Daily Papers

AI agents are increasingly asked to carry out work that spans minutes, hours, or longer. Yet the default model of agent behavior is continuous action: issuing tool calls, refreshing pages, searching for alternatives, or otherwise trying to force progress. This is the wrong approach for many long-running tasks, which are better served by a strategy of sustained attention. Instead, agents should monitor an environment, notice when an external event makes progress possible, then respond promptly without wasting resources while waiting. To measure progress on this class of tasks, we introduce SentinelBench, an open-source benchmark for time-evolving monitoring tasks. SentinelBench contains 100 tasks across 10 synthetic web environments, including email, calendars, finance, professional networking, and entertainment. Each environment exposes a live web interface and replays a scripted sequence of events, requiring agents to navigate and reason about web pages whose state shifts underfoot. SentinelBench measures task completion, reaction time, and resource use, exposing the tradeoff between responsiveness and cost. We report results across three models and two browser-agent harnesses, establishing performance baselines for future comparison and demonstrating how agent design choices can dramatically impact key metrics. Together, these results show that SentinelBench distinguishes meaningful differences in agent behavior.

Efficient scheduling of LLM inference tasks is essential for achieving low latency and high throughput, particularly with the growing use of reasoning-capable LLMs. Traditional strategies like First-Come-First-Serve (FCFS) often suffer from Head-of-Line (HOL) blocking, where long-running tasks delay shorter ones queued behind them. In this paper, we introduce PARS, a prompt-aware LLM task scheduler that improves serving efficiency by approximating shortest-job-first (SJF) scheduling through pairwise ranking with margin ranking loss. PARS focuses on impactful scheduling decisions and is seamlessly integrated into the state-of-the-art LLM serving system vLLM. It effectively predicts response-length-based task ordering, reducing latency with minimal overhead. Extensive experiments across multiple LLMs and real-world inference datasets show that PARS significantly improves performance, including for reasoning workloads. Furthermore, our cross-model evaluations demonstrate that the design generalizes well, enabling effective scheduling even when predictors are trained on different LLMs.

In recent years, attention-like mechanisms have been used to great success in the space of large language models, unlocking scaling potential to a previously unthinkable extent. "Attention Is All You Need" famously claims RNN cells are not needed in conjunction with attention. We challenge this view. In this paper, we point to existing proofs that architectures with fully parallelizable forward or backward passes cannot represent classes of problems specifically interesting for long-running agentic tasks. We further conjecture a critical time t beyond which non-recurrence-complete models fail to aggregate inputs correctly, with concrete implications for agentic systems (e.g., software engineering agents). To address this, we introduce a recurrence-complete architecture and train it on GitHub-derived action sequences. Loss follows a power law in the trained sequence length while the parameter count remains fixed. Moreover, longer-sequence training always amortizes its linearly increasing wall-time cost, yielding lower loss as a function of wall time.

We introduce Nemotron 3 Ultra, a 550 billion total and 55 billion active parameter Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Attention language model. We pre-trained Nemotron 3 Ultra on 20 trillion text tokens, then extended the context length to 1M tokens, and post-trained using Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT), Reinforcement Learning (RL), and Multi-teacher On-Policy Distillation (MOPD). Nemotron 3 Ultra is our most capable model yet, employing multiple key technologies - LatentMoE, Multi Token Prediction (MTP), NVFP4 pre-training, multi-environment RLVR, MOPD, and reasoning budget control. Nemotron 3 Ultra achieves up to ~6x higher inference throughput as compared to state-of-the-art publicly available LLMs while attaining on-par accuracy. The state-of-the-art accuracy, high inference throughput, and 1M token context length make Nemotron 3 Ultra ideal for long-running autonomous agentic tasks. We open-source the base, post-trained, and quantized checkpoints, along with the training data and recipe on HuggingFace.

Scientific research proceeds through iterative cycles of hypothesis generation, experiment design, execution, and revision. AI agents can automate parts of this process, but existing approaches typically follow a single research trajectory or coordinate through a central planner with fixed objectives. As a result, they struggle to sustain parallel exploration, adapt as experimental evidence changes, or preserve knowledge of failed directions over long-running experiments. We introduce AutoScientists, a decentralized team of AI agents for long-running computational scientific experimentation. Agents interpret a shared experimental state, self-organize into teams around promising hypotheses, critique proposals before using experimental compute, and share successes and failures to reduce redundant exploration. Under matched experimental budgets, AutoScientists improves over prior AI agents across biomedical machine learning, language-model training optimization, and protein fitness prediction. On BioML-Bench, spanning biomedical imaging, protein engineering, single-cell omics, and drug discovery, AutoScientists achieves a mean leaderboard percentile of 74.4% across 24 tasks, improving over the strongest AI agent by +8.33%. On GPT training optimization, AutoScientists reaches a target validation bits-per-byte 1.9x faster than Autoresearch and continues discovering improvements from a starting champion where the single-agent approach finds none (7 vs. 0 accepted improvements). On ProteinGym fitness prediction, AutoScientists discovers a method for ACE2-Spike binding that improves over the current state-of-the-art model by +12.5% in Spearman correlation. Applied without modification across all 217 ProteinGym assays, the same method improves over the prior state of the art by +6.5% (Spearman correlation).

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly capable of carrying out long-running, real-world tasks. However, as the amount of context grows, their reliability often deteriorates, a phenomenon known as "context rot". Existing long-context benchmarks primarily focus on single-step settings that evaluate a model's ability to retrieve information from a long snippet. In realistic scenarios, however, LLMs often need to act as agents that explore environments, follow instructions and plans, extract useful information, and predict correct actions under a dynamically growing context. To assess language agents in such settings, we introduce LOCA-bench (a benchmark for LOng-Context Agents). Given a task prompt, LOCA-bench leverages automated and scalable control of environment states to regulate the agent's context length. This design enables LOCA-bench to extend the context length potentially to infinity in a controlled way while keeping the underlying task semantics fixed. LOCA-bench evaluates language agents as a combination of models and scaffolds, including various context management strategies. While agent performance generally degrades as the environment states grow more complex, advanced context management techniques can substantially improve the overall success rate. We open-source LOCA-bench to provide a platform for evaluating models and scaffolds in long-context, agentic scenarios: https://github.com/hkust-nlp/LOCA-bench

LLM-driven agentic applications increasingly automate complex, multi-step tasks, but serving them efficiently remains challenging due to heterogeneous components, dynamic and model-driven control flow, long-running state, and unpredictable latencies. Nalar is a ground-up agent-serving framework that cleanly separates workflow specification from execution while providing the runtime visibility and control needed for robust performance. Nalar preserves full Python expressiveness, using lightweight auto-generated stubs that turn agent and tool invocations into futures carrying dependency and context metadata. A managed state layer decouples logical state from physical placement, enabling safe reuse, migration, and consistent retry behavior. A two-level control architecture combines global policy computation with local event-driven enforcement to support adaptive routing, scheduling, and resource management across evolving workflows. Together, these mechanisms allow Nalar to deliver scalable, efficient, and policy-driven serving of heterogeneous agentic applications without burdening developers with orchestration logic. Across three agentic workloads, Nalar cuts tail latency by 34--74\%, achieves up to 2.9times speedups, sustains 80 RPS where baselines fail, and scales to 130K futures with sub-500 ms control overhead.

Scientific and engineering progress is fundamentally a long-horizon iterative process: proposing changes, running experiments, measuring outcomes, and continuously refining artifacts. Yet existing benchmarks for frontier models primarily evaluate either single-turn responses or short-horizon agent trajectories, failing to capture the challenges of sustained iterative improvement over extended time horizons. To address this gap, we introduce AutoLab, a new benchmark for ultra long-horizon closed-loop optimization. AutoLab consists of 36 realistic, expert-curated tasks spanning four diverse domains: system optimization, puzzle & challenge, model development, and CUDA kernel optimization. Each task begins with a correct but deliberately suboptimal baseline and challenges agents to improve it within a strict wall-clock budget. Evaluating 17 state-of-the-art models reveals the dominant predictor of success is not the quality of an agent's initial attempt, but its persistence in repeatedly benchmarking, editing, and incorporating empirical feedback. While claude-opus-4.6 exhibits strong long-horizon optimization capabilities, most frontier models, including several proprietary ones, either terminate prematurely or exhaust their budgets with minimal progress. These results underscore the importance of time awareness and persistent iteration in autonomous agents. We open-source the full benchmark, evaluation harness, and task artifacts, to accelerate research toward truly capable long-horizon agents.

Discontinuing ad creatives at an appropriate time is one of the most important ad operations that can have a significant impact on sales. Such operational support for ineffective ads has been less explored than that for effective ads. After pre-analyzing 1,000,000 real-world ad creatives, we found that there are two types of discontinuation: short-term (i.e., cut-out) and long-term (i.e., wear-out). In this paper, we propose a practical prediction framework for the discontinuation of ad creatives with a hazard function-based loss function inspired by survival analysis. Our framework predicts the discontinuations with a multi-modal deep neural network that takes as input the ad creative (e.g., text, categorical, image, numerical features). To improve the prediction performance for the two different types of discontinuations and for the ad creatives that contribute to sales, we introduce two new techniques: (1) a two-term estimation technique with multi-task learning and (2) a click-through rate-weighting technique for the loss function. We evaluated our framework using the large-scale ad creative dataset, including 10 billion scale impressions. In terms of the concordance index (short: 0.896, long: 0.939, and overall: 0.792), our framework achieved significantly better performance than the conventional method (0.531). Additionally, we confirmed that our framework (i) demonstrated the same degree of discontinuation effect as manual operations for short-term cases, and (ii) accurately predicted the ad discontinuation order, which is important for long-running ad creatives for long-term cases.

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed in long running workflows, where they must preserve user and task state across many turns. Many existing agent memory systems behave like external databases with ad hoc read/write rules, which can yield unstable retention, limited consolidation, and vulnerability to distractor content. We present CraniMem, a neurocognitively motivated, gated and bounded multi-stage memory design for agentic systems. CraniMem couples goal conditioned gating and utility tagging with a bounded episodic buffer for near term continuity and a structured long-term knowledge graph for durable semantic recall. A scheduled consolidation loop replays high utility traces into the graph while pruning low utility items, keeping memory growth in check and reducing interference. On long horizon benchmarks evaluated under both clean inputs and injected noise, CraniMem is more robust than a Vanilla RAG and Mem0 baseline and exhibits smaller performance drops under distraction. Our code is available at https://github.com/PearlMody05/Cranimem and the accompanying PyPI package at https://pypi.org/project/cranimem.

Real-world data analysis is inherently iterative, yet existing benchmarks mostly evaluate isolated or short interactive tasks, leaving agents' ability to track evolving analytical context over long horizons untested. We introduce LongDS, a benchmark for long-horizon, multi-turn data analysis where agents must maintain, update, restore, and compose evolving analytical states. LongDS comprises 68 tasks constructed from real-world Kaggle notebooks, spanning 2,225 turns across six domains including Geoscience, Business, and Education. Tasks are designed around state-evolution patterns (e.g., counterfactual perturbation, rollback, multi-state composition), with an average dependency span of 11.3 turns. Evaluating five state-of-the-art models, we find that the best model reaches only 48.45% average accuracy, performance drops nearly 47 points from early to late turns, and long-horizon errors account for 52%--69% of failures. Further analysis shows that additional agent steps do not necessarily improve performance, suggesting that the key bottleneck is maintaining a correct analytical state rather than increasing interaction budget. We release LongDS to support research on reliable long-horizon agentic data analysis. Code and data will be released at https://github.com/zjunlp/DataMind.

Improvements in language models' capabilities have pushed their applications towards longer contexts, making long-context evaluation and development an active research area. However, many disparate use-cases are grouped together under the umbrella term of "long-context", defined simply by the total length of the model's input, including - for example - Needle-in-a-Haystack tasks, book summarization, and information aggregation. Given their varied difficulty, in this position paper we argue that conflating different tasks by their context length is unproductive. As a community, we require a more precise vocabulary to understand what makes long-context tasks similar or different. We propose to unpack the taxonomy of long-context based on the properties that make them more difficult with longer contexts. We propose two orthogonal axes of difficulty: (I) Diffusion: How hard is it to find the necessary information in the context? (II) Scope: How much necessary information is there to find? We survey the literature on long-context, provide justification for this taxonomy as an informative descriptor, and situate the literature with respect to it. We conclude that the most difficult and interesting settings, whose necessary information is very long and highly diffused within the input, is severely under-explored. By using a descriptive vocabulary and discussing the relevant properties of difficulty in long-context, we can implement more informed research in this area. We call for a careful design of tasks and benchmarks with distinctly long context, taking into account the characteristics that make it qualitatively different from shorter context.

Continual learning, especially class-incremental learning (CIL), on the basis of a pre-trained model (PTM) has garnered substantial research interest in recent years. However, how to effectively learn both discriminative and comprehensive feature representations while maintaining stability and plasticity over very long task sequences remains an open problem. We propose CaRE, a scalable {C}ontinual Le{a}rner with efficient Bi-Level {R}outing Mixture-of-{E}xperts (BR-MoE). The core idea of BR-MoE is a bi-level routing mechanism: a router selection stage that dynamically activates relevant task-specific routers, followed by an expert routing phase that dynamically activates and aggregates experts, aiming to inject discriminative and comprehensive representations into every intermediate network layer. On the other hand, we introduce a challenging dataset, OmniBenchmark-1K, for CIL performance evaluation on very long task sequences with hundreds of tasks. Extensive experiments show that CaRE demonstrates leading performance across a variety of datasets and task settings, including commonly used CIL datasets with classical CIL settings (e.g., 5-20 tasks). To the best of our knowledge, CaRE is the first continual learner that scales to very long task sequences (ranging from 100 to over 300 non-overlapping tasks), while outperforming all baselines by a large margin on such task sequences. We hope that this work will inspire further research into continual learning over extremely long task sequences. Code and dataset are publicly released at https://github.com/LMMMEng/CaRE.

Existing benchmarks for evaluating long-context language models (LCLMs) primarily focus on long-context recall, requiring models to produce short responses based on a few critical snippets while processing thousands of irrelevant tokens. We introduce LongProc (Long Procedural Generation), a new benchmark that requires both the integration of highly dispersed information and long-form generation. LongProc consists of six diverse procedural generation tasks, such as extracting structured information from HTML pages into a TSV format and executing complex search procedures to create travel plans. These tasks challenge LCLMs by testing their ability to follow detailed procedural instructions, synthesize and reason over dispersed information, and generate structured, long-form outputs (up to 8K tokens). Furthermore, as these tasks adhere to deterministic procedures and yield structured outputs, they enable reliable rule-based evaluation. We evaluate 17 LCLMs on LongProc across three difficulty levels, with maximum numbers of output tokens set at 500, 2K, and 8K. Notably, while all tested models claim a context window size above 32K tokens, open-weight models typically falter on 2K-token tasks, and closed-source models like GPT-4o show significant degradation on 8K-token tasks. Further analysis reveals that LCLMs struggle to maintain long-range coherence in long-form generations. These findings highlight critical limitations in current LCLMs and suggest substantial room for improvement. Data and code available at: https://princeton-pli.github.io/LongProc

AI agents are increasingly expected to complete long-horizon workflows that require sustained progress over hours, millions of tokens, and complex environments. Yet current agent benchmarks largely evaluate short-form tasks, such as single pull requests, small tickets, or 5-10 minute exercises, limiting our ability to measure agents' capabilities in planning, long-context understanding, and memory use. We introduce SWE-Marathon, a benchmark of 20 long-horizon tasks spanning software engineering and adjacent technical domains. Each task consists of a unique executable environment, a human-written reference solution, and a multi-layer verification suite. Logged agent attempts average 27.2M total tokens, making SWE-Marathon substantially longer-horizon than existing SWE and command-line agent benchmarks. Current frontier coding agents solve fewer than 30% of tasks. Failures often arise from poor self-verification, self-reported infeasibility, and premature termination. We also observe reward-hacking behavior in 13.8% of rollouts, where agents attempt to exploit the environment or verifier to bypass the intended workflow. SWE-Marathon includes adversarial review of test suites and execution environments, as well as multi-layer checks designed to prevent shortcut solutions. We release SWE-Marathon, evaluation code, and agent trajectories at https://swe-marathon.org/.

Standard artificial neural networks suffer from the well-known issue of catastrophic forgetting, making continual or lifelong learning difficult for machine learning. In recent years, numerous methods have been proposed for continual learning, but due to differences in evaluation protocols it is difficult to directly compare their performance. To enable more structured comparisons, we describe three continual learning scenarios based on whether at test time task identity is provided and--in case it is not--whether it must be inferred. Any sequence of well-defined tasks can be performed according to each scenario. Using the split and permuted MNIST task protocols, for each scenario we carry out an extensive comparison of recently proposed continual learning methods. We demonstrate substantial differences between the three scenarios in terms of difficulty and in terms of how efficient different methods are. In particular, when task identity must be inferred (i.e., class incremental learning), we find that regularization-based approaches (e.g., elastic weight consolidation) fail and that replaying representations of previous experiences seems required for solving this scenario.

Long-range tasks require reasoning over long inputs. Existing solutions either need large compute budgets, training data, access to model weights, or use complex, task-specific approaches. We present PRISM, which alleviates these concerns by processing information as a stream of chunks, maintaining a structured in-context memory specified by a typed hierarchy schema. This approach demonstrates superior performance to baselines on diverse tasks while using at least 4x smaller contexts than long-context models. Moreover, PRISM is token-efficient. By producing short outputs and efficiently leveraging key-value (KV) caches, it achieves up to 54% cost reduction when compared to alternative short-context approaches. The method also scales down to tiny information chunks (e.g., 500 tokens) without increasing the number of tokens encoded or sacrificing quality. Furthermore, we show that it is possible to generate schemas to generalize our approach to new tasks with minimal effort.

As LLM agents tackle increasingly complex tasks, a critical question is whether they can maintain strategic coherence over long horizons: planning under uncertainty, learning from delayed feedback, and adapting when early mistakes compound. We introduce YC-Bench, a benchmark that evaluates these capabilities by tasking an agent with running a simulated startup over a one-year horizon spanning hundreds of turns. The agent must manage employees, select task contracts, and maintain profitability in a partially observable environment where adversarial clients and growing payroll create compounding consequences for poor decisions. We evaluate 12 models, both proprietary and open source, across 3 seeds each. Only three models consistently surpass the starting capital of \200K, with Claude Opus 4.6 achieving the highest average final funds at 1.27 M, followed by GLM-5 at \1.21 M at 11\times lower inference cost. Scratchpad usage, the sole mechanism for persisting information across context truncation, is the strongest predictor of success, and adversarial client detection is the primary failure mode, accounting for 47\% of bankruptcies. Our analysis reveals that frontier models still fail through distinct failure modes such as over-parallelization, demonstrating the capability gaps for long-horizon performance. YC-Bench$ is open-source, reproducible, and configurable.

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.}

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.

A long-standing challenge in AI is to develop agents capable of solving a wide range of physical tasks and generalizing to new, unseen tasks and environments. A popular recent approach involves training a world model from state-action trajectories and subsequently use it with a planning algorithm to solve new tasks. Planning is commonly performed in the input space, but a recent family of methods has introduced planning algorithms that optimize in the learned representation space of the world model, with the promise that abstracting irrelevant details yields more efficient planning. In this work, we characterize models from this family as JEPA-WMs and investigate the technical choices that make algorithms from this class work. We propose a comprehensive study of several key components with the objective of finding the optimal approach within the family. We conducted experiments using both simulated environments and real-world robotic data, and studied how the model architecture, the training objective, and the planning algorithm affect planning success. We combine our findings to propose a model that outperforms two established baselines, DINO-WM and V-JEPA-2-AC, in both navigation and manipulation tasks. Code, data and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/jepa-wms.

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

Long-context language models (LCLM), characterized by their extensive context window, is becoming increasingly popular. Meanwhile, many long-context benchmarks present challenging tasks that even the most advanced LCLMs struggle to complete. However, the underlying sources of various challenging long-context tasks have seldom been studied. To bridge this gap, we conduct experiments to indicate their difficulty stems primarily from two basic issues: "multi-matching retrieval," which requires the simultaneous retrieval of multiple items, and "logic-based retrieval," which necessitates logical judgment within retrieval criteria. These two problems, while seemingly straightforward, actually exceed the capabilities of LCLMs because they are proven to be hyper-multi-step (demanding numerous steps to solve) in nature. This finding could explain why LLMs struggle with more advanced long-context tasks, providing a more accurate perspective for rethinking solutions for them.

Efficient task scheduling is paramount in the Linux kernel, where the Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS) meticulously manages CPU resources to balance high utilization with interactive responsiveness. This research pioneers the use of deep learning techniques to predict the sequence of tasks selected by CFS, aiming to evaluate the feasibility of a more generalized and potentially more adaptive task scheduler for diverse workloads. Our core contributions are twofold: first, the systematic generation and curation of a novel scheduling dataset from a running Linux kernel, capturing real-world CFS behavior; and second, the development, training, and evaluation of a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network designed to accurately forecast the next task to be scheduled. This paper further discusses the practical pathways and implications of integrating such a predictive model into the kernel's scheduling framework. The findings and methodologies presented herein open avenues for data-driven advancements in kernel scheduling, with the full source code provided for reproducibility and further exploration.

Recent studies have delved into constructing autonomous agents capable of performing complex Graphical User Interface (GUI)-based computer tasks, with the potential to revolutionize human-computer interaction. Despite encouraging results, existing efforts mainly focus on short-term interactions and rely on outcome-only verification, thereby limiting their scalability in real-world GUI applications that demand long-horizon task decomposition and execution. In this work, we introduce VeriGUI, a novel verifiable long-chain GUI dataset designed to facilitate the development and evaluation of generalist GUI agents operating in realistic computer environments. Our dataset emphasizes two critical dimensions: (1) long-chain complexity, with tasks decomposed into a sequence of interdependent subtasks spanning hundreds of steps, explicitly designed to allow any subtask to serve as a valid starting point; and (2) subtask-level verifiability, which enables diverse exploration strategies within each subtask, while ensuring that each subtask-level goal remains verifiable and consistent. The dataset consists of GUI task trajectories across both desktop and web, annotated by human experts. Extensive experiments on VeriGUI using various agents with different foundation models reveal significant performance gaps in handling long-horizon tasks, highlighting the need for more robust planning and decision-making capabilities in GUI agents.

Processing and reasoning over long contexts is crucial for many practical applications of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as document comprehension and agent construction. Despite recent strides in making LLMs process contexts with more than 100K tokens, there is currently a lack of a standardized benchmark to evaluate this long-context capability. Existing public benchmarks typically focus on contexts around 10K tokens, limiting the assessment and comparison of LLMs in processing longer contexts. In this paper, we propose inftyBench, the first LLM benchmark featuring an average data length surpassing 100K tokens. inftyBench comprises synthetic and realistic tasks spanning diverse domains, presented in both English and Chinese. The tasks in inftyBench are designed to require well understanding of long dependencies in contexts, and make simply retrieving a limited number of passages from contexts not sufficient for these tasks. In our experiments, based on inftyBench, we evaluate the state-of-the-art proprietary and open-source LLMs tailored for processing long contexts. The results indicate that existing long context LLMs still require significant advancements to effectively process 100K+ context. We further present three intriguing analyses regarding the behavior of LLMs processing long context.

Real-world long-horizon embodied planning underpins embodied AI. To accomplish long-horizon tasks, agents need to decompose abstract instructions into detailed steps. Prior works mostly rely on GPT-4V for task decomposition into predefined actions, which limits task diversity due to GPT-4V's finite understanding of larger skillsets. Therefore, we present ReLEP, a groundbreaking framework for Real world Long-horizon Embodied Planning, which can accomplish a wide range of daily tasks. At its core lies a fine-tuned large vision language model that formulates plans as sequences of skill functions according to input instruction and scene image. These functions are selected from a carefully designed skill library. ReLEP is also equipped with a Memory module for plan and status recall, and a Robot Configuration module for versatility across robot types. In addition, we propose a semi-automatic data generation pipeline to tackle dataset scarcity. Real-world off-line experiments across eight daily embodied tasks demonstrate that ReLEP is able to accomplish long-horizon embodied tasks and outperforms other state-of-the-art baseline methods.

Although large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive performance for many language tasks, most of them can only handle texts a few thousand tokens long, limiting their applications on longer sequence inputs, such as books, reports, and codebases. Recent works have proposed methods to improve LLMs' long context capabilities by extending context windows and more sophisticated memory mechanisms. However, comprehensive benchmarks tailored for evaluating long context understanding are lacking. In this paper, we introduce LongBench, the first bilingual, multi-task benchmark for long context understanding, enabling a more rigorous evaluation of long context understanding. LongBench comprises 21 datasets across 6 task categories in both English and Chinese, with an average length of 6,711 words (English) and 13,386 characters (Chinese). These tasks cover key long-text application areas including single-doc QA, multi-doc QA, summarization, few-shot learning, synthetic tasks, and code completion. All datasets in LongBench are standardized into a unified format, allowing for effortless automatic evaluation of LLMs. Upon comprehensive evaluation of 8 LLMs on LongBench, we find that: (1) Commercial model (GPT-3.5-Turbo-16k) outperforms other open-sourced models, but still struggles on longer contexts. (2) Scaled position embedding and fine-tuning on longer sequences lead to substantial improvement on long context understanding. (3) Context compression technique such as retrieval brings improvement for model with weak ability on long contexts, but the performance still lags behind models that have strong long context understanding capability. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/THUDM/LongBench.

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents are increasingly deployed for complex, tool-based tasks where long-term memory is critical to driving actions. Existing benchmarks, however, primarily test a angent's ability to passively retrieve isolated facts in response to explicit questions. They fail to evaluate the more crucial capability of actively applying memory to execute tasks. To address this gap, we introduce Mem2ActBench, a benchmark for evaluating whether agents can proactively leverage long-term memory to execute tool-based actions by selecting appropriate tools and grounding their parameters. The benchmark simulates persistent assistant usage, where users mention the same topic across long, interrupted interactions and expect previously established preferences and task states to be implicitly applied. We build the dataset with an automated pipeline that merges heterogeneous sources (ToolACE, BFCL, Oasst1), resolves conflicts via consistency modeling, and synthesizes 2,029 sessions with 12 user--assistant--tool turns on average. From these memory chains, a reverse-generation method produces 400 tool-use tasks, with human evaluation confirming 91.3\% are strongly memory-dependent. Experiments on seven memory frameworks show that current systems remain inadequate at actively utilizing memory for parameter grounding, highlighting the need for more effective approaches to evaluate and improve memory application in task execution.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to advance in understanding and generating long sequences, new safety concerns have been introduced through the long context. However, the safety of LLMs in long-context tasks remains under-explored, leaving a significant gap in both evaluation and improvement of their safety. To address this, we introduce LongSafety, the first comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to evaluate LLM safety in open-ended long-context tasks. LongSafety encompasses 7 categories of safety issues and 6 user-oriented long-context tasks, with a total of 1,543 test cases, averaging 5,424 words per context. Our evaluation towards 16 representative LLMs reveals significant safety vulnerabilities, with most models achieving safety rates below 55%. Our findings also indicate that strong safety performance in short-context scenarios does not necessarily correlate with safety in long-context tasks, emphasizing the unique challenges and urgency of improving long-context safety. Moreover, through extensive analysis, we identify challenging safety issues and task types for long-context models. Furthermore, we find that relevant context and extended input sequences can exacerbate safety risks in long-context scenarios, highlighting the critical need for ongoing attention to long-context safety challenges. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/thu-coai/LongSafety.

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/.

The recent advancement of autonomous agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) has demonstrated significant potential for automating tasks on mobile devices through graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Despite initial progress, these agents still face challenges when handling complex real-world tasks. These challenges arise from a lack of knowledge about real-life mobile applications in LLM-based agents, which may lead to ineffective task planning and even cause hallucinations. To address these challenges, we propose a novel LLM-based agent framework called MapAgent that leverages memory constructed from historical trajectories to augment current task planning. Specifically, we first propose a trajectory-based memory mechanism that transforms task execution trajectories into a reusable and structured page-memory database. Each page within a trajectory is extracted as a compact yet comprehensive snapshot, capturing both its UI layout and functional context. Secondly, we introduce a coarse-to-fine task planning approach that retrieves relevant pages from the memory database based on similarity and injects them into the LLM planner to compensate for potential deficiencies in understanding real-world app scenarios, thereby achieving more informed and context-aware task planning. Finally, planned tasks are transformed into executable actions through a task executor supported by a dual-LLM architecture, ensuring effective tracking of task progress. Experimental results in real-world scenarios demonstrate that MapAgent achieves superior performance to existing methods. The code will be open-sourced to support further research.

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

Existing computer-use benchmarks fail to capture the realism, complexity, and long-horizon demands of real-world computer use, limiting their ability to reveal the limitations of frontier agents. We introduce OSWorld 2.0, a benchmark of 108 long-horizon computer-use workflows across everyday and professional tasks, designed to capture complex and challenging real-world phenomena. Each task represents a realistic end-to-end workflow that takes human users a median of about 1.6 hours to complete and requires an average of 318 tool calls with Claude Opus 4.7 using maximum thinking, compared with about 30 in OSWorld 1.0. OSWorld 2.0 targets challenge phenomena that are common in real workflows yet underrepresented in prior benchmarks, spanning interaction-design challenges such as streaming interaction and dynamic environments, as well as agent-pattern challenges such as cross-source reasoning, implicit-state inference, and visual-spatial precision. Tasks are grounded in authentic input artifacts and cross-referenced against realistic stateful user profile data, and include separate safety reports auditing safety-sensitive execution. Under our primary binary-completion metric at 500 steps, Claude Opus 4.8 with maximum thinking and batched tool calls scores best but still completes only 20.6% of tasks at a 54.8% partial score; GPT-5.5 is far more token-efficient yet plateaus near 13%. These results show that current agents are still far from professional-level computer use: rather than stumbling on basic GUI control or coding, they lose track of constraints, miss information that arrives mid-task, guess rather than ask the user, and skip verification, struggling most when a task hinges on hidden state they must recover.

This paper introduces ExpertLongBench, an expert-level benchmark containing 11 tasks from 9 domains that reflect realistic expert workflows and applications. Beyond question answering, the application-driven tasks in ExpertLongBench demand long-form outputs that can exceed 5,000 tokens and strict adherence to domain-specific requirements. Notably, each task in ExpertLongBench includes a rubric, designed or validated by domain experts, to specify task requirements and guide output evaluation. Furthermore, we propose CLEAR, an evaluation framework that supports accurate evaluation of long-form model outputs in our benchmark. To achieve fine-grained, expert-aligned evaluation, CLEAR derives checklists from both model outputs and references by extracting information corresponding to items in the task-specific rubric. Checklist items for model outputs are then compared with corresponding items for reference outputs to assess their correctness, enabling grounded evaluation. We benchmark 11 large language models (LLMs) and analyze components in CLEAR, showing that (1) existing LLMs, with the top performer achieving only a 26.8% F1 score, require significant improvement for expert-level tasks; (2) models can generate content corresponding to the required aspects, though often not accurately; and (3) accurate checklist extraction and comparison in CLEAR can be achieved by open-weight models for more scalable and low-cost usage.

Multi-task optimization is a powerful approach for solving a large number of tasks in parallel. However, existing algorithms face distinct limitations: Population-based methods scale poorly and remain underexplored for large task sets. Approaches that do scale beyond a thousand tasks are mostly MAP-Elites variants and rely on a fixed, discretized archive that disregards the topology of the task space. We introduce MONET (Multi-Task Optimization over Networks of Tasks), a multi-task optimization algorithm that models the task space as a graph: tasks are nodes, and edges connect tasks in the task parameter space. This representation enables knowledge transfer between tasks and remains tractable for high-dimensional problems while exploiting the topology of the task space. MONET combines social learning, which generates candidates from neighboring nodes via crossover, with individual learning, which refines a node's own solution independently via mutation. We evaluate MONET on four domains (archery, arm, and cartpole with 5,000 tasks each; hexapod with 2,000 tasks) and show that it matches or exceeds the performance of existing MAP-Elites-based baselines across all four domains.

Workforce transformation across diverse industries has driven an increased demand for specialized natural language processing capabilities. Nevertheless, tasks derived from work-related contexts inherently reflect real-world complexities, characterized by long-tailed distributions, extreme multi-label target spaces, and scarce data availability. The rise of generalist embedding models prompts the question of their performance in the work domain, especially as progress in the field has focused mainly on individual tasks. To this end, we introduce WorkBench, the first unified evaluation suite spanning six work-related tasks formulated explicitly as ranking problems, establishing a common ground for multi-task progress. Based on this benchmark, we find significant positive cross-task transfer, and use this insight to compose task-specific bipartite graphs from real-world data, synthetically enriched through grounding. This leads to Unified Work Embeddings (UWE), a task-agnostic bi-encoder that exploits our training-data structure with a many-to-many InfoNCE objective, and leverages token-level embeddings with task-agnostic soft late interaction. UWE demonstrates zero-shot ranking performance on unseen target spaces in the work domain, enables low-latency inference by caching the task target space embeddings, and shows significant gains in macro-averaged MAP and RP@10 over generalist embedding models.

Instructing a robot to complete an everyday task within our homes has been a long-standing challenge for robotics. While recent progress in language-conditioned imitation learning and offline reinforcement learning has demonstrated impressive performance across a wide range of tasks, they are typically limited to short-horizon tasks -- not reflective of those a home robot would be expected to complete. While existing architectures have the potential to learn these desired behaviours, the lack of the necessary long-horizon, multi-step datasets for real robotic systems poses a significant challenge. To this end, we present the Long-Horizon Manipulation (LHManip) dataset comprising 200 episodes, demonstrating 20 different manipulation tasks via real robot teleoperation. The tasks entail multiple sub-tasks, including grasping, pushing, stacking and throwing objects in highly cluttered environments. Each task is paired with a natural language instruction and multi-camera viewpoints for point-cloud or NeRF reconstruction. In total, the dataset comprises 176,278 observation-action pairs which form part of the Open X-Embodiment dataset. The full LHManip dataset is made publicly available at https://github.com/fedeceola/LHManip.

The learning and deployment of long-LLMs remains a challenging problem despite recent progresses. In this work, we argue that the long-LLMs are not a necessity to solve long-context tasks, as common long-context tasks are short-context solvable, i.e. they can be solved by purely working with oracle short-contexts within the long-context tasks' inputs. On top of this argument, we propose a framework called LC-Boost (Long-Context Bootstrapper), which enables a short-LLM to address the long-context tasks in a bootstrapping manner. In our framework, the short-LLM prompts itself to reason for two critical decisions: 1) how to access to the appropriate part of context within the input, 2) how to make effective use of the accessed context. By adaptively accessing and utilizing the context based on the presented tasks, LC-Boost can serve as a general framework to handle diversified long-context processing problems. We comprehensively evaluate different types of tasks from popular long-context benchmarks, where LC-Boost is able to achieve a substantially improved performance with a much smaller consumption of resource.

Computer-use agents hold the promise of assisting in a wide range of digital economic activities. However, current research has largely focused on short-horizon tasks over a limited set of software with limited economic value, such as basic e-commerce and OS-configuration tasks. A key reason is that creating environments for complex software requires significant time and human effort, and therefore does not scale. To address this, we introduce Gym-Anything, a framework for converting any software into an interactive computer-use environment. We frame environment creation itself as a multi-agent task: a coding agent writes setup scripts, downloads real-world data, and configures the software, while producing evidence of correct setup. An independent audit agent then verifies evidence for the environment setup against a quality checklist. Using a taxonomy of economically valuable occupations grounded in U.S. GDP data, we apply this pipeline to 200 software applications with broad occupational coverage. The result is CUA-World, a collection of over 10K long-horizon tasks spanning domains from medical science and astronomy to engineering and enterprise systems, each configured with realistic data along with train and test splits. CUA-World also includes CUA-World-Long, a challenging long-horizon benchmark with tasks often requiring over 500 steps, far exceeding existing benchmarks. Distilling successful trajectories from the training split into a 2B vision-language model outperforms models 2times its size. We also apply the same auditing principle at test time: a separate VLM reviews completed trajectories and provides feedback on what remains, improving Gemini-3-Flash on CUA-World-Long from 11.5% to 14.0%. We release all code, infrastructure, and benchmark data to facilitate future research in realistic computer-use agents.

Realistic long-horizon productivity work is strongly conditioned on user-specific computer environments, where much of the work context is stored and organized through directory structures and content-rich artifacts. To scale synthetic data creation for such productivity scenarios, we introduce Synthetic Computers at Scale, a scalable methodology for creating such environments with realistic folder hierarchies and content-rich artifacts (e.g., documents, spreadsheets, and presentations). Conditioned on each synthetic computer, we run long-horizon simulations: one agent creates productivity objectives that are specific to the computer's user and require multiple professional deliverables and about a month of human work; another agent then acts as that user and keeps working across the computer -- for example, navigating the filesystem for grounding, coordinating with simulated collaborators, and producing professional artifacts -- until these objectives are completed. In preliminary experiments, we create 1,000 synthetic computers and run long-horizon simulations on them; each run requires over 8 hours of agent runtime and spans more than 2,000 turns on average. These simulations produce rich experiential learning signals, whose effectiveness is validated by significant improvements in agent performance on both in-domain and out-of-domain productivity evaluations. Given that personas are abundant at billion scale, this methodology can in principle scale to millions or even billions of synthetic user worlds with sufficient compute, enabling broader coverage of diverse professions, roles, contexts, environments, and productivity needs. We argue that scalable synthetic computer creation, together with at-scale simulations, is highly promising as a foundational substrate for agent self-improvement and agentic reinforcement learning in long-horizon productivity scenarios.

Graphical user interface (GUI) agents can substantially improve productivity by automating frequently executed long-latency tasks on mobile devices. However, existing evaluation benchmarks are still constrained to limited applications, simple tasks, and coarse-grained metrics. To address this, we introduce AndroidLens, a challenging evaluation framework for mobile GUI agents, comprising 571 long-latency tasks in both Chinese and English environments, each requiring an average of more than 26 steps to complete. The framework features: (1) tasks derived from real-world user scenarios across 38 domains, covering complex types such as multi-constraint, multi-goal, and domain-specific tasks; (2) static evaluation that preserves real-world anomalies and allows multiple valid paths to reduce bias; and (3) dynamic evaluation that employs a milestone-based scheme for fine-grained progress measurement via Average Task Progress (ATP). Our evaluation indicates that even the best models reach only a 12.7% task success rate and 50.47% ATP. We also underscore key challenges in real-world environments, including environmental anomalies, adaptive exploration, and long-term memory retention.

Long-context large language models (LC LLMs) promise to increase reliability of LLMs in real-world tasks requiring processing and understanding of long input documents. However, this ability of LC LLMs to reliably utilize their growing context windows remains under investigation. In this work, we evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art GPT-4 suite of LC LLMs in solving a series of progressively challenging tasks, as a function of factors such as context length, task difficulty, and position of key information by creating a real world financial news dataset. Our findings indicate that LC LLMs exhibit brittleness at longer context lengths even for simple tasks, with performance deteriorating sharply as task complexity increases. At longer context lengths, these state-of-the-art models experience catastrophic failures in instruction following resulting in degenerate outputs. Our prompt ablations also reveal unfortunate continued sensitivity to both the placement of the task instruction in the context window as well as minor markdown formatting. Finally, we advocate for more rigorous evaluation of LC LLMs by employing holistic metrics such as F1 (rather than recall) and reporting confidence intervals, thereby ensuring robust and conclusive findings.

We introduce LongSkywork, a long-context Large Language Model (LLM) capable of processing up to 200,000 tokens. We provide a training recipe for efficiently extending context length of LLMs. We identify that the critical element in enhancing long-context processing capability is to incorporate a long-context SFT stage following the standard SFT stage. A mere 200 iterations can convert the standard SFT model into a long-context model. To reduce the effort in collecting and annotating data for long-context language modeling, we develop two novel methods for creating synthetic data. These methods are applied during the continual pretraining phase as well as the Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) phase, greatly enhancing the training efficiency of our long-context LLMs. Our findings suggest that synthetic long-context SFT data can surpass the performance of data curated by humans to some extent. LongSkywork achieves outstanding performance on a variety of long-context benchmarks. In the Needle test, a benchmark for long-context information retrieval, our models achieved perfect accuracy across multiple context spans. Moreover, in realistic application scenarios, LongSkywork-13B demonstrates performance on par with Claude2.1, the leading long-context model, underscoring the effectiveness of our proposed methods.

Generating long, informative, and factual outputs remains a major challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing benchmarks for long-form generation typically assess real-world queries with hard-to-verify metrics or use synthetic setups that ease evaluation but overlook real-world intricacies. In this paper, we introduce LongWeave, which balances real-world and verifiable assessment with Constraint-Verifier Evaluation (CoV-Eval). CoV-Eval constructs tasks by first defining verifiable targets within real-world scenarios, then systematically generating corresponding queries, textual materials, and constraints based on these targets. This ensures that tasks are both realistic and objectively assessable, enabling rigorous assessment of model capabilities in meeting complex real-world constraints. LongWeave supports customizable input/output lengths (up to 64K/8K tokens) across seven distinct tasks. Evaluation on 23 LLMs shows that even state-of-the-art models encounter significant challenges in long-form generation as real-world complexity and output length increase.

AI agents have become increasingly capable at isolated software engineering (SWE) tasks such as resolving issues on Github. Yet long-horizon tasks involving multiple interdependent subtasks still pose challenges both with respect to accuracy, and with respect to timely completion. A natural approach to solving these long-horizon tasks in a timely manner is asynchronous multi-agent collaboration, where multiple agents work on different parts of the task at the same time. But effective application of multi-agent systems has proven surprisingly difficult: concurrent edits by multiple agents interfere with each other, dependencies are difficult to synchronize, and combining partial progress into a coherent whole is challenging. On the other hand, human developers have long relied on mature collaboration infrastructure to manage these challenges in large software projects. Inspired by these collaboration primitives, we introduce Centralized Asynchronous Isolated Delegation (CAID), a structured multi-agent coordination paradigm grounded in three core SWE primitives: centralized task delegation, asynchronous execution, and isolated workspaces. CAID constructs dependency-aware task plans through a central manager, executes subtasks concurrently in isolated workspaces, and consolidates progress via structured integration with executable test-based verification. In empirical evaluation, we find that CAID improves accuracy over single-agent baselines by 26.7% absolute on paper reproduction tasks (PaperBench) and 14.3% on Python library development tasks (Commit0). Through systematic analysis, we find that branch-and-merge is a central coordination mechanism for multi-agent collaboration, and that SWE primitives such as git worktree, git commit, and git merge enable it to be realized in a reliable and executable manner.

Experts in various fields routinely perform methodical writing tasks to plan, organize, and report their work. From a clinician writing a differential diagnosis for a patient, to a teacher writing a lesson plan for students, these tasks are pervasive, requiring to methodically generate structured long-form output for a given input. We develop a typology of methodical tasks structured in the form of a task objective, procedure, input, and output, and introduce DoLoMiTes, a novel benchmark with specifications for 519 such tasks elicited from hundreds of experts from across 25 fields. Our benchmark further contains specific instantiations of methodical tasks with concrete input and output examples (1,857 in total) which we obtain by collecting expert revisions of up to 10 model-generated examples of each task. We use these examples to evaluate contemporary language models highlighting that automating methodical tasks is a challenging long-form generation problem, as it requires performing complex inferences, while drawing upon the given context as well as domain knowledge.

Task incremental learning aims to enable a system to maintain its performance on previously learned tasks while learning new tasks, solving the problem of catastrophic forgetting. One promising approach is to build an individual network or sub-network for future tasks. However, this leads to an ever-growing memory due to saving extra weights for new tasks and how to address this issue has remained an open problem in task incremental learning. In this paper, we introduce a novel Neural Weight Search technique that designs a fixed search space where the optimal combinations of frozen weights can be searched to build new models for novel tasks in an end-to-end manner, resulting in scalable and controllable memory growth. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks, i.e., Split-CIFAR-100 and CUB-to-Sketches, show our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with respect to both average inference accuracy and total memory cost.

We introduce PhysicianBench, a benchmark for evaluating LLM agents on physician tasks grounded in real clinical setting within electronic health record (EHR) environments. Existing medical agent benchmarks primarily focus on static knowledge recall, single-step atomic actions, or action intent without verifiable execution against the environment. As a result, they fail to capture the long-horizon, composite workflows that characterize real clinical systems. PhysicianBench comprises 100 long-horizon tasks adapted from real consultation cases between primary care and subspecialty physicians, with each task independently reviewed by a separate panel of physicians. Tasks are instantiated in an EHR environment with real patient records and accessed through the same standard APIs used by commercial EHR vendors. Tasks span 21 specialties (e.g., cardiology, endocrinology, oncology, psychiatry) and diverse workflow types (e.g., diagnosis interpretation, medication prescribing, treatment planning), requiring an average of 27 tool calls per task. Solving each task requires retrieving data across encounters, reasoning over heterogeneous clinical information, executing consequential clinical actions, and producing clinical documentation. Each task is decomposed into structured checkpoints (670 in total across the benchmark) capturing distinct stages of completion graded by task-specific scripts with execution-grounded verification. Across 13 proprietary and open-source LLM agents, the best-performing model achieves only 46% success rate (pass@1), while open-source models reach at most 19%, revealing a substantial gap between current agent capabilities and the demands of real-world clinical workflows. PhysicianBench provides a realistic and execution-grounded benchmark for measuring progress toward autonomous clinical agents.

Open-ended algorithms aim to learn new, interesting behaviors forever. That requires a vast environment search space, but there are thus infinitely many possible tasks. Even after filtering for tasks the current agent can learn (i.e., learning progress), countless learnable yet uninteresting tasks remain (e.g., minor variations of previously learned tasks). An Achilles Heel of open-endedness research is the inability to quantify (and thus prioritize) tasks that are not just learnable, but also interesting (e.g., worthwhile and novel). We propose solving this problem by Open-endedness via Models of human Notions of Interestingness (OMNI). The insight is that we can utilize foundation models (FMs) as a model of interestingness (MoI), because they already internalize human concepts of interestingness from training on vast amounts of human-generated data, where humans naturally write about what they find interesting or boring. We show that FM-based MoIs improve open-ended learning by focusing on tasks that are both learnable and interesting, outperforming baselines based on uniform task sampling or learning progress alone. This approach has the potential to dramatically advance the ability to intelligently select which tasks to focus on next (i.e., auto-curricula), and could be seen as AI selecting its own next task to learn, facilitating self-improving AI and AI-Generating Algorithms. Project website at https://www.jennyzhangzt.com/omni/

Long context capability is a crucial competency for large language models (LLMs) as it mitigates the human struggle to digest long-form texts. This capability enables complex task-solving scenarios such as book summarization, code assistance, and many more tasks that are traditionally manpower-intensive. However, transformer-based LLMs face significant challenges with long context input due to the growing size of the KV cache and the intrinsic complexity of attending to extended inputs; where multiple schools of efficiency-driven approaches -- such as KV cache quantization, token dropping, prompt compression, linear-time sequence models, and hybrid architectures -- have been proposed to produce efficient yet long context-capable models. Despite these advancements, no existing work has comprehensively benchmarked these methods in a reasonably aligned environment. In this work, we fill this gap by providing a taxonomy of current methods and evaluating 10+ state-of-the-art approaches across seven categories of long context tasks. Our work reveals numerous previously unknown phenomena and offers insights -- as well as a friendly workbench -- for the future development of long context-capable LLMs. The source code will be available at https://github.com/henryzhongsc/longctx_bench

Periodic human activities with implicit workflows are common in manufacturing, sports, and daily life. While short-term periodic activities -- characterized by simple structures and high-contrast patterns -- have been widely studied, long-term periodic workflows with low-contrast patterns remain largely underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce the first benchmark comprising 580 multimodal human activity sequences featuring long-term periodic workflows. The benchmark supports three evaluation tasks aligned with real-world applications: unsupervised periodic workflow detection, task completion tracking, and procedural anomaly detection. We also propose a lightweight, training-free baseline for modeling diverse periodic workflow patterns. Experiments show that: (i) our benchmark presents significant challenges to both unsupervised periodic detection methods and zero-shot approaches based on powerful large language models (LLMs); (ii) our baseline outperforms competing methods by a substantial margin in all evaluation tasks; and (iii) in real-world applications, our baseline demonstrates deployment advantages on par with traditional supervised workflow detection approaches, eliminating the need for annotation and retraining. Our project page is https://sites.google.com/view/periodicworkflow.

Standard multi-task benchmarks are essential for developing pretraining models that can generalize to various downstream tasks. Existing benchmarks for natural language processing (NLP) usually focus only on understanding or generating short texts. However, long text modeling requires many distinct abilities in contrast to short texts, such as the modeling of long-range discourse and commonsense relations, and the coherence and controllability of generation. The lack of standardized benchmarks makes it difficult to assess these abilities of a model and fairly compare different models, especially Chinese models. Therefore, we propose a story-centric benchmark named LOT for evaluating Chinese long text modeling, which aggregates two understanding tasks and two generation tasks. We construct new datasets for these tasks based on human-written Chinese stories with hundreds of words. Furthermore, we release an encoder-decoder-based Chinese long text pretraining model named LongLM with up to 1 billion parameters. We pretrain LongLM on 120G Chinese novels with two generative tasks including text infilling and conditional continuation. Extensive experiments show that LongLM outperforms similar-sized pretraining models substantially on both the understanding and generation tasks in LOT.

Despite the potential of language model-based agents to solve real-world tasks such as web navigation, current methods still struggle with long-horizon tasks with complex action trajectories. In contrast, humans can flexibly solve complex tasks by learning reusable task workflows from past experiences and using them to guide future actions. To build agents that can similarly benefit from this process, we introduce Agent Workflow Memory (AWM), a method for inducing commonly reused routines, i.e., workflows, and selectively providing workflows to the agent to guide subsequent generations. AWM flexibly applies to both offline and online scenarios, where agents induce workflows from training examples beforehand or from test queries on the fly. We experiment on two major web navigation benchmarks -- Mind2Web and WebArena -- that collectively cover 1000+ tasks from 200+ domains across travel, shopping, and social media, among others. AWM substantially improves the baseline results by 24.6% and 51.1% relative success rate on Mind2Web and WebArena while reducing the number of steps taken to solve WebArena tasks successfully. Furthermore, online AWM robustly generalizes in cross-task, website, and domain evaluations, surpassing baselines from 8.9 to 14.0 absolute points as train-test task distribution gaps widen.

Despite improvements by length extrapolation, efficient attention and memory modules, handling infinitely long documents with linear complexity without performance degradation during extrapolation remains the ultimate challenge in long-text processing. We directly optimize for long-text tasks in an end-to-end fashion and introduce a novel agent workflow, MemAgent, which reads text in segments and updates the memory using an overwrite strategy. We extend the DAPO algorithm to facilitate training via independent-context multi-conversation generation. MemAgent has demonstrated superb long-context capabilities, being able to extrapolate from an 8K context trained on 32K text to a 3.5M QA task with performance loss < 5% and achieves 95%+ in 512K RULER test.

Recent advancements in long-context Large Language Models (LLMs) have primarily concentrated on processing extended input contexts, resulting in significant strides in long-context comprehension. However, the equally critical aspect of generating long-form outputs has received comparatively less attention. This paper advocates for a paradigm shift in NLP research toward addressing the challenges of long-output generation. Tasks such as novel writing, long-term planning, and complex reasoning require models to understand extensive contexts and produce coherent, contextually rich, and logically consistent extended text. These demands highlight a critical gap in current LLM capabilities. We underscore the importance of this under-explored domain and call for focused efforts to develop foundational LLMs tailored for generating high-quality, long-form outputs, which hold immense potential for real-world applications.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated proficiency in addressing tasks that necessitate a combination of task planning and the usage of external tools that require a blend of task planning and the utilization of external tools, such as APIs. However, real-world complex systems present three prevalent challenges concerning task planning and tool usage: (1) The real system usually has a vast array of APIs, so it is impossible to feed the descriptions of all APIs to the prompt of LLMs as the token length is limited; (2) the real system is designed for handling complex tasks, and the base LLMs can hardly plan a correct sub-task order and API-calling order for such tasks; (3) Similar semantics and functionalities among APIs in real systems create challenges for both LLMs and even humans in distinguishing between them. In response, this paper introduces a comprehensive framework aimed at enhancing the Task Planning and Tool Usage (TPTU) abilities of LLM-based agents operating within real-world systems. Our framework comprises three key components designed to address these challenges: (1) the API Retriever selects the most pertinent APIs for the user task among the extensive array available; (2) LLM Finetuner tunes a base LLM so that the finetuned LLM can be more capable for task planning and API calling; (3) the Demo Selector adaptively retrieves different demonstrations related to hard-to-distinguish APIs, which is further used for in-context learning to boost the final performance. We validate our methods using a real-world commercial system as well as an open-sourced academic dataset, and the outcomes clearly showcase the efficacy of each individual component as well as the integrated framework.

Approaches to continual learning aim to successfully learn a set of related tasks that arrive in an online manner. Recently, several frameworks have been developed which enable deep learning to be deployed in this learning scenario. A key modelling decision is to what extent the architecture should be shared across tasks. On the one hand, separately modelling each task avoids catastrophic forgetting but it does not support transfer learning and leads to large models. On the other hand, rigidly specifying a shared component and a task-specific part enables task transfer and limits the model size, but it is vulnerable to catastrophic forgetting and restricts the form of task-transfer that can occur. Ideally, the network should adaptively identify which parts of the network to share in a data driven way. Here we introduce such an approach called Continual Learning with Adaptive Weights (CLAW), which is based on probabilistic modelling and variational inference. Experiments show that CLAW achieves state-of-the-art performance on six benchmarks in terms of overall continual learning performance, as measured by classification accuracy, and in terms of addressing catastrophic forgetting.

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.

The rapid expansion of context length in large language models (LLMs) has outpaced existing evaluation benchmarks. Current long-context benchmarks often trade off scalability and realism: synthetic tasks underrepresent real-world complexity, while fully manual annotation is costly to scale to extreme lengths and diverse scenarios. We present LongBench Pro, a more realistic and comprehensive bilingual benchmark of 1,500 naturally occurring long-context samples in English and Chinese spanning 11 primary tasks and 25 secondary tasks, with input lengths from 8k to 256k tokens. LongBench Pro supports fine-grained analysis with task-specific metrics and a multi-dimensional taxonomy of context requirement (full vs. partial dependency), length (six levels), and difficulty (four levels calibrated by model performance). To balance quality with scalability, we propose a Human-Model Collaborative Construction pipeline: frontier LLMs draft challenging questions and reference answers, along with design rationales and solution processes, to reduce the cost of expert verification. Experts then rigorously validate correctness and refine problematic cases. Evaluating 46 widely used long-context LLMs on LongBench Pro yields three findings: (1) long-context optimization contributes more to long-context comprehension than parameter scaling; (2) effective context length is typically shorter than the claimed context length, with pronounced cross-lingual misalignment; and (3) the "thinking" paradigm helps primarily models trained with native reasoning, while mixed-thinking designs offer a promising Pareto trade-off. In summary, LongBench Pro provides a robust testbed for advancing long-context understanding.

Real-world professional desktop workflows in specialized creative and engineering software unfold over long horizons and often require human-in-the-loop coordination, where agents proactively seek necessary information and users provide additional instructions, clarifications, feedback, or corrections as the task progresses. Yet existing desktop GUI benchmarks mostly reduce this setting to short, simplified tasks with all user instructions provided upfront. To address this issue, we introduce DeskCraft, a desktop GUI benchmark targeting long horizon creative and engineering workflows and proactive human-agent collaboration. DeskCraft organizes tasks into a multilevel difficulty taxonomy, with long horizon tasks requiring over 50 execution steps, and covers professional creative software across design, video, audio, and 3D creation. Furthermore, DeskCraft formalizes human-agent collaboration into an interaction protocol covering mid-turn and post-turn exchanges. Mid-turn interaction captures both agent-initiated clarification under uncertainty and user-initiated interruption during execution, while post-turn interaction accommodates user-driven feedback after the agent signals completion, together spanning the full space of realistic collaboration patterns. We evaluate 18 proprietary and open source agents on 538 tasks and find that GPT-5.4 reaches 31.6% on standard tasks and 27.6% on interactive tasks. Further analyses reveal persistent failures in long horizon workflow delivery and proactive clarification. We will open-source all evaluation codes, tasks, and data at https://github.com/mrwwk/DeskCraft.

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/

To achieve successful assistance with long-horizon web-based tasks, AI agents must be able to sequentially follow real-world user instructions over a long period. Unlike existing web-based agent benchmarks, sequential instruction following in the real world poses significant challenges beyond performing a single, clearly defined task. For instance, real-world human instructions can be ambiguous, require different levels of AI assistance, and may evolve over time, reflecting changes in the user's mental state. To address this gap, we introduce RealWebAssist, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate sequential instruction-following in realistic scenarios involving long-horizon interactions with the web, visual GUI grounding, and understanding ambiguous real-world user instructions. RealWebAssist includes a dataset of sequential instructions collected from real-world human users. Each user instructs a web-based assistant to perform a series of tasks on multiple websites. A successful agent must reason about the true intent behind each instruction, keep track of the mental state of the user, understand user-specific routines, and ground the intended tasks to actions on the correct GUI elements. Our experimental results show that state-of-the-art models struggle to understand and ground user instructions, posing critical challenges in following real-world user instructions for long-horizon web assistance.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have enabled significant progress in decision-making and task planning for embodied autonomous agents. However, most existing methods struggle with complex, long-horizon tasks because they rely on a monolithic trajectory that entangles all past decisions and observations to solve the entire task in a single unified process. To address this limitation, we propose ReAcTree, a hierarchical task-planning method that decomposes a complex goal into manageable subgoals within a dynamically constructed agent tree. Each subgoal is handled by an LLM agent node capable of reasoning, acting, and further expanding the tree, while control flow nodes coordinate the execution strategies of agent nodes. In addition, we integrate two complementary memory systems: each agent node retrieves goal-specific, subgoal-level examples from episodic memory and shares environment-specific observations through working memory. Experiments on the WAH-NL and ALFRED show ReAcTree consistently outperforms strong task-planning baselines such as ReAct across diverse LLMs. Notably, on WAH-NL, ReAcTree achieves a 61% goal success rate with Qwen 2.5 72B, nearly doubling ReAct's 31%. The code is available at https://github.com/Choi-JaeWoo/ReAcTree.git.

Artificial neural networks have exceeded human-level performance in accomplishing several individual tasks (e.g. voice recognition, object recognition, and video games). However, such success remains modest compared to human intelligence that can learn and perform an unlimited number of tasks. Humans' ability of learning and accumulating knowledge over their lifetime is an essential aspect of their intelligence. Continual machine learning aims at a higher level of machine intelligence through providing the artificial agents with the ability to learn online from a non-stationary and never-ending stream of data. A key component of such a never-ending learning process is to overcome the catastrophic forgetting of previously seen data, a problem that neural networks are well known to suffer from. The work described in this thesis has been dedicated to the investigation of continual learning and solutions to mitigate the forgetting phenomena in neural networks. To approach the continual learning problem, we first assume a task incremental setting where tasks are received one at a time and data from previous tasks are not stored. Since the task incremental setting can't be assumed in all continual learning scenarios, we also study the more general online continual setting. We consider an infinite stream of data drawn from a non-stationary distribution with a supervisory or self-supervisory training signal. The proposed methods in this thesis have tackled important aspects of continual learning. They were evaluated on different benchmarks and over various learning sequences. Advances in the state of the art of continual learning have been shown and challenges for bringing continual learning into application were critically identified.

Deep research agents have shown remarkable potential in handling long-horizon tasks. However, state-of-the-art performance typically relies on online reinforcement learning (RL), which is financially expensive due to extensive API calls. While offline training offers a more efficient alternative, its progress is hindered by the scarcity of high-quality research trajectories. In this paper, we demonstrate that expensive online reinforcement learning is not all you need to build powerful research agents. To bridge this gap, we introduce a fully open-source suite designed for effective offline training. Our core contributions include DeepForge, a ready-to-use task synthesis framework that generates large-scale research queries without heavy preprocessing; and a curated collection of 66k QA pairs, 33k SFT trajectories, and 21k DPO pairs. Leveraging these resources, we train OffSeeker (8B), a model developed entirely offline. Extensive evaluations across six benchmarks show that OffSeeker not only leads among similar-sized agents but also remains competitive with 30B-parameter systems trained via heavy online RL.

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.

Despite remarkable advancements in emulating human-like behavior through Large Language Models (LLMs), current textual simulations do not adequately address the notion of time. To this end, we introduce TimeArena, a novel textual simulated environment that incorporates complex temporal dynamics and constraints that better reflect real-life planning scenarios. In TimeArena, agents are asked to complete multiple tasks as soon as possible, allowing for parallel processing to save time. We implement the dependency between actions, the time duration for each action, and the occupancy of the agent and the objects in the environment. TimeArena grounds to 30 real-world tasks in cooking, household activities, and laboratory work. We conduct extensive experiments with various state-of-the-art LLMs using TimeArena. Our findings reveal that even the most powerful models, e.g., GPT-4, still lag behind humans in effective multitasking, underscoring the need for enhanced temporal awareness in the development of language agents.

Long-context modeling capabilities are important for large language models (LLMs) in various applications. However, directly training LLMs with long context windows is insufficient to enhance this capability since some training samples do not exhibit strong semantic dependencies across long contexts. In this study, we propose a data mining framework ProLong that can assign each training sample with a long dependency score, which can be used to rank and filter samples that are more advantageous for enhancing long-context modeling abilities in LLM training. Specifically, we first use delta perplexity scores to measure the Dependency Strength between text segments in a given document. Then we refine this metric based on the Dependency Distance of these segments to incorporate spatial relationships across long-contexts. Final results are calibrated with a Dependency Specificity metric to prevent trivial dependencies introduced by repetitive patterns. Moreover, a random sampling approach is proposed to optimize the computational efficiency of ProLong. Comprehensive experiments on multiple benchmarks indicate that ProLong effectively identifies documents that carry long dependencies and LLMs trained on these documents exhibit significantly enhanced long-context modeling capabilities.

Extending large language models to effectively handle long contexts requires instruction fine-tuning on input sequences of similar length. To address this, we present LongAlign -- a recipe of the instruction data, training, and evaluation for long context alignment. First, we construct a long instruction-following dataset using Self-Instruct. To ensure the data diversity, it covers a broad range of tasks from various long context sources. Second, we adopt the packing and sorted batching strategies to speed up supervised fine-tuning on data with varied length distributions. Additionally, we develop a loss weighting method to balance the contribution to the loss across different sequences during packing training. Third, we introduce the LongBench-Chat benchmark for evaluating instruction-following capabilities on queries of 10k-100k in length. Experiments show that LongAlign outperforms existing recipes for LLMs in long context tasks by up to 30\%, while also maintaining their proficiency in handling short, generic tasks. The code, data, and long-aligned models are open-sourced at https://github.com/THUDM/LongAlign.

A long-standing goal in robotics is to build robots that can perform a wide range of daily tasks from perceptions obtained with their onboard sensors and specified only via natural language. While recently substantial advances have been achieved in language-driven robotics by leveraging end-to-end learning from pixels, there is no clear and well-understood process for making various design choices due to the underlying variation in setups. In this paper, we conduct an extensive study of the most critical challenges in learning language conditioned policies from offline free-form imitation datasets. We further identify architectural and algorithmic techniques that improve performance, such as a hierarchical decomposition of the robot control learning, a multimodal transformer encoder, discrete latent plans and a self-supervised contrastive loss that aligns video and language representations. By combining the results of our investigation with our improved model components, we are able to present a novel approach that significantly outperforms the state of the art on the challenging language conditioned long-horizon robot manipulation CALVIN benchmark. We have open-sourced our implementation to facilitate future research in learning to perform many complex manipulation skills in a row specified with natural language. Codebase and trained models available at http://hulc.cs.uni-freiburg.de

Computer use agents (CUAs) today are primarily deployed as single serial agents. This setup is suboptimal for complex long-horizon tasks that benefit from task decomposition, parallel execution, and consistent re-planning based on new information. In this paper, we argue that we should instead move towards evaluating and building multi-agent computer use (MACU) systems. These systems, which emphasize planning and parallel execution, alleviate many of the shortcomings of single-agent CUAs. We propose a general multi-agent setup in which a manager model decomposes computer use tasks as a directed acyclic graph (DAG), encoding relevant dependencies and goals for subagents. At each iteration, the manager dispatches parallel CUA subagents to carry out nodes on the ready frontier of the DAG, and continuously revises the DAG (adding, canceling, or rewriting nodes) as new findings arrive from subagents. This design treats the partially observable environment of computer use as a first class challenge: information that downstream agents may not be able to re-observe are retained and passed forward through the manager and DAG structure. We demonstrate that MACU consistently improves over strong single-agent baselines by 3.4-25.5% on desktop (OSWorld) and web navigation (Online-Mind2Web, WebTailBench, Odysseys) benchmarks, exhibits more favorable test-time scaling, and solves complex long-horizon tasks where single-agent CUAs get stuck. On Odysseys, a long-horizon web navigation benchmark, MACU improves average task completion wall-clock time by {sim} 1.5 times, demonstrating its efficacy in speeding up traditionally slow CUA pipelines. Our findings highlight that multi-agent coordination is a promising axis for scaling computer use agents to work productively for longer and more effectively. We release all code and interactive visualizations at https://jykoh.com/multi-agent-computer-use.

The recent success of Large Language Models (LLMs) signifies an impressive stride towards artificial general intelligence. They have shown a promising prospect in automatically completing tasks upon user instructions, functioning as brain-like coordinators. The associated risks will be revealed as we delegate an increasing number of tasks to machines for automated completion. A big question emerges: how can we make machines behave responsibly when helping humans automate tasks as personal copilots? In this paper, we explore this question in depth from the perspectives of feasibility, completeness and security. In specific, we present Responsible Task Automation (ResponsibleTA) as a fundamental framework to facilitate responsible collaboration between LLM-based coordinators and executors for task automation with three empowered capabilities: 1) predicting the feasibility of the commands for executors; 2) verifying the completeness of executors; 3) enhancing the security (e.g., the protection of users' privacy). We further propose and compare two paradigms for implementing the first two capabilities. One is to leverage the generic knowledge of LLMs themselves via prompt engineering while the other is to adopt domain-specific learnable models. Moreover, we introduce a local memory mechanism for achieving the third capability. We evaluate our proposed ResponsibleTA on UI task automation and hope it could bring more attentions to ensuring LLMs more responsible in diverse scenarios. The research project homepage is at https://task-automation-research.github.io/responsible_task_automation.

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.

Large language models (LLMs) with extended context windows enable tasks requiring extensive information integration but are limited by the scarcity of high-quality, diverse datasets for long-context instruction tuning. Existing data synthesis methods focus narrowly on objectives like fact retrieval and summarization, restricting their generalizability to complex, real-world tasks. WildLong extracts meta-information from real user queries, models co-occurrence relationships via graph-based methods, and employs adaptive generation to produce scalable data. It extends beyond single-document tasks to support multi-document reasoning, such as cross-document comparison and aggregation. Our models, finetuned on 150K instruction-response pairs synthesized using WildLong, surpasses existing open-source long-context-optimized models across benchmarks while maintaining strong performance on short-context tasks without incorporating supplementary short-context data. By generating a more diverse and realistic long-context instruction dataset, WildLong enhances LLMs' ability to generalize to complex, real-world reasoning over long contexts, establishing a new paradigm for long-context data synthesis.

When an agent encounters a continual stream of new tasks in the lifelong learning setting, it leverages the knowledge it gained from the earlier tasks to help learn the new tasks better. In such a scenario, identifying an efficient knowledge representation becomes a challenging problem. Most research works propose to either store a subset of examples from the past tasks in a replay buffer, dedicate a separate set of parameters to each task or penalize excessive updates over parameters by introducing a regularization term. While existing methods employ the general task-agnostic stochastic gradient descent update rule, we propose a task-aware optimizer that adapts the learning rate based on the relatedness among tasks. We utilize the directions taken by the parameters during the updates by accumulating the gradients specific to each task. These task-based accumulated gradients act as a knowledge base that is maintained and updated throughout the stream. We empirically show that our proposed adaptive learning rate not only accounts for catastrophic forgetting but also allows positive backward transfer. We also show that our method performs better than several state-of-the-art methods in lifelong learning on complex datasets with a large number of tasks.

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.

Incremental Task learning (ITL) is a category of continual learning that seeks to train a single network for multiple tasks (one after another), where training data for each task is only available during the training of that task. Neural networks tend to forget older tasks when they are trained for the newer tasks; this property is often known as catastrophic forgetting. To address this issue, ITL methods use episodic memory, parameter regularization, masking and pruning, or extensible network structures. In this paper, we propose a new incremental task learning framework based on low-rank factorization. In particular, we represent the network weights for each layer as a linear combination of several rank-1 matrices. To update the network for a new task, we learn a rank-1 (or low-rank) matrix and add that to the weights of every layer. We also introduce an additional selector vector that assigns different weights to the low-rank matrices learned for the previous tasks. We show that our approach performs better than the current state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy and forgetting. Our method also offers better memory efficiency compared to episodic memory- and mask-based approaches. Our code will be available at https://github.com/CSIPlab/task-increment-rank-update.git

Current long context large language models (LLMs) can process inputs up to 100,000 tokens, yet struggle to generate outputs exceeding even a modest length of 2,000 words. Through controlled experiments, we find that the model's effective generation length is inherently bounded by the sample it has seen during supervised fine-tuning (SFT). In other words, their output limitation is due to the scarcity of long-output examples in existing SFT datasets. To address this, we introduce AgentWrite, an agent-based pipeline that decomposes ultra-long generation tasks into subtasks, enabling off-the-shelf LLMs to generate coherent outputs exceeding 20,000 words. Leveraging AgentWrite, we construct LongWriter-6k, a dataset containing 6,000 SFT data with output lengths ranging from 2k to 32k words. By incorporating this dataset into model training, we successfully scale the output length of existing models to over 10,000 words while maintaining output quality. We also develop LongBench-Write, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating ultra-long generation capabilities. Our 9B parameter model, further improved through DPO, achieves state-of-the-art performance on this benchmark, surpassing even much larger proprietary models. In general, our work demonstrates that existing long context LLM already possesses the potential for a larger output window--all you need is data with extended output during model alignment to unlock this capability. Our code & models are at: https://github.com/THUDM/LongWriter.

Generative AI is being leveraged to solve a variety of computer-use tasks involving desktop applications. State-of-the-art systems have focused solely on improving accuracy on leading benchmarks. However, these systems are practically unusable due to extremely high end-to-end latency (e.g., tens of minutes) for tasks that typically take humans just a few minutes to complete. To understand the cause behind this and to guide future developments of computer agents, we conduct the first study on the temporal performance of computer-use agents on OSWorld, the flagship benchmark in computer-use AI. We find that large model calls for planning and reflection account for the majority of the overall latency, and as an agent uses more steps to complete a task, each successive step can take 3x longer than steps at the beginning of a task. We then construct OSWorld-Human, a manually annotated version of the original OSWorld dataset that contains a human-determined trajectory for each task. We evaluate 16 agents on their efficiency using OSWorld-Human and found that even the highest-scoring agents on OSWorld take 1.4-2.7x more steps than necessary.

Natural language provides an accessible and expressive interface to specify long-term tasks for robotic agents. However, non-experts are likely to specify such tasks with high-level instructions, which abstract over specific robot actions through several layers of abstraction. We propose that key to bridging this gap between language and robot actions over long execution horizons are persistent representations. We propose a persistent spatial semantic representation method, and show how it enables building an agent that performs hierarchical reasoning to effectively execute long-term tasks. We evaluate our approach on the ALFRED benchmark and achieve state-of-the-art results, despite completely avoiding the commonly used step-by-step instructions.

Incorporating external knowledge in large language models (LLMs) enhances their utility across diverse applications, but existing methods have trade-offs. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) fetches evidence via similarity search, but key information may fall outside top ranked results. Long-context models can process multiple documents but are computationally expensive and limited by context window size. Inspired by students condensing study material for open-book exams, we propose task-aware key-value (KV) cache compression, which compresses external knowledge in a zero- or few-shot setup. This enables LLMs to reason efficiently over a compacted representation of all relevant information. Experiments show our approach outperforms both RAG and task-agnostic compression methods. On LongBench v2, it improves accuracy by up to 7 absolute points over RAG with a 30x compression rate, while reducing inference latency from 0.43s to 0.16s. A synthetic dataset highlights that RAG performs well when sparse evidence suffices, whereas task-aware compression is superior for broad knowledge tasks.

Computer-use agents provide a promising path toward general software automation because they can interact directly with arbitrary graphical user interfaces instead of relying on brittle, application-specific integrations. Despite recent advances in benchmark performance, strong computer-use agents remain expensive and slow in practice, since most systems invoke large multimodal models at nearly every interaction step. We argue that this uniform allocation of compute is fundamentally inefficient for long-horizon GUI tasks. Such trajectories are highly heterogeneous: many steps are routine and can be handled reliably by smaller, cheaper policies, while errors tend to concentrate at a relatively small number of high-risk moments. Across computer-use benchmarks, these failures repeatedly take two forms: progress stalls, where the agent loops, repeats ineffective actions, or fails to make meaningful progress, and silent semantic drift, where the agent continues taking locally plausible actions after already deviating from the user's true goal. To address this inefficiency, we propose an event-driven, step-level cascade for computer-use agents that runs a small policy by default and escalates to a stronger model only when lightweight learned monitors detect elevated risk. Our framework combines two complementary signals: a Stuck Monitor that detects degraded progress from recent reasoning-action history and triggers recovery, and a Milestone Monitor that identifies semantically meaningful checkpoints where sparse verification is most informative for catching drift. This design turns always-on frontier-model inference into adaptive, on-demand compute allocation over the course of an evolving interaction. The framework is modular and deployment-oriented: it can be layered on top of existing computer-use agents without changing the underlying agent architecture or retraining the large model.

We study continued training and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of a language model (LM) to make effective use of long-context information. We first establish a reliable evaluation protocol to guide model development -- Instead of perplexity or simple needle-in-a-haystack (NIAH) tests, we use a broad set of long-context tasks, and we evaluate models after SFT with instruction data as this better reveals long-context abilities. Supported by our robust evaluations, we run thorough experiments to decide the data mix for continued pre-training, the instruction tuning dataset, and many other design choices. We find that (1) code repositories and books are excellent sources of long data, but it is crucial to combine them with high-quality short data; (2) training with a sequence length beyond the evaluation length boosts long-context performance; (3) for SFT, using only short instruction datasets yields strong performance on long-context tasks. Our final model, ProLong-8B, which is initialized from Llama-3 and trained on 40B tokens, demonstrates state-of-the-art long-context performance among similarly sized models at a length of 128K. ProLong outperforms Llama-3.18B-Instruct on the majority of long-context tasks despite having seen only 5% as many tokens during long-context training. Additionally, ProLong can effectively process up to 512K tokens, one of the longest context windows of publicly available LMs.

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) built on large language models typically solve complex tasks by coordinating multiple agents through workflows. Existing approaches generates workflows either at task level or query level, but their relative costs and benefits remain unclear. After rethinking and empirical analyses, we show that query-level workflow generation is not always necessary, since a small set of top-K best task-level workflows together already covers equivalent or even more queries. We further find that exhaustive execution-based task-level evaluation is both extremely token-costly and frequently unreliable. Inspired by the idea of self-evolution and generative reward modeling, we propose a low-cost task-level generation framework SCALE, which means \textbf{S}elf prediction of the optimizer with few shot \textbf{CAL}ibration for \textbf{E}valuation instead of full validation execution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SCALE maintains competitive performance, with an average degradation of just 0.61\% compared to existing approach across multiple datasets, while cutting overall token usage by up to 83\%.

NLP benchmarks have largely focused on short texts, such as sentences and paragraphs, even though long texts comprise a considerable amount of natural language in the wild. We introduce SCROLLS, a suite of tasks that require reasoning over long texts. We examine existing long-text datasets, and handpick ones where the text is naturally long, while prioritizing tasks that involve synthesizing information across the input. SCROLLS contains summarization, question answering, and natural language inference tasks, covering multiple domains, including literature, science, business, and entertainment. Initial baselines, including Longformer Encoder-Decoder, indicate that there is ample room for improvement on SCROLLS. We make all datasets available in a unified text-to-text format and host a live leaderboard to facilitate research on model architecture and pretraining methods.

Artificial neural networks suffer from catastrophic forgetting when they are sequentially trained on multiple tasks. To overcome this problem, we present a novel approach based on task-conditioned hypernetworks, i.e., networks that generate the weights of a target model based on task identity. Continual learning (CL) is less difficult for this class of models thanks to a simple key feature: instead of recalling the input-output relations of all previously seen data, task-conditioned hypernetworks only require rehearsing task-specific weight realizations, which can be maintained in memory using a simple regularizer. Besides achieving state-of-the-art performance on standard CL benchmarks, additional experiments on long task sequences reveal that task-conditioned hypernetworks display a very large capacity to retain previous memories. Notably, such long memory lifetimes are achieved in a compressive regime, when the number of trainable hypernetwork weights is comparable or smaller than target network size. We provide insight into the structure of low-dimensional task embedding spaces (the input space of the hypernetwork) and show that task-conditioned hypernetworks demonstrate transfer learning. Finally, forward information transfer is further supported by empirical results on a challenging CL benchmark based on the CIFAR-10/100 image datasets.

Large language model (LLM)-powered agents are transforming digital devices from passive tools into proactive intelligent collaborators. However, most existing frameworks remain confined to a single OS or device, making cross-device workflows brittle and largely manual. We present UFO^3, a system that unifies heterogeneous endpoints, desktops, servers, mobile devices, and edge, into a single orchestration fabric. UFO^3 models each user request as a mutable TaskConstellation: a distributed DAG of atomic subtasks (TaskStars) with explicit control and data dependencies (TaskStarLines). The TaskConstellation continuously evolves as results stream in from distributed devices, enabling asynchronous execution, adaptive recovery, and dynamic optimization. A Constellation Orchestrator} executes tasks safely and asynchronously while applying dynamic DAG updates, and the Agent Interaction Protocol (AIP) provides persistent, low-latency channels for reliable task dispatch and result streaming. These designs dissolve the traditional boundaries between devices and platforms, allowing agents to collaborate seamlessly and amplify their collective intelligence. We evaluate UFO^3 on NebulaBench, a benchmark of 55 cross-device tasks across 5 machines and 10 categories. UFO^3 achieves 83.3% subtask completion, 70.9% task success, exposes parallelism with an average width of 1.72, and reduces end-to-end latency by 31% relative to a sequential baseline. Fault-injection experiments demonstrate graceful degradation and recovery under transient and permanent agent failures. These results show that UFO^3 achieves accurate, efficient, and resilient task orchestration across heterogeneous devices, uniting isolated agents into a coherent, adaptive computing fabric that extends across the landscape of ubiquitous computing.

Large language model (LLM)-based agents have shown strong capabilities in using external tools to solve complex tasks. However, existing evaluations often overlook the temporal dimension of tool use, especially the impact of tool response latency, and are usually limited to single-task settings. In real-world applications, multiple tasks often need to be executed concurrently, and overall efficiency depends on whether an agent can use idle time while waiting for tool responses. We refer to this capability as asynchronous tool calling. To evaluate it, we propose AsyncTool, a benchmark for assessing LLM-based agents in interactive multi-task tool-use environments with delayed tool feedback. AsyncTool presents multiple heterogeneous tasks simultaneously and simulates realistic tool response latency during execution. Using a hybrid data evolution strategy, we construct a diverse asynchronous multitasking dataset that covers multiple scenarios and tool-use patterns. We evaluate models at the step, sub-task, and task levels, and introduce efficiency-oriented metrics to measure task coordination and completion efficiency. Extensive experiments show that delayed tool feedback poses substantial challenges to current agents and leads to clear performance degradation. Models that better coordinate task switching, dependency tracking, and state maintenance achieve stronger performance on AsyncTool. Our analysis identifies key failure modes of current tool-using agents and provides practical insights for designing future systems with stronger temporal reasoning and coordination capabilities.

Despite rapid progress on AI benchmarks, the real-world meaning of benchmark performance remains unclear. To quantify the capabilities of AI systems in terms of human capabilities, we propose a new metric: 50%-task-completion time horizon. This is the time humans typically take to complete tasks that AI models can complete with 50% success rate. We first timed humans with relevant domain expertise on a combination of RE-Bench, HCAST, and 66 novel shorter tasks. On these tasks, current frontier AI models such as Claude 3.7 Sonnet have a 50% time horizon of around 50 minutes. Furthermore, frontier AI time horizon has been doubling approximately every seven months since 2019, though the trend may have accelerated in 2024. The increase in AI models' time horizons seems to be primarily driven by greater reliability and ability to adapt to mistakes, combined with better logical reasoning and tool use capabilities. We discuss the limitations of our results -- including their degree of external validity -- and the implications of increased autonomy for dangerous capabilities. If these results generalize to real-world software tasks, extrapolation of this trend predicts that within 5 years, AI systems will be capable of automating many software tasks that currently take humans a month.

To teach robots complex manipulation tasks, it is now a common practice to fine-tune a pre-trained vision-language-action model (VLA) on task-specific data. However, since this recipe updates existing representations, it is unsuitable for long-term operation in the real world, where robots must continually adapt to new tasks and environments while retaining the knowledge they have already acquired. Existing continual learning methods for robotics commonly require storing previous data (exemplars), struggle with long task sequences, or rely on task identifiers for deployment. To address these limitations, we propose CLARE, a general, parameter-efficient framework for exemplar-free continual learning with VLAs. CLARE introduces lightweight modular adapters into selected feedforward layers and autonomously expands the model only where necessary when learning a new task, guided by layer-wise feature similarity. During deployment, an autoencoder-based routing mechanism dynamically activates the most relevant adapters without requiring task labels. Through extensive experiments on the LIBERO benchmark, we show that CLARE achieves high performance on new tasks without catastrophic forgetting of earlier tasks, significantly outperforming even exemplar-based methods. Code and data are available at https://tum-lsy.github.io/clare.

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

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

Prompt routing dynamically selects the most appropriate large language model from a pool of candidates for each query, optimizing performance while managing costs. As model pools scale to include dozens of frontier models with narrow performance gaps, existing approaches face significant challenges: manually defined task taxonomies cannot capture fine-grained capability distinctions, while monolithic routers struggle to differentiate subtle differences across diverse tasks. We propose a two-stage routing architecture that addresses these limitations through automated fine-grained task discovery and task-aware quality estimation. Our first stage employs graph-based clustering to discover latent task types and trains a classifier to assign prompts to discovered tasks. The second stage uses a mixture-of-experts architecture with task-specific prediction heads for specialized quality estimates. At inference, we aggregate predictions from both stages to balance task-level stability with prompt-specific adaptability. Evaluated on 10 benchmarks with 11 frontier models, our method consistently outperforms existing baselines and surpasses the strongest individual model while incurring less than half its cost.

Hierarchical policies that combine language and low-level control have been shown to perform impressively long-horizon robotic tasks, by leveraging either zero-shot high-level planners like pretrained language and vision-language models (LLMs/VLMs) or models trained on annotated robotic demonstrations. However, for complex and dexterous skills, attaining high success rates on long-horizon tasks still represents a major challenge -- the longer the task is, the more likely it is that some stage will fail. Can humans help the robot to continuously improve its long-horizon task performance through intuitive and natural feedback? In this paper, we make the following observation: high-level policies that index into sufficiently rich and expressive low-level language-conditioned skills can be readily supervised with human feedback in the form of language corrections. We show that even fine-grained corrections, such as small movements ("move a bit to the left"), can be effectively incorporated into high-level policies, and that such corrections can be readily obtained from humans observing the robot and making occasional suggestions. This framework enables robots not only to rapidly adapt to real-time language feedback, but also incorporate this feedback into an iterative training scheme that improves the high-level policy's ability to correct errors in both low-level execution and high-level decision-making purely from verbal feedback. Our evaluation on real hardware shows that this leads to significant performance improvement in long-horizon, dexterous manipulation tasks without the need for any additional teleoperation. Videos and code are available at https://yay-robot.github.io/.

To cope with real-world dynamics, an intelligent system needs to incrementally acquire, update, accumulate, and exploit knowledge throughout its lifetime. This ability, known as continual learning, provides a foundation for AI systems to develop themselves adaptively. In a general sense, continual learning is explicitly limited by catastrophic forgetting, where learning a new task usually results in a dramatic performance degradation of the old tasks. Beyond this, increasingly numerous advances have emerged in recent years that largely extend the understanding and application of continual learning. The growing and widespread interest in this direction demonstrates its realistic significance as well as complexity. In this work, we present a comprehensive survey of continual learning, seeking to bridge the basic settings, theoretical foundations, representative methods, and practical applications. Based on existing theoretical and empirical results, we summarize the general objectives of continual learning as ensuring a proper stability-plasticity trade-off and an adequate intra/inter-task generalizability in the context of resource efficiency. Then we provide a state-of-the-art and elaborated taxonomy, extensively analyzing how representative methods address continual learning, and how they are adapted to particular challenges in realistic applications. Through an in-depth discussion of promising directions, we believe that such a holistic perspective can greatly facilitate subsequent exploration in this field and beyond.

Despite the critical importance of the medical domain in Deep Learning, most of the research in this area solely focuses on training models in static environments. It is only in recent years that research has begun to address dynamic environments and tackle the Catastrophic Forgetting problem through Continual Learning (CL) techniques. Previous studies have primarily focused on scenarios such as Domain Incremental Learning and Class Incremental Learning, which do not fully capture the complexity of real-world applications. Therefore, in this work, we propose a novel benchmark combining the challenges of new class arrivals and domain shifts in a single framework, by considering the New Instances and New Classes (NIC) scenario. This benchmark aims to model a realistic CL setting for the multi-label classification problem in medical imaging. Additionally, it encompasses a greater number of tasks compared to previously tested scenarios. Specifically, our benchmark consists of two datasets (NIH and CXP), nineteen classes, and seven tasks, a stream longer than the previously tested ones. To solve common challenges (e.g., the task inference problem) found in the CIL and NIC scenarios, we propose a novel approach called Replay Consolidation with Label Propagation (RCLP). Our method surpasses existing approaches, exhibiting superior performance with minimal forgetting.

For large language models (LLMs) to be effective in the financial domain -- where each decision can have a significant impact -- it is necessary to investigate realistic tasks and data. Financial professionals often interact with documents that are hundreds of pages long, but most financial research datasets only deal with short excerpts from these documents. To address this, we introduce a long-document financial QA task. We augment 7,437 questions from the existing FinQA dataset with the full-document context, extending the average context length from under 700 words in FinQA to 123k words in DocFinQA. We conduct extensive experiments over retrieval-based QA pipelines and long-context language models. DocFinQA proves a significant challenge for even state-of-the-art systems. We also provide a case-study on the longest documents in DocFinQA and find that models particularly struggle on these documents. Addressing these challenges may have a wide reaching impact across applications where specificity and long-range contexts are critical, like gene sequences and legal document contract analysis.

Long-horizon search agents must manage a rapidly growing working context as they reason, call tools, and observe information. Naively accumulating all intermediate content can overwhelm the agent, increasing costs and the risk of errors. We propose that effective context management should be adaptive: parts of the agent's trajectory are maintained at different levels of detail depending on their current relevance to the task. To operationalize this principle, we introduce Context-ReAct, a general agentic paradigm for elastic context orchestration that integrates reasoning, context management, and tool use in a unified loop. Context-ReAct provides five atomic operations: Skip, Compress, Rollback, Snippet and Delete, which allow the agent to dynamically reshape its working context, preserving important evidence, summarizing resolved information, discarding unhelpful branches, and controlling context size. We prove that the Compress operator is expressively complete, while the other specialized operators provide efficiency and fidelity guarantees that reduce generation cost and hallucination risk. Building on this paradigm, we develop LongSeeker, a long-horizon search agent fine-tuned from Qwen3-30B-A3B on 10k synthesized trajectories. Across four representative search benchmarks, LongSeeker achieves 61.5% on BrowseComp and 62.5% on BrowseComp-ZH, substantially outperforming Tongyi DeepResearch (43.2% and 46.7%) and AgentFold (36.2% and 47.3%). These results highlight the potential of adaptive context management, showing that agents can achieve more reliable and efficient long-horizon reasoning by actively shaping their working memory.

User profiling and region analysis are two tasks of significant commercial value. However, in practical applications, modeling different features typically involves four main steps: data preparation, data processing, model establishment, evaluation, and optimization. This process is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Repeating this workflow for each feature results in abundant development time for tasks and a reduced overall volume of task development. Indeed, human mobility data contains a wealth of information. Several successful cases suggest that conducting in-depth analysis of population movement data could potentially yield meaningful profiles about users and areas. Nonetheless, most related works have not thoroughly utilized the semantic information within human mobility data and trained on a fixed number of the regions. To tap into the rich information within population movement, based on the perspective that Regions Are Who walk them, we propose a large spatiotemporal model based on trajectories (RAW). It possesses the following characteristics: 1) Tailored for trajectory data, introducing a GPT-like structure with a parameter count of up to 1B; 2) Introducing a spatiotemporal fine-tuning module, interpreting trajectories as collection of users to derive arbitrary region embedding. This framework allows rapid task development based on the large spatiotemporal model. We conducted extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of our proposed large spatiotemporal model. It's evident that our proposed method, relying solely on human mobility data without additional features, exhibits a certain level of relevance in user profiling and region analysis. Moreover, our model showcases promising predictive capabilities in trajectory generation tasks based on the current state, offering the potential for further innovative work utilizing this large spatiotemporal model.

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 models (LLMs) have the potential to boost human productivity by speeding up task completion -- provided users know when to offload cognitive work to them. But we do not know if users are well-calibrated in estimating these potential time savings. We conducted a preregistered large-scale behavioral study (N = 1237) to characterize mismatches between expectations and reality, with a focus on simple cognitive tasks. While actual completion times between independent completion and AI-assisted completion did not differ, participants predicted AI to be significantly faster. The same bias was not observed when imagining help from another human participant. We identify a speedup illusion where people have accurate forecasts of independent completion times but significantly underestimate AI-assisted times. Additionally, time and effort dissociate: participants reported lower subjective effort with AI despite equivalent completion times. This suggests that completion time itself is not sufficient to characterize efficiency gains.

Long-context capability is considered one of the most important abilities of LLMs, as a truly long context-capable LLM enables users to effortlessly process many originally exhausting tasks -- e.g., digesting a long-form document to find answers vs. directly asking an LLM about it. However, existing real-task-based long-context evaluation benchmarks have two major shortcomings. First, benchmarks like LongBench often do not provide proper metrics to separate long-context performance from the model's baseline ability, making cross-model comparison unclear. Second, such benchmarks are usually constructed with fixed input lengths, which limits their applicability across different models and fails to reveal when a model begins to break down. To address these issues, we introduce a length-controllable long-context benchmark and a novel metric that disentangles baseline knowledge from true long-context capabilities. Experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach in effectively evaluating LLMs.

The ability to learn different tasks sequentially is essential to the development of artificial intelligence. In general, neural networks lack this capability, the major obstacle being catastrophic forgetting. It occurs when the incrementally available information from non-stationary data distributions is continually acquired, disrupting what the model has already learned. Our approach remembers old tasks by projecting the representations of new tasks close to that of old tasks while keeping the decision boundaries unchanged. We employ the center loss as a regularization penalty that enforces new tasks' features to have the same class centers as old tasks and makes the features highly discriminative. This, in turn, leads to the least forgetting of already learned information. This method is easy to implement, requires minimal computational and memory overhead, and allows the neural network to maintain high performance across many sequentially encountered tasks. We also demonstrate that using the center loss in conjunction with the memory replay outperforms other replay-based strategies. Along with standard MNIST variants for continual learning, we apply our method to continual domain adaptation scenarios with the Digits and PACS datasets. We demonstrate that our approach is scalable, effective, and gives competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art continual learning methods.

Long-form generation is crucial for a wide range of practical applications, typically categorized into short-to-long and long-to-long generation. While short-to-long generations have received considerable attention, generating long texts from extremely long resources remains relatively underexplored. The primary challenge in long-to-long generation lies in effectively integrating and analyzing relevant information from extensive inputs, which remains difficult for current large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we propose LLMtimesMapReduce-V2, a novel test-time scaling strategy designed to enhance the ability of LLMs to process extremely long inputs. Drawing inspiration from convolutional neural networks, which iteratively integrate local features into higher-level global representations, LLMtimesMapReduce-V2 utilizes stacked convolutional scaling layers to progressively expand the understanding of input materials. Both quantitative and qualitative experimental results demonstrate that our approach substantially enhances the ability of LLMs to process long inputs and generate coherent, informative long-form articles, outperforming several representative baselines.

Long-text generation is seemingly ubiquitous in real-world applications of large language models such as generating an email or writing a review. Despite the fundamental importance and prevalence of long-text generation in many practical applications, existing work on personalized generation has focused on the generation of very short text. To overcome these limitations, we study the problem of personalized long-text generation, that is, generating long-text that is personalized for a specific user while being practically useful for the vast majority of real-world applications that naturally require the generation of longer text. In this work, we demonstrate the importance of user-specific personalization for long-text generation tasks and develop the Long-text Language Model Personalization (LongLaMP) Benchmark. LongLaMP provides a comprehensive and diverse evaluation framework for personalized long-text generation. Extensive experiments on LongLaMP for zero-shot and fine-tuned language tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed benchmark and its utility for developing and evaluating techniques for personalized long-text generation across a wide variety of long-text generation tasks. The results highlight the importance of personalization across a wide variety of long-text generation tasks. Finally, we release the benchmark for others to use for this important problem.

The ability to learn tasks in a sequential fashion is crucial to the development of artificial intelligence. Neural networks are not, in general, capable of this and it has been widely thought that catastrophic forgetting is an inevitable feature of connectionist models. We show that it is possible to overcome this limitation and train networks that can maintain expertise on tasks which they have not experienced for a long time. Our approach remembers old tasks by selectively slowing down learning on the weights important for those tasks. We demonstrate our approach is scalable and effective by solving a set of classification tasks based on the MNIST hand written digit dataset and by learning several Atari 2600 games sequentially.

Everyday tasks of long-horizon and comprising a sequence of multiple implicit subtasks still impose a major challenge in offline robot control. While a number of prior methods aimed to address this setting with variants of imitation and offline reinforcement learning, the learned behavior is typically narrow and often struggles to reach configurable long-horizon goals. As both paradigms have complementary strengths and weaknesses, we propose a novel hierarchical approach that combines the strengths of both methods to learn task-agnostic long-horizon policies from high-dimensional camera observations. Concretely, we combine a low-level policy that learns latent skills via imitation learning and a high-level policy learned from offline reinforcement learning for skill-chaining the latent behavior priors. Experiments in various simulated and real robot control tasks show that our formulation enables producing previously unseen combinations of skills to reach temporally extended goals by "stitching" together latent skills through goal chaining with an order-of-magnitude improvement in performance upon state-of-the-art baselines. We even learn one multi-task visuomotor policy for 25 distinct manipulation tasks in the real world which outperforms both imitation learning and offline reinforcement learning techniques.

We introduce QwenLong-L1.5, a model that achieves superior long-context reasoning capabilities through systematic post-training innovations. The key technical breakthroughs of QwenLong-L1.5 are as follows: (1) Long-Context Data Synthesis Pipeline: We develop a systematic synthesis framework that generates challenging reasoning tasks requiring multi-hop grounding over globally distributed evidence. By deconstructing documents into atomic facts and their underlying relationships, and then programmatically composing verifiable reasoning questions, our approach creates high-quality training data at scale, moving substantially beyond simple retrieval tasks to enable genuine long-range reasoning capabilities. (2) Stabilized Reinforcement Learning for Long-Context Training: To overcome the critical instability in long-context RL, we introduce task-balanced sampling with task-specific advantage estimation to mitigate reward bias, and propose Adaptive Entropy-Controlled Policy Optimization (AEPO) that dynamically regulates exploration-exploitation trade-offs. (3) Memory-Augmented Architecture for Ultra-Long Contexts: Recognizing that even extended context windows cannot accommodate arbitrarily long sequences, we develop a memory management framework with multi-stage fusion RL training that seamlessly integrates single-pass reasoning with iterative memory-based processing for tasks exceeding 4M tokens. Based on Qwen3-30B-A3B-Thinking, QwenLong-L1.5 achieves performance comparable to GPT-5 and Gemini-2.5-Pro on long-context reasoning benchmarks, surpassing its baseline by 9.90 points on average. On ultra-long tasks (1M~4M tokens), QwenLong-L1.5's memory-agent framework yields a 9.48-point gain over the agent baseline. Additionally, the acquired long-context reasoning ability translates to enhanced performance in general domains like scientific reasoning, memory tool using, and extended dialogue.

In this work, we introduce the task of life-long personalization of large language models. While recent mainstream efforts in the LLM community mainly focus on scaling data and compute for improved capabilities of LLMs, we argue that it is also very important to enable LLM systems, or language agents, to continuously adapt to the diverse and ever-changing profiles of every distinct user and provide up-to-date personalized assistance. We provide a clear task formulation and introduce a simple, general, effective, and scalable framework for life-long personalization of LLM systems and language agents. To facilitate future research on LLM personalization, we also introduce methods to synthesize realistic benchmarks and robust evaluation metrics. We will release all codes and data for building and benchmarking life-long personalized LLM systems.

Long-context models (LCMs) have made remarkable strides in recent years, offering users great convenience for handling tasks that involve long context, such as document summarization. As the community increasingly prioritizes the faithfulness of generated results, merely ensuring the accuracy of LCM outputs is insufficient, as it is quite challenging for humans to verify the results from the extremely lengthy context. Yet, although some efforts have been made to assess whether LCMs respond truly based on the context, these works either are limited to specific tasks or heavily rely on external evaluation resources like GPT-4.In this work, we introduce L-CiteEval, a comprehensive multi-task benchmark for long-context understanding with citations, aiming to evaluate both the understanding capability and faithfulness of LCMs. L-CiteEval covers 11 tasks from diverse domains, spanning context lengths from 8K to 48K, and provides a fully automated evaluation suite. Through testing with 11 cutting-edge closed-source and open-source LCMs, we find that although these models show minor differences in their generated results, open-source models substantially trail behind their closed-source counterparts in terms of citation accuracy and recall. This suggests that current open-source LCMs are prone to responding based on their inherent knowledge rather than the given context, posing a significant risk to the user experience in practical applications. We also evaluate the RAG approach and observe that RAG can significantly improve the faithfulness of LCMs, albeit with a slight decrease in the generation quality. Furthermore, we discover a correlation between the attention mechanisms of LCMs and the citation generation process.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise as interactive agents that solve tasks through extended sequences of environment interactions. While prior work has primarily focused on system-level optimizations or algorithmic improvements, the role of task horizon length in shaping training dynamics remains poorly understood. In this work, we present a systematic empirical study that examines horizon length through controlled task constructions. Specifically, we construct controlled tasks in which agents face identical decision rules and reasoning structures, but differ only in the length of action sequences required for successful completion. Our results reveal that increasing horizon length alone constitutes a training bottleneck, inducing severe training instability driven by exploration difficulties and credit assignment challenges. We demonstrate that horizon reduction is a key principle to address this limitation, stabilizing training and achieving better performance in long-horizon tasks. Moreover, we find that horizon reduction is related to stronger generalization across horizon lengths: models trained under reduced horizons generalize more effectively to longer-horizon variants at inference time, a phenomenon we refer to as horizon generalization.

An ideal embodied agent should possess lifelong learning capabilities to handle long-horizon and complex tasks, enabling continuous operation in general environments. This not only requires the agent to accurately accomplish given tasks but also to leverage long-term episodic memory to optimize decision-making. However, existing mainstream one-shot embodied tasks primarily focus on task completion results, neglecting the crucial process of exploration and memory utilization. To address this, we propose Long-term Memory Embodied Exploration (LMEE), which aims to unify the agent's exploratory cognition and decision-making behaviors to promote lifelong learning.We further construct a corresponding dataset and benchmark, LMEE-Bench, incorporating multi-goal navigation and memory-based question answering to comprehensively evaluate both the process and outcome of embodied exploration. To enhance the agent's memory recall and proactive exploration capabilities, we propose MemoryExplorer, a novel method that fine-tunes a multimodal large language model through reinforcement learning to encourage active memory querying. By incorporating a multi-task reward function that includes action prediction, frontier selection, and question answering, our model achieves proactive exploration. Extensive experiments against state-of-the-art embodied exploration models demonstrate that our approach achieves significant advantages in long-horizon embodied tasks.

The emergence of long-context language models with context windows extending to millions of tokens has created new opportunities for sophisticated code understanding and software development evaluation. We propose LoCoBench, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to evaluate long-context LLMs in realistic, complex software development scenarios. Unlike existing code evaluation benchmarks that focus on single-function completion or short-context tasks, LoCoBench addresses the critical evaluation gap for long-context capabilities that require understanding entire codebases, reasoning across multiple files, and maintaining architectural consistency across large-scale software systems. Our benchmark provides 8,000 evaluation scenarios systematically generated across 10 programming languages, with context lengths spanning 10K to 1M tokens, a 100x variation that enables precise assessment of long-context performance degradation in realistic software development settings. LoCoBench introduces 8 task categories that capture essential long-context capabilities: architectural understanding, cross-file refactoring, multi-session development, bug investigation, feature implementation, code comprehension, integration testing, and security analysis. Through a 5-phase pipeline, we create diverse, high-quality scenarios that challenge LLMs to reason about complex codebases at unprecedented scale. We introduce a comprehensive evaluation framework with 17 metrics across 4 dimensions, including 8 new evaluation metrics, combined in a LoCoBench Score (LCBS). Our evaluation of state-of-the-art long-context models reveals substantial performance gaps, demonstrating that long-context understanding in complex software development represents a significant unsolved challenge that demands more attention. LoCoBench is released at: https://github.com/SalesforceAIResearch/LoCoBench.

Completing Long-Horizon (LH) tasks in open-ended worlds is an important yet difficult problem for embodied agents. Existing approaches suffer from two key challenges: (1) they heavily rely on experiences obtained from human-created data or curricula, failing to autonomously update and select multimodal experiences, and (2) they may encounter catastrophic forgetting issues when faced with new tasks, failing to autonomously update world knowledge. To solve these challenges, this paper presents {\bf EvolvingAgent}, a curriculum self-evolving agent with a continual World Model (WM), which can autonomously complete various LH tasks across environments through self-planning, self-control, and self-reflection, without human intervention. Specifically, EvolvingAgent contains three modules, i.e., i) the experience-driven task planner, which uses an LLM along with multimodal experiences to convert LH tasks into executable sub-tasks; ii) the WM-guided action controller, which leverages WM to generate low-level actions and incorporates a self-verification mechanism to update multimodal experiences; iii) the Curriculum Learning (CL) -based reflector, which implements a two-stage CL algorithm to select multimodal experiences for task-adaptive WM updates. By building a planner-controller-reflector closed-loop dynamic, the continual WM for EvolvingAgent can autonomously update multimodal experiences and world knowledge. We conducted extensive experiments on Minecraft, compared with existing methods, EvolvingAgent can improve 111.74{\%} average success rate, reduce more than 6x ineffective actions, and generalize to the Atari environment with human-level performance.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made incredible progress recently. On the one hand, advanced foundation models like ChatGPT can offer powerful conversation, in-context learning and code generation abilities on a broad range of open-domain tasks. They can also generate high-level solution outlines for domain-specific tasks based on the common sense knowledge they have acquired. However, they still face difficulties with some specialized tasks because they lack enough domain-specific data during pre-training or they often have errors in their neural network computations on those tasks that need accurate executions. On the other hand, there are also many existing models and systems (symbolic-based or neural-based) that can do some domain-specific tasks very well. However, due to the different implementation or working mechanisms, they are not easily accessible or compatible with foundation models. Therefore, there is a clear and pressing need for a mechanism that can leverage foundation models to propose task solution outlines and then automatically match some of the sub-tasks in the outlines to the off-the-shelf models and systems with special functionalities to complete them. Inspired by this, we introduce TaskMatrix.AI as a new AI ecosystem that connects foundation models with millions of APIs for task completion. Unlike most previous work that aimed to improve a single AI model, TaskMatrix.AI focuses more on using existing foundation models (as a brain-like central system) and APIs of other AI models and systems (as sub-task solvers) to achieve diversified tasks in both digital and physical domains. As a position paper, we will present our vision of how to build such an ecosystem, explain each key component, and use study cases to illustrate both the feasibility of this vision and the main challenges we need to address next.

Long-context language models unlock advanced capabilities in reasoning, code generation, and document summarization by leveraging dependencies across extended spans of text. However, a significant portion of readily available long-text data lacks meaningful long-distance dependencies; most spans can be predicted using only local context. Training on such data is inefficient, making careful data selection crucial. Therefore, we introduce LongFilter, a framework for curating training data tailored to long-context pretraining. LongFilter measures the information gain provided by extended context by contrasting model predictions under long-context versus short-context settings, thereby identifying samples where long-range dependencies are essential. Experiments with LLaMA-3-8B, extending its context length from 8K to 64K, show that LongFilter efficiently selects high-quality data and yields substantial improvements on benchmarks such as HELMET, LongBench, and RULER.

Real-world RAG applications often encounter long-context input scenarios, where redundant information and noise results in higher inference costs and reduced performance. To address these challenges, we propose LongRefiner, an efficient plug-and-play refiner that leverages the inherent structural characteristics of long documents. LongRefiner employs dual-level query analysis, hierarchical document structuring, and adaptive refinement through multi-task learning on a single foundation model. Experiments on seven QA datasets demonstrate that LongRefiner achieves competitive performance in various scenarios while using 10x fewer computational costs and latency compared to the best baseline. Further analysis validates that LongRefiner is scalable, efficient, and effective, providing practical insights for real-world long-text RAG applications. Our code is available at https://github.com/ignorejjj/LongRefiner.

The rise of personal assistant agents, e.g., OpenClaw, highlights the growing potential of large language models to support users across everyday life and work. A core challenge in these settings is proactive assistance, since users often begin with underspecified requests and leave important needs, constraints, or preferences unstated. However, existing benchmarks rarely evaluate whether agents can identify and act on such hidden intents before they are explicitly stated, especially in sustained multi-turn interactions where user needs emerge gradually. To address this gap, we introduce π-Bench, a benchmark for proactive assistance comprising 100 multi-turn tasks across 5 domain-specific user personas. By incorporating hidden user intents, inter-task dependencies, and cross-session continuity, π-Bench evaluates agents' ability to anticipate and address user needs over extended interactions, jointly measuring proactivity and task completion in long-horizon trajectories that better reflect real-world use. Experiments show (1) proactive assistance remains challenging, (2) a clear distinction between task completion and proactivity, and (3) the value of prior interaction for proactive intent resolution in later tasks.

When building a unified vision system or gradually adding new capabilities to a system, the usual assumption is that training data for all tasks is always available. However, as the number of tasks grows, storing and retraining on such data becomes infeasible. A new problem arises where we add new capabilities to a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), but the training data for its existing capabilities are unavailable. We propose our Learning without Forgetting method, which uses only new task data to train the network while preserving the original capabilities. Our method performs favorably compared to commonly used feature extraction and fine-tuning adaption techniques and performs similarly to multitask learning that uses original task data we assume unavailable. A more surprising observation is that Learning without Forgetting may be able to replace fine-tuning with similar old and new task datasets for improved new task performance.