Daily Papers

Automated presentation generation remains a challenging task requiring coherent content creation, visual design, and audience-aware communication. This work proposes an OpenEnv-compatible reinforcement learning environment where LLM agents learn to research topics, plan content, and generate professional HTML slide presentations through tool use. We introduce a multi-component reward system combining structural validation, render quality assessment, LLM-based aesthetic scoring, content quality metrics, and an inverse specification reward that measures how faithfully generated slides convey their intended purpose. The inverse specification reward, an "inverse task" where an LLM attempts to recover the original specification from generated slides, provides a holistic quality signal. Our approach fine-tunes Qwen2.5-Coder-7B via GRPO, training only 0.5% of parameters on prompts derived from expert demonstrations collected using Claude Opus 4.6. Experiments on 48 diverse business briefs across six models demonstrate that our fine-tuned 7B model achieves 91.2% of Claude Opus 4.6's quality while improving 33.1% over the base model. The six-model comparison reveals that instruction adherence and tool-use compliance, rather than raw parameter count, determine agentic task performance. We contribute SlideRL, an open-source dataset of 288 multi-turn rollout trajectories across all six models: https://huggingface.co/datasets/KarthikRagunathAnandaKumar/sliderl-multi-turn-rollouts Code: https://github.com/pushing-the-frontier/slide-forge-llm

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on external tools to perform complex, realistic tasks, yet their ability to utilize the rapidly expanding Model Contextual Protocol (MCP) ecosystem remains limited. Existing MCP research covers few servers, depends on costly manual curation, and lacks training support, hindering progress toward real-world deployment. To overcome these limitations, we introduce MCP-Flow, an automated web-agent-driven pipeline for large-scale server discovery, data synthesis, and model training. MCP-Flow collects and filters data from 1166 servers and 11536 tools, producing 68733 high-quality instruction-function call pairs and 6439 trajectories, far exceeding prior work in scale and diversity. Extensive experiments demonstrate MCP-Flow's effectiveness in driving superior MCP tool selection, function-call generation, and enhanced agentic task performance. MCP-Flow thus provides a scalable foundation for advancing LLM agents' proficiency in real-world MCP environments. MCP-Flow is publicly available at https://github.com/wwh0411/MCP-Flow{https://github.com/wwh0411/MCP-Flow}.

Recent work synthesizes agentic tasks for post-training tool-using LLMs, yet robust generalization under shifts in tasks and toolsets remains an open challenge. We trace this brittleness to insufficient diversity in synthesized tasks. Scaling diversity is difficult because training requires tasks to remain executable and verifiable, while generalization demands coverage of diverse tool types, toolset combinations, and heterogeneous tool-use patterns. We propose DIVE, an evidence-driven recipe that inverts synthesis order, executing diverse, real-world tools first and reverse-deriving tasks strictly entailed by the resulting traces, thereby providing grounding by construction. DIVE scales structural diversity along two controllable axes, tool-pool coverage and per-task toolset variety, and an Evidence Collection--Task Derivation loop further induces rich multi-step tool-use patterns across 373 tools in five domains. Training Qwen3-8B on DIVE data (48k SFT + 3.2k RL) improves by +22 average points across 9 OOD benchmarks and outperforms the strongest 8B baseline by +68. Remarkably, controlled scaling analysis reveals that diversity scaling consistently outperforms quantity scaling for OOD generalization, even with 4x less data.

Large Language Models face challenges in long-horizon agentic tasks as their constrained memory is easily overwhelmed by distracting or irrelevant context. Existing working memory methods typically rely on external, heuristic mechanisms that are decoupled from the agent's core policy. In this work, we reframe working memory management as a learnable, intrinsic capability. We propose a novel framework, Memory-as-Action, where an agent actively manages its working memory by executing explicit editing operations as part of a unified policy. This formulation allows an agent, trained via reinforcement learning, to balance memory curation against long-term task objectives under given resource constraints. However, such memory editing actions break the standard assumption of a continuously growing prefix in LLM interactions, leading to what we call trajectory fractures. These non-prefix changes disrupt the causal continuity required by standard policy gradient methods, making those methods inapplicable. To address this, we propose a new algorithm, Dynamic Context Policy Optimization, which enables stable end-to-end reinforcement learning by segmenting trajectories at memory action points and applying trajectory-level advantages to the resulting action segments. Our results demonstrate that jointly optimizing for task reasoning and memory management in an end-to-end fashion not only reduces overall computational consumption but also improves task performance, driven by adaptive context curation strategies tailored to the model's intrinsic capabilities.

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.

RL training of multi-turn LLM agents is inherently unstable, and reasoning quality directly determines task performance. Entropy is widely used to track reasoning stability. However, entropy only measures diversity within the same input, and cannot tell whether reasoning actually responds to different inputs. In RAGEN-2, we find that even with stable entropy, models can rely on fixed templates that look diverse but are input-agnostic. We call this template collapse, a failure mode invisible to entropy and all existing metrics. To diagnose this failure, we decompose reasoning quality into within-input diversity (Entropy) and cross-input distinguishability (Mutual Information, MI), and introduce a family of mutual information proxies for online diagnosis. Across diverse tasks, mutual information correlates with final performance much more strongly than entropy, making it a more reliable proxy for reasoning quality. We further explain template collapse with a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) mechanism. Low reward variance weakens task gradients, letting regularization terms dominate and erase cross-input reasoning differences. To address this, we propose SNR-Aware Filtering to select high-signal prompts per iteration using reward variance as a lightweight proxy. Across planning, math reasoning, web navigation, and code execution, the method consistently improves both input dependence and task performance.

Agentic language models operate in a fundamentally different safety regime than chat models: they must plan, call tools, and execute long-horizon actions where a single misstep, such as accessing files or entering credentials, can cause irreversible harm. Existing alignment methods, largely optimized for static generation and task completion, break down in these settings due to sequential decision-making, adversarial tool feedback, and overconfident intermediate reasoning. We introduce MOSAIC, a post-training framework that aligns agents for safe multi-step tool use by making safety decisions explicit and learnable. MOSAIC structures inference as a plan, check, then act or refuse loop, with explicit safety reasoning and refusal as first-class actions. To train without trajectory-level labels, we use preference-based reinforcement learning with pairwise trajectory comparisons, which captures safety distinctions often missed by scalar rewards. We evaluate MOSAIC zero-shot across three model families, Qwen2.5-7B, Qwen3-4B-Thinking, and Phi-4, and across out-of-distribution benchmarks spanning harmful tasks, prompt injection, benign tool use, and cross-domain privacy leakage. MOSAIC reduces harmful behavior by up to 50%, increases harmful-task refusal by over 20% on injection attacks, cuts privacy leakage, and preserves or improves benign task performance, demonstrating robust generalization across models, domains, and agentic settings.

Agentic systems solve complex tasks by coordinating multiple agents that iteratively reason, invoke tools, and exchange intermediate results. To improve robustness and solution quality, recent approaches deploy multiple agent teams running in parallel to explore diverse reasoning trajectories. However, parallel execution comes at a significant computational cost: when different teams independently reason about similar sub-problems or execute analogous steps, they repeatedly perform substantial overlapping computation. To address these limitations, in this paper, we propose Learning to Share (LTS), a learned shared-memory mechanism for parallel agentic frameworks that enables selective cross-team information reuse while controlling context growth. LTS introduces a global memory bank accessible to all teams and a lightweight controller that decides whether intermediate agent steps should be added to memory or not. The controller is trained using stepwise reinforcement learning with usage-aware credit assignment, allowing it to identify information that is globally useful across parallel executions. Experiments on the AssistantBench and GAIA benchmarks show that LTS significantly reduces overall runtime while matching or improving task performance compared to memory-free parallel baselines, demonstrating that learned memory admission is an effective strategy for improving the efficiency of parallel agentic systems. Project page: https://joefioresi718.github.io/LTS_webpage/

Beyond simple text generation, Large Language Models (LLMs) have evolved into agentic systems capable of planning and interacting with external tools to solve complex tasks. This evolution involves fine-tuning LLMs on agent-specific tasks to enhance their proficiency. However, safety concerns are frequently overlooked during this fine-tuning process. In this work, we show that aligned LLMs can become unintentionally misaligned, leading to a higher likelihood of executing harmful tasks and a reduced tendency to refuse them when fine-tuned to execute agentic tasks. To address these safety challenges, we propose Prefix INjection Guard (PING), a simple yet effective method that prepends automatically generated natural language prefixes to agent responses, guiding them to refuse harmful requests while preserving performance on benign tasks. Specifically, we introduce an iterative approach that alternates between (1) generating candidate prefixes and (2) selecting those that optimize both task performance and refusal behavior. Experimental results demonstrate that PING significantly enhances the safety of fine-tuned LLM agents without sacrificing their effectiveness. PING consistently outperforms existing prompting approaches across diverse benchmarks in both web navigation and code generation tasks. Our analysis of internal hidden states via linear probes reveals that prefix tokens are crucial for behavior modification, explaining the performance gains. WARNING: This paper contains contents that are unethical or offensive in nature.

Agent skills, structured packages of procedural knowledge and executable resources that agents dynamically load at inference time, have become a reliable mechanism for augmenting LLM agents. Yet inference-time skill augmentation is fundamentally limited: retrieval noise introduces irrelevant guidance, injected skill content imposes substantial token overhead, and the model never truly acquires the knowledge it merely follows. We ask whether skills can instead be internalized into model parameters, enabling zero-shot autonomous behavior without any runtime skill retrieval. We introduce SKILL0, an in-context reinforcement learning framework designed for skill internalization. SKILL0 introduces a training-time curriculum that begins with full skill context and progressively withdraws it. Skills are grouped offline by category and rendered with interaction history into a compact visual context, teaching he model tool invocation and multi-turn task completion. A Dynamic Curriculum then evaluates each skill file's on-policy helpfulness, retaining only those from which the current policy still benefits within a linearly decaying budget, until the agent operates in a fully zero-shot setting. Extensive agentic experiments demonstrate that SKILL0 achieves substantial improvements over the standard RL baseline (+9.7\% for ALFWorld and +6.6\% for Search-QA), while maintaining a highly efficient context of fewer than 0.5k tokens per step. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZJU-REAL/SkillZero.

Existing Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) typically rely on static, homogeneous model configurations, limiting their ability to exploit the distinct strengths of differently post-trained models. To address this, we introduce Team-of-Thoughts, a novel MAS architecture that leverages the complementary capabilities of heterogeneous agents via an orchestrator-tool paradigm. Our framework introduces two key mechanisms to optimize performance: (1) an orchestrator calibration scheme that identifies models with superior coordination capabilities, and (2) a self-assessment protocol where tool agents profile their own domain expertise to account for variations in post-training skills. During inference, the orchestrator dynamically activates the most suitable tool agents based on these proficiency profiles. Experiments on five reasoning and code generation benchmarks show that Team-of-Thoughts delivers consistently superior task performance. Notably, on AIME24 and LiveCodeBench, our approach achieves accuracies of 96.67% and 72.53%, respectively, substantially outperforming homogeneous role-play baselines, which score 80% and 65.93%.

Recent advances in AI-assisted programming have empowered agents to execute complex workflows via command-line interfaces, however, existing benchmarks are limited by short task horizons, data contamination from GitHub scraping, and a lack of fine-grained evaluation metrics, fail to rigorously evaluate the long-horizon planning and execution capabilities essential for realistic software engineering. To address these gaps, we introduce LongCLI-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate agentic capabilities across long-horizon, realistic tasks. We curated 20 high-quality, long-horizon tasks from over 1,000 computer science assignments and real-world workflows, covering four engineering categories: from scratch, feature addition, bug fixing, and refactoring. We propose a dual-set testing protocol for LongCLI-Bench, which measures requirement fulfillment (fail-to-pass) and regression avoidance (pass-to-pass), and incorporates step-level scoring to pinpoint execution failures. Extensive experiments reveal that even state-of-the-art agents achieve pass rates below 20% in LongCLI-Bench. Step-level analysis further indicates that the majority of tasks stall at less than 30% completion, highlighting that critical failures often occur in the early stages. Although self-correction offers marginal gains, human-agent collaboration through plan injection and interactive guidance yields significantly higher improvements. These results highlight that future research must emphasize the development of synergistic human-agent workflows alongside advances in agents' planning and execution capabilities to overcome key challenges in long-horizon task performance.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents have shown strong results on multi-turn tool-use tasks, yet they operate in isolation during training, failing to leverage experiences accumulated across episodes. Existing experience-augmented methods address this by organizing trajectories into retrievable libraries, but they retrieve experiences only once based on the initial task description and hold them constant throughout the episode. In multi-turn settings where observations change at every step, this static retrieval becomes increasingly mismatched as episodes progress. We propose SLEA-RL (Step-Level Experience-Augmented Reinforcement Learning), a framework that retrieves relevant experiences at each decision step conditioned on the current observation. SLEA-RL operates through three components: (i) step-level observation clustering that groups structurally equivalent environmental states for efficient cluster-indexed retrieval; (ii) a self-evolving experience library that distills successful strategies and failure patterns through score-based admission and rate-limited extraction; and (iii) policy optimization with step-level credit assignment for fine-grained advantage estimation across multi-turn episodes. The experience library evolves alongside the policy through semantic analysis rather than gradient updates. Experiments on long-horizon multi-turn agent benchmarks demonstrate that SLEA-RL achieves superior performance compared to various reinforcement learning baselines.

The advancement of large language model (LLM) based agents has shifted AI evaluation from single-turn response assessment to multi-step task completion in interactive environments. We present an empirical study evaluating frontier AI models on 150 workplace tasks within a realistic e-commerce RL environment from Surge. Our analysis reveals an empirically-derived hierarchy of agentic capabilities that models must master for real-world deployment: (1) tool use, (2) planning and goal formation, (3) adaptability, (4) groundedness, and (5) common-sense reasoning. Even the best-performing models fail approximately 40\% of the tasks, with failures clustering predictably along this hierarchy. Weaker models struggle with fundamental tool use and planning, whereas stronger models primarily fail on tasks requiring contextual inference beyond explicit instructions. We introduce a task-centric design methodology for RL environments that emphasizes diversity and domain expert contributions, provide detailed failure analysis, and discuss implications for agent development. Our findings suggest that while current frontier models can demonstrate coherent multi-step behavior, substantial capability gaps remain before achieving human-level task completion in realistic workplace settings.

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly equipped with memory, which are stored experience and reusable guidance that can improve task-solving performance. Recent self-evolving systems update memory based on interaction outcomes, but most existing evolution pipelines are developed for static train/test splits and only approximate online learning by folding static benchmarks, making them brittle under true distribution shift and continuous feedback. We introduce Live-Evo, an online self-evolving memory system that learns from a stream of incoming data over time. Live-Evo decouples what happened from how to use it via an Experience Bank and a Meta-Guideline Bank, compiling task-adaptive guidelines from retrieved experiences for each task. To manage memory online, Live-Evo maintains experience weights and updates them from feedback: experiences that consistently help are reinforced and retrieved more often, while misleading or stale experiences are down-weighted and gradually forgotten, analogous to reinforcement and decay in human memory. On the live Prophet Arena benchmark over a 10-week horizon, Live-Evo improves Brier score by 20.8\% and increases market returns by 12.9\%, while also transferring to deep-research benchmarks with consistent gains over strong baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/ag2ai/Live-Evo.

On-policy distillation (OPD) is appealing for large language model (LLM) post-training because it evaluates teacher feedback on student-generated rollouts rather than fixed teacher traces. In long-horizon settings, however, the common sampled-token variant is fragile: it reduces distribution matching to a one-token signal and becomes increasingly unreliable as rollouts drift away from prefixes the teacher commonly visits. We revisit OPD from the estimator and implementation sides. Theoretically, token-level OPD is biased relative to sequence-level reverse-KL, but it has a much tighter worst-case variance bound; our toy study shows the same tradeoff empirically, with stronger future-reward coupling producing higher gradient variance and less stable learning. Empirically, we identify three failure modes of sampled-token OPD: an imbalanced one-token signal, unreliable teacher guidance on student-generated prefixes, and distortions caused by tokenizer or special-token mismatch. We address these issues with teacher top-K local support matching, implemented as truncated reverse-KL with top-p rollout sampling and special-token masking. Across single-task math reasoning and multi-task agentic-plus-math training, this objective yields more stable optimization and better downstream performance than sampled-token OPD.

Machine learning-based interatomic potentials and force fields depend critically on accurate atomic structures, yet such data are scarce due to the limited availability of experimentally resolved crystals. Although atomic-resolution electron microscopy offers a potential source of structural data, converting these images into simulation-ready formats remains labor-intensive and error-prone, creating a bottleneck for model training and validation. We introduce AutoMat, an end-to-end, agent-assisted pipeline that automatically transforms scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) images into atomic crystal structures and predicts their physical properties. AutoMat combines pattern-adaptive denoising, physics-guided template retrieval, symmetry-aware atomic reconstruction, fast relaxation and property prediction via MatterSim, and coordinated orchestration across all stages. We propose the first dedicated STEM2Mat-Bench for this task and evaluate performance using lattice RMSD, formation energy MAE, and structure-matching success rate. By orchestrating external tool calls, AutoMat enables a text-only LLM to outperform vision-language models in this domain, achieving closed-loop reasoning throughout the pipeline. In large-scale experiments over 450 structure samples, AutoMat substantially outperforms existing multimodal large language models and tools. These results validate both AutoMat and STEM2Mat-Bench, marking a key step toward bridging microscopy and atomistic simulation in materials science.The code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/yyt-2378/AutoMat and https://huggingface.co/datasets/yaotianvector/STEM2Mat.

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.

Data science plays a critical role in transforming complex data into actionable insights across numerous domains. Recent developments in large language models (LLMs) have significantly automated data science workflows, but a fundamental question persists: Can these agentic AI systems truly match the performance of human data scientists who routinely leverage domain-specific knowledge? We explore this question by designing a prediction task where a crucial latent variable is hidden in relevant image data instead of tabular features. As a result, agentic AI that generates generic codes for modeling tabular data cannot perform well, while human experts could identify the important hidden variable using domain knowledge. We demonstrate this idea with a synthetic dataset for property insurance. Our experiments show that agentic AI that relies on generic analytics workflow falls short of methods that use domain-specific insights. This highlights a key limitation of the current agentic AI for data science and underscores the need for future research to develop agentic AI systems that can better recognize and incorporate domain knowledge.

Small language models (SLMs) are inherently limited in knowledge-intensive tasks due to their constrained capacity. While test-time computation offers a path to enhanced performance, most approaches treat reasoning as a fixed or heuristic process. In this work, we propose a new paradigm: viewing the model's internal reasoning, delimited by <think> and </think> tags, as a dynamic task vector machine. Rather than treating the content inside these tags as a mere trace of thought, we interpret the generation process itself as a mechanism through which the model constructs and refines its own task vectors on the fly. We developed a method to optimize this dynamic task vector machine through RLVR and successfully trained an agentic web-search model. We present Lucy, a 1.7B-parameter SLM that leverages this dynamic reasoning mechanism with MCP integration to achieve 78.3% accuracy on the SimpleQA benchmark, performing on par with much larger models such as DeepSeek-V3. This demonstrates that small models can rival large ones when equipped with structured, self-constructed task reasoning.

GPU kernel optimization is fundamental to modern deep learning but remains a highly specialized task requiring deep hardware expertise. Despite strong performance in general programming, large language models (LLMs) remain uncompetitive with compiler-based systems such as torch.compile for CUDA kernel generation. Existing CUDA code generation approaches either rely on training-free refinement or fine-tune models within fixed multi-turn execution-feedback loops, but both paradigms fail to fundamentally improve the model's intrinsic CUDA optimization ability, resulting in limited performance gains. We present CUDA Agent, a large-scale agentic reinforcement learning system that develops CUDA kernel expertise through three components: a scalable data synthesis pipeline, a skill-augmented CUDA development environment with automated verification and profiling to provide reliable reward signals, and reinforcement learning algorithmic techniques enabling stable training. CUDA Agent achieves state-of-the-art results on KernelBench, delivering 100\%, 100\%, and 92\% faster rate over torch.compile on KernelBench Level-1, Level-2, and Level-3 splits, outperforming the strongest proprietary models such as Claude Opus 4.5 and Gemini 3 Pro by about 40\% on the hardest Level-3 setting.

Agentic coding requires agents to effectively interact with runtime environments, e.g., command line interfaces (CLI), so as to complete tasks like resolving dependency issues, fixing system problems, etc. But it remains underexplored how such environment-intensive tasks can be obtained at scale to enhance agents' capabilities. To address this, based on an analogy between the Dockerfile and the agentic task, we propose to employ agents to simulate and explore environment histories, guided by execution feedback. By tracing histories of a healthy environment, its state can be inverted to an earlier one with runtime failures, from which a task can be derived by packing the buggy state and the corresponding error messages. With our method, named CLI-Gym, a total of 1,655 environment-intensive tasks are derived, being the largest collection of its kind. Moreover, with curated successful trajectories, our fine-tuned model, named LiberCoder, achieves substantial absolute improvements of +21.1% (to 46.1%) on Terminal-Bench, outperforming various strong baselines. To our knowledge, this is the first public pipeline for scalable derivation of environment-intensive tasks.

Large language models (LLMs) often struggle when performing agentic tasks without substantial tool support, prom-pt engineering, or fine tuning. Despite research showing that domain-dependent, procedural knowledge can dramatically increase planning efficiency, little work evaluates its potential for improving LLM performance on agentic tasks that may require implicit planning. We formalize, implement, and evaluate an agentic LLM workflow that leverages procedural knowledge in the form of a hierarchical task network (HTN). Empirical results of our implementation show that hand-coded HTNs can dramatically improve LLM performance on agentic tasks, and using HTNs can boost a 20b or 70b parameter LLM to outperform a much larger 120b parameter LLM baseline. Furthermore, LLM-created HTNs improve overall performance, though less so. The results suggest that leveraging expertise--from humans, documents, or LLMs--to curate procedural knowledge will become another important tool for improving LLM workflows.

Large language model (LLM) coding agents increasingly operate at the repository level, motivating benchmarks that evaluate their ability to optimize entire codebases under realistic constraints. Existing code benchmarks largely rely on synthetic tasks, binary correctness signals, or single-objective evaluation, limiting their ability to assess holistic optimization behavior. We introduce FormulaCode, a benchmark for evaluating agentic optimization on large, real-world codebases with fine-grained, multi-objective performance metrics. FormulaCode comprises 957 performance bottlenecks mined from scientific Python repositories on GitHub, each paired with expert-authored patches and, on average, 264.6 community-maintained performance workloads per task, enabling the holistic ability of LLM agents to optimize codebases under realistic correctness and performance constraints. Our evaluations reveal that repository-scale, multi-objective optimization remains a major challenge for frontier LLM agents. Project website at: https://formula-code.github.io

Agents powered by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted in the software industry, contributing code as collaborators or even autonomous developers. As their presence grows, it becomes important to assess the current boundaries of their coding abilities. Existing agentic coding benchmarks, however, cover a limited task scope, e.g., bug fixing within a single pull request (PR), and often rely on non-executable evaluations or lack an automated approach for continually updating the evaluation coverage. To address such issues, we propose FeatureBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate agentic coding performance in end-to-end, feature-oriented software development. FeatureBench incorporates an execution-based evaluation protocol and a scalable test-driven method that automatically derives tasks from code repositories with minimal human effort. By tracing from unit tests along a dependency graph, our approach can identify feature-level coding tasks spanning multiple commits and PRs scattered across the development timeline, while ensuring the proper functioning of other features after the separation. Using this framework, we curated 200 challenging evaluation tasks and 3825 executable environments from 24 open-source repositories in the first version of our benchmark. Empirical evaluation reveals that the state-of-the-art agentic model, such as Claude 4.5 Opus, which achieves a 74.4% resolved rate on SWE-bench, succeeds on only 11.0% of tasks, opening new opportunities for advancing agentic coding. Moreover, benefiting from our automated task collection toolkit, FeatureBench can be easily scaled and updated over time to mitigate data leakage. The inherent verifiability of constructed environments also makes our method potentially valuable for agent training.

Multi-agent frameworks powered by large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated great success in automated planning and task execution. However, the effective adjustment of Agentic workflows during execution has not been well-studied. A effective workflow adjustment is crucial, as in many real-world scenarios, the initial plan must adjust to unforeseen challenges and changing conditions in real-time to ensure the efficient execution of complex tasks. In this paper, we define workflows as an activity-on-vertex (AOV) graphs. We continuously refine the workflow by dynamically adjusting task allocations based on historical performance and previous AOV with LLM agents. To further enhance system performance, we emphasize modularity in workflow design based on measuring parallelism and dependence complexity. Our proposed multi-agent framework achieved efficient sub-task concurrent execution, goal achievement, and error tolerance. Empirical results across different practical tasks demonstrate dramatic improvements in the efficiency of multi-agent frameworks through dynamic workflow updating and modularization.

We introduce GenAgent, unifying visual understanding and generation through an agentic multimodal model. Unlike unified models that face expensive training costs and understanding-generation trade-offs, GenAgent decouples these capabilities through an agentic framework: understanding is handled by the multimodal model itself, while generation is achieved by treating image generation models as invokable tools. Crucially, unlike existing modular systems constrained by static pipelines, this design enables autonomous multi-turn interactions where the agent generates multimodal chains-of-thought encompassing reasoning, tool invocation, judgment, and reflection to iteratively refine outputs. We employ a two-stage training strategy: first, cold-start with supervised fine-tuning on high-quality tool invocation and reflection data to bootstrap agent behaviors; second, end-to-end agentic reinforcement learning combining pointwise rewards (final image quality) and pairwise rewards (reflection accuracy), with trajectory resampling for enhanced multi-turn exploration. GenAgent significantly boosts base generator(FLUX.1-dev) performance on GenEval++ (+23.6\%) and WISE (+14\%). Beyond performance gains, our framework demonstrates three key properties: 1) cross-tool generalization to generators with varying capabilities, 2) test-time scaling with consistent improvements across interaction rounds, and 3) task-adaptive reasoning that automatically adjusts to different tasks. Our code will be available at https://github.com/deep-kaixun/GenAgent{this url}.

The rapid progress of navigation, manipulation, and vision models has made mobile manipulators capable in many specialized tasks. However, the open-world mobile manipulation (OWMM) task remains a challenge due to the need for generalization to open-ended instructions and environments, as well as the systematic complexity to integrate high-level decision making with low-level robot control based on both global scene understanding and current agent state. To address this complexity, we propose a novel multi-modal agent architecture that maintains multi-view scene frames and agent states for decision-making and controls the robot by function calling. A second challenge is the hallucination from domain shift. To enhance the agent performance, we further introduce an agentic data synthesis pipeline for the OWMM task to adapt the VLM model to our task domain with instruction fine-tuning. We highlight our fine-tuned OWMM-VLM as the first dedicated foundation model for mobile manipulators with global scene understanding, robot state tracking, and multi-modal action generation in a unified model. Through experiments, we demonstrate that our model achieves SOTA performance compared to other foundation models including GPT-4o and strong zero-shot generalization in real world. The project page is at https://github.com/HHYHRHY/OWMM-Agent

As language model agents are applied to real world problems of increasing complexity, they will be expected to formulate plans across large search spaces. If those plans fail for reasons beyond their control, how well do language agents search for alternative ways to achieve their goals? We devise a specialized agentic planning benchmark to study this question. Each planning problem is solved via combinations of function calls. The agent searches for relevant functions from a set of over four thousand possibilities, and observes environmental feedback in the form of function outputs or error messages. Our benchmark confronts the agent with external failures in its workflow, such as functions that suddenly become unavailable. At the same time, even with the introduction of these failures, we guarantee that the task remains solvable. Ideally, an agent's performance on the planning task should not be affected by the presence of external failures. Overall, we find that language agents struggle to formulate and execute backup plans in response to environment feedback. While state-of-the-art models are often able to identify the correct function to use in the right context, they struggle to adapt to feedback from the environment and often fail to pursue alternate courses of action, even when the search space is artificially restricted. We provide a systematic analysis of the failures of both open-source and commercial models, examining the effects of search space size, as well as the benefits of scaling model size in our setting. Our analysis identifies key challenges for current generative models as well as promising directions for future work.

Current research on agentic visual reasoning enables deep multimodal understanding but primarily focuses on image manipulation tools, leaving a gap toward more general-purpose agentic models. In this work, we revisit the geolocalization task, which requires not only nuanced visual grounding but also web search to confirm or refine hypotheses during reasoning. Since existing geolocalization benchmarks fail to meet the need for high-resolution imagery and the localization challenge for deep agentic reasoning, we curate GeoBench, a benchmark that includes photos and panoramas from around the world, along with a subset of satellite images of different cities to rigorously evaluate the geolocalization ability of agentic models. We also propose GeoVista, an agentic model that seamlessly integrates tool invocation within the reasoning loop, including an image-zoom-in tool to magnify regions of interest and a web-search tool to retrieve related web information. We develop a complete training pipeline for it, including a cold-start supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage to learn reasoning patterns and tool-use priors, followed by a reinforcement learning (RL) stage to further enhance reasoning ability. We adopt a hierarchical reward to leverage multi-level geographical information and improve overall geolocalization performance. Experimental results show that GeoVista surpasses other open-source agentic models on the geolocalization task greatly and achieves performance comparable to closed-source models such as Gemini-2.5-flash and GPT-5 on most metrics.

New AI accelerators with novel instruction set architectures (ISAs) often require developers to manually craft low-level kernels -- a time-consuming, laborious, and error-prone process that cannot scale across diverse hardware targets. This prevents emerging hardware platforms from reaching the market efficiently. While prior LLM-based code generation has shown promise in mature GPU ecosystems, it remains unclear whether agentic LLM systems can quickly produce valid and efficient kernels for emerging hardware with new ISAs. We present KernelCraft: the first benchmark to evaluate an LLM agent's ability to generate and optimize low-level kernels for customized accelerators via a function-calling, feedback-driven workflow. Within KernelCraft, the agent refines kernels under ISA and hardware constraints using automated feedback derived from compilation checks, simulation, and correctness validation against ground truth. In our experiments, we assess agent performance across three emerging accelerator platforms on more than 20 ML tasks, each with 5 diverse task configurations, with special evaluation of task configuration complexity. Across four leading reasoning models, top agents produce functionally valid kernels for previously unseen ISAs within a few refinement steps, with optimized kernels that match or outperform template-based compiler baselines. With that, we demonstrate the potential for reducing the cost of kernel development for accelerator designers and kernel developers.

Training effective AI agents for multi-turn interactions requires high-quality data that captures realistic human-agent dynamics, yet such data is scarce and expensive to collect manually. We introduce APIGen-MT, a two-phase framework that generates verifiable and diverse multi-turn agent data. In the first phase, our agentic pipeline produces detailed task blueprints with ground-truth actions, leveraging a committee of LLM reviewers and iterative feedback loops. These blueprints are then transformed into complete interaction trajectories through simulated human-agent interplay. We train a family of models -- the xLAM-2-fc-r series with sizes ranging from 1B to 70B parameters. Our models outperform frontier models such as GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 on tau-bench and BFCL benchmarks, with the smaller models surpassing their larger counterparts, particularly in multi-turn settings, while maintaining superior consistency across multiple trials. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our verified blueprint-to-details approach yields high-quality training data, enabling the development of more reliable, efficient, and capable agents. We open-source both the synthetic data collected and the trained xLAM-2-fc-r models to advance research in AI agents. Models are available on HuggingFace at https://huggingface.co/collections/Salesforce/xlam-2-67ef5be12949d8dcdae354c4 and project website is https://apigen-mt.github.io

Agentic systems are evaluated on benchmarks where agents interact with environments to solve tasks. Most papers report a pass@1 score computed from a single run per task, assuming this gives a reliable performance estimate. We test this assumption by collecting 60,000 agentic trajectories on SWE-Bench-Verified, spanning three models and two scaffolds. We find substantial variance: single-run pass@1 estimates vary by 2.2 to 6.0 percentage points depending on which run is selected, with standard deviations exceeding 1.5 percentage points even at temperature 0. This variance has critical implications: reported improvements of 2--3 percentage points may reflect evaluation noise rather than genuine algorithmic progress. Through token-level analysis, we show that trajectories diverge early, often within the first few percent of tokens, and that these small differences cascade into different solution strategies. To enable reliable evaluation of agentic systems, we recommend three concrete practices: (1) estimate pass@1 from multiple independent runs per task, especially when measuring small improvements, (2) use statistical power analysis to determine the number of runs needed to detect expected effect sizes, and (3) consider metrics like pass@k (optimistic bound) and pass^k (pessimistic bound) with k>1 to better characterize the full performance envelope. While these practices increase evaluation cost, they are essential for distinguishing genuine scientific progress from statistical noise.

We present Federation of Agents (FoA), a distributed orchestration framework that transforms static multi-agent coordination into dynamic, capability-driven collaboration. FoA introduces Versioned Capability Vectors (VCVs): machine-readable profiles that make agent capabilities searchable through semantic embeddings, enabling agents to advertise their capabilities, cost, and limitations. Our aarchitecturecombines three key innovations: (1) semantic routing that matches tasks to agents over sharded HNSW indices while enforcing operational constraints through cost-biased optimization, (2) dynamic task decomposition where compatible agents collaboratively break down complex tasks into DAGs of subtasks through consensus-based merging, and (3) smart clustering that groups agents working on similar subtasks into collaborative channels for k-round refinement before synthesis. Built on top of MQTT,s publish-subscribe semantics for scalable message passing, FoA achieves sub-linear complexity through hierarchical capability matching and efficient index maintenance. Evaluation on HealthBench shows 13x improvements over single-model baselines, with clustering-enhanced laboration particularly effective for complex reasoning tasks requiring multiple perspectives. The system scales horizontally while maintaining consistent performance, demonstrating that semantic orchestration with structured collaboration can unlock the collective intelligence of heterogeneous federations of AI agents.

Optimizing CUDA code across multiple generations of GPU architectures is challenging, as achieving peak performance requires an extensive exploration of an increasingly complex, hardware-specific optimization space. Traditional compilers are constrained by fixed heuristics, whereas finetuning Large Language Models (LLMs) can be expensive. However, agentic workflows for CUDA code optimization have limited ability to aggregate knowledge from prior exploration, leading to biased sampling and suboptimal solutions. We propose KernelBlaster, a Memory-Augmented In-context Reinforcement Learning (MAIC-RL) framework designed to improve CUDA optimization search capabilities of LLM-based GPU coding agents. KernelBlaster enables agents to learn from experience and make systematically informed decisions on future tasks by accumulating knowledge into a retrievable Persistent CUDA Knowledge Base. We propose a novel profile-guided, textual-gradient-based agentic flow for CUDA generation and optimization to achieve high performance across generations of GPU architectures. KernelBlaster guides LLM agents to systematically explore high-potential optimization strategies beyond naive rewrites. Compared to the PyTorch baseline, our method achieves geometric mean speedups of 1.43x, 2.50x, and 1.50x on KernelBench Levels 1, 2, and 3, respectively. We release KernelBlaster as an open-source agentic framework, accompanied by a test harness, verification components, and a reproducible evaluation pipeline.

While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in robotic manipulation, their performance in complex reasoning and long-horizon task planning is limited by data scarcity and model capacity. To address this, we introduce ManiAgent, an agentic architecture for general manipulation tasks that achieves end-to-end output from task descriptions and environmental inputs to robotic manipulation actions. In this framework, multiple agents involve inter-agent communication to perform environmental perception, sub-task decomposition and action generation, enabling efficient handling of complex manipulation scenarios. Evaluations show ManiAgent achieves an 86.8% success rate on the SimplerEnv benchmark and 95.8% on real-world pick-and-place tasks, enabling efficient data collection that yields VLA models with performance comparable to those trained on human-annotated datasets. The project webpage is available at https://yi-yang929.github.io/ManiAgent/.

Language agents have shown strong promise for task automation. Realizing this promise for increasingly complex, long-horizon tasks has driven the rise of a sub-agent-as-tools paradigm for multi-turn task solving. However, existing designs still lack a dynamic abstraction view of sub-agents, thereby hurting adaptability. We address this challenge with a unified, framework-agnostic agent abstraction that models any agent as a tuple Instruction, Context, Tools, Model. This tuple acts as a compositional recipe for capabilities, enabling the system to spawn specialized executors for each task on demand. Building on this abstraction, we introduce an agentic system AOrchestra, where the central orchestrator concretizes the tuple at each step: it curates task-relevant context, selects tools and models, and delegates execution via on-the-fly automatic agent creation. Such designs enable reducing human engineering efforts, and remain framework-agnostic with plug-and-play support for diverse agents as task executors. It also enables a controllable performance-cost trade-off, allowing the system to approach Pareto-efficient. Across three challenging benchmarks (GAIA, SWE-Bench, Terminal-Bench), AOrchestra achieves 16.28% relative improvement against the strongest baseline when paired with Gemini-3-Flash. The code is available at: https://github.com/FoundationAgents/AOrchestra

Recent advances in persona-centric memory have revealed the powerful capability of multi-agent systems in managing persona memory, especially in conversational scenarios. However, these complex frameworks often suffer from information loss and are fragile across varying scenarios, resulting in suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose DeltaMem, an agentic memory management system that formulates persona-centric memory management as an end-to-end task within a single-agent setting. To further improve the performance of our agentic memory manager, we draw inspiration from the evolution of human memory and synthesize a user-assistant dialogue dataset along with corresponding operation-level memory updating labels. Building on this, we introduce a novel Memory-based Levenshtein Distance to formalize the memory updating reward, and propose a tailored reinforcement learning framework to further enhance the management capabilities of DeltaMem. Extensive experiments show that both training-free and RL-trained DeltaMem outperform all product-level baselines across diverse long-term memory benchmarks, including LoCoMo, HaluMem, and PersonaMem.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently shown tremendous promise in serving as the backbone to agentic systems, as demonstrated by their performance in multi-faceted, challenging benchmarks like SWE-Bench and Agent-Bench. However, to realize the true potential of LLMs as autonomous agents, they must learn to identify, call, and interact with external tools and application program interfaces (APIs) to complete complex tasks. These tasks together are termed function calling. Endowing LLMs with function calling abilities leads to a myriad of advantages, such as access to current and domain-specific information in databases and knowledge sources, and the ability to outsource tasks that can be reliably performed by tools, e.g., a Python interpreter or calculator. While there has been significant progress in function calling with LLMs, there is still a dearth of open models that perform on par with proprietary LLMs like GPT, Claude, and Gemini. Therefore, in this work, we introduce the GRANITE-20B-FUNCTIONCALLING model under an Apache 2.0 license. The model is trained using a multi-task training approach on seven fundamental tasks encompassed in function calling, those being Nested Function Calling, Function Chaining, Parallel Functions, Function Name Detection, Parameter-Value Pair Detection, Next-Best Function, and Response Generation. We present a comprehensive evaluation on multiple out-of-domain datasets comparing GRANITE-20B-FUNCTIONCALLING to more than 15 other best proprietary and open models. GRANITE-20B-FUNCTIONCALLING provides the best performance among all open models on the Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard and fourth overall. As a result of the diverse tasks and datasets used for training our model, we show that GRANITE-20B-FUNCTIONCALLING has better generalizability on multiple tasks in seven different evaluation datasets.

Recent advances demonstrate that multimodal large language models (MLLMs) exhibit strong multimodal in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, enabling them to adapt to novel vision-language tasks from a few contextual examples. However, existing ICL approaches face challenges in reconciling scalability with robustness across diverse tasks and noisy contextual examples: manually selecting examples produces clean contexts but is labor-intensive and task-specific, while similarity-based retrieval improves scalability but could introduce irrelevant or structurally inconsistent samples that degrade ICL performance. To address these limitations, we propose ContextNav, the first agentic framework that integrates the scalability of automated retrieval with the quality and adaptiveness of human-like curation, enabling noise-robust and dynamically optimized contextualization for multimodal ICL. ContextNav unifies context management and noise-robust contextualization within a closed-loop workflow driven by graph-based orchestration. Specifically, it builds a resource-aware multimodal embedding pipeline, maintains a retrievable vector database, and applies agentic retrieval and structural alignment to construct noise-resilient contexts. An Operational Grammar Graph (OGG) further supports adaptive workflow planning and optimization, enabling the agent to refine its operational strategies based on downstream ICL feedback. Experimental results demonstrate that ContextNav achieves state-of-the-art performance across various datasets, underscoring the promise of agentic workflows for advancing scalable and robust contextualization in multimodal ICL.

The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) from static instruction-followers to autonomous agents necessitates operating within complex, stateful environments to achieve precise state-transition objectives. However, this paradigm is bottlenecked by data scarcity, as existing tool-centric reverse-synthesis pipelines fail to capture the rigorous logic of real-world applications. We introduce LOGIGEN, a logic-driven framework that synthesizes verifiable training data based on three core pillars: Hard-Compiled Policy Grounding, Logic-Driven Forward Synthesis, and Deterministic State Verification. Specifically, a Triple-Agent Orchestration is employed: the Architect compiles natural-language policy into database constraints to enforce hard rules; the Set Designer initializes boundary-adjacent states to trigger critical policy conflicts; and the Explorer searches this environment to discover causal solution paths. This framework yields a dataset of 20,000 complex tasks across 8 domains, where validity is strictly guaranteed by checking exact state equivalence. Furthermore, we propose a verification-based training protocol where Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on verifiable trajectories establishes compliance with hard-compiled policy, while Reinforcement Learning (RL) guided by dense state-rewards refines long-horizon goal achievement. On τ^2-Bench, LOGIGEN-32B(RL) achieves a 79.5\% success rate, substantially outperforming the base model (40.7\%). These results demonstrate that logic-driven synthesis combined with verification-based training effectively constructs the causally valid trajectories needed for next-generation agents.

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents increasingly interact, collaborate, and delegate tasks to one another autonomously with minimal human interaction. Industry guidelines for agentic system governance emphasize the need for users to maintain comprehensive control over their agents, mitigating potential damage from malicious agents. Several proposed agentic system designs address agent identity, authorization, and delegation, but remain purely theoretical, without concrete implementation and evaluation. Most importantly, they do not provide user-controlled agent management. To address this gap, we propose SAGA, a scalable Security Architecture for Governing Agentic systems, that offers user oversight over their agents' lifecycle. In our design, users register their agents with a central entity, the Provider, that maintains agent contact information, user-defined access control policies, and helps agents enforce these policies on inter-agent communication. We introduce a cryptographic mechanism for deriving access control tokens, that offers fine-grained control over an agent's interaction with other agents, providing formal security guarantees. We evaluate SAGA on several agentic tasks, using agents in different geolocations, and multiple on-device and cloud LLMs, demonstrating minimal performance overhead with no impact on underlying task utility in a wide range of conditions. Our architecture enables secure and trustworthy deployment of autonomous agents, accelerating the responsible adoption of this technology in sensitive environments.

Sports video understanding presents unique challenges, requiring models to perceive high-speed dynamics, comprehend complex rules, and reason over long temporal contexts. While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown promise in genral domains, the current state of research in sports remains narrowly focused: existing approaches are either single-sport centric, limited to specific tasks, or rely on training-free paradigms that lack robust, learned reasoning process. To address this gap, we introduce DeepSport, the first end-to-end trained MLLM framework designed for multi-task, multi-sport video understanding. DeepSport shifts the paradigm from passive frame processing to active, iterative reasoning, empowering the model to ``think with videos'' by dynamically interrogating content via a specialized frame-extraction tool. To enable this, we propose a data distillation pipeline that synthesizes high-quality Chain-of-Thought (CoT) trajectories from 10 diverse data source, creating a unified resource of 78k training data. We then employ a two-stage training strategy, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL) with a novel gated tool-use reward, to optimize the model's reasoning process. Extensive experiments on the testing benchmark of 6.7k questions demonstrate that DeepSport achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming baselines of both proprietary model and open-source models. Our work establishes a new foundation for domain-specific video reasoning to address the complexities of diverse sports.

Self-evolving memory systems are unprecedentedly reshaping the evolutionary paradigm of large language model (LLM)-based agents. Prior work has predominantly relied on manually engineered memory architectures to store trajectories, distill experience, and synthesize reusable tools, enabling agents to evolve on the fly within environment interactions. However, this paradigm is fundamentally constrained by the staticity of the memory system itself: while memory facilitates agent-level evolving, the underlying memory architecture cannot be meta-adapted to diverse task contexts. To address this gap, we propose MemEvolve, a meta-evolutionary framework that jointly evolves agents' experiential knowledge and their memory architecture, allowing agent systems not only to accumulate experience but also to progressively refine how they learn from it. To ground MemEvolve in prior research and foster openness in future self-evolving systems, we introduce EvolveLab, a unified self-evolving memory codebase that distills twelve representative memory systems into a modular design space (encode, store, retrieve, manage), providing both a standardized implementation substrate and a fair experimental arena. Extensive evaluations on four challenging agentic benchmarks demonstrate that MemEvolve achieves (I) substantial performance gains, improving frameworks such as SmolAgent and Flash-Searcher by up to 17.06%; and (II) strong cross-task and cross-LLM generalization, designing memory architectures that transfer effectively across diverse benchmarks and backbone models.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for training LLM-based agents, yet remains limited by low sample efficiency, stemming not only from sparse outcome feedback but also from the agent's inability to leverage prior experience across episodes. While augmenting agents with historical experience offers a promising remedy, existing approaches suffer from a critical weakness: the experience distilled from history is either stored statically or fail to coevolve with the improving actor, causing a progressive misalignment between the experience and the actor's evolving capability that diminishes its utility over the course of training. Inspired by complementary learning systems in neuroscience, we present Complementary RL to achieve seamless co-evolution of an experience extractor and a policy actor within the RL optimization loop. Specifically, the actor is optimized via sparse outcome-based rewards, while the experience extractor is optimized according to whether its distilled experiences demonstrably contribute to the actor's success, thereby evolving its experience management strategy in lockstep with the actor's growing capabilities. Empirically, Complementary RL outperforms outcome-based agentic RL baselines that do not learn from experience, achieving 10% performance improvement in single-task scenarios and exhibits robust scalability in multi-task settings. These results establish Complementary RL as a paradigm for efficient experience-driven agent learning.

Graphical user interface (GUI) agents autonomously operate across platforms (e.g., Linux) to complete tasks by interacting with visual elements. Specifically, a user instruction is decomposed into a sequence of action proposals, each corresponding to an interaction with the GUI. After each action, the agent observes the updated GUI environment to plan the next step. However, two main challenges arise: i) resolving ambiguity in task planning (i.e., the action proposal sequence), where selecting an appropriate plan is non-trivial, as many valid ones may exist; ii) accurately grounding actions in complex and high-resolution interfaces, i.e., precisely interacting with visual targets. This paper investigates the two aforementioned challenges with our GUI Test-time Scaling Agent, namely GTA1. First, to select the most appropriate action proposal, we introduce a test-time scaling method. At each step, we sample multiple candidate action proposals and leverage a judge model to evaluate and select the most suitable one. It trades off computation for better decision quality by concurrent sampling, shortening task execution steps, and improving overall performance. Second, we propose a model that achieves improved accuracy when grounding the selected action proposal to its corresponding visual elements. Our key insight is that reinforcement learning (RL) facilitates visual grounding through inherent objective alignments, rewarding successful clicks on interface elements. Experimentally, our method establishes state-of-the-art performance across diverse benchmarks. For example, GTA1-7B achieves 50.1%, 92.4%, and 67.7% accuracies on Screenspot-Pro, Screenspot-V2, and OSWorld-G, respectively. When paired with a planner applying our test-time scaling strategy, it exhibits state-of-the-art agentic performance (e.g., 45.2% task success rate on OSWorld). We open-source our code and models here.

Agentic tasks, which require multi-step problem solving with autonomy, tool use, and adaptive reasoning, are becoming increasingly central to the advancement of NLP and AI. However, existing instruction data lacks tool interaction, and current agentic benchmarks rely on costly human annotation, limiting their scalability. We introduce TaskCraft, an automated workflow for generating difficulty-scalable, multi-tool, and verifiable agentic tasks with execution trajectories. TaskCraft expands atomic tasks using depth-based and width-based extensions to create structurally and hierarchically complex challenges. Empirical results show that these tasks improve prompt optimization in the generation workflow and enhance supervised fine-tuning of agentic foundation models. We present a large-scale synthetic dataset of approximately 36,000 tasks with varying difficulty to support future research on agent tuning and evaluation.

LLM-powered search agents are increasingly being used for multi-step information seeking tasks, yet the IR community lacks empirical understanding of how agentic search sessions unfold and how retrieved evidence is used. This paper presents a large-scale log analysis of agentic search based on 14.44M search requests (3.97M sessions) collected from DeepResearchGym, i.e. an open-source search API accessed by external agentic clients. We sessionize the logs, assign session-level intents and step-wise query-reformulation labels using LLM-based annotation, and propose Context-driven Term Adoption Rate (CTAR) to quantify whether newly introduced query terms are traceable to previously retrieved evidence. Our analyses reveal distinctive behavioral patterns. First, over 90% of multi-turn sessions contain at most ten steps, and 89% of inter-step intervals fall under one minute. Second, behavior varies by intent. Fact-seeking sessions exhibit high repetition that increases over time, while sessions requiring reasoning sustain broader exploration. Third, agents reuse evidence across steps. On average, 54% of newly introduced query terms appear in the accumulated evidence context, with contributions from earlier steps beyond the most recent retrieval. The findings suggest that agentic search may benefit from repetition-aware early stopping, intent-adaptive retrieval budgets, and explicit cross-step context tracking. We plan to release the anonymized logs to support future research.

Recent years have witnessed increasing interest in extending large language models into agentic systems. While the effectiveness of agents has continued to improve, efficiency, which is crucial for real-world deployment, has often been overlooked. This paper therefore investigates efficiency from three core components of agents: memory, tool learning, and planning, considering costs such as latency, tokens, steps, etc. Aimed at conducting comprehensive research addressing the efficiency of the agentic system itself, we review a broad range of recent approaches that differ in implementation yet frequently converge on shared high-level principles including but not limited to bounding context via compression and management, designing reinforcement learning rewards to minimize tool invocation, and employing controlled search mechanisms to enhance efficiency, which we discuss in detail. Accordingly, we characterize efficiency in two complementary ways: comparing effectiveness under a fixed cost budget, and comparing cost at a comparable level of effectiveness. This trade-off can also be viewed through the Pareto frontier between effectiveness and cost. From this perspective, we also examine efficiency oriented benchmarks by summarizing evaluation protocols for these components and consolidating commonly reported efficiency metrics from both benchmark and methodological studies. Moreover, we discuss the key challenges and future directions, with the goal of providing promising insights.

Mobile agents are essential for automating tasks in complex and dynamic mobile environments. As foundation models evolve, the demands for agents that can adapt in real-time and process multimodal data have grown. This survey provides a comprehensive review of mobile agent technologies, focusing on recent advancements that enhance real-time adaptability and multimodal interaction. Recent evaluation benchmarks have been developed better to capture the static and interactive environments of mobile tasks, offering more accurate assessments of agents' performance. We then categorize these advancements into two main approaches: prompt-based methods, which utilize large language models (LLMs) for instruction-based task execution, and training-based methods, which fine-tune multimodal models for mobile-specific applications. Additionally, we explore complementary technologies that augment agent performance. By discussing key challenges and outlining future research directions, this survey offers valuable insights for advancing mobile agent technologies. A comprehensive resource list is available at https://github.com/aialt/awesome-mobile-agents

With generative AI advances, the exciting potential for autonomous agents to manage daily tasks via natural language commands has emerged. However, cur rent agents are primarily created and tested in simplified synthetic environments, substantially limiting real-world scenario representation. In this paper, we build an environment for agent command and control that is highly realistic and reproducible. Specifically, we focus on agents that perform tasks on websites, and we create an environment with fully functional websites from four common domains: e-commerce, social forum discussions, collaborative software development, and content management. Our environment is enriched with tools (e.g., a map) and external knowledge bases (e.g., user manuals) to encourage human-like task-solving. Building upon our environment, we release a set of benchmark tasks focusing on evaluating the functional correctness of task completions. The tasks in our benchmark are diverse, long-horizon, and are designed to emulate tasks that humans routinely perform on the internet. We design and implement several autonomous agents, integrating recent techniques such as reasoning before acting. The results demonstrate that solving complex tasks is challenging: our best GPT-4-based agent only achieves an end-to-end task success rate of 10.59%. These results highlight the need for further development of robust agents, that current state-of-the-art LMs are far from perfect performance in these real-life tasks, and that WebArena can be used to measure such progress. Our code, data, environment reproduction resources, and video demonstrations are publicly available at https://webarena.dev/.

Autonomous embodied agents live on an Internet of multimedia websites. Can they hop around multimodal websites to complete complex user tasks? Existing benchmarks fail to assess them in a realistic, evolving environment for their embodiment across websites. To answer this question, we present MMInA, a multihop and multimodal benchmark to evaluate the embodied agents for compositional Internet tasks, with several appealing properties: 1) Evolving real-world multimodal websites. Our benchmark uniquely operates on evolving real-world websites, ensuring a high degree of realism and applicability to natural user tasks. Our data includes 1,050 human-written tasks covering various domains such as shopping and travel, with each task requiring the agent to autonomously extract multimodal information from web pages as observations; 2) Multihop web browsing. Our dataset features naturally compositional tasks that require information from or actions on multiple websites to solve, to assess long-range reasoning capabilities on web tasks; 3) Holistic evaluation. We propose a novel protocol for evaluating an agent's progress in completing multihop tasks. We experiment with both standalone (multimodal) language models and heuristic-based web agents. Extensive experiments demonstrate that while long-chain multihop web tasks are easy for humans, they remain challenging for state-of-the-art web agents. We identify that agents are more likely to fail on the early hops when solving tasks of more hops, which results in lower task success rates. To address this issue, we propose a simple memory augmentation approach replaying past action trajectories to reflect. Our method significantly improved both the single-hop and multihop web browsing abilities of agents. See our code and data at https://mmina.cliangyu.com

The capacity of AI agents to effectively handle tasks of increasing duration and complexity continues to grow, demonstrating exceptional performance in coding, deep research, and complex problem-solving evaluations. However, in daily scenarios, the perception of these advanced AI capabilities among general users remains limited. We argue that current evaluations prioritize increasing task difficulty without sufficiently addressing the diversity of agentic tasks necessary to cover the daily work, life, and learning activities of a broad demographic. To address this, we propose AgentIF-OneDay, aimed at determining whether general users can utilize natural language instructions and AI agents to complete a diverse array of daily tasks. These tasks require not only solving problems through dialogue but also understanding various attachment types and delivering tangible file-based results. The benchmark is structured around three user-centric categories: Open Workflow Execution, which assesses adherence to explicit and complex workflows; Latent Instruction, which requires agents to infer implicit instructions from attachments; and Iterative Refinement, which involves modifying or expanding upon ongoing work. We employ instance-level rubrics and a refined evaluation pipeline that aligns LLM-based verification with human judgment, achieving an 80.1% agreement rate using Gemini-3-Pro. AgentIF-OneDay comprises 104 tasks covering 767 scoring points. We benchmarked four leading general AI agents and found that agent products built based on APIs and ChatGPT agents based on agent RL remain in the first tier simultaneously. Leading LLM APIs and open-source models have internalized agentic capabilities, enabling AI application teams to develop cutting-edge Agent products.

Multimodal agents offer a promising path to automating complex document-intensive workflows. Yet, a critical question remains: do these agents demonstrate genuine strategic reasoning, or merely stochastic trial-and-error search? To address this, we introduce MADQA, a benchmark of 2,250 human-authored questions grounded in 800 heterogeneous PDF documents. Guided by Classical Test Theory, we design it to maximize discriminative power across varying levels of agentic abilities. To evaluate agentic behaviour, we introduce a novel evaluation protocol measuring the accuracy-effort trade-off. Using this framework, we show that while the best agents can match human searchers in raw accuracy, they succeed on largely different questions and rely on brute-force search to compensate for weak strategic planning. They fail to close the nearly 20% gap to oracle performance, persisting in unproductive loops. We release the dataset and evaluation harness to help facilitate the transition from brute-force retrieval to calibrated, efficient reasoning.

Agents are predominantly evaluated and optimized via task success metrics, which are coarse, rely on manual design from experts, and fail to reward intermediate emergent behaviors. We propose AutoLibra, a framework for agent evaluation, that transforms open-ended human feedback, e.g., "If you find that the button is disabled, don't click it again", or "This agent has too much autonomy to decide what to do on its own", into metrics for evaluating fine-grained behaviors in agent trajectories. AutoLibra accomplishes this by grounding feedback to an agent's behavior, clustering similar positive and negative behaviors, and creating concrete metrics with clear definitions and concrete examples, which can be used for prompting LLM-as-a-Judge as evaluators. We further propose two meta-metrics to evaluate the alignment of a set of (induced) metrics with open feedback: "coverage" and "redundancy". Through optimizing these meta-metrics, we experimentally demonstrate AutoLibra's ability to induce more concrete agent evaluation metrics than the ones proposed in previous agent evaluation benchmarks and discover new metrics to analyze agents. We also present two applications of AutoLibra in agent improvement: First, we show that AutoLibra-induced metrics serve as better prompt-engineering targets than the task success rate on a wide range of text game tasks, improving agent performance over baseline by a mean of 20%. Second, we show that AutoLibra can iteratively select high-quality fine-tuning data for web navigation agents. Our results suggest that AutoLibra is a powerful task-agnostic tool for evaluating and improving language agents.

Information retrieval is a cornerstone of modern knowledge acquisition, enabling billions of queries each day across diverse domains. However, traditional keyword-based search engines are increasingly inadequate for handling complex, multi-step information needs. Our position is that Large Language Models (LLMs), endowed with reasoning and agentic capabilities, are ushering in a new paradigm termed Agentic Deep Research. These systems transcend conventional information search techniques by tightly integrating autonomous reasoning, iterative retrieval, and information synthesis into a dynamic feedback loop. We trace the evolution from static web search to interactive, agent-based systems that plan, explore, and learn. We also introduce a test-time scaling law to formalize the impact of computational depth on reasoning and search. Supported by benchmark results and the rise of open-source implementations, we demonstrate that Agentic Deep Research not only significantly outperforms existing approaches, but is also poised to become the dominant paradigm for future information seeking. All the related resources, including industry products, research papers, benchmark datasets, and open-source implementations, are collected for the community in https://github.com/DavidZWZ/Awesome-Deep-Research.

Benchmarks are essential for quantitatively tracking progress in AI. As AI agents become increasingly capable, researchers and practitioners have introduced agentic benchmarks to evaluate agents on complex, real-world tasks. These benchmarks typically measure agent capabilities by evaluating task outcomes via specific reward designs. However, we show that many agentic benchmarks have issues task setup or reward design. For example, SWE-bench Verified uses insufficient test cases, while TAU-bench counts empty responses as successful. Such issues can lead to under- or overestimation agents' performance by up to 100% in relative terms. To make agentic evaluation rigorous, we introduce the Agentic Benchmark Checklist (ABC), a set of guidelines that we synthesized from our benchmark-building experience, a survey of best practices, and previously reported issues. When applied to CVE-Bench, a benchmark with a particularly complex evaluation design, ABC reduces the performance overestimation by 33%.

Agentic search such as Deep Research systems, where large language models autonomously browse the web, synthesize information, and return comprehensive citation-backed answers, represents a major shift in how users interact with web-scale information. While promising greater efficiency and cognitive offloading, the growing complexity and open-endedness of agentic search have outpaced existing evaluation benchmarks and methodologies, which largely assume short search horizons and static answers. In this paper, we introduce Mind2Web 2, a benchmark of 130 realistic, high-quality, and long-horizon tasks that require real-time web browsing and extensive information synthesis, constructed with over 1,000 hours of human labor. To address the challenge of evaluating time-varying and complex answers, we propose a novel Agent-as-a-Judge framework. Our method constructs task-specific judge agents based on a tree-structured rubric design to automatically assess both answer correctness and source attribution. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of nine frontier agentic search systems and human performance, along with a detailed error analysis to draw insights for future development. The best-performing system, OpenAI Deep Research, can already achieve 50-70% of human performance while spending half the time, showing a great potential. Altogether, Mind2Web 2 provides a rigorous foundation for developing and benchmarking the next generation of agentic search systems.

The growing capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in instruction-following and context-understanding lead to the era of agents with numerous applications. Among these, task planning agents have become especially prominent in realistic scenarios involving complex internal pipelines, such as context understanding, tool management, and response generation. However, existing benchmarks predominantly evaluate agent performance based on task completion as a proxy for overall effectiveness. We hypothesize that merely improving task completion is misaligned with maximizing user satisfaction, as users interact with the entire agentic process and not only the end result. To address this gap, we propose PIPA, a unified evaluation protocol that conceptualizes the behavioral process of interactive task planning agents within a partially observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) paradigm. The proposed protocol offers a comprehensive assessment of agent performance through a set of atomic evaluation criteria, allowing researchers and practitioners to diagnose specific strengths and weaknesses within the agent's decision-making pipeline. Our analyses show that agents excel in different behavioral stages, with user satisfaction shaped by both outcomes and intermediate behaviors. We also highlight future directions, including systems that leverage multiple agents and the limitations of user simulators in task planning.

LLM-based software engineering is influencing modern software development. In addition to correctness, prior studies have also examined the performance of software artifacts generated by AI agents. However, it is unclear how exactly the agentic AI systems address performance concerns in practice. In this paper, we present an empirical study of performance-related pull requests generated by AI agents. Using LLM-assisted detection and BERTopic-based topic modeling, we identified 52 performance-related topics grouped into 10 higher-level categories. Our results show that AI agents apply performance optimizations across diverse layers of the software stack and that the type of optimization significantly affects pull request acceptance rates and review times. We also found that performance optimization by AI agents primarily occurs during the development phase, with less focus on the maintenance phase. Our findings provide empirical evidence that can support the evaluation and improvement of agentic AI systems with respect to their performance optimization behaviors and review outcomes.

Agentic search leverages LLMs to solve complex user information needs by executing a multi-step process of planning, searching, and synthesizing information to provide answers. This paradigm introduces unique challenges for LLMs' agentic reasoning capabilities when interacting with search systems. In this paper, we propose an LLM-based pipeline to study effective reasoning behavior patterns in agentic search by analyzing agentic search trajectories. Using this pipeline, we identify four beneficial reasoning behaviors: Information Verification, Authority Evaluation, Adaptive Search, and Error Recovery. Based on these findings, we propose a technique called Behavior Priming to train agentic search models. It synthesizes trajectories that exhibit these four behaviors and integrates them into the agentic search model through SFT, followed by standard reinforcement learning. Experiments on Qwen3-1.7B and Llama3.2-3B-Instruct across three web benchmarks and seven multi-hop QA benchmarks demonstrate that behavior priming 1) yields significant performance gains compared to training with direct RL, and 2) outperforms other SFT-then-RL baselines, such as those SFT on randomly selected trajectories or on trajectories with merely correct outcomes. Crucially, we demonstrate that the reasoning behaviors, rather than the correctness of the final answer, is the critical factor for achieving strong performance in RL: SFT on trajectories with reasoning behaviors but incorrect answers leads to comparable performance with SFT on those with reasoning behaviors and correct answers. Our analysis further reveals that the introduced reasoning behaviors endow models with more effective exploration (higher pass@k and entropy) and test-time scaling (longer trajectories) capabilities, providing a strong foundation for RL. Our code are avalible at https://github.com/cxcscmu/Behavior_Priming_For_Agentic_Search.

Small language models are increasingly viewed as a promising, cost-effective approach to agentic AI, with proponents claiming they are sufficiently capable for agentic workflows. However, while smaller agents can closely match larger ones on simple tasks, it remains unclear how their performance scales with task complexity, when large models become necessary, and how to better leverage small agents for long-horizon workloads. In this work, we empirically show that small agents' performance fails to scale with task complexity on deep search and coding tasks, and we introduce Strategy Auctions for Workload Efficiency (SALE), an agent framework inspired by freelancer marketplaces. In SALE, agents bid with short strategic plans, which are scored by a systematic cost-value mechanism and refined via a shared auction memory, enabling per-task routing and continual self-improvement without training a separate router or running all models to completion. Across deep search and coding tasks of varying complexity, SALE reduces reliance on the largest agent by 53%, lowers overall cost by 35%, and consistently improves upon the largest agent's pass@1 with only a negligible overhead beyond executing the final trace. In contrast, established routers that rely on task descriptions either underperform the largest agent or fail to reduce cost -- often both -- underscoring their poor fit for agentic workflows. These results suggest that while small agents may be insufficient for complex workloads, they can be effectively "scaled up" through coordinated task allocation and test-time self-improvement. More broadly, they motivate a systems-level view of agentic AI in which performance gains come less from ever-larger individual models and more from market-inspired coordination mechanisms that organize heterogeneous agents into efficient, adaptive ecosystems.

Agentic search has recently emerged as a powerful paradigm, where an agent interleaves multi-step reasoning with on-demand retrieval to solve complex questions. Despite its success, how to design a retriever for agentic search remains largely underexplored. Existing search agents typically rely on similarity-based retrievers, while similar passages are not always useful for final answer generation. In this paper, we propose a novel retriever training framework tailored for agentic search. Unlike retrievers designed for single-turn retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) that only rely on local passage utility, we propose to use both local query-passage relevance and global answer correctness to measure passage utility in a multi-turn agentic search. We further introduce an iterative training strategy, where the search agent and the retriever are optimized bidirectionally and iteratively. Different from RAG retrievers that are only trained once with fixed questions, our retriever is continuously improved using evolving and higher-quality queries from the agent. Extensive experiments on seven single-hop and multi-hop QA benchmarks demonstrate that our retriever, termed , consistently outperforms strong baselines across different search agents. Our codes are available at: https://github.com/8421BCD/Agentic-R.

Autonomous agent frameworks still struggle to reconcile long-term experiential learning with real-time, context-sensitive decision-making. In practice, this gap appears as static cognition, rigid workflow dependence, and inefficient context usage, which jointly limit adaptability in open-ended and non-stationary environments. To address these limitations, we present AutoAgent, a self-evolving multi-agent framework built on three tightly coupled components: evolving cognition, on-the-fly contextual decision-making, and elastic memory orchestration. At the core of AutoAgent, each agent maintains structured prompt-level cognition over tools, self-capabilities, peer expertise, and task knowledge. During execution, this cognition is combined with live task context to select actions from a unified space that includes tool calls, LLM-based generation, and inter-agent requests. To support efficient long-horizon reasoning, an Elastic Memory Orchestrator dynamically organizes interaction history by preserving raw records, compressing redundant trajectories, and constructing reusable episodic abstractions, thereby reducing token overhead while retaining decision-critical evidence. These components are integrated through a closed-loop cognitive evolution process that aligns intended actions with observed outcomes to continuously update cognition and expand reusable skills, without external retraining. Empirical results across retrieval-augmented reasoning, tool-augmented agent benchmarks, and embodied task environments show that AutoAgent consistently improves task success, tool-use efficiency, and collaborative robustness over static and memory-augmented baselines. Overall, AutoAgent provides a unified and practical foundation for adaptive autonomous agents that must learn from experience while making reliable context-aware decisions in dynamic environments.

Agentic search has emerged as a promising paradigm for complex information seeking by enabling Large Language Models (LLMs) to interleave reasoning with tool use. However, prevailing systems rely on monolithic agents that suffer from structural bottlenecks, including unconstrained reasoning outputs that inflate trajectories, sparse outcome-level rewards that complicate credit assignment, and stochastic search noise that destabilizes learning. To address these challenges, we propose M-ASK (Multi-Agent Search and Knowledge), a framework that explicitly decouples agentic search into two complementary roles: Search Behavior Agents, which plan and execute search actions, and Knowledge Management Agents, which aggregate, filter, and maintain a compact internal context. This decomposition allows each agent to focus on a well-defined subtask and reduces interference between search and context construction. Furthermore, to enable stable coordination, M-ASK employs turn-level rewards to provide granular supervision for both search decisions and knowledge updates. Experiments on multi-hop QA benchmarks demonstrate that M-ASK outperforms strong baselines, achieving not only superior answer accuracy but also significantly more stable training dynamics.The source code for M-ASK is available at https://github.com/chenyiqun/M-ASK.

Driven by curiosity, humans have continually sought to explore and understand the world around them, leading to the invention of various tools to satiate this inquisitiveness. Despite not having the capacity to process and memorize vast amounts of information in their brains, humans excel in critical thinking, planning, reflection, and harnessing available tools to interact with and interpret the world, enabling them to find answers efficiently. The recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) suggest that machines might also possess the aforementioned human-like capabilities, allowing them to exhibit powerful abilities even with a constrained parameter count. In this paper, we introduce KwaiAgents, a generalized information-seeking agent system based on LLMs. Within KwaiAgents, we propose an agent system that employs LLMs as its cognitive core, which is capable of understanding a user's query, behavior guidelines, and referencing external documents. The agent can also update and retrieve information from its internal memory, plan and execute actions using a time-aware search-browse toolkit, and ultimately provide a comprehensive response. We further investigate the system's performance when powered by LLMs less advanced than GPT-4, and introduce the Meta-Agent Tuning (MAT) framework, designed to ensure even an open-sourced 7B or 13B model performs well among many agent systems. We exploit both benchmark and human evaluations to systematically validate these capabilities. Extensive experiments show the superiority of our agent system compared to other autonomous agents and highlight the enhanced generalized agent-abilities of our fine-tuned LLMs.

Information retrieval (IR) systems have traditionally been designed and trained for human users, with learning-to-rank methods relying heavily on large-scale human interaction logs such as clicks and dwell time. With the rapid emergence of large language model (LLM) powered search agents, however, retrieval is increasingly consumed by agents rather than human beings, and is embedded as a core component within multi-turn reasoning and action loops. In this setting, retrieval models trained under human-centric assumptions exhibit a fundamental mismatch with the way agents issue queries and consume results. In this work, we argue that retrieval models for agentic search should be trained directly from agent interaction data. We introduce learning to retrieve from agent trajectories as a new training paradigm, where supervision is derived from multi-step agent interactions. Through a systematic analysis of search agent trajectories, we identify key behavioral signals that reveal document utility, including browsing actions, unbrowsed rejections, and post-browse reasoning traces. Guided by these insights, we propose LRAT, a simple yet effective framework that mines high-quality retrieval supervision from agent trajectories and incorporates relevance intensity through weighted optimization. Extensive experiments on both in-domain and out-of-domain deep research benchmarks demonstrate that retrievers trained with LRAT consistently improve evidence recall, end-to-end task success, and execution efficiency across diverse agent architectures and scales. Our results highlight agent trajectories as a practical and scalable supervision source, pointing to a promising direction for retrieval in the era of agentic search.

Temporal progression is an integral part of knowledge accumulation and update. Web search is frequently adopted as grounding for agent knowledge, yet an improper configuration affects the quality of the agent's responses. Here, we assess the agent behavior using distinct date-controlled tools (DCTs) as stress test to measure the knowledge variability of large language model (LLM) agents. We demonstrate the temporal effects of an LLM agent as a writing assistant, which uses web search to complete scientific publication abstracts. We show that the temporality of search engine translates into tool-dependent agent performance but can be alleviated with base model choice and explicit reasoning instructions such as chain-of-thought prompting. Our results indicate that agent design and evaluations should take a dynamical view and implement measures to account for the temporal influence of external resources to ensure reliability.

Recent advances in autonomous LLM agents demonstrate their ability to improve performance through iterative interaction with the environment. We define this paradigm as Test-Time Improvement (TTI). However, the mechanisms under how and why TTI succeed or fail remain poorly understood, and existing evaluation metrics fail to capture their task optimization efficiency, behavior adaptation after erroneous actions, and the specific utility of working memory for task completion. To address these gaps, we propose Test-time Improvement Diagnostic Evaluation (TIDE), an agent-agnostic and environment-agnostic framework that decomposes TTI into three comprehensive and interconnected dimensions. The framework measures (1) the overall temporal dynamics of task completion and (2) identifies whether performance is primarily constrained by recursive looping behaviors or (3) by burdensome accumulated memory. Through extensive experiments across diverse agents and environments, TIDE highlights that improving agent performance requires more than scaling internal reasoning, calling for explicitly optimizing the interaction dynamics between the agent and the environment.

As the research community aims to build better AI assistants that are more dynamic and personalized to the diversity of humans that they interact with, there is increased interest in evaluating the theory of mind capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Indeed, several recent studies suggest that LLM theory of mind capabilities are quite impressive, approximating human-level performance. Our paper aims to rebuke this narrative and argues instead that past studies were not directly measuring agent performance, potentially leading to findings that are illusory in nature as a result. We draw a strong distinction between what we call literal theory of mind i.e. measuring the agent's ability to predict the behavior of others and functional theory of mind i.e. adapting to agents in-context based on a rational response to predictions of their behavior. We find that top performing open source LLMs may display strong capabilities in literal theory of mind, depending on how they are prompted, but seem to struggle with functional theory of mind -- even when partner policies are exceedingly simple. Our work serves to highlight the double sided nature of inductive bias in LLMs when adapting to new situations. While this bias can lead to strong performance over limited horizons, it often hinders convergence to optimal long-term behavior.

Recent advancements in large foundation models have remarkably enhanced our understanding of sensory information in open-world environments. In leveraging the power of foundation models, it is crucial for AI research to pivot away from excessive reductionism and toward an emphasis on systems that function as cohesive wholes. Specifically, we emphasize developing Agent AI -- an embodied system that integrates large foundation models into agent actions. The emerging field of Agent AI spans a wide range of existing embodied and agent-based multimodal interactions, including robotics, gaming, and healthcare systems, etc. In this paper, we propose a novel large action model to achieve embodied intelligent behavior, the Agent Foundation Model. On top of this idea, we discuss how agent AI exhibits remarkable capabilities across a variety of domains and tasks, challenging our understanding of learning and cognition. Furthermore, we discuss the potential of Agent AI from an interdisciplinary perspective, underscoring AI cognition and consciousness within scientific discourse. We believe that those discussions serve as a basis for future research directions and encourage broader societal engagement.

The advent of large language models (LLMs) has transformed information access and reasoning through open-ended natural language interaction. However, LLMs remain limited by static knowledge, factual hallucinations, and the inability to retrieve real-time or domain-specific information. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates these issues by grounding model outputs in external evidence, but traditional RAG pipelines are often single turn and heuristic, lacking adaptive control over retrieval and reasoning. Recent advances in agentic search address these limitations by enabling LLMs to plan, retrieve, and reflect through multi-step interaction with search environments. Within this paradigm, reinforcement learning (RL) offers a powerful mechanism for adaptive and self-improving search behavior. This survey provides the first comprehensive overview of RL-based agentic search, organizing the emerging field along three complementary dimensions: (i) What RL is for (functional roles), (ii) How RL is used (optimization strategies), and (iii) Where RL is applied (scope of optimization). We summarize representative methods, evaluation protocols, and applications, and discuss open challenges and future directions toward building reliable and scalable RL driven agentic search systems. We hope this survey will inspire future research on the integration of RL and agentic search. Our repository is available at https://github.com/ventr1c/Awesome-RL-based-Agentic-Search-Papers.

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.

Large language models (LLMs) excel in both closed tasks (including problem-solving, and code generation) and open tasks (including creative writing), yet existing explanations for their capabilities lack connections to real-world human intelligence. To fill this gap, this paper systematically investigates LLM intelligence through the lens of ``human simulation'', addressing three core questions: (1) How do personality traits affect problem-solving in closed tasks? (2) How do traits shape creativity in open tasks? (3) How does single-agent performance influence multi-agent collaboration? By assigning Big Five personality traits to LLM agents and evaluating their performance in single- and multi-agent settings, we reveal that specific traits significantly influence reasoning accuracy (closed tasks) and creative output (open tasks). Furthermore, multi-agent systems exhibit collective intelligence distinct from individual capabilities, driven by distinguishing combinations of personalities. We demonstrate that LLMs inherently simulate human behavior through next-token prediction, mirroring human language, decision-making, and collaborative dynamics.

Existing evaluations of agents with memory typically assess memorization and action in isolation. One class of benchmarks evaluates memorization by testing recall of past conversations or text but fails to capture how memory is used to guide future decisions. Another class focuses on agents acting in single-session tasks without the need for long-term memory. However, in realistic settings, memorization and action are tightly coupled: agents acquire memory while interacting with the environment, and subsequently rely on that memory to solve future tasks. To capture this setting, we introduce MemoryArena, a unified evaluation gym for benchmarking agent memory in multi-session Memory-Agent-Environment loops. The benchmark consists of human-crafted agentic tasks with explicitly interdependent subtasks, where agents must learn from earlier actions and feedback by distilling experiences into memory, and subsequently use that memory to guide later actions to solve the overall task. MemoryArena supports evaluation across web navigation, preference-constrained planning, progressive information search, and sequential formal reasoning, and reveals that agents with near-saturated performance on existing long-context memory benchmarks like LoCoMo perform poorly in our agentic setting, exposing a gap in current evaluations for agents with memory.

Agentic search, as a more autonomous and adaptive paradigm of retrieval augmentation, is driving the evolution of intelligent search systems. However, existing evaluation frameworks fail to align well with the goals of agentic search. First, the complex queries commonly used in current benchmarks often deviate from realistic user search scenarios. Second, prior approaches tend to introduce noise when extracting ground truth for end-to-end evaluations, leading to distorted assessments at a fine-grained level. Third, most current frameworks focus solely on the quality of final answers, neglecting the evaluation of the iterative process inherent to agentic search. To address these limitations, we propose RAVine -- a Reality-Aligned eValuation framework for agentic LLMs with search. RAVine targets multi-point queries and long-form answers that better reflect user intents, and introduces an attributable ground truth construction strategy to enhance the accuracy of fine-grained evaluation. Moreover, RAVine examines model's interaction with search tools throughout the iterative process, and accounts for factors of efficiency. We benchmark a series of models using RAVine and derive several insights, which we hope will contribute to advancing the development of agentic search systems. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/SwordFaith/RAVine.

We introduce AgentSynth, a scalable and cost-efficient pipeline for automatically synthesizing high-quality tasks and trajectory datasets for generalist computer-use agents. Leveraging information asymmetry, AgentSynth constructs subtasks that are simple during generation but significantly more challenging when composed into long-horizon tasks, enabling the creation of over 6,000 diverse and realistic tasks. Our pipeline begins with an LLM-based task proposer guided by a persona, followed by an execution agent that completes the task and logs the trajectory. This process is repeated iteratively to form a sequence of subtasks, which are then summarized by a separate agent into a composite task of controllable difficulty. A key strength of AgentSynth is its ability to precisely modulate task complexity by varying the number of subtasks. Empirical evaluations show that state-of-the-art LLM agents suffer a steep performance drop, from 18% success at difficulty level 1 to just 4% at level 6, highlighting the benchmark's difficulty and discriminative power. Moreover, our pipeline achieves a low average cost of \$0.60 per trajectory, orders of magnitude cheaper than human annotations. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/sunblaze-ucb/AgentSynth

The trajectory of AI development suggests that we will increasingly rely on agent-based systems composed of independently developed agents with different information, privileges, and tools. The success of these systems will critically depend on effective collaboration among these heterogeneous agents, even under partial observability. Despite intense interest, few empirical studies have evaluated such agent-agent collaboration at scale. We propose a collaborative maze-solving benchmark that (i) isolates collaborative capabilities, (ii) modulates problem complexity, (iii) enables scalable automated grading, and (iv) imposes no output-format constraints, preserving ecological plausibility. Using this framework, we evaluate 32 leading open- and closed-source models in solo, homogeneous, and heterogeneous pairings. Our results reveal a "collaboration gap": models that perform well solo often degrade substantially when required to collaborate. Collaboration can break down dramatically; for instance, small distilled models that solve mazes well alone may fail almost completely in certain pairings. We find that starting with the stronger agent often improves outcomes, motivating a "relay inference" approach where the stronger agent leads before handing off to the weaker one, closing much of the gap. Our findings argue for (1) collaboration-aware evaluation, (2) training strategies developed to enhance collaborative capabilities, and (3) interaction design that reliably elicits agents' latent skills, guidance that applies to AI-AI and human-AI collaboration.

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.

Deep research systems are widely used for multi-step web research, analysis, and cross-source synthesis, yet their evaluation remains challenging. Existing benchmarks often require annotation-intensive task construction, rely on static evaluation dimensions, or fail to reliably verify facts when citations are missing. To bridge these gaps, we introduce DeepResearchEval, an automated framework for deep research task construction and agentic evaluation. For task construction, we propose a persona-driven pipeline generating realistic, complex research tasks anchored in diverse user profiles, applying a two-stage filter Task Qualification and Search Necessity to retain only tasks requiring multi-source evidence integration and external retrieval. For evaluation, we propose an agentic pipeline with two components: an Adaptive Point-wise Quality Evaluation that dynamically derives task-specific evaluation dimensions, criteria, and weights conditioned on each generated task, and an Active Fact-Checking that autonomously extracts and verifies report statements via web search, even when citations are missing.

We define Agency as the emergent capacity of AI systems to function as autonomous agents actively discovering problems, formulating hypotheses, and executing solutions through self-directed engagement with environments and tools. This fundamental capability marks the dawn of the Age of AI Agency, driven by a critical industry shift: the urgent need for AI systems that don't just think, but work. While current AI excels at reasoning and generating responses, industries demand autonomous agents that can execute tasks, operate tools, and drive real-world outcomes. As agentic intelligence becomes the defining characteristic separating cognitive systems from productive workers, efficiently cultivating machine autonomy becomes paramount. Current approaches assume that more data yields better agency, following traditional scaling laws from language modeling. We fundamentally challenge this paradigm. LIMI (Less Is More for Intelligent Agency) demonstrates that agency follows radically different development principles. Through strategic focus on collaborative software development and scientific research workflows, we show that sophisticated agentic intelligence can emerge from minimal but strategically curated demonstrations of autonomous behavior. Using only 78 carefully designed training samples, LIMI achieves 73.5% on comprehensive agency benchmarks, dramatically outperforming state-of-the-art models: Kimi-K2-Instruct (24.1%), DeepSeek-V3.1 (11.9%), Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct (27.5%), and GLM-4.5 (45.1%). Most strikingly, LIMI demonstrates 53.7% improvement over models trained on 10,000 samples-achieving superior agentic intelligence with 128 times fewer samples. Our findings establish the Agency Efficiency Principle: machine autonomy emerges not from data abundance but from strategic curation of high-quality agentic demonstrations.

Autonomous agents powered by language models (LMs) have demonstrated promise in their ability to perform decision-making tasks such as web automation. However, a key limitation remains: LMs, primarily optimized for natural language understanding and generation, struggle with multi-step reasoning, planning, and using environmental feedback when attempting to solve realistic computer tasks. Towards addressing this, we propose an inference-time search algorithm for LM agents to explicitly perform exploration and multi-step planning in interactive web environments. Our approach is a form of best-first tree search that operates within the actual environment space, and is complementary with most existing state-of-the-art agents. It is the first tree search algorithm for LM agents that shows effectiveness on realistic web tasks. On the challenging VisualWebArena benchmark, applying our search algorithm on top of a GPT-4o agent yields a 39.7% relative increase in success rate compared to the same baseline without search, setting a state-of-the-art success rate of 26.4%. On WebArena, search also yields a 28.0% relative improvement over a baseline agent, setting a competitive success rate of 19.2%. Our experiments highlight the effectiveness of search for web agents, and we demonstrate that performance scales with increased test-time compute. We conduct a thorough analysis of our results to highlight improvements from search, limitations, and promising directions for future work. Our code and models are publicly released at https://jykoh.com/search-agents.

We interact with computers on an everyday basis, be it in everyday life or work, and many aspects of work can be done entirely with access to a computer and the Internet. At the same time, thanks to improvements in large language models (LLMs), there has also been a rapid development in AI agents that interact with and affect change in their surrounding environments. But how performant are AI agents at helping to accelerate or even autonomously perform work-related tasks? The answer to this question has important implications for both industry looking to adopt AI into their workflows, and for economic policy to understand the effects that adoption of AI may have on the labor market. To measure the progress of these LLM agents' performance on performing real-world professional tasks, in this paper, we introduce TheAgentCompany, an extensible benchmark for evaluating AI agents that interact with the world in similar ways to those of a digital worker: by browsing the Web, writing code, running programs, and communicating with other coworkers. We build a self-contained environment with internal web sites and data that mimics a small software company environment, and create a variety of tasks that may be performed by workers in such a company. We test baseline agents powered by both closed API-based and open-weights language models (LMs), and find that with the most competitive agent, 24% of the tasks can be completed autonomously. This paints a nuanced picture on task automation with LM agents -- in a setting simulating a real workplace, a good portion of simpler tasks could be solved autonomously, but more difficult long-horizon tasks are still beyond the reach of current systems.

Imagine a world where AI can handle your work while you sleep - organizing your research materials, drafting a report, or creating a presentation you need for tomorrow. However, while current digital agents can perform simple tasks, they are far from capable of handling the complex real-world work that humans routinely perform. We present PC Agent, an AI system that demonstrates a crucial step toward this vision through human cognition transfer. Our key insight is that the path from executing simple "tasks" to handling complex "work" lies in efficiently capturing and learning from human cognitive processes during computer use. To validate this hypothesis, we introduce three key innovations: (1) PC Tracker, a lightweight infrastructure that efficiently collects high-quality human-computer interaction trajectories with complete cognitive context; (2) a two-stage cognition completion pipeline that transforms raw interaction data into rich cognitive trajectories by completing action semantics and thought processes; and (3) a multi-agent system combining a planning agent for decision-making with a grounding agent for robust visual grounding. Our preliminary experiments in PowerPoint presentation creation reveal that complex digital work capabilities can be achieved with a small amount of high-quality cognitive data - PC Agent, trained on just 133 cognitive trajectories, can handle sophisticated work scenarios involving up to 50 steps across multiple applications. This demonstrates the data efficiency of our approach, highlighting that the key to training capable digital agents lies in collecting human cognitive data. By open-sourcing our complete framework, including the data collection infrastructure and cognition completion methods, we aim to lower the barriers for the research community to develop truly capable digital agents.

Open large language models (LLMs) with great performance in various tasks have significantly advanced the development of LLMs. However, they are far inferior to commercial models such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 when acting as agents to tackle complex tasks in the real world. These agent tasks employ LLMs as the central controller responsible for planning, memorization, and tool utilization, necessitating both fine-grained prompting methods and robust LLMs to achieve satisfactory performance. Though many prompting methods have been proposed to complete particular agent tasks, there is lack of research focusing on improving the agent capabilities of LLMs themselves without compromising their general abilities. In this work, we present AgentTuning, a simple and general method to enhance the agent abilities of LLMs while maintaining their general LLM capabilities. We construct AgentInstruct, a lightweight instruction-tuning dataset containing high-quality interaction trajectories. We employ a hybrid instruction-tuning strategy by combining AgentInstruct with open-source instructions from general domains. AgentTuning is used to instruction-tune the Llama 2 series, resulting in AgentLM. Our evaluations show that AgentTuning enables LLMs' agent capabilities without compromising general abilities. The AgentLM-70B is comparable to GPT-3.5-turbo on unseen agent tasks, demonstrating generalized agent capabilities. We open source the AgentInstruct and AgentLM-7B, 13B, and 70B models at https://github.com/THUDM/AgentTuning , serving open and powerful alternatives to commercial LLMs for agent tasks.

Computer use agents automate digital tasks by directly interacting with graphical user interfaces (GUIs) on computers and mobile devices, offering significant potential to enhance human productivity by completing an open-ended space of user queries. However, current agents face significant challenges: imprecise grounding of GUI elements, difficulties with long-horizon task planning, and performance bottlenecks from relying on single generalist models for diverse cognitive tasks. To this end, we introduce Agent S2, a novel compositional framework that delegates cognitive responsibilities across various generalist and specialist models. We propose a novel Mixture-of-Grounding technique to achieve precise GUI localization and introduce Proactive Hierarchical Planning, dynamically refining action plans at multiple temporal scales in response to evolving observations. Evaluations demonstrate that Agent S2 establishes new state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on three prominent computer use benchmarks. Specifically, Agent S2 achieves 18.9% and 32.7% relative improvements over leading baseline agents such as Claude Computer Use and UI-TARS on the OSWorld 15-step and 50-step evaluation. Moreover, Agent S2 generalizes effectively to other operating systems and applications, surpassing previous best methods by 52.8% on WindowsAgentArena and by 16.52% on AndroidWorld relatively. Code available at https://github.com/simular-ai/Agent-S.

The remarkable capabilities of Large Language Model (LLM)-driven agents have enabled sophisticated systems to tackle complex, multi-step tasks, but their escalating costs threaten scalability and accessibility. This work presents the first systematic study of the efficiency-effectiveness trade-off in modern agent systems, addressing the critical need for cost-effective designs without sacrificing performance. We investigate three key questions: (1) How much complexity do agentic tasks inherently require? (2) When do additional modules yield diminishing returns? (3) How much efficiency can be gained through the design of efficient agent frameworks? Through an empirical analysis on the GAIA benchmark, we evaluate the impact of LLM backbone selection, agent framework designs, and test-time scaling strategies. Using the cost-of-pass metric, we quantify the efficiency-performance trade-off across these dimensions. Our findings inform the development of Efficient Agents , a novel agent framework that has an optimal complexity to task requirements. Efficient Agents retains 96.7% of the performance of OWL, one leading open-source agent framework, while reducing operational costs from 0.398 to 0.228, resulting in a 28.4% improvement in cost-of-pass. Our work provides actionable insights for designing efficient, high-performing agent systems, advancing the accessibility and sustainability of AI-driven solutions.

Memory plays a foundational role in augmenting the reasoning, adaptability, and contextual fidelity of modern Large Language Models and Multi-Modal LLMs. As these models transition from static predictors to interactive systems capable of continual learning and personalized inference, the incorporation of memory mechanisms has emerged as a central theme in their architectural and functional evolution. This survey presents a comprehensive and structured synthesis of memory in LLMs and MLLMs, organizing the literature into a cohesive taxonomy comprising implicit, explicit, and agentic memory paradigms. Specifically, the survey delineates three primary memory frameworks. Implicit memory refers to the knowledge embedded within the internal parameters of pre-trained transformers, encompassing their capacity for memorization, associative retrieval, and contextual reasoning. Recent work has explored methods to interpret, manipulate, and reconfigure this latent memory. Explicit memory involves external storage and retrieval components designed to augment model outputs with dynamic, queryable knowledge representations, such as textual corpora, dense vectors, and graph-based structures, thereby enabling scalable and updatable interaction with information sources. Agentic memory introduces persistent, temporally extended memory structures within autonomous agents, facilitating long-term planning, self-consistency, and collaborative behavior in multi-agent systems, with relevance to embodied and interactive AI. Extending beyond text, the survey examines the integration of memory within multi-modal settings, where coherence across vision, language, audio, and action modalities is essential. Key architectural advances, benchmark tasks, and open challenges are discussed, including issues related to memory capacity, alignment, factual consistency, and cross-system interoperability.

Language agents have demonstrated autonomous decision-making abilities by reasoning with foundation models. Recently, efforts have been made to train language agents for performance improvement, with multi-step reasoning and action trajectories as the training data. However, collecting such trajectories still requires considerable human effort, by either artificial annotation or implementations of diverse prompting frameworks. In this work, we propose A^3T, a framework that enables the Autonomous Annotation of Agent Trajectories in the style of ReAct. The central role is an ActRe prompting agent, which explains the reason for an arbitrary action. When randomly sampling an external action, the ReAct-style agent could query the ActRe agent with the action to obtain its textual rationales. Novel trajectories are then synthesized by prepending the posterior reasoning from ActRe to the sampled action. In this way, the ReAct-style agent executes multiple trajectories for the failed tasks, and selects the successful ones to supplement its failed trajectory for contrastive self-training. Realized by policy gradient methods with binarized rewards, the contrastive self-training with accumulated trajectories facilitates a closed loop for multiple rounds of language agent self-improvement. We conduct experiments using QLoRA fine-tuning with the open-sourced Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2. In AlfWorld, the agent trained with A^3T obtains a 1-shot success rate of 96%, and 100% success with 4 iterative rounds. In WebShop, the 1-shot performance of the A^3T agent matches human average, and 4 rounds of iterative refinement lead to the performance approaching human experts. A^3T agents significantly outperform existing techniques, including prompting with GPT-4, advanced agent frameworks, and fully fine-tuned LLMs.

AI agents are increasingly deployed to execute important tasks. While rising accuracy scores on standard benchmarks suggest rapid progress, many agents still continue to fail in practice. This discrepancy highlights a fundamental limitation of current evaluations: compressing agent behavior into a single success metric obscures critical operational flaws. Notably, it ignores whether agents behave consistently across runs, withstand perturbations, fail predictably, or have bounded error severity. Grounded in safety-critical engineering, we provide a holistic performance profile by proposing twelve concrete metrics that decompose agent reliability along four key dimensions: consistency, robustness, predictability, and safety. Evaluating 14 agentic models across two complementary benchmarks, we find that recent capability gains have only yielded small improvements in reliability. By exposing these persistent limitations, our metrics complement traditional evaluations while offering tools for reasoning about how agents perform, degrade, and fail.

Autonomous agents have recently achieved remarkable progress across diverse domains, yet most evaluations focus on short-horizon, fully observable tasks. In contrast, many critical real-world tasks, such as large-scale software development, commercial investment, and scientific discovery, unfold in long-horizon and partially observable scenarios where success hinges on sustained reasoning, planning, memory management, and tool use. Existing benchmarks rarely capture these long-horizon challenges, leaving a gap in systematic evaluation. To bridge this gap, we introduce UltraHorizon a novel benchmark that measures the foundational capabilities essential for complex real-world challenges. We use exploration as a unifying task across three distinct environments to validate these core competencies. Agents are designed in long-horizon discovery tasks where they must iteratively uncover hidden rules through sustained reasoning, planning, memory and tools management, and interaction with environments. Under the heaviest scale setting, trajectories average 200k+ tokens and 400+ tool calls, whereas in standard configurations they still exceed 35k tokens and involve more than 60 tool calls on average. Our extensive experiments reveal that LLM-agents consistently underperform in these settings, whereas human participants achieve higher scores, underscoring a persistent gap in agents' long-horizon abilities. We also observe that simple scaling fails in our task. To better illustrate the failure of agents, we conduct an in-depth analysis of collected trajectories. We identify eight types of errors and attribute them to two primary causes: in-context locking and functional fundamental capability gaps. https://github.com/StarDewXXX/UltraHorizon{Our code will be available here.}

From professional research to everyday planning, many tasks are bottlenecked by wide-scale information seeking, which is more repetitive than cognitively complex. With the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs), automated search agents powered by LLMs offer a promising solution to liberate humans from this tedious work. However, the capability of these agents to perform such "wide-context" collection reliably and completely remains largely unevaluated due to a lack of suitable benchmarks. To bridge this gap, we introduce WideSearch, a new benchmark engineered to evaluate agent reliability on these large-scale collection tasks. The benchmark features 200 manually curated questions (100 in English, 100 in Chinese) from over 15 diverse domains, grounded in real user queries. Each task requires agents to collect large-scale atomic information, which could be verified one by one objectively, and arrange it into a well-organized output. A rigorous five-stage quality control pipeline ensures the difficulty, completeness, and verifiability of the dataset. We benchmark over 10 state-of-the-art agentic search systems, including single-agent, multi-agent frameworks, and end-to-end commercial systems. Most systems achieve overall success rates near 0\%, with the best performer reaching just 5\%. However, given sufficient time, cross-validation by multiple human testers can achieve a near 100\% success rate. These results demonstrate that present search agents have critical deficiencies in large-scale information seeking, underscoring urgent areas for future research and development in agentic search. Our dataset, evaluation pipeline, and benchmark results have been publicly released at https://widesearch-seed.github.io/

The rapid progress of foundation models has led to the prosperity of autonomous agents, which leverage the universal capabilities of foundation models to conduct reasoning, decision-making, and environmental interaction. However, the efficacy of agents remains limited when operating in intricate, realistic environments. In this work, we introduce the principles of Unified Alignment for Agents (UA^2), which advocate for the simultaneous alignment of agents with human intentions, environmental dynamics, and self-constraints such as the limitation of monetary budgets. From the perspective of UA^2, we review the current agent research and highlight the neglected factors in existing agent benchmarks and method candidates. We also conduct proof-of-concept studies by introducing realistic features to WebShop, including user profiles to demonstrate intentions, personalized reranking for complex environmental dynamics, and runtime cost statistics to reflect self-constraints. We then follow the principles of UA^2 to propose an initial design of our agent, and benchmark its performance with several candidate baselines in the retrofitted WebShop. The extensive experimental results further prove the importance of the principles of UA^2. Our research sheds light on the next steps of autonomous agent research with improved general problem-solving abilities.

Can machines truly think, reason and act in domains like humans? This enduring question continues to shape the pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Despite the growing capabilities of models such as GPT-4.5, DeepSeek, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Phi-4, and Grok 3, which exhibit multimodal fluency and partial reasoning, these systems remain fundamentally limited by their reliance on token-level prediction and lack of grounded agency. This paper offers a cross-disciplinary synthesis of AGI development, spanning artificial intelligence, cognitive neuroscience, psychology, generative models, and agent-based systems. We analyze the architectural and cognitive foundations of general intelligence, highlighting the role of modular reasoning, persistent memory, and multi-agent coordination. In particular, we emphasize the rise of Agentic RAG frameworks that combine retrieval, planning, and dynamic tool use to enable more adaptive behavior. We discuss generalization strategies, including information compression, test-time adaptation, and training-free methods, as critical pathways toward flexible, domain-agnostic intelligence. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are reexamined not just as perception modules but as evolving interfaces for embodied understanding and collaborative task completion. We also argue that true intelligence arises not from scale alone but from the integration of memory and reasoning: an orchestration of modular, interactive, and self-improving components where compression enables adaptive behavior. Drawing on advances in neurosymbolic systems, reinforcement learning, and cognitive scaffolding, we explore how recent architectures begin to bridge the gap between statistical learning and goal-directed cognition. Finally, we identify key scientific, technical, and ethical challenges on the path to AGI.

Training models to act as agents that can effectively navigate and perform actions in a complex environment, such as a web browser, has typically been challenging due to lack of training data. Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated some capability to navigate novel environments as agents in a zero-shot or few-shot fashion, purely guided by natural language instructions as prompts. Recent research has also demonstrated LLMs have the capability to exceed their base performance through self-improvement, i.e. fine-tuning on data generated by the model itself. In this work, we explore the extent to which LLMs can self-improve their performance as agents in long-horizon tasks in a complex environment using the WebArena benchmark. In WebArena, an agent must autonomously navigate and perform actions on web pages to achieve a specified objective. We explore fine-tuning on three distinct synthetic training data mixtures and achieve a 31\% improvement in task completion rate over the base model on the WebArena benchmark through a self-improvement procedure. We additionally contribute novel evaluation metrics for assessing the performance, robustness, capabilities, and quality of trajectories of our fine-tuned agent models to a greater degree than simple, aggregate-level benchmark scores currently used to measure self-improvement.

Researchers are investing substantial effort in developing powerful general-purpose agents, wherein Foundation Models are used as modules within agentic systems (e.g. Chain-of-Thought, Self-Reflection, Toolformer). However, the history of machine learning teaches us that hand-designed solutions are eventually replaced by learned solutions. We formulate a new research area, Automated Design of Agentic Systems (ADAS), which aims to automatically create powerful agentic system designs, including inventing novel building blocks and/or combining them in new ways. We further demonstrate that there is an unexplored yet promising approach within ADAS where agents can be defined in code and new agents can be automatically discovered by a meta agent programming ever better ones in code. Given that programming languages are Turing Complete, this approach theoretically enables the learning of any possible agentic system: including novel prompts, tool use, control flows, and combinations thereof. We present a simple yet effective algorithm named Meta Agent Search to demonstrate this idea, where a meta agent iteratively programs interesting new agents based on an ever-growing archive of previous discoveries. Through extensive experiments across multiple domains including coding, science, and math, we show that our algorithm can progressively invent agents with novel designs that greatly outperform state-of-the-art hand-designed agents. Importantly, we consistently observe the surprising result that agents invented by Meta Agent Search maintain superior performance even when transferred across domains and models, demonstrating their robustness and generality. Provided we develop it safely, our work illustrates the potential of an exciting new research direction toward automatically designing ever-more powerful agentic systems to benefit humanity.

Language Agent could be endowed with different mechanisms for autonomous task accomplishment. Current agents typically rely on fixed mechanisms or a set of mechanisms activated in a predefined order, limiting their adaptation to varied potential task solution structures. To this end, this paper proposes Adaptive Language Agent Mechanism Activation Learning with Self-Exploration (ALAMA), which focuses on optimizing mechanism activation adaptability without reliance on expert models. Initially, it builds a harmonized agent framework (UniAct) to Unify different mechanisms via Actions. Then it leverages a training-efficient optimization method based on self-exploration to enable the UniAct to adaptively activate the appropriate mechanisms according to the potential characteristics of the task. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in downstream agent tasks, affirming the effectiveness of our approach in facilitating more dynamic and context-sensitive mechanism activation.

We study the use of large language model-based agents for interacting with software via web browsers. Unlike prior work, we focus on measuring the agents' ability to perform tasks that span the typical daily work of knowledge workers utilizing enterprise software systems. To this end, we propose WorkArena, a remote-hosted benchmark of 29 tasks based on the widely-used ServiceNow platform. We also introduce BrowserGym, an environment for the design and evaluation of such agents, offering a rich set of actions as well as multimodal observations. Our empirical evaluation reveals that while current agents show promise on WorkArena, there remains a considerable gap towards achieving full task automation. Notably, our analysis uncovers a significant performance disparity between open and closed-source LLMs, highlighting a critical area for future exploration and development in the field.

Following instructions in real-world conditions requires the ability to adapt to the world's volatility and entanglement: the environment is dynamic and unpredictable, instructions can be linguistically complex with diverse vocabulary, and the number of possible goals an agent may encounter is vast. Despite extensive research in this area, most studies are conducted in static environments with simple instructions and a limited vocabulary, making it difficult to assess agent performance in more diverse and challenging settings. To address this gap, we introduce CrafText, a benchmark for evaluating instruction following in a multimodal environment with diverse instructions and dynamic interactions. CrafText includes 3,924 instructions with 3,423 unique words, covering Localization, Conditional, Building, and Achievement tasks. Additionally, we propose an evaluation protocol that measures an agent's ability to generalize to novel instruction formulations and dynamically evolving task configurations, providing a rigorous test of both linguistic understanding and adaptive decision-making.

Autonomy via agents using large language models (LLMs) for personalized, standardized tasks boosts human efficiency. Automating web tasks (like booking hotels within a budget) is increasingly sought after. Fulfilling practical needs, the web agent also serves as an important proof-of-concept example for various agent grounding scenarios, with its success promising advancements in many future applications. Prior research often handcrafts web agent strategies (e.g., prompting templates, multi-agent systems, search methods, etc.) and the corresponding in-context examples, which may not generalize well across all real-world scenarios. On the other hand, there has been limited study on the misalignment between a web agent's observation/action representation and the pre-training data of the LLM it's based on. This discrepancy is especially notable when LLMs are primarily trained for language completion rather than tasks involving embodied navigation actions and symbolic web elements. Our study enhances an LLM-based web agent by simply refining its observation and action space to better align with the LLM's capabilities. This approach enables our base agent to significantly outperform previous methods on a wide variety of web tasks. Specifically, on WebArena, a benchmark featuring general-purpose web interaction tasks, our agent AgentOccam surpasses the previous state-of-the-art and concurrent work by 9.8 (+29.4%) and 5.9 (+15.8%) absolute points respectively, and boosts the success rate by 26.6 points (+161%) over similar plain web agents with its observation and action space alignment. We achieve this without using in-context examples, new agent roles, online feedback or search strategies. AgentOccam's simple design highlights LLMs' impressive zero-shot performance on web tasks, and underlines the critical role of carefully tuning observation and action spaces for LLM-based agents.

Autonomous agents powered by multimodal large language models have been developed to facilitate task execution on mobile devices. However, prior work has predominantly focused on atomic tasks -- such as shot-chain execution tasks and single-screen grounding tasks -- while overlooking the generalization to compositional tasks, which are indispensable for real-world applications. This work introduces UI-NEXUS, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate mobile agents on three categories of compositional operations: Simple Concatenation, Context Transition, and Deep Dive. UI-NEXUS supports interactive evaluation in 20 fully controllable local utility app environments, as well as 30 online Chinese and English service apps. It comprises 100 interactive task templates with an average optimal step count of 14.05. Experimental results across a range of mobile agents with agentic workflow or agent-as-a-model show that UI-NEXUS presents significant challenges. Specifically, existing agents generally struggle to balance performance and efficiency, exhibiting representative failure modes such as under-execution, over-execution, and attention drift, causing visible atomic-to-compositional generalization gap. Inspired by these findings, we propose AGENT-NEXUS, a lightweight and efficient scheduling system to tackle compositional mobile tasks. AGENT-NEXUS extrapolates the abilities of existing mobile agents by dynamically decomposing long-horizon tasks to a series of self-contained atomic subtasks. AGENT-NEXUS achieves 24% to 40% task success rate improvement for existing mobile agents on compositional operation tasks within the UI-NEXUS benchmark without significantly sacrificing inference overhead. The demo video, dataset, and code are available on the project page at https://ui-nexus.github.io.

The research of artificial intelligence is undergoing a paradigm shift from prioritizing model innovations over benchmark scores towards emphasizing problem definition and rigorous real-world evaluation. As the field enters the "second half," the central challenge becomes real utility in long-horizon, dynamic, and user-dependent environments, where agents face context explosion and must continuously accumulate, manage, and selectively reuse large volumes of information across extended interactions. Memory, with hundreds of papers released this year, therefore emerges as the critical solution to fill the utility gap. In this survey, we provide a unified view of foundation agent memory along three dimensions: memory substrate (internal and external), cognitive mechanism (episodic, semantic, sensory, working, and procedural), and memory subject (agent- and user-centric). We then analyze how memory is instantiated and operated under different agent topologies and highlight learning policies over memory operations. Finally, we review evaluation benchmarks and metrics for assessing memory utility, and outline various open challenges and future directions.

In this work we create agents that can perform well beyond a single, individual task, that exhibit much wider generalisation of behaviour to a massive, rich space of challenges. We define a universe of tasks within an environment domain and demonstrate the ability to train agents that are generally capable across this vast space and beyond. The environment is natively multi-agent, spanning the continuum of competitive, cooperative, and independent games, which are situated within procedurally generated physical 3D worlds. The resulting space is exceptionally diverse in terms of the challenges posed to agents, and as such, even measuring the learning progress of an agent is an open research problem. We propose an iterative notion of improvement between successive generations of agents, rather than seeking to maximise a singular objective, allowing us to quantify progress despite tasks being incomparable in terms of achievable rewards. We show that through constructing an open-ended learning process, which dynamically changes the training task distributions and training objectives such that the agent never stops learning, we achieve consistent learning of new behaviours. The resulting agent is able to score reward in every one of our humanly solvable evaluation levels, with behaviour generalising to many held-out points in the universe of tasks. Examples of this zero-shot generalisation include good performance on Hide and Seek, Capture the Flag, and Tag. Through analysis and hand-authored probe tasks we characterise the behaviour of our agent, and find interesting emergent heuristic behaviours such as trial-and-error experimentation, simple tool use, option switching, and cooperation. Finally, we demonstrate that the general capabilities of this agent could unlock larger scale transfer of behaviour through cheap finetuning.

Scaling up high-quality trajectory data has long been a critical bottleneck for developing human-like computer use agents. We introduce PC Agent-E, an efficient agent training framework that significantly reduces reliance on large-scale human demonstrations. Starting with just 312 human-annotated computer use trajectories, we further improved data quality by synthesizing diverse action decisions with Claude 3.7 Sonnet. Trained on these enriched trajectories, our PC Agent-E model achieved a remarkable 141% relative improvement, surpassing the strong Claude 3.7 Sonnet with extended thinking on WindowsAgentArena-V2, an improved benchmark we also released. Furthermore, PC Agent-E demonstrates strong generalizability to different operating systems on OSWorld. Our findings suggest that strong computer use capabilities can be stimulated from a small amount of high-quality trajectory data.

In an era where single large language models have dominated the landscape of artificial intelligence for years, multi-agent systems arise as new protagonists in conversational task-solving. While previous studies have showcased their potential in reasoning tasks and creative endeavors, an analysis of their limitations concerning the conversational paradigms and the impact of individual agents is missing. It remains unascertained how multi-agent discussions perform across tasks of varying complexity and how the structure of these conversations influences the process. To fill that gap, this work systematically evaluates multi-agent systems across various discussion paradigms, assessing their strengths and weaknesses in both generative tasks and question-answering tasks. Alongside the experiments, I propose a taxonomy of 20 multi-agent research studies from 2022 to 2024, followed by the introduction of a framework for deploying multi-agent LLMs in conversational task-solving. I demonstrate that while multi-agent systems excel in complex reasoning tasks, outperforming a single model by leveraging expert personas, they fail on basic tasks. Concretely, I identify three challenges that arise: 1) While longer discussions enhance reasoning, agents fail to maintain conformity to strict task requirements, which leads to problem drift, making shorter conversations more effective for basic tasks. 2) Prolonged discussions risk alignment collapse, raising new safety concerns for these systems. 3) I showcase discussion monopolization through long generations, posing the problem of fairness in decision-making for tasks like summarization. This work uncovers both the potential and challenges that arise with multi-agent interaction and varying conversational paradigms, providing insights into how future research could improve the efficiency, performance, and safety of multi-agent LLMs.

Agents powered by large language models have shown remarkable abilities in solving complex tasks. However, most agent systems remain reactive, limiting their effectiveness in scenarios requiring foresight and autonomous decision-making. In this paper, we tackle the challenge of developing proactive agents capable of anticipating and initiating tasks without explicit human instructions. We propose a novel data-driven approach for this problem. Firstly, we collect real-world human activities to generate proactive task predictions. These predictions are then labeled by human annotators as either accepted or rejected. The labeled data is used to train a reward model that simulates human judgment and serves as an automatic evaluator of the proactiveness of LLM agents. Building on this, we develop a comprehensive data generation pipeline to create a diverse dataset, ProactiveBench, containing 6,790 events. Finally, we demonstrate that fine-tuning models with the proposed ProactiveBench can significantly elicit the proactiveness of LLM agents. Experimental results show that our fine-tuned model achieves an F1-Score of 66.47% in proactively offering assistance, outperforming all open-source and close-source models. These results highlight the potential of our method in creating more proactive and effective agent systems, paving the way for future advancements in human-agent collaboration.

Cutting-edge agentic AI systems are built on foundation models that can be adapted to plan, reason, and interact with external tools to perform increasingly complex and specialized tasks. As these systems grow in capability and scope, adaptation becomes a central mechanism for improving performance, reliability, and generalization. In this paper, we unify the rapidly expanding research landscape into a systematic framework that spans both agent adaptations and tool adaptations. We further decompose these into tool-execution-signaled and agent-output-signaled forms of agent adaptation, as well as agent-agnostic and agent-supervised forms of tool adaptation. We demonstrate that this framework helps clarify the design space of adaptation strategies in agentic AI, makes their trade-offs explicit, and provides practical guidance for selecting or switching among strategies during system design. We then review the representative approaches in each category, analyze their strengths and limitations, and highlight key open challenges and future opportunities. Overall, this paper aims to offer a conceptual foundation and practical roadmap for researchers and practitioners seeking to build more capable, efficient, and reliable agentic AI systems.

Recent advancements in language models (LMs) have sparked growing interest in developing LM agents. While fully autonomous agents could excel in many scenarios, numerous use cases inherently require them to collaborate with humans due to humans' latent preferences, domain expertise, or need for control. To facilitate the study of human-agent collaboration, we present Collaborative Gym (Co-Gym), a general framework enabling asynchronous, tripartite interaction among agents, humans, and task environments. We instantiate Co-Gym with three representative tasks in both simulated and real-world conditions, and propose an evaluation framework that assesses both the collaboration outcomes and processes. Our findings reveal that collaborative agents consistently outperform their fully autonomous counterparts in task performance within those delivered cases, achieving win rates of 86% in Travel Planning, 74% in Tabular Analysis, and 66% in Related Work when evaluated by real users. However, our study also highlights significant challenges in developing collaborative agents, requiring advancements in core aspects of intelligence -- communication capabilities, situational awareness, and balancing autonomy and human control.

We present Agent S, an open agentic framework that enables autonomous interaction with computers through a Graphical User Interface (GUI), aimed at transforming human-computer interaction by automating complex, multi-step tasks. Agent S aims to address three key challenges in automating computer tasks: acquiring domain-specific knowledge, planning over long task horizons, and handling dynamic, non-uniform interfaces. To this end, Agent S introduces experience-augmented hierarchical planning, which learns from external knowledge search and internal experience retrieval at multiple levels, facilitating efficient task planning and subtask execution. In addition, it employs an Agent-Computer Interface (ACI) to better elicit the reasoning and control capabilities of GUI agents based on Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Evaluation on the OSWorld benchmark shows that Agent S outperforms the baseline by 9.37% on success rate (an 83.6% relative improvement) and achieves a new state-of-the-art. Comprehensive analysis highlights the effectiveness of individual components and provides insights for future improvements. Furthermore, Agent S demonstrates broad generalizability to different operating systems on a newly-released WindowsAgentArena benchmark. Code available at https://github.com/simular-ai/Agent-S.

LLM agents hold significant promise for advancing scientific research. To accelerate this progress, we introduce AIRS-Bench (the AI Research Science Benchmark), a suite of 20 tasks sourced from state-of-the-art machine learning papers. These tasks span diverse domains, including language modeling, mathematics, bioinformatics, and time series forecasting. AIRS-Bench tasks assess agentic capabilities over the full research lifecycle -- including idea generation, experiment analysis and iterative refinement -- without providing baseline code. The AIRS-Bench task format is versatile, enabling easy integration of new tasks and rigorous comparison across different agentic frameworks. We establish baselines using frontier models paired with both sequential and parallel scaffolds. Our results show that agents exceed human SOTA in four tasks but fail to match it in sixteen others. Even when agents surpass human benchmarks, they do not reach the theoretical performance ceiling for the underlying tasks. These findings indicate that AIRS-Bench is far from saturated and offers substantial room for improvement. We open-source the AIRS-Bench task definitions and evaluation code to catalyze further development in autonomous scientific research.

The reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) remain a topic of debate. Some methods such as ReAct-based prompting, have gained popularity for claiming to enhance sequential decision-making abilities of agentic LLMs. However, it is unclear what is the source of improvement in LLM reasoning with ReAct based prompting. In this paper we examine these claims of ReAct based prompting in improving agentic LLMs for sequential decision-making. By introducing systematic variations to the input prompt we perform a sensitivity analysis along the claims of ReAct and find that the performance is minimally influenced by the "interleaving reasoning trace with action execution" or the content of the generated reasoning traces in ReAct, contrary to original claims and common usage. Instead, the performance of LLMs is driven by the similarity between input example tasks and queries, implicitly forcing the prompt designer to provide instance-specific examples which significantly increases the cognitive burden on the human. Our investigation shows that the perceived reasoning abilities of LLMs stem from the exemplar-query similarity and approximate retrieval rather than any inherent reasoning abilities.

Leveraging multiple Large Language Models(LLMs) has proven effective for addressing complex, high-dimensional tasks, but current approaches often rely on static, manually engineered multi-agent configurations. To overcome these constraints, we present the Agentic Neural Network(ANN), a framework that conceptualizes multi-agent collaboration as a layered neural network architecture. In this design, each agent operates as a node, and each layer forms a cooperative "team" focused on a specific subtask. Agentic Neural Network follows a two-phase optimization strategy: (1) Forward Phase-Drawing inspiration from neural network forward passes, tasks are dynamically decomposed into subtasks, and cooperative agent teams with suitable aggregation methods are constructed layer by layer. (2) Backward Phase-Mirroring backpropagation, we refine both global and local collaboration through iterative feedback, allowing agents to self-evolve their roles, prompts, and coordination. This neuro-symbolic approach enables ANN to create new or specialized agent teams post-training, delivering notable gains in accuracy and adaptability. Across four benchmark datasets, ANN surpasses leading multi-agent baselines under the same configurations, showing consistent performance improvements. Our findings indicate that ANN provides a scalable, data-driven framework for multi-agent systems, combining the collaborative capabilities of LLMs with the efficiency and flexibility of neural network principles. We plan to open-source the entire framework.

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly operate in settings where a single context window is far too small to capture what has happened, what was learned, and what should not be repeated. Memory -- the ability to persist, organize, and selectively recall information across interactions -- is what turns a stateless text generator into a genuinely adaptive agent. This survey offers a structured account of how memory is designed, implemented, and evaluated in modern LLM-based agents, covering work from 2022 through early 2026. We formalize agent memory as a write--manage--read loop tightly coupled with perception and action, then introduce a three-dimensional taxonomy spanning temporal scope, representational substrate, and control policy. Five mechanism families are examined in depth: context-resident compression, retrieval-augmented stores, reflective self-improvement, hierarchical virtual context, and policy-learned management. On the evaluation side, we trace the shift from static recall benchmarks to multi-session agentic tests that interleave memory with decision-making, analyzing four recent benchmarks that expose stubborn gaps in current systems. We also survey applications where memory is the differentiating factor -- personal assistants, coding agents, open-world games, scientific reasoning, and multi-agent teamwork -- and address the engineering realities of write-path filtering, contradiction handling, latency budgets, and privacy governance. The paper closes with open challenges: continual consolidation, causally grounded retrieval, trustworthy reflection, learned forgetting, and multimodal embodied memory.

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) show remarkable potential to act as computer agents, enhancing human productivity and software accessibility in multi-modal tasks that require planning and reasoning. However, measuring agent performance in realistic environments remains a challenge since: (i) most benchmarks are limited to specific modalities or domains (e.g. text-only, web navigation, Q&A, coding) and (ii) full benchmark evaluations are slow (on order of magnitude of days) given the multi-step sequential nature of tasks. To address these challenges, we introduce the Windows Agent Arena: a reproducible, general environment focusing exclusively on the Windows operating system (OS) where agents can operate freely within a real Windows OS and use the same wide range of applications, tools, and web browsers available to human users when solving tasks. We adapt the OSWorld framework (Xie et al., 2024) to create 150+ diverse Windows tasks across representative domains that require agent abilities in planning, screen understanding, and tool usage. Our benchmark is scalable and can be seamlessly parallelized in Azure for a full benchmark evaluation in as little as 20 minutes. To demonstrate Windows Agent Arena's capabilities, we also introduce a new multi-modal agent, Navi. Our agent achieves a success rate of 19.5% in the Windows domain, compared to 74.5% performance of an unassisted human. Navi also demonstrates strong performance on another popular web-based benchmark, Mind2Web. We offer extensive quantitative and qualitative analysis of Navi's performance, and provide insights into the opportunities for future research in agent development and data generation using Windows Agent Arena. Webpage: https://microsoft.github.io/WindowsAgentArena Code: https://github.com/microsoft/WindowsAgentArena

The promise of general-purpose agents - systems that perform tasks in unfamiliar environments without domain-specific engineering - remains largely unrealized. Existing agents are predominantly specialized, and while emerging implementations like OpenAI SDK Agent and Claude Code hint at broader capabilities, no systematic evaluation of their general performance has been pursued. Current agentic benchmarks assume domain-specific integration, encoding task information in ways that preclude fair evaluation of general agents. This paper frames general-agent evaluation as a first-class research objective. We propose conceptual principles for such evaluation, a Unified Protocol enabling agent-benchmark integration, and Exgentic - a practical framework for general agent evaluation. We benchmark five prominent agent implementations across six environments as the first Open General Agent Leaderboard. Our experiments show that general agents generalize across diverse environments, achieving performance comparable to domain-specific agents without any environment-specific tuning. We release our evaluation protocol, framework, and leaderboard to establish a foundation for systematic research on general-purpose agents.

Designing effective agentic systems requires the seamless composition and integration of agents, tools, and models within dynamic and uncertain environments. Most existing methods rely on static, semantic retrieval approaches for tool or agent discovery. However, effective reuse and composition of existing components remain challenging due to incomplete capability descriptions and the limitations of retrieval methods. Component selection suffers because the decisions are not based on capability, cost, and real-time utility. To address these challenges, we introduce a structured, automated framework for agentic system composition that is inspired by the knapsack problem. Our framework enables a composer agent to systematically identify, select, and assemble an optimal set of agentic components by jointly considering performance, budget constraints, and compatibility. By dynamically testing candidate components and modeling their utility in real-time, our approach streamlines the assembly of agentic systems and facilitates scalable reuse of resources. Empirical evaluation with Claude 3.5 Sonnet across five benchmarking datasets shows that our online-knapsack-based composer consistently lies on the Pareto frontier, achieving higher success rates at significantly lower component costs compared to our baselines. In the single-agent setup, the online knapsack composer shows a success rate improvement of up to 31.6% in comparison to the retrieval baselines. In multi-agent systems, the online knapsack composer increases success rate from 37% to 87% when agents are selected from an agent inventory of 100+ agents. The substantial performance gap confirms the robust adaptability of our method across diverse domains and budget constraints.

Agentic AI assistants that autonomously perform multi-step tasks raise open questions for user experience: how should such systems communicate progress and reasoning during extended operations, especially in attention-critical contexts such as driving? We investigate feedback timing and verbosity from agentic LLM-based in-car assistants through a controlled, mixed-methods study (N=45) comparing planned steps and intermediate results feedback against silent operation with final-only response. Using a dual-task paradigm with an in-car voice assistant, we found that intermediate feedback significantly improved perceived speed, trust, and user experience while reducing task load - effects that held across varying task complexities and interaction contexts. Interviews further revealed user preferences for an adaptive approach: high initial transparency to establish trust, followed by progressively reducing verbosity as systems prove reliable, with adjustments based on task stakes and situational context. We translate our empirical findings into design implications for feedback timing and verbosity in agentic assistants, balancing transparency and efficiency.

Performance optimization is a critical yet challenging aspect of software development, often requiring a deep understanding of system behavior, algorithmic tradeoffs, and careful code modifications. Although recent advances in AI coding agents have accelerated code generation and bug fixing, little is known about how these agents perform on real-world performance optimization tasks. We present the first empirical study comparing agent- and human-authored performance optimization commits, analyzing 324 agent-generated and 83 human-authored PRs from the AIDev dataset across adoption, maintainability, optimization patterns, and validation practices. We find that AI-authored performance PRs are less likely to include explicit performance validation than human-authored PRs (45.7\% vs. 63.6\%, p=0.007). In addition, AI-authored PRs largely use the same optimization patterns as humans. We further discuss limitations and opportunities for advancing agentic code optimization.

Designing a generalist scientific agent capable of performing tasks in laboratory settings to assist researchers has become a key goal in recent Artificial Intelligence (AI) research. Unlike everyday tasks, scientific tasks are inherently more delicate and complex, requiring agents to possess a higher level of reasoning ability, structured and temporal understanding of their environment, and a strong emphasis on safety. Existing approaches often fail to address these multifaceted requirements. To tackle these challenges, we present DAVIS. Unlike traditional retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approaches, DAVIS incorporates structured and temporal memory, which enables model-based planning. Additionally, DAVIS implements an agentic, multi-turn retrieval system, similar to a human's inner monologue, allowing for a greater degree of reasoning over past experiences. DAVIS demonstrates substantially improved performance on the ScienceWorld benchmark comparing to previous approaches on 8 out of 9 elementary science subjects. In addition, DAVIS's World Model demonstrates competitive performance on the famous HotpotQA and MusiqueQA dataset for multi-hop question answering. To the best of our knowledge, DAVIS is the first RAG agent to employ an interactive retrieval method in a RAG pipeline.