new

Get trending papers in your email inbox!

Subscribe

Daily Papers

byAK and the research community

Apr 15

GEO-Bench-2: From Performance to Capability, Rethinking Evaluation in Geospatial AI

Geospatial Foundation Models (GeoFMs) are transforming Earth Observation (EO), but evaluation lacks standardized protocols. GEO-Bench-2 addresses this with a comprehensive framework spanning classification, segmentation, regression, object detection, and instance segmentation across 19 permissively-licensed datasets. We introduce ''capability'' groups to rank models on datasets that share common characteristics (e.g., resolution, bands, temporality). This enables users to identify which models excel in each capability and determine which areas need improvement in future work. To support both fair comparison and methodological innovation, we define a prescriptive yet flexible evaluation protocol. This not only ensures consistency in benchmarking but also facilitates research into model adaptation strategies, a key and open challenge in advancing GeoFMs for downstream tasks. Our experiments show that no single model dominates across all tasks, confirming the specificity of the choices made during architecture design and pretraining. While models pretrained on natural images (ConvNext ImageNet, DINO V3) excel on high-resolution tasks, EO-specific models (TerraMind, Prithvi, and Clay) outperform them on multispectral applications such as agriculture and disaster response. These findings demonstrate that optimal model choice depends on task requirements, data modalities, and constraints. This shows that the goal of a single GeoFM model that performs well across all tasks remains open for future research. GEO-Bench-2 enables informed, reproducible GeoFM evaluation tailored to specific use cases. Code, data, and leaderboard for GEO-Bench-2 are publicly released under a permissive license.

  • 12 authors
·
Nov 19, 2025

Eureka: Evaluating and Understanding Large Foundation Models

Rigorous and reproducible evaluation is critical for assessing the state of the art and for guiding scientific advances in Artificial Intelligence. Evaluation is challenging in practice due to several reasons, including benchmark saturation, lack of transparency in methods used for measurement, development challenges in extracting measurements for generative tasks, and, more generally, the extensive number of capabilities required for a well-rounded comparison across models. We make three contributions to alleviate the above challenges. First, we present Eureka, an open-source framework for standardizing evaluations of large foundation models beyond single-score reporting and rankings. Second, we introduce Eureka-Bench as an extensible collection of benchmarks testing capabilities that (i) are still challenging for state-of-the-art models and (ii) represent fundamental but overlooked language and multimodal capabilities. The inherent space for improvement in non-saturated benchmarks enables us to discover meaningful differences between models at a capability level. Third, using Eureka, we conduct an analysis of 12 state-of-the-art models, providing in-depth insights into failure understanding and model comparison, which can be leveraged to plan targeted improvements. In contrast to recent trends in reports and leaderboards showing absolute rankings and claims for one model or another to be the best, our analysis shows that there is no such best model. Different models have different strengths, but there are models that appear more often than others as best performers for some capabilities. Despite the recent improvements, current models still struggle with several fundamental capabilities including detailed image understanding, benefiting from multimodal input when available rather than fully relying on language, factuality and grounding for information retrieval, and over refusals.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 13, 2024

Federation of Agents: A Semantics-Aware Communication Fabric for Large-Scale Agentic AI

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.

  • 11 authors
·
Sep 24, 2025

PropensityBench: Evaluating Latent Safety Risks in Large Language Models via an Agentic Approach

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have sparked concerns over their potential to acquire and misuse dangerous or high-risk capabilities, posing frontier risks. Current safety evaluations primarily test for what a model can do - its capabilities - without assessing what it would do if endowed with high-risk capabilities. This leaves a critical blind spot: models may strategically conceal capabilities or rapidly acquire them, while harboring latent inclinations toward misuse. We argue that propensity - the likelihood of a model to pursue harmful actions if empowered - is a critical, yet underexplored, axis of safety evaluation. We present PropensityBench, a novel benchmark framework that assesses the proclivity of models to engage in risky behaviors when equipped with simulated dangerous capabilities using proxy tools. Our framework includes 5,874 scenarios with 6,648 tools spanning four high-risk domains: cybersecurity, self-proliferation, biosecurity, and chemical security. We simulate access to powerful capabilities via a controlled agentic environment and evaluate the models' choices under varying operational pressures that reflect real-world constraints or incentives models may encounter, such as resource scarcity or gaining more autonomy. Across open-source and proprietary frontier models, we uncover 9 alarming signs of propensity: models frequently choose high-risk tools when under pressure, despite lacking the capability to execute such actions unaided. These findings call for a shift from static capability audits toward dynamic propensity assessments as a prerequisite for deploying frontier AI systems safely. Our code is available at https://github.com/scaleapi/propensity-evaluation.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 24, 2025

Capability Instruction Tuning: A New Paradigm for Dynamic LLM Routing

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated human-like instruction-following abilities, particularly those exceeding 100 billion parameters. The combined capability of some smaller, resource-friendly LLMs can address most of the instructions that larger LLMs excel at. In this work, we explore how to route the best-performing LLM for each instruction to achieve better overall performance. We develop a new paradigm, constructing capability instructions with model capability representation, user instruction, and performance inquiry prompts to assess the performance. To learn from capability instructions, we introduce a new end-to-end framework called Model Selection with Aptitude Test (Model-SAT), which generates positive and negative samples based on what different models perform well or struggle with. Model-SAT uses a model capability encoder that extends its model representation to a lightweight LLM. Our experiments show that Model-SAT understands the performance dimensions of candidate models and provides the probabilities of their capability to handle various instructions. Additionally, during deployment, a new model can quickly infer its aptitude test results across 50 tasks, each with 20 shots. Model-SAT performs state-of-the-art model routing without candidate inference and in real-world new model-released scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/Now-Join-Us/CIT-LLM-Routing

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 24, 2025

Structured Context Engineering for File-Native Agentic Systems: Evaluating Schema Accuracy, Format Effectiveness, and Multi-File Navigation at Scale

Large Language Model agents increasingly operate external systems through programmatic interfaces, yet practitioners lack empirical guidance on how to structure the context these agents consume. Using SQL generation as a proxy for programmatic agent operations, we present a systematic study of context engineering for structured data, comprising 9,649 experiments across 11 models, 4 formats (YAML, Markdown, JSON, Token-Oriented Object Notation [TOON]), and schemas ranging from 10 to 10,000 tables. Our findings challenge common assumptions. First, architecture choice is model-dependent: file-based context retrieval improves accuracy for frontier-tier models (Claude, GPT, Gemini; +2.7%, p=0.029) but shows mixed results for open source models (aggregate -7.7%, p<0.001), with deficits varying substantially by model. Second, format does not significantly affect aggregate accuracy (chi-squared=2.45, p=0.484), though individual models, particularly open source, exhibit format-specific sensitivities. Third, model capability is the dominant factor, with a 21 percentage point accuracy gap between frontier and open source tiers that dwarfs any format or architecture effect. Fourth, file-native agents scale to 10,000 tables through domain-partitioned schemas while maintaining high navigation accuracy. Fifth, file size does not predict runtime efficiency: compact or novel formats can incur a token overhead driven by grep output density and pattern unfamiliarity, with the magnitude depending on model capability. These findings provide practitioners with evidence-based guidance for deploying LLM agents on structured systems, demonstrating that architectural decisions should be tailored to model capability rather than assuming universal best practices.

  • 1 authors
·
Feb 5

Agent Skills for Large Language Models: Architecture, Acquisition, Security, and the Path Forward

The transition from monolithic language models to modular, skill-equipped agents marks a defining shift in how large language models (LLMs) are deployed in practice. Rather than encoding all procedural knowledge within model weights, agent skills -- composable packages of instructions, code, and resources that agents load on demand -- enable dynamic capability extension without retraining. It is formalized in a paradigm of progressive disclosure, portable skill definitions, and integration with the Model Context Protocol (MCP). This survey provides a comprehensive treatment of the agent skills landscape, as it has rapidly evolved during the last few months. We organize the field along four axes: (i) architectural foundations, examining the SKILL.md specification, progressive context loading, and the complementary roles of skills and MCP; (ii) skill acquisition, covering reinforcement learning with skill libraries, autonomous skill discovery (SEAgent), and compositional skill synthesis; (iii) deployment at scale, including the computer-use agent (CUA) stack, GUI grounding advances, and benchmark progress on OSWorld and SWE-bench; and (iv) security, where recent empirical analyses reveal that 26.1% of community-contributed skills contain vulnerabilities, motivating our proposed Skill Trust and Lifecycle Governance Framework -- a four-tier, gate-based permission model that maps skill provenance to graduated deployment capabilities. We identify seven open challenges -- from cross-platform skill portability to capability-based permission models -- and propose a research agenda for realizing trustworthy, self-improving skill ecosystems. Unlike prior surveys that broadly cover LLM agents or tool use, this work focuses specifically on the emerging skill abstraction layer and its implications for the next generation of agentic systems. Project repo: https://github.com/scienceaix/agentskills

  • 2 authors
·
Feb 12

daVinci-LLM:Towards the Science of Pretraining

The foundational pretraining phase determines a model's capability ceiling, as post-training struggles to overcome capability foundations established during pretraining, yet it remains critically under-explored. This stems from a structural paradox: organizations with computational resources operate under commercial pressures that inhibit transparent disclosure, while academic institutions possess research freedom but lack pretraining-scale computational resources. daVinci-LLM occupies this unexplored intersection, combining industrial-scale resources with full research freedom to advance the science of pretraining. We adopt a fully-open paradigm that treats openness as scientific methodology, releasing complete data processing pipelines, full training processes, and systematic exploration results. Recognizing that the field lacks systematic methodology for data processing, we employ the Data Darwinism framework, a principled L0-L9 taxonomy from filtering to synthesis. We train a 3B-parameter model from random initialization across 8T tokens using a two-stage adaptive curriculum that progressively shifts from foundational capabilities to reasoning-intensive enhancement. Through 200+ controlled ablations, we establish that: processing depth systematically enhances capabilities, establishing it as a critical dimension alongside volume scaling; different domains exhibit distinct saturation dynamics, necessitating adaptive strategies from proportion adjustments to format shifts; compositional balance enables targeted intensification while preventing performance collapse; how evaluation protocol choices shape our understanding of pretraining progress. By releasing the complete exploration process, we enable the community to build upon our findings and systematic methodologies to form accumulative scientific knowledge in pretraining.

SII-GAIR-NLP SII-GAIR
·
Mar 28 2

Law of the Weakest Link: Cross Capabilities of Large Language Models

The development and evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) have largely focused on individual capabilities. However, this overlooks the intersection of multiple abilities across different types of expertise that are often required for real-world tasks, which we term cross capabilities. To systematically explore this concept, we first define seven core individual capabilities and then pair them to form seven common cross capabilities, each supported by a manually constructed taxonomy. Building on these definitions, we introduce CrossEval, a benchmark comprising 1,400 human-annotated prompts, with 100 prompts for each individual and cross capability. To ensure reliable evaluation, we involve expert annotators to assess 4,200 model responses, gathering 8,400 human ratings with detailed explanations to serve as reference examples. Our findings reveal that, in both static evaluations and attempts to enhance specific abilities, current LLMs consistently exhibit the "Law of the Weakest Link," where cross-capability performance is significantly constrained by the weakest component. Specifically, across 58 cross-capability scores from 17 models, 38 scores are lower than all individual capabilities, while 20 fall between strong and weak, but closer to the weaker ability. These results highlight the under-performance of LLMs in cross-capability tasks, making the identification and improvement of the weakest capabilities a critical priority for future research to optimize performance in complex, multi-dimensional scenarios.

  • 17 authors
·
Sep 30, 2024 2

The Master Key Hypothesis: Unlocking Cross-Model Capability Transfer via Linear Subspace Alignment

We investigate whether post-trained capabilities can be transferred across models without retraining, with a focus on transfer across different model scales. We propose the Master Key Hypothesis, which states that model capabilities correspond to directions in a low-dimensional latent subspace that induce specific behaviors and are transferable across models through linear alignment. Based on this hypothesis, we introduce UNLOCK, a training-free and label-free framework that extracts a capability direction by contrasting activations between capability-present and capability-absent Source variants, aligns it with a Target model through a low-rank linear transformation, and applies it at inference time to elicit the behavior. Experiments on reasoning behaviors, including Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and mathematical reasoning, demonstrate substantial improvements across model scales without training. For example, transferring CoT reasoning from Qwen1.5-14B to Qwen1.5-7B yields an accuracy gain of 12.1% on MATH, and transferring a mathematical reasoning direction from Qwen3-4B-Base to Qwen3-14B-Base improves AGIEval Math accuracy from 61.1% to 71.3%, surpassing the 67.8% achieved by the 14B post-trained model. Our analysis shows that the success of transfer depends on the capabilities learned during pre-training, and that our intervention amplifies latent capabilities by sharpening the output distribution toward successful reasoning trajectories.

  • 9 authors
·
Apr 7 2

Evaluation of OpenAI o1: Opportunities and Challenges of AGI

This comprehensive study evaluates the performance of OpenAI's o1-preview large language model across a diverse array of complex reasoning tasks, spanning multiple domains, including computer science, mathematics, natural sciences, medicine, linguistics, and social sciences. Through rigorous testing, o1-preview demonstrated remarkable capabilities, often achieving human-level or superior performance in areas ranging from coding challenges to scientific reasoning and from language processing to creative problem-solving. Key findings include: -83.3% success rate in solving complex competitive programming problems, surpassing many human experts. -Superior ability in generating coherent and accurate radiology reports, outperforming other evaluated models. -100% accuracy in high school-level mathematical reasoning tasks, providing detailed step-by-step solutions. -Advanced natural language inference capabilities across general and specialized domains like medicine. -Impressive performance in chip design tasks, outperforming specialized models in areas such as EDA script generation and bug analysis. -Remarkable proficiency in anthropology and geology, demonstrating deep understanding and reasoning in these specialized fields. -Strong capabilities in quantitative investing. O1 has comprehensive financial knowledge and statistical modeling skills. -Effective performance in social media analysis, including sentiment analysis and emotion recognition. The model excelled particularly in tasks requiring intricate reasoning and knowledge integration across various fields. While some limitations were observed, including occasional errors on simpler problems and challenges with certain highly specialized concepts, the overall results indicate significant progress towards artificial general intelligence.

  • 78 authors
·
Sep 27, 2024

Who's the MVP? A Game-Theoretic Evaluation Benchmark for Modular Attribution in LLM Agents

Large Language Model (LLM) agents frameworks often employ modular architectures, incorporating components such as planning, reasoning, action execution, and reflection to tackle complex tasks. However, quantifying the contribution of each module to overall system performance remains a significant challenge, impeding optimization and interpretability. To address this, we introduce CapaBench (Capability-level Assessment Benchmark), an evaluation framework grounded in cooperative game theory's Shapley Value, which systematically measures the marginal impact of individual modules and their interactions within an agent's architecture. By replacing default modules with test variants across all possible combinations, CapaBench provides a principle method for attributing performance contributions. Key contributions include: (1) We are the first to propose a Shapley Value-based methodology for quantifying the contributions of capabilities in LLM agents; (2) Modules with high Shapley Values consistently lead to predictable performance gains when combined, enabling targeted optimization; and (3) We build a multi-round dataset of over 1,500 entries spanning diverse domains and practical task scenarios, enabling comprehensive evaluation of agent capabilities. CapaBench bridges the gap between component-level evaluation and holistic system assessment, providing actionable insights for optimizing modular LLM agents and advancing their deployment in complex, real-world scenarios.

  • 16 authors
·
Feb 1, 2025

A Domain-Agnostic Approach for Characterization of Lifelong Learning Systems

Despite the advancement of machine learning techniques in recent years, state-of-the-art systems lack robustness to "real world" events, where the input distributions and tasks encountered by the deployed systems will not be limited to the original training context, and systems will instead need to adapt to novel distributions and tasks while deployed. This critical gap may be addressed through the development of "Lifelong Learning" systems that are capable of 1) Continuous Learning, 2) Transfer and Adaptation, and 3) Scalability. Unfortunately, efforts to improve these capabilities are typically treated as distinct areas of research that are assessed independently, without regard to the impact of each separate capability on other aspects of the system. We instead propose a holistic approach, using a suite of metrics and an evaluation framework to assess Lifelong Learning in a principled way that is agnostic to specific domains or system techniques. Through five case studies, we show that this suite of metrics can inform the development of varied and complex Lifelong Learning systems. We highlight how the proposed suite of metrics quantifies performance trade-offs present during Lifelong Learning system development - both the widely discussed Stability-Plasticity dilemma and the newly proposed relationship between Sample Efficient and Robust Learning. Further, we make recommendations for the formulation and use of metrics to guide the continuing development of Lifelong Learning systems and assess their progress in the future.

  • 47 authors
·
Jan 18, 2023

Adaptive Guidance Accelerates Reinforcement Learning of Reasoning Models

We study the process through which reasoning models trained with reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards (RLVR) can learn to solve new problems. We find that RLVR drives performance in two main ways: (1) by compressing pass@k into pass@1 and (2) via "capability gain" in which models learn to solve new problems that they previously could not solve even at high k. We find that while capability gain exists across model scales, learning to solve new problems is primarily driven through self-distillation. We demonstrate these findings across model scales ranging from 0.5B to 72B parameters on >500,000 reasoning problems with prompts and verifiable final answers across math, science, and code domains. We further show that we can significantly improve pass@k rates by leveraging natural language guidance for the model to consider within context while still requiring the model to derive a solution chain from scratch. Based of these insights, we derive Guide -- a new class of online training algorithms. Guide adaptively incorporates hints into the model's context on problems for which all rollouts were initially incorrect and adjusts the importance sampling ratio for the "off-policy" trajectories in order to optimize the policy for contexts in which the hints are no longer present. We describe variants of Guide for GRPO and PPO and empirically show that Guide-GRPO on 7B and 32B parameter models improves generalization over its vanilla counterpart with up to 4% macro-average improvement across math benchmarks. We include careful ablations to analyze Guide's components and theoretically analyze Guide's learning efficiency.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 16, 2025

How do Scaling Laws Apply to Knowledge Graph Engineering Tasks? The Impact of Model Size on Large Language Model Performance

When using Large Language Models (LLMs) to support Knowledge Graph Engineering (KGE), one of the first indications when searching for an appropriate model is its size. According to the scaling laws, larger models typically show higher capabilities. However, in practice, resource costs are also an important factor and thus it makes sense to consider the ratio between model performance and costs. The LLM-KG-Bench framework enables the comparison of LLMs in the context of KGE tasks and assesses their capabilities of understanding and producing KGs and KG queries. Based on a dataset created in an LLM-KG-Bench run covering 26 open state-of-the-art LLMs, we explore the model size scaling laws specific to KGE tasks. In our analyses, we assess how benchmark scores evolve between different model size categories. Additionally, we inspect how the general score development of single models and families of models correlates to their size. Our analyses revealed that, with a few exceptions, the model size scaling laws generally also apply to the selected KGE tasks. However, in some cases, plateau or ceiling effects occurred, i.e., the task performance did not change much between a model and the next larger model. In these cases, smaller models could be considered to achieve high cost-effectiveness. Regarding models of the same family, sometimes larger models performed worse than smaller models of the same family. These effects occurred only locally. Hence it is advisable to additionally test the next smallest and largest model of the same family.

  • 5 authors
·
May 22, 2025

AGIEval: A Human-Centric Benchmark for Evaluating Foundation Models

Evaluating the general abilities of foundation models to tackle human-level tasks is a vital aspect of their development and application in the pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Traditional benchmarks, which rely on artificial datasets, may not accurately represent human-level capabilities. In this paper, we introduce AGIEval, a novel benchmark specifically designed to assess foundation model in the context of human-centric standardized exams, such as college entrance exams, law school admission tests, math competitions, and lawyer qualification tests. We evaluate several state-of-the-art foundation models, including GPT-4, ChatGPT, and Text-Davinci-003, using this benchmark. Impressively, GPT-4 surpasses average human performance on SAT, LSAT, and math competitions, attaining a 95% accuracy rate on the SAT Math test and a 92.5% accuracy on the English test of the Chinese national college entrance exam. This demonstrates the extraordinary performance of contemporary foundation models. In contrast, we also find that GPT-4 is less proficient in tasks that require complex reasoning or specific domain knowledge. Our comprehensive analyses of model capabilities (understanding, knowledge, reasoning, and calculation) reveal these models' strengths and limitations, providing valuable insights into future directions for enhancing their general capabilities. By concentrating on tasks pertinent to human cognition and decision-making, our benchmark delivers a more meaningful and robust evaluation of foundation models' performance in real-world scenarios. The data, code, and all model outputs are released in https://github.com/microsoft/AGIEval.

  • 9 authors
·
Apr 13, 2023

SkVM: Compiling Skills for Efficient Execution Everywhere

LLM agents increasingly adopt skills as a reusable unit of composition. While skills are shared across diverse agent platforms, current systems treat them as raw context, causing the same skill to behave inconsistently for different agents. This fragility undermines skill portability and execution efficiency. To address this challenge, we analyze 118,000 skills and draw inspiration from traditional compiler design. We treat skills as code and LLMs as heterogeneous processors. To make portability actionable, we decompose a skill's requirements into a set of primitive capabilities, and measure how well each model-harness pair supports them. Based on these capability profiles, we propose SkVM, a compilation and runtime system designed for portable and efficient skill execution. At compile time, SkVM performs capability-based compilation, environment binding, and concurrency extraction. At runtime, SkVM applies JIT code solidification and adaptive recompilation for performance optimization. We evaluate SkVM across eight LLMs of varying scales and three agent harnesses, covering SkillsBench and representative skill tasks. Results demonstrate that SkVM significantly improves task completion rates across different models and environments while reducing token consumption by up to 40%. In terms of performance, SkVM achieves up to 3.2x speedup with enhanced parallelism, and 19-50x latency reduction through code solidification.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 5

GPT as Knowledge Worker: A Zero-Shot Evaluation of (AI)CPA Capabilities

The global economy is increasingly dependent on knowledge workers to meet the needs of public and private organizations. While there is no single definition of knowledge work, organizations and industry groups still attempt to measure individuals' capability to engage in it. The most comprehensive assessment of capability readiness for professional knowledge workers is the Uniform CPA Examination developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). In this paper, we experimentally evaluate OpenAI's `text-davinci-003` and prior versions of GPT on both a sample Regulation (REG) exam and an assessment of over 200 multiple-choice questions based on the AICPA Blueprints for legal, financial, accounting, technology, and ethical tasks. First, we find that `text-davinci-003` achieves a correct rate of 14.4% on a sample REG exam section, significantly underperforming human capabilities on quantitative reasoning in zero-shot prompts. Second, `text-davinci-003` appears to be approaching human-level performance on the Remembering & Understanding and Application skill levels in the Exam absent calculation. For best prompt and parameters, the model answers 57.6% of questions correctly, significantly better than the 25% guessing rate, and its top two answers are correct 82.1% of the time, indicating strong non-entailment. Finally, we find that recent generations of GPT-3 demonstrate material improvements on this assessment, rising from 30% for `text-davinci-001` to 57% for `text-davinci-003`. These findings strongly suggest that large language models have the potential to transform the quality and efficiency of future knowledge work.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 11, 2023

TRACE: Capability-Targeted Agentic Training

Large Language Models (LLMs) deployed in agentic environments must exercise multiple capabilities across different task instances, where a capability is performing one or more actions in a trajectory that are necessary for successfully solving a subset of tasks in the environment. Many existing approaches either rely on synthetic training data that is not targeted to the model's actual capability deficits in the target environment or train directly on the target environment, where the model needs to implicitly learn the capabilities across tasks. We introduce TRACE (Turning Recurrent Agent failures into Capability-targeted training Environments), an end-to-end system for environment-specific agent self-improvement. TRACE contrasts successful and failed trajectories to automatically identify lacking capabilities, synthesizes a targeted training environment for each that rewards whether the capability was exercised, and trains a LoRA adapter via RL on each synthetic environment, routing to the relevant adapter at inference. Empirically, TRACE generalizes across different environments, improving over the base agent by +14.1 points on τ^2-bench (customer service) and +7 perfect scores on ToolSandbox (tool use), outperforming the strongest baseline by +7.4 points and +4 perfect scores, respectively. Given the same number of rollouts, TRACE scales more efficiently than baselines, outperforming GRPO and GEPA by +9.2 and +7.4 points on τ^2-bench.

CodeAssistBench (CAB): Dataset & Benchmarking for Multi-turn Chat-Based Code Assistance

Programming assistants powered by large language models have transformed software development, yet most benchmarks focus narrowly on code generation tasks. Recent efforts like InfiBench and StackEval attempt to address this gap using Stack Overflow data but remain limited to single-turn interactions in isolated contexts, require significant manual curation, and fail to represent complete project environments. We introduce CodeAssistBench (CAB), the first benchmark framework for evaluating multi-turn programming assistance in realistic settings that address real-world questions about actual codebases. Unlike existing programming Q&A benchmarks, CAB automatically generates scalable datasets from question-related GitHub issues using configurable parameters (e.g., repository creation date, star count, programming languages), and includes automatic containerization of codebases for evaluation. It then evaluates models through simulated users in these containerized environments with full codebase access. Using this framework, we constructed a test set of 3,286 real-world programming questions across 231 repositories, spanning seven programming languages and diverse problem domains. Our evaluation of leading LLMs reveals a substantial capability gap: while models perform well on Stack Overflow questions with success rates of 70-83%, they resolve only up to 16.49% of CAB's recent issues. This discrepancy highlights the challenges of providing assistance in complex, project-specific contexts versus answering standalone questions.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 14, 2025

R2D2: Reducing Redundancy and Duplication in Data Lakes

Enterprise data lakes often suffer from substantial amounts of duplicate and redundant data, with data volumes ranging from terabytes to petabytes. This leads to both increased storage costs and unnecessarily high maintenance costs for these datasets. In this work, we focus on identifying and reducing redundancy in enterprise data lakes by addressing the problem of 'dataset containment'. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first works that addresses table-level containment at a large scale. We propose R2D2: a three-step hierarchical pipeline that efficiently identifies almost all instances of containment by progressively reducing the search space in the data lake. It first builds (i) a schema containment graph, followed by (ii) statistical min-max pruning, and finally, (iii) content level pruning. We further propose minimizing the total storage and access costs by optimally identifying redundant datasets that can be deleted (and reconstructed on demand) while respecting latency constraints. We implement our system on Azure Databricks clusters using Apache Spark for enterprise data stored in ADLS Gen2, and on AWS clusters for open-source data. In contrast to existing modified baselines that are inaccurate or take several days to run, our pipeline can process an enterprise customer data lake at the TB scale in approximately 5 hours with high accuracy. We present theoretical results as well as extensive empirical validation on both enterprise (scale of TBs) and open-source datasets (scale of MBs - GBs), which showcase the effectiveness of our pipeline.

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 20, 2023

SWE-Spot: Building Small Repo-Experts with Repository-Centric Learning

The deployment of coding agents in privacy-sensitive and resource-constrained environments drives the demand for capable open-weight Small Language Models (SLMs). However, they suffer from a fundamental capability gap: unlike frontier large models, they lack the inference-time strong generalization to work with complicated, unfamiliar codebases. We identify that the prevailing Task-Centric Learning (TCL) paradigm, which scales exposure across disparate repositories, fails to address this limitation. In response, we propose Repository-Centric Learning (RCL), a paradigm shift that prioritizes vertical repository depth over horizontal task breadth, suggesting SLMs must internalize the "physics" of a target software environment through parametric knowledge acquisition, rather than attempting to recover it via costly inference-time search. Following this new paradigm, we design a four-unit Repository-Centric Experience, transforming static codebases into interactive learning signals, to train SWE-Spot-4B, a family of highly compact models built as repo-specialized experts that breaks established scaling trends, outperforming open-weight models up to larger (e.g., CWM by Meta, Qwen3-Coder-30B) and surpassing/matching efficiency-focused commercial models (e.g., GPT-4.1-mini, GPT-5-nano) across multiple SWE tasks. Further analysis reveals that RCL yields higher training sample efficiency and lower inference costs, emphasizing that for building efficient intelligence, repository mastery is a distinct and necessary dimension that complements general coding capability.

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 29

Knowledge Grafting of Large Language Models

Cross-capability transfer is a key challenge in large language model (LLM) research, with applications in multi-task integration, model compression, and continual learning. Recent works like FuseLLM and FuseChat have demonstrated the potential of transferring multiple model capabilities to lightweight models, enhancing adaptability and efficiency, which motivates our investigation into more efficient cross-capability transfer methods. However, existing approaches primarily focus on small, homogeneous models, limiting their applicability. For large, heterogeneous models, knowledge distillation with full-parameter fine-tuning often overlooks the student model's intrinsic capacity and risks catastrophic forgetting, while PEFT methods struggle to effectively absorb knowledge from source LLMs. To address these issues, we introduce GraftLLM, a novel method that stores source model capabilities in a target model with SkillPack format. This approach preserves general capabilities, reduces parameter conflicts, and supports forget-free continual learning and model fusion. We employ a module-aware adaptive compression strategy to compress parameter updates, ensuring efficient storage while maintaining task-specific knowledge. The resulting SkillPack serves as a compact and transferable knowledge carrier, ideal for heterogeneous model fusion and continual learning. Experiments across various scenarios demonstrate that GraftLLM outperforms existing techniques in knowledge transfer, knowledge fusion, and forget-free learning, providing a scalable and efficient solution for cross-capability transfer. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/duguodong7/GraftLLM.

  • 12 authors
·
May 24, 2025

Automated Composition of Agents: A Knapsack Approach for Agentic Component Selection

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.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 18, 2025 2

AIDABench: AI Data Analytics Benchmark

As AI-driven document understanding and processing tools become increasingly prevalent in real-world applications, the need for rigorous evaluation standards has grown increasingly urgent. Existing benchmarks and evaluations often focus on isolated capabilities or simplified scenarios, failing to capture the end-to-end task effectiveness required in practical settings. To address this gap, we introduce AIDABench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating AI systems on complex data analytics tasks in an end-to-end manner. AIDABench encompasses 600+ diverse document analysis tasks across three core capability dimensions: question answering, data visualization, and file generation. These tasks are grounded in realistic scenarios involving heterogeneous data types, including spreadsheets, databases, financial reports, and operational records, and reflect analytical demands across diverse industries and job functions. Notably, the tasks in AIDABench are sufficiently challenging that even human experts require 1-2 hours per question when assisted by AI tools, underscoring the benchmark's difficulty and real-world complexity. We evaluate 11 state-of-the-art models on AIDABench, spanning both proprietary (e.g., Claude Sonnet 4.5, Gemini 3 Pro Preview) and open-source (e.g., Qwen3-Max-2026-01-23-Thinking) families. Our results reveal that complex, real-world data analytics tasks remain a significant challenge for current AI systems, with the best-performing model achieving only 59.43% pass-at-1. We provide a detailed analysis of failure modes across each capability dimension and identify key challenges for future research. AIDABench offers a principled reference for enterprise procurement, tool selection, and model optimization, and is publicly available at https://github.com/MichaelYang-lyx/AIDABench.

  • 27 authors
·
Feb 27

Externalization in LLM Agents: A Unified Review of Memory, Skills, Protocols and Harness Engineering

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly built less by changing model weights than by reorganizing the runtime around them. Capabilities that earlier systems expected the model to recover internally are now externalized into memory stores, reusable skills, interaction protocols, and the surrounding harness that makes these modules reliable in practice. This paper reviews that shift through the lens of externalization. Drawing on the idea of cognitive artifacts, we argue that agent infrastructure matters not merely because it adds auxiliary components, but because it transforms hard cognitive burdens into forms that the model can solve more reliably. Under this view, memory externalizes state across time, skills externalize procedural expertise, protocols externalize interaction structure, and harness engineering serves as the unification layer that coordinates them into governed execution. We trace a historical progression from weights to context to harness, analyze memory, skills, and protocols as three distinct but coupled forms of externalization, and examine how they interact inside a larger agent system. We further discuss the trade-off between parametric and externalized capability, identify emerging directions such as self-evolving harnesses and shared agent infrastructure, and discuss open challenges in evaluation, governance, and the long-term co-evolution of models and external infrastructure. The result is a systems-level framework for explaining why practical agent progress increasingly depends not only on stronger models, but on better external cognitive infrastructure.

  • 21 authors
·
Apr 8 2

OS-MAP: How Far Can Computer-Using Agents Go in Breadth and Depth?

Computer-using agents have shown strong potential to boost human productivity and enable new application forms across platforms. While recent advances have led to usable applications, existing benchmarks fail to account for the internal task heterogeneity and the corresponding agent capabilities, as well as their alignment with actual user demands-hindering both targeted capability development and the reliable transition of research progress into practical deployment. To bridge the gap, we present OS-MAP, a benchmark for daily computer-using automation that organizes its 416 realistic tasks across 15 applications along two key dimensions: a five-level taxonomy of automation and a generalization scope derived from a real-world user demand hierarchy. To enable fine-grained analysis of required capabilities and alignment with real-world scenarios, OS-MAP evaluates agents along two dimensions: automation level across a five-level taxonomy, and generalization scope across a demand hierarchy. This design captures varying levels of required agent autonomy and generalization, forming a performance-generalization evaluation matrix for structured and comprehensive assessment. Experiments show that even State-of-the-Art agents with VLM backbones struggle with higher-level tasks involving perception, reasoning, and coordination-highlighting the need for a deeper understanding of current strengths and limitations to drive the future progress in computer-using agents research and deployment. All code, environments, baselines, and data are publicly available at https://github.com/OS-Copilot/OS-Map.

  • 15 authors
·
Jul 25, 2025

Toolshed: Scale Tool-Equipped Agents with Advanced RAG-Tool Fusion and Tool Knowledge Bases

Recent advancements in tool-equipped Agents (LLMs) have enabled complex tasks like secure database interactions and multi-agent code development. However, scaling tool capacity beyond agent reasoning or model limits remains a challenge. In this paper, we address these challenges by introducing Toolshed Knowledge Bases, a tool knowledge base (vector database) designed to store enhanced tool representations and optimize tool selection for large-scale tool-equipped Agents. Additionally, we propose Advanced RAG-Tool Fusion, a novel ensemble of tool-applied advanced retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques across the pre-retrieval, intra-retrieval, and post-retrieval phases, without requiring model fine-tuning. During pre-retrieval, tool documents are enhanced with key information and stored in the Toolshed Knowledge Base. Intra-retrieval focuses on query planning and transformation to increase retrieval accuracy. Post-retrieval refines the retrieved tool documents and enables self-reflection. Furthermore, by varying both the total number of tools (tool-M) an Agent has access to and the tool selection threshold (top-k), we address trade-offs between retrieval accuracy, agent performance, and token cost. Our approach achieves 46%, 56%, and 47% absolute improvements on the ToolE single-tool, ToolE multi-tool and Seal-Tools benchmark datasets, respectively (Recall@5).

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 18, 2024

Granite Embedding R2 Models

We introduce the Granite Embedding R2 models, a comprehensive family of high-performance English encoder-based embedding models engineered for enterprise-scale dense retrieval applications. Building upon our first-generation release, these models deliver substantial improvements, including 16x expanded context length (8,192 tokens), state-of-the-art performance across diverse retrieval domains - text, code, long-document search, multi-turn conversational, and tabular data - and measurable speed advantages of 19-44\% over leading competitors while maintaining superior accuracy. Our release encompasses both bi-encoder and cross-encoder architectures, featuring a highly effective 22-layer retriever model and its efficient 12-layer counterpart, alongside a high-quality reranker model, all trained exclusively on enterprise-appropriate data with comprehensive governance oversight. The models demonstrate exceptional versatility across standard benchmarks, IBM-developed evaluation suites, and real-world enterprise use cases, establishing new performance standards for open-source embedding models. In an era where retrieval speed and accuracy are paramount for competitive advantage, the Granite R2 models deliver a compelling combination of cutting-edge performance, enterprise-ready licensing, and transparent data provenance that organizations require for mission-critical deployments. All models are publicly available under the Apache 2.0 license at https://huggingface.co/collections/ibm-granite, enabling unrestricted research and commercial use.

  • 20 authors
·
Aug 26, 2025

Evaluating Language-Model Agents on Realistic Autonomous Tasks

In this report, we explore the ability of language model agents to acquire resources, create copies of themselves, and adapt to novel challenges they encounter in the wild. We refer to this cluster of capabilities as "autonomous replication and adaptation" or ARA. We believe that systems capable of ARA could have wide-reaching and hard-to-anticipate consequences, and that measuring and forecasting ARA may be useful for informing measures around security, monitoring, and alignment. Additionally, once a system is capable of ARA, placing bounds on a system's capabilities may become significantly more difficult. We construct four simple example agents that combine language models with tools that allow them to take actions in the world. We then evaluate these agents on 12 tasks relevant to ARA. We find that these language model agents can only complete the easiest tasks from this list, although they make some progress on the more challenging tasks. Unfortunately, these evaluations are not adequate to rule out the possibility that near-future agents will be capable of ARA. In particular, we do not think that these evaluations provide good assurance that the ``next generation'' of language models (e.g. 100x effective compute scaleup on existing models) will not yield agents capable of ARA, unless intermediate evaluations are performed during pretraining. Relatedly, we expect that fine-tuning of the existing models could produce substantially more competent agents, even if the fine-tuning is not directly targeted at ARA.

  • 13 authors
·
Dec 18, 2023

STARS: Skill-Triggered Audit for Request-Conditioned Invocation Safety in Agent Systems

Autonomous language-model agents increasingly rely on installable skills and tools to complete user tasks. Static skill auditing can expose capability surface before deployment, but it cannot determine whether a particular invocation is unsafe under the current user request and runtime context. We therefore study skill invocation auditing as a continuous-risk estimation problem: given a user request, candidate skill, and runtime context, predict a score that supports ranking and triage before a hard intervention is applied. We introduce STARS, which combines a static capability prior, a request-conditioned invocation risk model, and a calibrated risk-fusion policy. To evaluate this setting, we construct SIA-Bench, a benchmark of 3,000 invocation records with group-safe splits, lineage metadata, runtime context, canonical action labels, and derived continuous-risk targets. On a held-out split of indirect prompt injection attacks, calibrated fusion reaches 0.439 high-risk AUPRC, improving over 0.405 for the contextual scorer and 0.380 for the strongest static baseline, while the contextual scorer remains better calibrated with 0.289 expected calibration error. On the locked in-distribution test split, gains are smaller and static priors remain useful. The resulting claim is therefore narrower: request-conditioned auditing is most valuable as an invocation-time risk-scoring and triage layer rather than as a replacement for static screening. Code is available at https://github.com/123zgj123/STARS.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 10