive vulnerability at the architectural level, we propose MemIR, a typed Memory Intermediate Representation that operationalizes source monitoring as a structural constraint. MemIR writes long-term memory into grounded atoms that separate raw evidence, retrieval cues, and truth-bearing claims, with factual authorization restricted to supported claim atoms. It then applies multi-route atomic projection and provenance-scoped utilization to transform heterogeneous retrieval hits into claim-centered candidate bundles and a normalized fact interface for answer generation. Experiments on LoCoMo and BEAM-100K demonstrate that MemIR consistently outperforms existing memory baselines, especially on tasks requiring source tracking, temporal grounding, and aggregation of fragmented evidence.

While large language model (LLM) agents can effectively use external tools for complex real-world tasks, they require memory systems to leverage historical experiences. Current memory systems enable basic storage and retrieval but lack sophisticated memory organization, despite recent attempts to incorporate graph databases. Moreover, these systems' fixed operations and structures limit their adaptability across diverse tasks. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a novel agentic memory system for LLM agents that can dynamically organize memories in an agentic way. Following the basic principles of the Zettelkasten method, we designed our memory system to create interconnected knowledge networks through dynamic indexing and linking. When a new memory is added, we generate a comprehensive note containing multiple structured attributes, including contextual descriptions, keywords, and tags. The system then analyzes historical memories to identify relevant connections, establishing links where meaningful similarities exist. Additionally, this process enables memory evolution - as new memories are integrated, they can trigger updates to the contextual representations and attributes of existing historical memories, allowing the memory network to continuously refine its understanding. Our approach combines the structured organization principles of Zettelkasten with the flexibility of agent-driven decision making, allowing for more adaptive and context-aware memory management. Empirical experiments on six foundation models show superior improvement against existing SOTA baselines. The source code for evaluating performance is available at https://github.com/WujiangXu/AgenticMemory, while the source code of agentic memory system is available at https://github.com/agiresearch/A-mem.

Agentic crafting requires LLMs to operate in real-world environments over multiple turns by taking actions, observing outcomes, and iteratively refining artifacts. Despite its importance, the open-source community lacks a principled, end-to-end ecosystem to streamline agent development. We introduce the Agentic Learning Ecosystem (ALE), a foundational infrastructure that optimizes the production pipeline for agent LLMs. ALE consists of three components: ROLL, a post-training framework for weight optimization; ROCK, a sandbox environment manager for trajectory generation; and iFlow CLI, an agent framework for efficient context engineering. We release ROME (ROME is Obviously an Agentic Model), an open-source agent grounded by ALE and trained on over one million trajectories. Our approach includes data composition protocols for synthesizing complex behaviors and a novel policy optimization algorithm, Interaction-based Policy Alignment (IPA), which assigns credit over semantic interaction chunks rather than individual tokens to improve long-horizon training stability. Empirically, we evaluate ROME within a structured setting and introduce Terminal Bench Pro, a benchmark with improved scale and contamination control. ROME demonstrates strong performance across benchmarks like SWE-bench Verified and Terminal Bench, proving the effectiveness of the ALE infrastructure.

Large language models (LLMs) are often praised for exhibiting near-human performance on a wide range of tasks and valued for their ability to hold a general conversation. The rise of agentic AI systems is, however, ushering in a mass of applications in which language models perform a small number of specialized tasks repetitively and with little variation. Here we lay out the position that small language models (SLMs) are sufficiently powerful, inherently more suitable, and necessarily more economical for many invocations in agentic systems, and are therefore the future of agentic AI. Our argumentation is grounded in the current level of capabilities exhibited by SLMs, the common architectures of agentic systems, and the economy of LM deployment. We further argue that in situations where general-purpose conversational abilities are essential, heterogeneous agentic systems (i.e., agents invoking multiple different models) are the natural choice. We discuss the potential barriers for the adoption of SLMs in agentic systems and outline a general LLM-to-SLM agent conversion algorithm. Our position, formulated as a value statement, highlights the significance of the operational and economic impact even a partial shift from LLMs to SLMs is to have on the AI agent industry. We aim to stimulate the discussion on the effective use of AI resources and hope to advance the efforts to lower the costs of AI of the present day. Calling for both contributions to and critique of our position, we commit to publishing all such correspondence at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/lpr/slm-agents.

Agentic task-solving with Large Language Models (LLMs) requires multi-turn, multi-step interactions, often involving complex function calls and dynamic user-agent exchanges. Existing simulation-based data generation methods for such scenarios rely heavily on costly autoregressive interactions between multiple LLM agents, thereby limiting real-world performance of agentic tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel Non-Autoregressive Iterative Generation framework, called ToolACE-MT, for constructing high-quality multi-turn agentic dialogues. ToolACE-MT generates full conversational trajectories through three stages: coarse-grained initialization, iterative refinement, and offline verification. The initialization phase builds a structurally complete yet semantically coarse dialogue skeleton; the iterative refinement phase introduces realistic complexities and continued refinement via mask-and-fill operations; and the offline verification phase ensures correctness and coherence via rule- and model-based checks. Experiments demonstrate that ToolACE-MT enables efficient, effective and generalizable agentic data generation, offering a new paradigm for high-quality data construction in tool-augmented LLM scenarios.

Solving complex or long-horizon problems often requires large language models (LLMs) to use external tools and operate over a significantly longer context window. New LLMs enable longer context windows and support tool calling capabilities. Prior works have focused mainly on evaluation of LLMs on long-context prompts, leaving agentic setup relatively unexplored, both from capability and safety perspectives. Our work addresses this gap. We find that LLM agents could be sensitive to length, type, and placement of the context, exhibiting unexpected and inconsistent shifts in task performance and in refusals to execute harmful requests. Models with 1M-2M token context windows show severe degradation already at 100K tokens, with performance drops exceeding 50\% for both benign and harmful tasks. Refusal rates shift unpredictably: GPT-4.1-nano increases from sim5\% to sim40\% while Grok 4 Fast decreases from sim80\% to sim10\% at 200K tokens. Our work shows potential safety issues with agents operating on longer context and opens additional questions on the current metrics and paradigm for evaluating LLM agent safety on long multi-step tasks. In particular, our results on LLM agents reveal a notable divergence in both capability and safety performance compared to prior evaluations of LLMs on similar criteria.

Long-horizon LLM agents accumulate tool results, files, plans, and user constraints that are too structured to be treated as a disposable text suffix. Current systems mostly rely on in-run heuristics such as chronological pruning and tool-output masking, or on final self-summary near a context limit. Heuristics are cheap but blind to future dependencies; summaries preserve narrative state but often hide exact evidence, locators, and editable artifacts. We present Self-GC, where GC denotes self-governing context while deliberately echoing garbage collection: the system does not merely reclaim unused tokens, but governs the lifecycle of agent context objects. Self-GC turns user turns, tool spans, and skill state into indexed objects; asks a side-channel planner to propose fold, mask, and prune actions; and lets the harness enforce recoverable sidecars, safe commit boundaries, and cache-aware commit. On a 33-session Hard Set, Self-GC prunes 43.95% of prefix tokens while leaving 84.85% of future continuations unaffected, compared with no-impact rates of 54.55% to 69.70% for heuristic baselines. On a 332-session production-derived suite, three planner backbones reach no-impact rates of 91.27% to 94.58%, while baselines remain at 77.71% to 87.46%. In production, an online account-level split reduces daytime average input tokens by 10% to 15%, with peak reductions near 20%. These results point to context management as runtime lifecycle control over indexed, recoverable objects rather than post hoc text cleanup.

LLM agents can reason and use tools, but they often break down on long-horizon tasks due to unbounded context growth and accumulated errors. Common remedies such as context compression or retrieval-augmented prompting introduce trade-offs between information fidelity and reasoning stability. We present InfiAgent, a general-purpose framework that keeps the agent's reasoning context strictly bounded regardless of task duration by externalizing persistent state into a file-centric state abstraction. At each step, the agent reconstructs context from a workspace state snapshot plus a fixed window of recent actions. Experiments on DeepResearch and an 80-paper literature review task show that, without task-specific fine-tuning, InfiAgent with a 20B open-source model is competitive with larger proprietary systems and maintains substantially higher long-horizon coverage than context-centric baselines. These results support explicit state externalization as a practical foundation for stable long-horizon agents. Github Repo:https://github.com/ChenglinPoly/infiAgent

LLM agents are rapidly being deployed in production, including coding assistants, customer-support chatbots, and scientific research assistants, yet they remain fundamentally static in enterprise deployment. The LLM weights, system prompts, tool repertoires, and in-context harnesses are frozen at deployment time, and any improvement requires a manual loop of human-curated data collection, offline fine-tuning, modification of the agentic paradigm, and re-deployment. Recent work on self-evolving agents, such as OpenClaw for individual users, indicates that the next leap in agent capability will come from agents that continually learn from their own experience. In this paper, we argue that this vision for self-evolving agent deployment is being held back for enterprise-level large-scale agentic service not by reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms but by agentic online RL systems. Specifically, current agentic RL systems and the surrounding observability software stack are inadequate along three essential aspects: (i) there is no standardized agent trajectory data protocol capable of carrying RL learning signals at step granularity across heterogeneous agent paradigms; (ii) there is no enterprise-grade comprehensive data proxy that converts real workloads into governed learning substrates; and (iii) there is no unified agent evolution control plane that automatically decides, based on trajectory statistics, when to update policy weights or evolve the in-context harness. The next generation of agentic RL systems must be co-designed around these three pillars, and we sketch concrete architectures, case studies, and counter-arguments. We instantiate one branch through AReaL2.0, reorganizing existing RL infrastructure into an agent-oriented online RL loop for policy weight updates from deployed workloads.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents, acting on their users' behalf to manipulate and analyze data, are likely to become the dominant workload for data systems in the future. When working with data, agents employ a high-throughput process of exploration and solution formulation for the given task, one we call agentic speculation. The sheer volume and inefficiencies of agentic speculation can pose challenges for present-day data systems. We argue that data systems need to adapt to more natively support agentic workloads. We take advantage of the characteristics of agentic speculation that we identify, i.e., scale, heterogeneity, redundancy, and steerability - to outline a number of new research opportunities for a new agent-first data systems architecture, ranging from new query interfaces, to new query processing techniques, to new agentic memory stores.

Contemporary large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems exhibit systematic advantages in deep research tasks, which emphasize iterative, vertically structured information seeking. However, when confronted with wide search tasks characterized by large-scale, breadth-oriented retrieval, existing agentic frameworks, primarily designed around sequential, vertically structured reasoning, remain stuck in expansive search objectives and inefficient long-horizon execution. To bridge this gap, we propose A-MapReduce, a MapReduce paradigm-inspired multi-agent execution framework that recasts wide search as a horizontally structured retrieval problem. Concretely, A-MapReduce implements parallel processing of massive retrieval targets through task-adaptive decomposition and structured result aggregation. Meanwhile, it leverages experiential memory to drive the continual evolution of query-conditioned task allocation and recomposition, enabling progressive improvement in large-scale wide-search regimes. Extensive experiments on five agentic benchmarks demonstrate that A-MapReduce is (i) high-performing, achieving state-of-the-art performance on WideSearch and DeepWideSearch, and delivering 5.11% - 17.50% average Item F1 improvements compared with strong baselines with OpenAI o3 or Gemini 2.5 Pro backbones; (ii) cost-effective and efficient, delivering superior cost-performance trade-offs and reducing running time by 45.8\% compared to representative multi-agent baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/mingju-c/AMapReduce.

We introduce Agents-A1, a 35B Mixture-of-Experts Agentic Model that reaches trillion-parameter-level performance by scaling the agent horizon. We investigate agent-horizon scaling from two perspectives: scaling long-horizon trajectories and scaling heterogeneous agent abilities. To support this goal, we build a long-horizon knowledge-action infrastructure that connects external knowledge, actions, observations, and verifier outcomes, producing agentic trajectories with an average length of 45K tokens. Based on this, we train Agents-A1 with a three-stage recipe. First, we perform full-domain supervised fine-tuning to align the base model with broad agentic behaviors. Second, we train domain-level teacher models to capture specialized expertise in each domain. Third, we propose a multi-teacher domain-routed on-policy distillation with salient vocabulary alignment to improve knowledge transfer efficiency across different domains, unifying six heterogeneous domains into one deployable student model. Agents-A1 achieves strong and broad performance for long-horizon agent benchmarks. Compared with 1T-parameter model such as Kimi-K2.6 and DeepSeek-V4-pro, Agents-A1 achieves leading results on SEAL-0 (56.4), IFBench (80.6), HiPhO (46.4), FrontierScience-Olympiad (79.0), and MolBench-Bind (56.8), and remains highly competitive on SciCode (44.3), HLE (47.6) and BrowseComp (75.5). We hope this work provides the community with a practical path for scaling the horizon using a 35B agent that can reach or match the performance of 1T models on long-horizon tasks.

Large Language Model (LLM) Agents, often trained with Reinforcement Learning (RL), are constrained by a dependency on human-curated data, limiting scalability and tethering AI to human knowledge. Existing self-evolution frameworks offer an alternative but are typically restricted by the model's inherent capabilities and single-round interactions, hindering the development of complex curricula involving tool use or dynamic reasoning. We introduce Agent0, a fully autonomous framework that evolves high-performing agents without external data through multi-step co-evolution and seamless tool integration. Agent0 establishes a symbiotic competition between two agents initialized from the same base LLM: a curriculum agent that proposes increasingly challenging frontier tasks, and an executor agent that learns to solve them. We integrate external tools to enhance the executor's problem-solving capacity; this improvement, in turn, pressures the curriculum agent to construct more complex, tool-aware tasks. Through this iterative process, Agent0 establishes a self-reinforcing cycle that continuously produces high-quality curricula. Empirically, Agent0 substantially boosts reasoning capabilities, improving the Qwen3-8B-Base model by 18% on mathematical reasoning and 24% on general reasoning benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/Agent0.

Large language models (LLMs) encode a vast amount of world knowledge acquired from massive text datasets. Recent studies have demonstrated that LLMs can assist an embodied agent in solving complex sequential decision making tasks by providing high-level instructions. However, interactions with LLMs can be time-consuming. In many practical scenarios, they require a significant amount of storage space that can only be deployed on remote cloud server nodes. Additionally, using commercial LLMs can be costly since they may charge based on usage frequency. In this paper, we explore how to enable intelligent cost-effective interactions between the agent and an LLM. We propose When2Ask, a reinforcement learning based approach that learns when it is necessary to query LLMs for high-level instructions to accomplish a target task. Experiments on MiniGrid and Habitat environments that entail planning sub-goals demonstrate that When2Ask learns to solve target tasks with only a few necessary interactions with an LLM, and significantly reduces interaction costs in testing environments compared with baseline methods. Experiment results also suggest that by learning a mediator model to interact with the LLM, the agent's performance becomes more robust against partial observability of the environment. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZJLAB-AMMI/LLM4RL.

Tool-using LLM agents still struggle in open-world settings with large tool pools, long-horizon objectives, wild constraints, and unreliable tool states. For scalable and realistic training and testing, we introduce an open-world tool-using environment, built on 5,571 format unified tools across 204 commonly used apps. It includes a task creation engine that synthesizes long-horizon, multi-tool workflows with wild constraints, and a state controller that injects interruptions and failures to stress-test robustness. On top of this environment, we develop a tool select-then-execute agent framework with a planner-actor decomposition to separate deliberate reasoning and self-correction from step-wise execution. Comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art LLMs reveals the misalignment between tool planning and execution abilities, the constraint following weakness of existing LLMs, and DeepSeek-v3.2's strongest robustness. Finally, we collect 1,170 trajectories from our environment to fine-tune LLMs, achieving superior performance to baselines using 119k samples, indicating the environment's value as both a realistic benchmark and a data engine for tool-using agents. Our code and data will be publicly released.

Equipping large language models (LLMs) with complex, interleaved reasoning and tool-use capabilities has become a key focus in agentic AI research, especially with recent advances in reasoning-oriented (``thinking'') models. Such capabilities are key to unlocking a number of important applications. One such application is Deep Research (DR), which requires extensive search and reasoning over many sources. Our work in this paper focuses on the development of native Autonomous Single-Agent models for DR featuring minimal web crawling and Python tool integration. Unlike multi-agent systems, where agents take up pre-defined roles and are told what to do at each step in a static workflow, an autonomous single-agent determines its next action dynamically based on context, without manual directive. While prior work has proposed training recipes for base or instruction-tuned LLMs, we focus on continual reinforcement learning (RL) of reasoning-optimized models to further enhance agentic skills while preserving reasoning ability. Towards this end, we propose a simple RL recipe with entirely synthetic data, which we apply to various open-source LLMs. Our best variant SFR-DR-20B achieves up to 28.7% on Humanity's Last Exam benchmark. In addition, we conduct key analysis experiments to provide more insights into our methodologies.