Daily Papers

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have propelled intelligent agents from reactive responses to proactive support. While promising, existing proactive agents either rely exclusively on observations from enclosed environments (e.g., desktop UIs) with direct LLM inference or employ rule-based proactive notifications, leading to suboptimal user intent understanding and limited functionality for proactive service. In this paper, we introduce ContextAgent, the first context-aware proactive agent that incorporates extensive sensory contexts to enhance the proactive capabilities of LLM agents. ContextAgent first extracts multi-dimensional contexts from massive sensory perceptions on wearables (e.g., video and audio) to understand user intentions. ContextAgent then leverages the sensory contexts and the persona contexts from historical data to predict the necessity for proactive services. When proactive assistance is needed, ContextAgent further automatically calls the necessary tools to assist users unobtrusively. To evaluate this new task, we curate ContextAgentBench, the first benchmark for evaluating context-aware proactive LLM agents, covering 1,000 samples across nine daily scenarios and twenty tools. Experiments on ContextAgentBench show that ContextAgent outperforms baselines by achieving up to 8.5% and 6.0% higher accuracy in proactive predictions and tool calling, respectively. We hope our research can inspire the development of more advanced, human-centric, proactive AI assistants.

Proactive LLM agents can turn idle compute into useful support before users ask. Yet even correct work can misread user context, impose review costs, or undermine trust. This work proposes foundations for designing, realizing, and evaluating proactive LLM agents around three joint principles (3T): Task Capability, anticipating relevant needs and correctly performing useful work; Temporal Allocation, allocating compute according to resource availability and when results are needed; and Trust, sustaining users' confidence and appropriate reliance on the agent. We connect these objectives to a design space organized around five dimensions: task scope, anticipation horizon, activation trigger, processing timing, and intervention depth, and specify the situation and system modeling needed to support its choices, including user and environment representations, backbone LLMs, and agent harnesses. Lastly, we propose PROACTIVITY-GYM, a simulation-based evaluation testbed including multi-day scenarios, stateful environments, and persona-conditioned simulated users that can evaluate the consequences of proactive assistance across interactions. Evaluations across 23 model-harness configurations uncover substantial performance gaps across 3T and reveal that LLM judges often conflate task capability and trust. A human study with 30 participants demonstrates the importance of the joint 3T optimization: participants show sharp trust declines after intervention misalignment despite correct outcomes, and prefer sleep-time assistance, even when imperfect, to preserve ongoing focus. Together, these findings support designing and evaluating proactive agents through the joint consideration of useful work, compute allocation, and evolving user trust.

Personalization is a crucial capability of modern language agents. However, current research primarily positions personalized agents as passive responders to user preferences, limiting their ability to interact with users and provide suggestions or guidance proactively. To systematically evaluate such proactive personalization in realistic interactions, we propose Ψ-Bench, a benchmark for assessing LLMs' ability to influence realistic users through conversation. We design three real-world interaction scenarios that involve persuasion in Ψ-Bench, and endow simulated clients with personal characteristics through explicit user profiles derived from dialogue histories. We evaluate 10 frontier LLMs on Ψ-Bench and find that while most models can produce coherent and reasonable arguments, even state-of-the-art models still leave considerable room for improvement in persuasion. We also find that providing access to client profiles yields an average performance gain of 18.24\%, highlighting the importance of user-specific information for effective persuasion. Overall, our work highlights persona-sensitive influencing as a challenging yet practical direction for evaluating and developing more proactive personalized LLM agents. Codes are available at: https://github.com/Hanpx20/Psi-Bench.

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

While existing work focuses primarily on task success, we argue that effective real-world agents require optimizing three dimensions: productivity (task completion), proactivity (asking essential questions), and personalization (adapting to diverse user preferences). We introduce UserVille, an interactive environment with LLM-based user simulators enabling diverse, configurable user preferences. Leveraging UserVille, we introduce PPP, a multi-objective reinforcement learning approach that jointly optimizes all three dimensions: Productivity, Proactivity, and Personalization. Experiments on software engineering and deep research tasks show that agents trained with PPP achieve substantial improvements over strong baselines such as GPT-5 (+21.6 on average), demonstrating the ability to ask strategic clarifying questions, adapt to unseen user preferences, and improve task success through better interaction. This work demonstrates that explicitly optimizing for user-centered interaction is critical for building practical and effective AI agents.

Proactive agents that anticipate user intentions without explicit prompts represent a significant evolution in human-AI interaction, promising to reduce cognitive load and streamline workflows. However, existing datasets suffer from two critical deficiencies: (1) reliance on LLM-synthesized data that fails to capture authentic human decision-making patterns, and (2) focus on isolated tasks rather than continuous workflows, missing the pre-assistance behavioral context essential for learning proactive intervention signals. To address these gaps, we introduce ProAgentBench, a rigorous benchmark for proactive agents in working scenarios. Our contributions include: (1) a hierarchical task framework that decomposes proactive assistance into timing prediction and assist content generation; (2) a privacy-compliant dataset with 28,000+ events from 500+ hours of real user sessions, preserving bursty interaction patterns (burstiness B=0.787) absent in synthetic data; and (3) extensive experiments that evaluates LLM- and VLM-based baselines. Numerically, we showed that long-term memory and historical context significantly enhance prediction accuracy, while real-world training data substantially outperforms synthetic alternatives. We release our dataset and code at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ProAgentBench-6BC0.

LLM agents increasingly operate through multi-turn tool use and environment interaction, where safety risks often emerge from intermediate steps long before they surface in the final outcome. Reactive auditing is therefore insufficient: post-hoc diagnosis frequently misses the chance to flag risks while they are unfolding. We propose TRACES, a representation-based proactive auditor that learns prefix-level trajectory risk states from the hidden representations of an observer LLM. TRACES induces latent mechanism features from step representations and models their temporal evolution to estimate whether a partial trajectory is drifting toward unsafe behavior. To sidestep the cost and ambiguity of step-level risk annotation, TRACES is trained with weak trajectory-level supervision while still producing dense prefix-level risk estimates. Across multiple agent safety benchmarks, TRACES improves both full-trajectory safety prediction and proactive risk discrimination. Our analyses further suggest that these risk states can help train a safer agent, highlighting the broader potential of proactive auditing for long-horizon agent safety.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed in unfamiliar and evolving environments, requiring them to proactively explore, understand, and adapt to environmental dynamics. However, existing benchmarks rarely test whether agents can proactively discover how an environment works and adapt as it evolves. To address this gap, we introduce AdaExploreBench, a benchmark for proactive exploration and test-time adaptation in evolving environments. By instantiating environmental dynamics as hidden rules, AdaExploreBench requires agents to actively acquire evidence and infer the rules. Under implicit rule drift, the latent rule changes without announcement, requiring agents to detect from degraded performance that prior knowledge is stale and re-explore. Experiments on eight leading LLMs show that proactive and adaptive exploration remain challenging: GPT-6 Sol achieves only 61.9% calibrated accuracy, while providing sufficient evidence or removing rule drift improves average performance significantly by close to 10%. These results reveal a critical bottleneck in current LLM agents: they can often reason effectively from informative evidence once it is available, but struggle to actively acquire the right evidence and recognize when previously acquired evidence is no longer valid.

Memory management is vital for LLM agents to handle long-term interaction and personalization. Most research focuses on how to organize and use memory summary, but often overlooks the initial memory extraction stage. In this paper, we argue that existing summary-based methods have two major limitations based on the recurrent processing theory. First, summarization is "ahead-of-time", acting as a blind "feed-forward" process that misses important details because it doesn't know future tasks. Second, extraction is usually "one-off", lacking a feedback loop to verify facts, which leads to the accumulation of information loss. To address these issues, we propose proactive memory extraction (namely ProMem). Unlike static summarization, ProMem treats extraction as an iterative cognitive process. We introduce a recurrent feedback loop where the agent uses self-questioning to actively probe the dialogue history. This mechanism allows the agent to recover missing information and correct errors. Our ProMem significantly improves the completeness of the extracted memory and QA accuracy. It also achieves a superior trade-off between extraction quality and token cost.

While LLM-based agents can interact with environments via invoking external tools, their expanded capabilities also amplify security risks. Monitoring step-level tool invocation behaviors in real time and proactively intervening before unsafe execution is critical for agent deployment, yet remains under-explored. In this work, we first construct TS-Bench, a novel benchmark for step-level tool invocation safety detection in LLM agents. We then develop a guardrail model, TS-Guard, using multi-task reinforcement learning. The model proactively detects unsafe tool invocation actions before execution by reasoning over the interaction history. It assesses request harmfulness and action-attack correlations, producing interpretable and generalizable safety judgments and feedback. Furthermore, we introduce TS-Flow, a guardrail-feedback-driven reasoning framework for LLM agents, which reduces harmful tool invocations of ReAct-style agents by 65 percent on average and improves benign task completion by approximately 10 percent under prompt injection attacks.

While agents are increasingly spending more resources, today agent cost is mostly measured only after execution. A Budget-Aware Agent (BAGEN) should treat budget as an active control signal, rather than a passive cost metric. We first systematically define budget estimation as internal budgets (from agent computation) and external budgets (from agent actions). We then formalize budget-awareness as progressive interval estimation: at each step of a plan, an agent should predict an upper and lower bound on remaining budget, and alert when completion is unlikely. Scoring with a rollout-replay protocol, we find consistent failure patterns on four environments and five frontier agents: (1) strong agents do not necessarily have strong budget-awareness, with correlation r=0.35. (2) frontier models are consistently over-optimistic, continue spending on tasks that are unlikely to succeed, instead of alerting the user early. (3) budget-aware signal is actionable and trainable. Early stop saves 28-64% tokens on failed trajectories, and SFT+RL strengthens early stop and alert behavior. (4) precise interval calibration remains challenging, with interval coverage capping at 47% after SFT+RL. Project page: https://ragen-ai.github.io/bagen/

Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex decision-making and tool-use tasks, yet their ability to generalize across varying environments remains a under-examined concern. Current evaluation paradigms predominantly rely on trajectory-based metrics that measure task success, while failing to assess whether agents possess a grounded, transferable model of the environment. To address this gap, we propose Task-to-Quiz (T2Q), a deterministic and automated evaluation paradigm designed to decouple task execution from world-state understanding. We instantiate this paradigm in T2QBench, a suite comprising 30 environments and 1,967 grounded QA pairs across multiple difficulty levels. Our extensive experiments reveal that task success is often a poor proxy for environment understanding, and that current memory machanism can not effectively help agents acquire a grounded model of the environment. These findings identify proactive exploration and fine-grained state representation as primary bottlenecks, offering a robust foundation for developing more generalizable autonomous agents.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents demonstrate strong autonomy, but their stochastic behavior introduces unpredictable safety risks. Existing rule-based enforcement systems, such as AgentSpec, are reactive, intervening only when unsafe behavior is imminent or has occurred, lacking foresight for long-horizon dependencies. To overcome these limitations, we present a proactive runtime enforcement framework for LLM agents. The framework abstracts agent behaviors into symbolic states and learns a Discrete-Time Markov Chain (DTMC) from execution traces. At runtime, it predicts the probability of leading to undesired behaviors and intervenes before violations occur when the estimated risk exceeds a user-defined threshold. Designed to provide PAC-correctness guarantee, the framework achieves statistically reliable enforcement of agent safety. We evaluate the framework across two safety-critical domains: autonomous vehicles and embodied agents. It proactively enforces safety and maintains high task performance, outperforming existing methods.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents use memory to learn from past interactions, enabling autonomous planning and decision-making in complex environments. However, this reliance on memory introduces a critical security risk: an adversary can inject seemingly harmless records into an agent's memory to manipulate its future behavior. This vulnerability is characterized by two core aspects: First, the malicious effect of injected records is only activated within a specific context, making them hard to detect when individual memory entries are audited in isolation. Second, once triggered, the manipulation can initiate a self-reinforcing error cycle: the corrupted outcome is stored as precedent, which not only amplifies the initial error but also progressively lowers the threshold for similar attacks in the future. To address these challenges, we introduce A-MemGuard (Agent-Memory Guard), the first proactive defense framework for LLM agent memory. The core idea of our work is the insight that memory itself must become both self-checking and self-correcting. Without modifying the agent's core architecture, A-MemGuard combines two mechanisms: (1) consensus-based validation, which detects anomalies by comparing reasoning paths derived from multiple related memories and (2) a dual-memory structure, where detected failures are distilled into ``lessons'' stored separately and consulted before future actions, breaking error cycles and enabling adaptation. Comprehensive evaluations on multiple benchmarks show that A-MemGuard effectively cuts attack success rates by over 95% while incurring a minimal utility cost. This work shifts LLM memory security from static filtering to a proactive, experience-driven model where defenses strengthen over time. Our code is available in https://github.com/TangciuYueng/AMemGuard

Recent advancements in LLM agents are gradually shifting from reactive, text-based paradigms toward proactive, multimodal interaction. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on reactive responses, overlooking the complexities of proactive intervention and monitoring. To bridge this gap, we introduce ProVoice-Bench, the first evaluation framework specifically designed for proactive voice agents, featuring four novel tasks. By leveraging a multi-stage data synthesis pipeline, we curate 1,182 high-quality samples for rigorous testing. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art Multimodal LLMs reveals a significant performance gap, particularly regarding over-triggering and reasoning capabilities. These findings highlight the limitations of current models and offer a roadmap for developing more natural, context-aware proactive agents.

LLM agents increasingly act on users' personal information, yet existing privacy defenses remain limited in both design and adaptability. Most prior approaches rely on static or passive defenses, such as prompting and guarding. These paradigms are insufficient for supporting contextual, proactive privacy decisions in multi-step agent execution. We propose Contextualized Defense Instructing (CDI), a new privacy defense paradigm in which an instructor model generates step-specific, context-aware privacy guidance during execution, proactively shaping actions rather than merely constraining or vetoing them. Crucially, CDI is paired with an experience-driven optimization framework that trains the instructor via reinforcement learning (RL), where we convert failure trajectories with privacy violations into learning environments. We formalize baseline defenses and CDI as distinct intervention points in a canonical agent loop, and compare their privacy-helpfulness trade-offs within a unified simulation framework. Results show that our CDI consistently achieves a better balance between privacy preservation (94.2%) and helpfulness (80.6%) than baselines, with superior robustness to adversarial conditions and generalization.

Eliciting reasoning has emerged as a powerful technique for improving the performance of large language models (LLMs) on complex tasks by inducing thinking. However, their effectiveness in realistic user-engaged agent scenarios remains unclear. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study on the effect of explicit thinking in user-engaged LLM agents. Our experiments span across seven models, three benchmarks, and two thinking instantiations, and we evaluate them through both a quantitative response taxonomy analysis and qualitative failure propagation case studies. Contrary to expectations, we find that mandatory thinking often backfires on agents in user-engaged settings, causing anomalous performance degradation across various LLMs. Our key finding reveals that thinking makes agents more ``introverted'' by shortening responses and reducing information disclosure to users, which weakens agent-user information exchange and leads to downstream task failures. Furthermore, we demonstrate that explicitly prompting for information disclosure reliably improves performance across diverse model families, suggesting that proactive transparency is a vital lever for agent optimization. Overall, our study suggests that information transparency awareness is a crucial yet underexplored perspective for the future design of reasoning agents in real-world scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/deeplearning-wisc/Thinking-Agent.

Large language model (LLM)-based AI agents extend LLM capabilities by enabling access to tools such as data sources, APIs, search engines, code sandboxes, and even other agents. While this empowers agents to perform complex tasks, LLMs may invoke unintended tool interactions and introduce risks, such as leaking sensitive data or overwriting critical records, which are unacceptable in enterprise contexts. Current approaches to mitigate these risks, such as model-based safeguards, enhance agents' reliability but cannot guarantee system safety. Methods like information flow control (IFC) and temporal constraints aim to provide guarantees but often require extensive human annotation. We propose a process that starts with applying System-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) to identify hazards in agent workflows, derive safety requirements, and formalize them as enforceable specifications on data flows and tool sequences. To enable this, we introduce a capability-enhanced Model Context Protocol (MCP) framework that requires structured labels on capabilities, confidentiality, and trust level. Together, these contributions aim to shift LLM-based agent safety from ad hoc reliability fixes to proactive guardrails with formal guarantees, while reducing dependence on user confirmation and making autonomy a deliberate design choice.

Recent position papers argue that the classical aleatoric/epistemic uncertainty framework is insufficient for interactive large language model (LLM) agents and call for underspecification-aware, decomposed, and communicable uncertainty representations that can unlock new agent capabilities such as proactive clarification seeking and shared mental-model building. Practical deployment constraints -- black-box APIs, interactive latency budgets, and the absence of labeled trajectories -- rule out logprob-based, multi-sampling, and training-based methods, leaving prompt-based estimation as the most viable family for surfacing such signals at deployment time. We answer this call with a simple prompt-based decomposition that separates action confidence from request uncertainty (u), enabling the agent to ask for clarification when the task specification is ambiguous. To evaluate it, we introduce two clarification-augmented benchmarks (WebShop-Clarification and ALFWorld-Clarification) in which 50% of tasks are deliberately underspecified, and systematically compare the proposed decomposition against ReAct+UE and Uncertainty-Aware Memory (UAM) across five LLM backbones (GPT-5.1, DeepSeek-v3.2-exp, GLM-4.7, Qwen3.5-35B, GPT-OSS-120B) on these variants together with the standard WebShop, ALFWorld, and REAL benchmarks for fault detection. Averaged across the five backbones, the proposed decomposition improves clarification F1 on ALFWorld-Clarification by 73% over ReAct+UE and by 36% over UAM, and leads clarification F1 on every backbone on WebShop-Clarification and on four of five backbones on ALFWorld-Clarification, indicating that the gains generalize beyond a single LLM.

LLM-Agents have evolved into autonomous systems for complex task execution, with the SKILL.md specification emerging as a de facto standard for encapsulating agent capabilities. However, a critical bottleneck remains: different agent frameworks exhibit starkly different sensitivities to prompt formatting, causing up to 40% performance variation, yet nearly all skills exist as a single, format-agnostic Markdown version. Manual per-platform rewriting creates an unsustainable maintenance burden, while prior audits have found that over one third of community skills contain security vulnerabilities. To address this, we present SkCC, a compilation framework that introduces classical compiler design into agent skill development. At its core, SkIR - a strongly-typed intermediate representation - decouples skill semantics from platform-specific formatting, enabling portable deployment across heterogeneous agent frameworks. Around this IR, a compile-time Analyzer enforces security constraints via Anti-Skill Injection before deployment. Through a four-phase pipeline, SkCC reduces adaptation complexity from O(m times n) to O(m + n). Experiments on SkillsBench demonstrate that compiled skills consistently outperform their original counterparts, improving pass rates from 21.1% to 33.3% on Claude Code and from 35.1% to 48.7% on Kimi CLI, while achieving sub-10ms compilation latency, a 94.8% proactive security trigger rate, and 10-46% runtime token savings across platforms.

Customer-service LLM agents must follow organizational policy when acting on a user's behalf. Compliance failures arise from either forbidden actions, such as granting an ineligible change, or omitted procedural requirements, such as identification or confirmation. Runtime safeguards can intervene on risky actions, but action-local checks do not guide an agent through a multi-step procedure. Workflow-following systems support prescribed process execution, but primarily target workflow completion rather than safeguarding agent behavior. PolicyGuide instead compiles each domain policy into a workflow graph and invokes a proactive verifier at user-turn boundaries. From persisted graph state, the verifier reconciles open requests and returns step-specific remediation along a policy-compliant path. Across the τ^2-bench airline, retail, and telecom domains with a GPT-5.4 agent and verifier, PolicyGuide raises mean Pass^4 from 0.42 to 0.62, with the largest gain on telecom (0.19 to 0.61), the most workflow-structured domain. The same workflows transfer to Claude Sonnet 4.6 and Gemini 2.5 Pro agents. Complementary evaluations find the lowest observed attack-success rate under adversarial users and the strongest procedural compliance in an author-designed workflow-level validation.

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed as personal assistants. Existing evaluations, however, mostly use short, self-contained requests in static environments. Everyday life assistance is different. A task runs for weeks rather than minutes. The world keeps changing while the agent is not being prompted. Many constraints are never stated outright. An agent that merely answers the request in front of it will fail at such a task. What is needed instead is an agent that stays proactive and consistent. It decides on its own when to act, when to ask, and when to stay silent. It notices changes that nobody announced. It keeps one plan coherent from the first day to the last. No current benchmark measures this. We introduce VibeLifeBench, a benchmark of 200 long-horizon tasks across ten everyday-life domains. Each task is a scripted multi-week timeline in a simulated world of 22 mock services. The world advances on its own clock, and many of its changes are silent, so only an agent that re-inspects the world discovers them. Every task is graded by fine-grained, weighted checks that read only what the agent actually left behind, covering the end state, the timeliness of its actions, and whether it upheld the implicit constraints. We evaluate seven frontier models. All of them score low, which shows how far current agents are from assisting with real life. We will open-source all tasks, environments, and the evaluation framework.

Large-language-model (LLM) agents excel at reactive dialogue but struggle with proactive, goal-driven interactions due to myopic decoding and costly planning. We introduce DialogXpert, which leverages a frozen LLM to propose a small, high-quality set of candidate actions per turn and employs a compact Q-network over fixed BERT embeddings trained via temporal-difference learning to select optimal moves within this reduced space. By tracking the user's emotions, DialogXpert tailors each decision to advance the task while nurturing a genuine, empathetic connection. Across negotiation, emotional support, and tutoring benchmarks, DialogXpert drives conversations to under 3 turns with success rates exceeding 94\% and, with a larger LLM prior, pushes success above 97\% while markedly improving negotiation outcomes. This framework delivers real-time, strategic, and emotionally intelligent dialogue planning at scale. Code available at https://github.com/declare-lab/dialogxpert/

The evolution of large language models (LLMs) has enhanced the planning capabilities of language agents in diverse real-world scenarios. Despite these advancements, the potential of LLM-powered agents to comprehend ambiguous user instructions for reasoning and decision-making is still under exploration. In this work, we introduce a new task, Proactive Agent Planning, which requires language agents to predict clarification needs based on user-agent conversation and agent-environment interaction, invoke external tools to collect valid information, and generate a plan to fulfill the user's demands. To study this practical problem, we establish a new benchmark dataset, Ask-before-Plan. To tackle the deficiency of LLMs in proactive planning, we propose a novel multi-agent framework, Clarification-Execution-Planning (CEP), which consists of three agents specialized in clarification, execution, and planning. We introduce the trajectory tuning scheme for the clarification agent and static execution agent, as well as the memory recollection mechanism for the dynamic execution agent. Extensive evaluations and comprehensive analyses conducted on the Ask-before-Plan dataset validate the effectiveness of our proposed framework.

Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) holds great promise for the development of autonomous agents under complex GUI tasks, but its scalability remains severely hampered by the verification of task completion. Existing task verification is treated as a passive, post-hoc process: a verifier (i.e., rule-based scoring script, reward or critic model, and LLM-as-a-Judge) analyzes the agent's entire interaction trajectory to determine if the agent succeeds. Such processing of verbose context that contains irrelevant, noisy history poses challenges to the verification protocols and therefore leads to prohibitive cost and low reliability. To overcome this bottleneck, we propose SmartSnap, a paradigm shift from this passive, post-hoc verification to proactive, in-situ self-verification by the agent itself. We introduce the Self-Verifying Agent, a new type of agent designed with dual missions: to not only complete a task but also to prove its accomplishment with curated snapshot evidences. Guided by our proposed 3C Principles (Completeness, Conciseness, and Creativity), the agent leverages its accessibility to the online environment to perform self-verification on a minimal, decisive set of snapshots. Such evidences are provided as the sole materials for a general LLM-as-a-Judge verifier to determine their validity and relevance. Experiments on mobile tasks across model families and scales demonstrate that our SmartSnap paradigm allows training LLM-driven agents in a scalable manner, bringing performance gains up to 26.08% and 16.66% respectively to 8B and 30B models. The synergizing between solution finding and evidence seeking facilitates the cultivation of efficient, self-verifying agents with competitive performance against DeepSeek V3.1 and Qwen3-235B-A22B.

LLM-based agents score well on search benchmarks, yet real users consistently find results unsatisfying, revealing a persistent evaluation-experience gap. We attribute this gap to existing benchmarks' reliance on over-specified queries, single-turn interactions, and fixed-schema evaluation, none of which reflect real search behavior where users and agents collaboratively refine vague intent through multi-turn dialogue. We term this paradigm VibeSearch and introduce VibeSearchBench, a benchmark comprising 200 manually curated bilingual (Chinese and English) tasks across 20 domains, split into VibeSearch-Pro (professional) and VibeSearch-Daily (daily-life) subsets. Each task pairs a user persona with a schema-free ground-truth knowledge graph, and is evaluated through a progressive-disclosure user simulator and a graph-matching evaluation framework. We benchmark seven frontier models under both the ReAct framework and the OpenClaw agent harness. Results show that all models remain substantially inadequate for VibeSearch (best F1: 30.30), highlighting the need for fundamental advances in long-context reasoning, proactive intent elicitation, and structured knowledge construction.

While LLM-based agents excel at individual tasks, effective collaboration with realistic human partners remains challenging. Most of the existing conversation-level collaborative studies lack grounded interaction and behavioral execution, motivating the need for cooperative game environments that enable contextualized and immersive collaboration. To this end, this paper proposes CollabBench, a benchmark for evaluating and training collaborative agents in cooperative games. CollabBench features a Diverse Player Profile Simulation pipeline to model varied players behaviors, and a Collaborative Agentic Training paradigm that unifies reasoning, communication, and action via agentic rollouts, optimized with a hybrid reward balancing task efficiency and affective adaptation. We further extend classic environments to CWAH-MultiPlayer and Cook-MultiPlayer for systematic evaluation under diverse personalities. Experiments with efficiency and affective metrics show that our trained models outperform base models, achieving 19.5% higher efficiency and 24.4% improved affective performance. Further analysis reveals key collaborative limitations of existing models and offers insights for future collaborative training.

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.

LLM-based web agents show immense promise for information seeking, yet their effectiveness on long-horizon tasks is hindered by a fundamental trade-off in context management. Prevailing ReAct-based agents suffer from context saturation as they accumulate noisy, raw histories, while methods that fixedly summarize the full history at each step risk the irreversible loss of critical details. Addressing these, we introduce AgentFold, a novel agent paradigm centered on proactive context management, inspired by the human cognitive process of retrospective consolidation. AgentFold treats its context as a dynamic cognitive workspace to be actively sculpted, rather than a passive log to be filled. At each step, it learns to execute a `folding' operation, which manages its historical trajectory at multiple scales: it can perform granular condensations to preserve vital, fine-grained details, or deep consolidations to abstract away entire multi-step sub-tasks. The results on prominent benchmarks are striking: with simple supervised fine-tuning (without continual pre-training or RL), our AgentFold-30B-A3B agent achieves 36.2% on BrowseComp and 47.3% on BrowseComp-ZH. Notably, this performance not only surpasses or matches open-source models of a dramatically larger scale, such as the DeepSeek-V3.1-671B-A37B, but also surpasses leading proprietary agents like OpenAI's o4-mini.

Proactive interventions by LLM critic models are often assumed to improve reliability, yet their effects at deployment time are poorly understood. We show that a binary LLM critic with strong offline accuracy (AUROC 0.94) can nevertheless cause severe performance degradation, inducing a 26 percentage point (pp) collapse on one model while affecting another by near zero pp. This variability demonstrates that LLM critic accuracy alone is insufficient to determine whether intervention is safe. We identify a disruption-recovery tradeoff: interventions may recover failing trajectories but also disrupt trajectories that would have succeeded. Based on this insight, we propose a pre-deployment test that uses a small pilot of 50 tasks to estimate whether intervention is likely to help or harm, without requiring full deployment. Across benchmarks, the test correctly anticipates outcomes: intervention degrades performance on high-success tasks (0 to -26 pp), while yielding a modest improvement on the high-failure ALFWorld benchmark (+2.8 pp, p=0.014). The primary value of our framework is therefore identifying when not to intervene, preventing severe regressions before deployment.

Proactive agents read user activity as text and call an LLM on every event to decide whether to act. But user activity is not natively text: it is a structured event stream of (actor, verb, object, timestamp) tuples that the operating system already maintains in graph form. Rendering the structure as text and asking an LLM to recover it is a round-trip the system never had to take. We treat the always-on signal as graph updates rather than text and use a small temporal-graph-learning (TGL) model as the encoder: one forward pass yields a per-event trigger probability and a per-entity routing score, and only the downstream agent (turning a small structured handoff into a fluent user-facing sentence) is an LLM call, invoked only when the trigger fires. TGL improves F1 on each of 14 backbones (mean +16.7, up to +46.0); in trigger-architecture comparisons, one TGL checkpoint gives the strongest trigger AUCs and the most stable deployed threshold. It runs at 11.13 ms per event on a GPU server and 13.99 ms on a consumer laptop, approximately 4--7x and 12--83x faster than every single-forward LLM-as-trigger configuration tested in each regime, with an approximately 220 MiB BF16 resident footprint deployable on-device alongside the privacy-sensitive activity stream it consumes.

Reward is critical to the evaluation and training of large language models (LLMs). However, existing rule-based or model-based reward methods struggle to generalize to GUI agents, where access to ground-truth trajectories or application databases is often unavailable, and static trajectory-based LLM-as-a-Judge approaches suffer from limited accuracy. To address these challenges, we propose ProRe, a proactive reward system that leverages a general-purpose reasoner and domain-specific evaluator agents (actors). The reasoner schedules targeted state probing tasks, which the evaluator agents then execute by actively interacting with the environment to collect additional observations. This enables the reasoner to assign more accurate and verifiable rewards to GUI agents. Empirical results on over 3K trajectories demonstrate that ProRe improves reward accuracy and F1 score by up to 5.3% and 19.4%, respectively. Furthermore, integrating ProRe with state-of-the-art policy agents yields a success rate improvement of up to 22.4%.

Critical domain knowledge typically resides with few experts, creating organizational bottlenecks in scalability and decision-making. Non-experts struggle to create effective visualizations, leading to suboptimal insights and diverting expert time. This paper investigates how to capture and embed human domain knowledge into AI agent systems through an industrial case study. We propose a software engineering framework to capture human domain knowledge for engineering AI agents in simulation data visualization by augmenting a Large Language Model (LLM) with a request classifier, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system for code generation, codified expert rules, and visualization design principles unified in an agent demonstrating autonomous, reactive, proactive, and social behavior. Evaluation across five scenarios spanning multiple engineering domains with 12 evaluators demonstrates 206% improvement in output quality, with our agent achieving expert-level ratings in all cases versus baseline's poor performance, while maintaining superior code quality with lower variance. Our contributions are: an automated agent-based system for visualization generation and a validated framework for systematically capturing human domain knowledge and codifying tacit expert knowledge into AI agents, demonstrating that non-experts can achieve expert-level outcomes in specialized domains.

Partial perception deficits can compromise autonomous vehicle safety by disrupting environmental understanding. Current protocols typically respond with immediate stops or minimal-risk maneuvers, worsening traffic flow and lacking flexibility for rare driving scenarios. In this paper, we propose LLM-RCO, a framework leveraging large language models to integrate human-like driving commonsense into autonomous systems facing perception deficits. LLM-RCO features four key modules: hazard inference, short-term motion planner, action condition verifier, and safety constraint generator. These modules interact with the dynamic driving environment, enabling proactive and context-aware control actions to override the original control policy of autonomous agents. To improve safety in such challenging conditions, we construct DriveLM-Deficit, a dataset of 53,895 video clips featuring deficits of safety-critical objects, complete with annotations for LLM-based hazard inference and motion planning fine-tuning. Extensive experiments in adverse driving conditions with the CARLA simulator demonstrate that systems equipped with LLM-RCO significantly improve driving performance, highlighting its potential for enhancing autonomous driving resilience against adverse perception deficits. Our results also show that LLMs fine-tuned with DriveLM-Deficit can enable more proactive movements instead of conservative stops in the context of perception deficits.

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

The increasing demand for intelligent assistants in human-populated environments has motivated significant research in autonomous robotic systems. Traditional service robots and virtual assistants, however, struggle with real-world task execution due to their limited capacity for dynamic reasoning and interaction, particularly when human collaboration is required. Recent developments in Large Language Models have opened new avenues for improving these systems, enabling more sophisticated reasoning and natural interaction capabilities. In this paper, we introduce AssistantX, an LLM-powered proactive assistant designed to operate autonomously in a physical office environment. Unlike conventional service robots, AssistantX leverages a novel multi-agent architecture, PPDR4X, which provides advanced inference capabilities and comprehensive collaboration awareness. By effectively bridging the gap between virtual operations and physical interactions, AssistantX demonstrates robust performance in managing complex real-world scenarios. Our evaluation highlights the architecture's effectiveness, showing that AssistantX can respond to clear instructions, actively retrieve supplementary information from memory, and proactively seek collaboration from team members to ensure successful task completion. More details and videos can be found at https://assistantx-agent.github.io/AssistantX/.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in automating scientific peer review. However, existing approaches often struggle to generate in-depth reviews supported by concrete evidence. We argue that a key limitation is the lack of flexibility to proactively investigate suspicious parts of a paper based on accumulated evidence, as human reviewers do. In this paper, we explore how to enable an LLM-based review agent to perform such proactive investigation. We find that this can be naturally formulated as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), and propose ProReviewer, a scientific peer review agent that proactively reviews a paper guided by a maintained, structured review log. The structured review log serves as a workspace for the agent to track evidence and intermediate findings collected during review. Experiments show that ProReviewer with an 8B backbone, trained by supervised fine-tuning and optimized by reinforcement learning, achieves the highest average score across five quality dimensions, outperforming prompt-based methods with much larger frontier LLMs by up to 39% and the strongest fine-tuned baseline by 16% relatively. It also attains the highest win rates against baselines in human evaluation.

The emergent reasoning and Theory of Mind (ToM) abilities demonstrated by Large Language Models (LLMs) make them promising candidates for developing coordination agents. In this study, we introduce a new LLM-Coordination Benchmark aimed at a detailed analysis of LLMs within the context of Pure Coordination Games, where participating agents need to cooperate for the most gain. This benchmark evaluates LLMs through two distinct tasks: (1) Agentic Coordination, where LLMs act as proactive participants for cooperation in 4 pure coordination games; (2) Coordination Question Answering (QA), where LLMs are prompted to answer 198 multiple-choice questions from the 4 games for evaluation of three key reasoning abilities: Environment Comprehension, ToM Reasoning, and Joint Planning. Furthermore, to enable LLMs for multi-agent coordination, we introduce a Cognitive Architecture for Coordination (CAC) framework that can easily integrate different LLMs as plug-and-play modules for pure coordination games. Our findings indicate that LLM agents equipped with GPT-4-turbo achieve comparable performance to state-of-the-art reinforcement learning methods in games that require commonsense actions based on the environment. Besides, zero-shot coordination experiments reveal that, unlike RL methods, LLM agents are robust to new unseen partners. However, results on Coordination QA show a large room for improvement in the Theory of Mind reasoning and joint planning abilities of LLMs. The analysis also sheds light on how the ability of LLMs to understand their environment and their partner's beliefs and intentions plays a part in their ability to plan for coordination. Our code is available at https://github.com/eric-ai-lab/llm_coordination.

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is pivotal for the continuous evolution of GUI agents, yet existing evaluation paradigms face significant limitations. Rule-based methods suffer from poor scalability and cannot handle open-ended tasks, while LLM-as-a-Judge approaches rely on passive visual observation, often failing to capture latent system states due to partial state observability. To address these challenges, we advocate for a paradigm shift from passive evaluation to Agentic Interactive Verification. We introduce VAGEN, a framework that employs a verifier agent equipped with interaction tools to autonomously plan verification strategies and proactively probe the environment for evidence of task completion. Leveraging the insight that GUI tasks are typically "easy to verify but hard to solve", VAGEN overcomes the bottlenecks of visual limitations. Experimental results on OSWorld-Verified and AndroidWorld benchmarks demonstrate that VAGEN significantly improves evaluation accuracy compared to LLM-as-a-Judge baselines and further enhances performance through test-time scaling strategies.

Personalized mobile agents that infer user preferences and calibrate proactive assistance hold great promise as everyday digital assistants, yet existing benchmarks fail to capture what this requires. Prior work evaluates preference recovery from static histories or intent prediction from fixed contexts. Neither tests whether an agent can elicit missing preferences through interaction, nor whether it can decide when to intervene, seek consent, or remain silent in a live GUI environment. We introduce KnowU-Bench, an online benchmark for personalized mobile agents built on a reproducible Android emulation environment, covering 42 general GUI tasks, 86 personalized tasks, and 64 proactive tasks. Unlike prior work that treats user preferences as static context, KnowU-Bench hides the user profile from the agent and exposes only behavioral logs, forcing genuine preference inference rather than context lookup. To support multi-turn preference elicitation, it instantiates an LLM-driven user simulator grounded in structured profiles, enabling realistic clarification dialogues and proactive consent handling. Beyond personalization, KnowU-Bench provides comprehensive evaluation of the complete proactive decision chain, including grounded GUI execution, consent negotiation, and post-rejection restraint, evaluated through a hybrid protocol combining rule-based verification with LLM-as-a-Judge scoring. Our experiments reveal a striking degradation: agents that excel at explicit task execution fall below 50% under vague instructions requiring user preference inference or intervention calibration, even for frontier models like Claude Sonnet 4.6. The core bottlenecks are not GUI navigation but preference acquisition and intervention calibration, exposing a fundamental gap between competent interface operation and trustworthy personal assistance.

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.

Batch inference for agentic workloads stresses the GPU key-value (KV) cache in a sustained and cumulative manner, often causing severe throughput degradation well before memory capacity is exhausted. We identify this phenomenon as middle-phase thrashing, a previously under-characterized pathology in which cache efficiency collapses as long-lived agents accumulate state over time. We argue that mitigating this pathology requires moving beyond reactive, request-level cache management to proactive, agent-level admission control. Drawing inspiration from congestion control in distributed systems, we view the KV cache as a shared resource whose efficient utilization depends on feedback-driven regulation. Based on this insight, we present CONCUR, a lightweight control layer that regulates agent admission to bound aggregate cache pressure while preserving execution continuity. CONCUR adapts a cache-aware control algorithm to dynamically adjust the number of active agents using runtime cache signals. Across large models and real-world agent workloads, CONCUR prevents middle-phase thrashing and improves batch inference throughput by up to 4.09x on Qwen3-32B and 1.9x on DeepSeek-V3, while remaining compatible with existing LLM serving systems.

Multi-turn LLM agents are increasingly important for solving complex, interactive tasks, and reinforcement learning (RL) is a key ingredient for improving their long-horizon behavior. However, RL training requires generating large numbers of sandboxed rollout trajectories, and existing infrastructures often couple rollout orchestration with the training loop, making systems hard to migrate and maintain. Under the rollout-as-a-service philosophy, we present ProRL Agent , a scalable infrastructure that serves the full agentic rollout lifecycle through an API service. ProRL Agent also provides standardized and extensible sandbox environments that support diverse agentic tasks in rootless HPC settings. We validate ProRL Agent through RL training on software engineering, math, STEM, and coding tasks. ProRL Agent is open-sourced and integrated as part of NVIDIA NeMo Gym.

Conversational systems based on Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, show exceptional proficiency in context understanding and response generation. However, despite their impressive capabilities, they still possess limitations, such as providing randomly-guessed answers to ambiguous queries or failing to refuse users' requests, both of which are considered aspects of a conversational agent's proactivity. This raises the question of whether LLM-based conversational systems are equipped to handle proactive dialogue problems. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of LLM-based conversational systems, specifically focusing on three aspects of proactive dialogue systems: clarification, target-guided, and non-collaborative dialogues. To trigger the proactivity of LLMs, we propose the Proactive Chain-of-Thought prompting scheme, which augments LLMs with the goal planning capability over descriptive reasoning chains. Empirical findings are discussed to promote future studies on LLM-based proactive dialogue systems.

LLM agents are an emerging form of AI systems where large language models (LLMs) serve as the central component, utilizing a diverse set of tools to complete user-assigned tasks. Despite their great potential, LLM agents pose significant security risks. When interacting with the external world, they may encounter malicious commands from attackers, leading to the execution of dangerous actions. A promising way to address this is by enforcing the principle of least privilege: allowing only essential actions for task completion while blocking unnecessary ones. However, achieving this is challenging, as it requires covering diverse agent scenarios while preserving both security and utility. We introduce Progent, the first privilege control mechanism for LLM agents. At its core is a domain-specific language for flexibly expressing privilege control policies applied during agent execution. These policies provide fine-grained constraints over tool calls, deciding when tool calls are permissible and specifying fallbacks if they are not. This enables agent developers and users to craft suitable policies for their specific use cases and enforce them deterministically to guarantee security. Thanks to its modular design, integrating Progent does not alter agent internals and requires only minimal changes to agent implementation, enhancing its practicality and potential for widespread adoption. To automate policy writing, we leverage LLMs to generate policies based on user queries, which are then updated dynamically for improved security and utility. Our extensive evaluation shows that it enables strong security while preserving high utility across three distinct scenarios or benchmarks: AgentDojo, ASB, and AgentPoison. Furthermore, we perform an in-depth analysis, showcasing the effectiveness of its core components and the resilience of its automated policy generation against adaptive attacks.

Proactive dialogues serve as a practical yet challenging dialogue problem in the era of large language models (LLMs), where the dialogue policy planning is the key to improving the proactivity of LLMs. Most existing studies enable the dialogue policy planning of LLMs using various prompting schemes or iteratively enhance this capability in handling the given case with verbal AI feedback. However, these approaches are either bounded by the policy planning capability of the frozen LLMs or hard to be transferred to new cases. In this work, we introduce a new dialogue policy planning paradigm to strategize LLMs for proactive dialogue problems with a tunable language model plug-in as a plug-and-play dialogue policy planner, named PPDPP. Specifically, we develop a novel training framework to facilitate supervised fine-tuning over available human-annotated data as well as reinforcement learning from goal-oriented AI feedback with dynamic interaction data collected by the LLM-based self-play simulation. In this manner, the LLM-powered dialogue agent can not only be generalized to different cases after the training, but also be applicable to different applications by just substituting the learned plug-in. In addition, we propose to evaluate the policy planning capability of dialogue systems under the interactive setting. Experimental results demonstrate that PPDPP consistently and substantially outperforms existing approaches on three different proactive dialogue applications, including negotiation, emotional support, and tutoring dialogues.

From ancient water wheels to robotic process automation (RPA), automation technology has evolved throughout history to liberate human beings from arduous tasks. Yet, RPA struggles with tasks needing human-like intelligence, especially in elaborate design of workflow construction and dynamic decision-making in workflow execution. As Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged human-like intelligence, this paper introduces Agentic Process Automation (APA), a groundbreaking automation paradigm using LLM-based agents for advanced automation by offloading the human labor to agents associated with construction and execution. We then instantiate ProAgent, an LLM-based agent designed to craft workflows from human instructions and make intricate decisions by coordinating specialized agents. Empirical experiments are conducted to detail its construction and execution procedure of workflow, showcasing the feasibility of APA, unveiling the possibility of a new paradigm of automation driven by agents. Our code is public at https://github.com/OpenBMB/ProAgent.

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit robust problem-solving capabilities for diverse tasks. However, most LLM-based agents are designed as specific task solvers with sophisticated prompt engineering, rather than agents capable of learning and evolving through interactions. These task solvers necessitate manually crafted prompts to inform task rules and regulate LLM behaviors, inherently incapacitating to address complex dynamic scenarios e.g., large interactive games. In light of this, we propose Agent-Pro: an LLM-based Agent with Policy-level Reflection and Optimization that can learn a wealth of expertise from interactive experiences and progressively elevate its behavioral policy. Specifically, it involves a dynamic belief generation and reflection process for policy evolution. Rather than action-level reflection, Agent-Pro iteratively reflects on past trajectories and beliefs, fine-tuning its irrational beliefs for a better policy. Moreover, a depth-first search is employed for policy optimization, ensuring continual enhancement in policy payoffs. Agent-Pro is evaluated across two games: Blackjack and Texas Hold'em, outperforming vanilla LLM and specialized models. Our results show Agent-Pro can learn and evolve in complex and dynamic scenes, which also benefits numerous LLM-based applications.

While AI agents hold transformative potential in business, effective performance benchmarking is hindered by the scarcity of public, realistic business data on widely used platforms. Existing benchmarks often lack fidelity in their environments, data, and agent-user interactions, with limited coverage of diverse business scenarios and industries. To address these gaps, we introduce CRMArena-Pro, a novel benchmark for holistic, realistic assessment of LLM agents in diverse professional settings. CRMArena-Pro expands on CRMArena with nineteen expert-validated tasks across sales, service, and 'configure, price, and quote' processes, for both Business-to-Business and Business-to-Customer scenarios. It distinctively incorporates multi-turn interactions guided by diverse personas and robust confidentiality awareness assessments. Experiments reveal leading LLM agents achieve only around 58% single-turn success on CRMArena-Pro, with performance dropping significantly to approximately 35% in multi-turn settings. While Workflow Execution proves more tractable for top agents (over 83% single-turn success), other evaluated business skills present greater challenges. Furthermore, agents exhibit near-zero inherent confidentiality awareness; though targeted prompting can improve this, it often compromises task performance. These findings highlight a substantial gap between current LLM capabilities and enterprise demands, underscoring the need for advancements in multi-turn reasoning, confidentiality adherence, and versatile skill acquisition.

Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) achieve strong performance on reactive question answering, but real-world streaming assistants require proactive reasoning over continuous visual inputs. Existing benchmarks mainly study reactive or proactive interactions in isolated single-turn settings, overlooking dynamic multi-turn scenarios where users may add, modify, or cancel proactive requests alongside interleaved reactive queries. To address this gap, we introduce IPIBench, the first benchmark for evaluating Interactive Proactive Intelligence of MLLMs under streaming video settings. IPIBench covers proactive monitoring, proactive task management, and interleaved reactive-proactive requests. Evaluations on representative MLLMs reveal two major limitations: unstable proactive triggering and weak coordination between reactive and proactive behaviors. We further propose IPI-Agent, a training-free agentic framework with an interaction-control policy and a temporal-gating mechanism for stabilizing proactive triggering and coordinating multi-turn interactions. Experiments show that IPI-Agent consistently improves existing MLLMs across all benchmark settings.

The booming success of LLMs initiates rapid development in LLM agents. Though the foundation of an LLM agent is the generative model, it is critical to devise the optimal reasoning strategies and agent architectures. Accordingly, LLM agent research advances from the simple chain-of-thought prompting to more complex ReAct and Reflection reasoning strategy; agent architecture also evolves from single agent generation to multi-agent conversation, as well as multi-LLM multi-agent group chat. However, with the existing intricate frameworks and libraries, creating and evaluating new reasoning strategies and agent architectures has become a complex challenge, which hinders research investigation into LLM agents. Thus, we open-source a new AI agent library, AgentLite, which simplifies this process by offering a lightweight, user-friendly platform for innovating LLM agent reasoning, architectures, and applications with ease. AgentLite is a task-oriented framework designed to enhance the ability of agents to break down tasks and facilitate the development of multi-agent systems. Furthermore, we introduce multiple practical applications developed with AgentLite to demonstrate its convenience and flexibility. Get started now at: https://github.com/SalesforceAIResearch/AgentLite.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made significant progress in mobile agent development, yet their capabilities are predominantly confined to a reactive paradigm, where they merely execute explicit user commands. The emerging paradigm of proactive intelligence, where agents autonomously anticipate needs and initiate actions, represents the next frontier for mobile agents. However, its development is critically bottlenecked by the lack of benchmarks that can address real-world complexity and enable objective, executable evaluation. To overcome these challenges, we introduce ProactiveMobile, a comprehensive benchmark designed to systematically advance research in this domain. ProactiveMobile formalizes the proactive task as inferring latent user intent across four dimensions of on-device contextual signals and generating an executable function sequence from a comprehensive function pool of 63 APIs. The benchmark features over 3,660 instances of 14 scenarios that embrace real-world complexity through multi-answer annotations. To ensure quality, a team of 30 experts conducts a final audit of the benchmark, verifying factual accuracy, logical consistency, and action feasibility, and correcting any non-compliant entries. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our fine-tuned Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct achieves a success rate of 19.15%, outperforming o1 (15.71%) and GPT-5 (7.39%). This result indicates that proactivity is a critical competency widely lacking in current MLLMs, yet it is learnable, emphasizing the importance of the proposed benchmark for proactivity evaluation.

Effective collaboration begins with knowing when to ask for help. For example, when trying to identify an occluded object, a human would ask someone to remove the obstruction. Can MLLMs exhibit a similar "proactive" behavior by requesting simple user interventions? To investigate this, we introduce ProactiveBench, a benchmark built from seven repurposed datasets that tests proactiveness across different tasks such as recognizing occluded objects, enhancing image quality, and interpreting coarse sketches. We evaluate 22 MLLMs on ProactiveBench, showing that (i) they generally lack proactiveness; (ii) proactiveness does not correlate with model capacity; (iii) "hinting" at proactiveness yields only marginal gains. Surprisingly, we found that conversation histories and in-context learning introduce negative biases, hindering performance. Finally, we explore a simple fine-tuning strategy based on reinforcement learning: its results suggest that proactiveness can be learned, even generalizing to unseen scenarios. We publicly release ProactiveBench as a first step toward building proactive multimodal models.

Automatically compiling open-source software (OSS) projects is a vital, labor-intensive, and complex task, which makes it a good challenge for LLM Agents. Existing methods rely on manually curated rules and workflows, which cannot adapt to OSS that requires customized configuration or environment setup. Recent attempts using Large Language Models (LLMs) used selective evaluation on a subset of highly rated OSS, a practice that underestimates the realistic challenges of OSS compilation. In practice, compilation instructions are often absent, dependencies are undocumented, and successful builds may even require patching source files or modifying build scripts. We propose a more challenging and realistic benchmark, BUILD-BENCH, comprising OSS that are more diverse in quality, scale, and characteristics. Furthermore, we propose a strong baseline LLM-based agent, OSS-BUILD-AGENT, an effective system with enhanced build instruction retrieval module that achieves state-of-the-art performance on BUILD-BENCH and is adaptable to heterogeneous OSS characteristics. We also provide detailed analysis regarding different compilation method design choices and their influence to the whole task, offering insights to guide future advances. We believe performance on BUILD-BENCH can faithfully reflect an agent's ability to tackle compilation as a complex software engineering tasks, and, as such, our benchmark will spur innovation with a significant impact on downstream applications in the fields of software development and software security.

One paradigm of language model (LM) fine-tuning relies on creating large training datasets, under the assumption that high quantity and diversity will enable models to generalize to novel tasks after post-training. In practice, gathering large sets of data is inefficient, and training on them is prohibitively expensive; worse, there is no guarantee that the resulting model will handle complex scenarios or generalize better. Moreover, existing techniques rarely assess whether a training sample provides novel information or is redundant with the knowledge already acquired by the model, resulting in unnecessary costs. In this work, we explore a new test-time self-improvement method to create more effective and generalizable agentic LMs on-the-fly. The proposed algorithm can be summarized in three steps: (i) first it identifies the samples that model struggles with (self-awareness), (ii) then generates similar examples from detected uncertain samples (self-data augmentation), and (iii) uses these newly generated samples at test-time fine-tuning (self-improvement). We study two variants of this approach: Test-Time Self-Improvement (TT-SI), where the same model generates additional training examples from its own uncertain cases and then learns from them, and contrast this approach with Test-Time Distillation (TT-D), where a stronger model generates similar examples for uncertain cases, enabling student to adapt using distilled supervision. Empirical evaluations across different agent benchmarks demonstrate that TT-SI improves the performance with +5.48% absolute accuracy gain on average across all benchmarks and surpasses other standard learning methods, yet using 68x less training samples. Our findings highlight the promise of TT-SI, demonstrating the potential of self-improvement algorithms at test-time as a new paradigm for building more capable agents toward self-evolution.

Agents are deployed in applications from trip planners and stock trading to IT incident triage. In most cases, LLM agents work autonomously with minimal rule-based safeguarding, leading to cost and safety issues from irreversible actions. Recent works resolve this either by using a safeguard agent to monitor behavior or evaluating logs post-hoc. The first adds cost and latency to every step; the second delivers its verdict after the run, when tokens are burned and damage is done. To overcome this, we propose OnTrack, a streaming monitoring mechanism that compares an agent's steps and dependencies against recorded successful runs to alert users or block the agent in about a millisecond per step. We study this problem in three regimes of decreasing access: full reference access (historical runs and tool schemas), intermediate access (only tool schemas), and no prior knowledge (only step logs as generated). Expectation of OnTrack's monitoring capabilities reduces as data access drops, ranging from plan violation detection to identifying loops, stalls, and repeated tool calls. Finally, we evaluate OnTrack using SWE-bench trajectories. Based on the first 8 steps, our method ranks failing trajectories below succeeding ones better than content similarity approaches (+0.057 AUROC). With an abort policy, we save about 18% of compute that would be burned on failing runs, where 83% of interrupted runs were actually heading to failure (5 out of 6 aborts were correct).

LLM-based agents increasingly rely on long-term memory to support multi-session reasoning and interaction, yet current systems provide little control over what information is retained. In practice, agents either accumulate large volumes of conversational content, including hallucinated or obsolete facts, or depend on opaque, fully LLM-driven memory policies that are costly and difficult to audit. As a result, memory admission remains a poorly specified and weakly controlled component in agent architectures. To address this gap, we propose Adaptive Memory Admission Control (A-MAC), a framework that treats memory admission as a structured decision problem. A-MAC decomposes memory value into five complementary and interpretable factors: future utility, factual confidence, semantic novelty, temporal recency, and content type prior. The framework combines lightweight rule-based feature extraction with a single LLM-assisted utility assessment, and learns domain-adaptive admission policies through cross-validated optimization. This design enables transparent and efficient control over long-term memory. Experiments on the LoCoMo benchmark show that A-MAC achieves a superior precision-recall tradeoff, improving F1 to 0.583 while reducing latency by 31% compared to state-of-the-art LLM-native memory systems. Ablation results identify content type prior as the most influential factor for reliable memory admission. These findings demonstrate that explicit and interpretable admission control is a critical design principle for scalable and reliable memory in LLM-based agents.

Recent advancements in large language model (LLM) agents have significantly accelerated scientific discovery automation, yet concurrently raised critical ethical and safety concerns. To systematically address these challenges, we introduce SafeScientist, an innovative AI scientist framework explicitly designed to enhance safety and ethical responsibility in AI-driven scientific exploration. SafeScientist proactively refuses ethically inappropriate or high-risk tasks and rigorously emphasizes safety throughout the research process. To achieve comprehensive safety oversight, we integrate multiple defensive mechanisms, including prompt monitoring, agent-collaboration monitoring, tool-use monitoring, and an ethical reviewer component. Complementing SafeScientist, we propose SciSafetyBench, a novel benchmark specifically designed to evaluate AI safety in scientific contexts, comprising 240 high-risk scientific tasks across 6 domains, alongside 30 specially designed scientific tools and 120 tool-related risk tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SafeScientist significantly improves safety performance by 35\% compared to traditional AI scientist frameworks, without compromising scientific output quality. Additionally, we rigorously validate the robustness of our safety pipeline against diverse adversarial attack methods, further confirming the effectiveness of our integrated approach. The code and data will be available at https://github.com/ulab-uiuc/SafeScientist. red{Warning: this paper contains example data that may be offensive or harmful.}

Memory systems have shown promise for improving agent performance, but their potential remains largely unexplored for small language models, which struggle to generate sufficient successful trajectories on their own. We propose Agent Memory Distillation (AMD), a training-free framework that transfers structured knowledge from a large teacher agent to a small student agent through hierarchical memory. AMD constructs three complementary memory types from successful teacher trajectories: Workflow memory encodes task-level strategies, Subtask memory provides concrete behavioral examples at an intermediate granularity, and Function memory captures per-function calling conventions and common pitfalls. Workflow and Subtask memories are injected proactively at the start of each task, while Function memory is retrieved reactively upon tool-calling errors. We evaluate AMD on three tool-use benchmarks using four student models (4B-8B parameters) with GPT-5-mini as the teacher, achieving average accuracy gains of 27.2%p, 11.2%p, and 3.4%p on AppWorld, BFCL V3, and ToolSandbox, while consistently outperforming existing memory-based baselines. Further analysis shows that Subtask memory contributes the largest gains, teacher effectiveness depends on both teacher capability and student compatibility, and 4B-sized students benefit most from AMD.

Frontier LLM agents have been shown to be capable of solving increasingly complex tasks for which humans have measurable solutions. This begs the pertinent question of whether LLM agents can go beyond what humans have already solved. The ability to develop sophisticated strategies to tackle consequential problems becomes paramount as well-trodden, human-developed solutions become insufficient for problems for which we lack context or enough training data. We study agents' capability of such strategy formation through the communal practice of video game speedrunning. In speedrunning, practitioners compete to find the fastest way to complete a video game under certain conditions, and in so doing uncovering interesting unorthodox play styles that require a thorough understanding and mastery of the underlying game mechanics. We introduce SPEEDRUNBENCH, a benchmark that evaluates frontier LLM agents across 9 different games. To perform well in this benchmark, agents must repeatedly improve their strategy, reflect on their performance, exploit their gained knowledge, and reason across a long-horizon of actions to improve on an increasingly difficult problem: being faster than themselves and everyone else. Our experiments show that while frontier agents approach human world records in simple platformer games, they remain behind human performance on longer, more complex games under practical budgets. These results suggest that SPEEDRUNBENCH is a useful testbed for studying agents' strategy formation capabilities as well as being a saturation-resistant evaluation measure, as there is almost always a faster completion time waiting to be discovered.

Current Mixture-of-Agents (MoA) paradigms generally treat query routing and agent fine-tuning as separate processes, limiting their ability to respond to evolving agent capabilities. This disconnect prevents routing strategies from adapting to evolving agent capabilities during post-training and prevents agents from achieving synergistic data-driven specialization. To resolve this, we introduce CERA-MoA (Co-Evolving Router with continually learning Agents for Mixture-of-Agents), an iterative reinforcement learning framework where the dynamic router and independent agent policies co-evolve. We design a predictive familiarity estimator that leverages mid-layer hidden states to evaluate semantic competence among agents, avoiding the overhead of full rollouts. Based on these familiarity scores, a cumulative-threshold adaptive routing mechanism dynamically activates a tailored minimal agent subset, achieving a trade-off between task performance and efficiency. By proactively allocating targeted training samples to agents based on their evolving competence, CERA-MoA promotes capability differentiation. Extensive experiments across various domains demonstrate that CERA-MoA outperforms state-of-the-art static-agent routing and fix-workflow fine-tuning baselines.

As LLM-based agents are increasingly deployed in real-life scenarios, existing benchmarks fail to capture their inherent complexity of handling extensive information, leveraging diverse resources, and managing dynamic user interactions. To address this gap, we introduce VitaBench, a challenging benchmark that evaluates agents on versatile interactive tasks grounded in real-world settings. Drawing from daily applications in food delivery, in-store consumption, and online travel services, VitaBench presents agents with the most complex life-serving simulation environment to date, comprising 66 tools. Through a framework that eliminates domain-specific policies, we enable flexible composition of these scenarios and tools, yielding 100 cross-scenario tasks (main results) and 300 single-scenario tasks. Each task is derived from multiple real user requests and requires agents to reason across temporal and spatial dimensions, utilize complex tool sets, proactively clarify ambiguous instructions, and track shifting user intent throughout multi-turn conversations. Moreover, we propose a rubric-based sliding window evaluator, enabling robust assessment of diverse solution pathways in complex environments and stochastic interactions. Our comprehensive evaluation reveals that even the most advanced models achieve only 30% success rate on cross-scenario tasks, and less than 50% success rate on others. Overall, we believe VitaBench will serve as a valuable resource for advancing the development of AI agents in practical real-world applications. The code, dataset, and leaderboard are available at https://vitabench.github.io/

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly expected to maintain coherent, long-term personalized memory, yet current benchmarks primarily measure static fact retrieval, overlooking the ability to revise stored beliefs when new evidence emerges. We identify a critical and underexplored failure mode, Implicit Conflict: a later observation invalidates an earlier memory without explicit negation, requiring contextual inference and commonsense reasoning to detect. To rigorously evaluate this capability, we introduce STALE, a benchmark of 400 expert-validated conflict scenarios (1,200 evaluation queries across three probing dimensions) spanning over 100 everyday topics with contexts up to 150K tokens. We propose a three-dimensional probing framework that tests State Resolution (detecting that a prior belief is outdated), Premise Resistance (rejecting queries that falsely presuppose a stale state), and Implicit Policy Adaptation (proactively applying updated states in downstream behavior). A systematic evaluation of frontier LLMs and specialized memory frameworks reveals a pervasive gap between retrieving updated evidence and acting on it, with even the best evaluated model achieving only 55.2% overall accuracy. Models often accept outdated assumptions embedded in a user's query, and they struggle to recognize when a change in one aspect of the user's state should invalidate related memories. To establish an initial baseline for state-aware memory, we further present CUPMem, a prototype that strengthens write-time revision through structured state consolidation and propagation-aware search, suggesting that explicit state adjudication is a promising direction for robust agentic memory.

Travel planning is a realistic task for evaluating the planning and tool-use abilities of LLM agents. However, existing benchmarks typically assume only a single user, thereby avoiding one of the most challenging aspects of real-world scenarios: an agent's ability to identify and resolve conflicts among multiple users. To address this gap, we introduce GroupTravelBench, the first benchmark for multi-user, multi-turn travel planning. Based on real user profiles, POI data, and ticket price data, we synthesize 650 tasks and divide them into three difficulty levels. Beyond standard abilities in single-user itinerary planning, such as multi-step reasoning and tool use, our benchmark further evaluates three key capabilities required for travel agents: (i) elicitation -- proactively engaging in multi-turn dialogue to gather preferences from each user; (ii) coordination -- resolving conflicts among users through compromise or subgrouping strategies; and (iii) planning -- searching for travel plans that maximize overall group utility while maintaining fairness and feasibility. To simulate real-world conversational itinerary planning while enabling reliable tool use and offline evaluation, we build an interactive sandbox environment with cached real-world tool data. We evaluate a wide range of LLMs and find that even frontier models still show substantial weaknesses in preference coverage and group fairness. GroupTravelBench provides a practical and reproducible benchmark for advancing research on LLM agents for real-world travel planning.

The widespread deployment of LLM-based agents is likely to introduce a critical privacy threat: malicious agents that proactively engage others in multi-turn interactions to extract sensitive information. These dynamic dialogues enable adaptive attack strategies that can cause severe privacy violations, yet their evolving nature makes it difficult to anticipate and discover sophisticated vulnerabilities manually. To tackle this problem, we present a search-based framework that alternates between improving attacker and defender instructions by simulating privacy-critical agent interactions. Each simulation involves three roles: data subject, data sender, and data recipient. While the data subject's behavior is fixed, the attacker (data recipient) attempts to extract sensitive information from the defender (data sender) through persistent and interactive exchanges. To explore this interaction space efficiently, our search algorithm employs LLMs as optimizers, using parallel search with multiple threads and cross-thread propagation to analyze simulation trajectories and iteratively propose new instructions. Through this process, we find that attack strategies escalate from simple direct requests to sophisticated multi-turn tactics such as impersonation and consent forgery, while defenses advance from rule-based constraints to identity-verification state machines. The discovered attacks and defenses transfer across diverse scenarios and backbone models, demonstrating strong practical utility for building privacy-aware agents.

Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various domains, gaining extensive attention from academia and industry. However, these agents raise significant concerns on AI safety due to their autonomous and non-deterministic behavior, as well as continuous evolving nature . From a DevOps perspective, enabling observability in agents is necessary to ensuring AI safety, as stakeholders can gain insights into the agents' inner workings, allowing them to proactively understand the agents, detect anomalies, and prevent potential failures. Therefore, in this paper, we present a comprehensive taxonomy of AgentOps, identifying the artifacts and associated data that should be traced throughout the entire lifecycle of agents to achieve effective observability. The taxonomy is developed based on a systematic mapping study of existing AgentOps tools. Our taxonomy serves as a reference template for developers to design and implement AgentOps infrastructure that supports monitoring, logging, and analytics. thereby ensuring AI safety.

Self-evolving agents requires adaptation after deployment, but existing approaches assume a usable learning loop, such as curated skills, successful trajectories, or verifier signals. Real open-world deployments may provide none of these, offering only a task prompt. In this work, we study open-world self-evolution, where an agent must build both its skills and its own verification signals from scratch, using open-world resources but no target-task supervision. We propose OpenSkill, a framework that bootstraps this loop: it acquires grounded knowledge and verification anchors from documentation, repositories, and the web, synthesizes them into transferable skills, and refines those skills against self-built virtual tasks grounded in the anchors rather than in target answers. The open world thus supplies both the knowledge to be learned and a supervision-independent practice environment, with target-task supervision reserved for final evaluation. Across three benchmarks and two target agents, OpenSkill attains the best automated pass rate while satisfying the no-supervision constraint. Analysis shows its skills transfer across models without model-specific adaptation, and its self-built verifier aligns with ground-truth outcomes despite never accessing them.

LLM agents are increasingly expected to function as general-purpose systems capable of resolving open-ended user requests. While existing benchmarks focus on domain-aware environments for developing specialized agents, evaluating general-purpose agents requires more realistic settings that challenge them to operate across multiple skills and tools within a unified environment. We introduce General AgentBench, a benchmark that provides such a unified framework for evaluating general LLM agents across search, coding, reasoning, and tool-use domains. Using General AgentBench, we systematically study test-time scaling behaviors under sequential scaling (iterative interaction) and parallel scaling (sampling multiple trajectories). Evaluation of ten leading LLM agents reveals a substantial performance degradation when moving from domain-specific evaluations to this general-agent setting. Moreover, we find that neither scaling methodology yields effective performance improvements in practice, due to two fundamental limitations: context ceiling in sequential scaling and verification gap in parallel scaling. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/cxcscmu/General-AgentBench.

Agentic systems increasingly rely on reusable procedural capabilities, a.k.a., agentic skills, to execute long-horizon workflows reliably. These capabilities are callable modules that package procedural knowledge with explicit applicability conditions, execution policies, termination criteria, and reusable interfaces. Unlike one-off plans or atomic tool calls, skills operate (and often do well) across tasks. This paper maps the skill layer across the full lifecycle (discovery, practice, distillation, storage, composition, evaluation, and update) and introduces two complementary taxonomies. The first is a system-level set of seven design patterns capturing how skills are packaged and executed in practice, from metadata-driven progressive disclosure and executable code skills to self-evolving libraries and marketplace distribution. The second is an orthogonal representation times scope taxonomy describing what skills are (natural language, code, policy, hybrid) and what environments they operate over (web, OS, software engineering, robotics). We analyze the security and governance implications of skill-based agents, covering supply-chain risks, prompt injection via skill payloads, and trust-tiered execution, grounded by a case study of the ClawHavoc campaign in which nearly 1{,}200 malicious skills infiltrated a major agent marketplace, exfiltrating API keys, cryptocurrency wallets, and browser credentials at scale. We further survey deterministic evaluation approaches, anchored by recent benchmark evidence that curated skills can substantially improve agent success rates while self-generated skills may degrade them. We conclude with open challenges toward robust, verifiable, and certifiable skills for real-world autonomous agents.

LLM agents increasingly act over long horizons, where a single trajectory can contain hundreds or thousands of actions. In these settings, outcome-only rewards provide too sparse guidance, failing to inform the model about the goodness of intermediate actions. Dense supervision methods aim to solve this problem by scoring intermediate steps, from intrinsic confidence to self-distillation and embedding similarities. However, it is common practice to evaluate them by measuring the downstream performance of a training pipeline that integrates them. This is expensive, conflates supervision quality with training engineering confounders, and renders different methodological families requiring distinct training setups incomparable. As a result, dense supervision methods are rarely benchmarked on common ground. We introduce QVal, a training-free testbed for directly evaluating dense supervision signals. Given a state-action pair, QVal measures how well a method's score is Q-aligned: whether it orders actions according to the Q-values of a strong reference-policy. This lets us compare signals before any training run and separate signal quality from other engineering choices. We instantiate QVal as QVal-v1.0, benchmarking 21 dense supervision methods across four diverse environments and seven methodological families, with over 1.2K evaluation experiments across six open-weight model backbones. We find that simple prompting baselines consistently outperform recent dense supervision methods from the literature, and that performance clusters strongly by family. These findings hold across model sizes, environments, and observation modalities. QVal is designed to be easily extensible to new environments and methods, enabling researchers to iterate on dense supervision methods before any training run.

LLM agents act in external environments where each action changes the state that later decisions condition on, and where a single wrong step can waste interaction budget or trigger irreversible side effects long before the final failure is observed. Reliable deployment therefore requires step-level confidence estimation: a calibrated probability that each proposed action is productive, available before the action is executed. Existing LLM confidence estimators are designed to score a response from the given prompt, but agent confidence also depends on execution consequences: whether similar actions in similar situations actually advanced the task after the environment responded. We introduce the \method (\methodshort), a self-evolving critic framework in which an LLM critic accumulates evidence from its own past judgments and their observed consequences. After each trajectory, a hindsight LLM that sees the full execution feedback votes on whether each step was productive. The resulting pseudo-labels populate a memory bank from which related productive and unproductive experiences are retrieved into the critic's prompt whenever a similar step recurs. \methodshort requires no training and uses no ground truth step labels. Across three agent benchmarks and three critic backbones, \methodshort attains the best calibration (ECE and Brier) and ranking (AUC) in every dataset--critic combination, reducing ECE by up to 54% relative to the strongest training-free baseline.

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) has become a popular recipe for post-training LLM agents. It supervises the agent model at the token level with a stronger teacher view of the same model, obtained by conditioning on privileged information (PI). In this work, we show that in multi-turn agents, this paradigm teaches the student to act with confidence but without the information behind it. The trained agent behaves as if it had privileged information it never observed, and its performance falls well short of plain RL, in the worst case below the untrained base model. Therefore, we propose Privileged Self-Practice (PSP), which keeps the PI and moves it from the loss to the sampler. When the student's rollouts on a task mostly fail, we inject a short per-task instruction written by an analyzer model, sample the task again with the instruction in context, and train on the result with an unchanged GRPO objective. The privileged information stays in the prompt and never enters the loss. Across AppWorld and SWE-bench Verified, with three different student models, PSP obtains the best average score in every setting and is the only method that consistently outperforms plain GRPO, improving task-goal completion by up to 65% on AppWorld and the resolved rate by up to 61% on SWE-bench Verified.

Agent skills, SKILL.md files that package reusable procedural knowledge for an LLM agent, are a popular mechanism for extending agent capabilities. Public repositories now host them in large and growing numbers, yet these artifacts are fragmented, redundant, and uneven in quality, and their value in practice is unclear. A core question remains open, namely how to consolidate this open-source SKILL.md ecosystem into a single usable corpus, and what bounds its benefit on real-world agent tasks. We present SkillCorpus, a framework that aggregates, curates, matches, and evaluates the open skill ecosystem at scale. It filters ~821,000 crawled skills through a multi-stage pipeline into 96,401 skills organised by a 16-class taxonomy and three quality facets (utility, robustness, safety), and pairs them with a fine-tuned retrieval-and-selection stack that matches task-relevant skills. We evaluate end-to-end across three benchmarks (SkillsBench, GDPVal, QwenClawBench), two harnesses, and two open backbones with a frontier robustness check. Integrating SkillCorpus yields consistent gains across all three benchmarks, largest on SkillsBench (+7.5 pp). An operational analysis traces the gains to a coverage boundary and a harness boundary. SkillCorpus is, to our knowledge, the first end-to-end account of when a curated, retrieval-served community corpus improves real agent tasks, and where it does not. The dataset, models, and code will be released upon acceptance.

LLM-based (Large Language Model) GUI (Graphical User Interface) agents can potentially reshape our daily lives significantly. However, current LLM-based GUI agents suffer from the scarcity of high-quality training data owing to the difficulties of trajectory collection and reward annotation. Existing works have been exploring LLMs to collect trajectories for imitation learning or to offer reward signals for online RL training. However, the Outcome Reward Model (ORM) used in existing works cannot provide finegrained feedback and can over-penalize the valuable steps in finally failed trajectories. To this end, we propose Progress Reward Model (ProgRM) to provide dense informative intermediate rewards by predicting a task completion progress for each step in online training. To handle the challenge of progress reward label annotation, we further design an efficient LCS-based (Longest Common Subsequence) self-annotation algorithm to discover the key steps in trajectories and assign progress labels accordingly. ProgRM is evaluated with extensive experiments and analyses. Actors trained with ProgRM outperform leading proprietary LLMs and ORM-trained actors, illustrating the effectiveness of ProgRM. The codes for experiments will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

Agent Skills improve LLM agents by making task knowledge reusable across sessions. Learning transferable Skills requires evidence about a procedure and its conditions of use, which a successful task attempt can leave untested. We introduce Socratic Skill Learning (SSL), which interleaves expert teaching with Student practice. An Educator guides investigation while the Student remains the sole environment operator and Skill author, able to question, test, and adapt advice. To test reuse beyond the learning task, we construct SkillTransferBench, with 35 task families and 408 executable cases, pairing public variation specifications with held-out evaluation in fresh solver sessions. On the main 22-family, 155-case cohort, Fixed-Window SSL reaches 0.801 utility, versus 0.723 without a Skill, 0.761 for adapted Trace2Skill (trajectory distillation), and 0.751 for adapted SKILL-KD (contrastive distillation). Across three model pairs on shared families, interleaved guidance outperforms expert authoring and post-hoc teaching. Process analysis links guidance to Student writing and package revision; a case study shows the Student testing and refining a proposed procedure for later reuse. As demand for new lessons falls, the cost of fixed-window review grows. Issue-Guided SSL tracks unresolved questions across Skill revisions to select and focus review, reaching 0.805 utility with 61.7% fewer Educator tokens and 16.9% fewer total acquisition tokens than Fixed-Window SSL on the main cohort.

We introduce a novel reinforcement learning framework of LLM agents named AGILE (AGent that Interacts and Learns from Environments) designed to perform complex conversational tasks with users, leveraging LLMs, memory, tools, and interactions with experts. The agent possesses capabilities beyond conversation, including reflection, tool usage, and expert consultation. We formulate the construction of such an LLM agent as a reinforcement learning (RL) problem, in which the LLM serves as the policy model. We fine-tune the LLM using labeled data of actions and the PPO algorithm. We focus on question answering and release a dataset for agents called ProductQA, comprising challenging questions in online shopping. Our extensive experiments on ProductQA, MedMCQA and HotPotQA show that AGILE agents based on 7B and 13B LLMs trained with PPO can outperform GPT-4 agents. Our ablation study highlights the indispensability of memory, tools, consultation, reflection, and reinforcement learning in achieving the agent's strong performance. Datasets and code are available at https://github.com/bytarnish/AGILE.

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized user interactions with knowledge-based systems, enabling chatbots to synthesize vast amounts of information and assist with complex, exploratory tasks. However, LLM-based chatbots often struggle to provide personalized support, particularly when users start with vague queries or lack sufficient contextual information. This paper introduces the Collaborative Assistant for Personalized Exploration (CARE), a system designed to enhance personalization in exploratory tasks by combining a multi-agent LLM framework with a structured user interface. CARE's interface consists of a Chat Panel, Solution Panel, and Needs Panel, enabling iterative query refinement and dynamic solution generation. The multi-agent framework collaborates to identify both explicit and implicit user needs, delivering tailored, actionable solutions. In a within-subject user study with 22 participants, CARE was consistently preferred over a baseline LLM chatbot, with users praising its ability to reduce cognitive load, inspire creativity, and provide more tailored solutions. Our findings highlight CARE's potential to transform LLM-based systems from passive information retrievers to proactive partners in personalized problem-solving and exploration.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant progress in understanding complex natural language. One important application of LLM is LLM-based AI Agent, which leverages the ability of LLM as well as external tools for complex-task solving. To make sure LLM Agents follow an effective and reliable procedure to solve the given task, manually designed workflows are usually used to guide the working mechanism of agents. However, manually designing the workflows requires considerable efforts and domain knowledge, making it difficult to develop and deploy agents on massive scales. To address these issues, we propose AutoFlow, a framework designed to automatically generate workflows for agents to solve complex tasks. AutoFlow takes natural language program as the format of agent workflow and employs a workflow optimization procedure to iteratively optimize the workflow quality. Besides, this work offers two workflow generation methods: fine-tuning-based and in-context-based methods, making the AutoFlow framework applicable to both open-source and closed-source LLMs. Experimental results show that our framework can produce robust and reliable agent workflows. We believe that the automatic generation and interpretation of workflows in natural language represent a promising paradigm for solving complex tasks, particularly with the rapid development of LLMs. The source code of this work is available at https://github.com/agiresearch/AutoFlow.

The predominant approach for training web navigation agents is to gather human demonstrations for a set of popular websites and hand-written tasks, but it is becoming clear that human data is an inefficient resource. We develop a pipeline to facilitate internet-scale training for agents without laborious human annotations. In the first stage, an LLM annotates 150k sites with agentic tasks. In the next stage, LLM agents complete tasks and produce trajectories. In the final stage, an LLM filters trajectories by judging their success. Language models are powerful data curation tools, identifying harmful content with an accuracy of 97%, judging successful trajectories with an accuracy of 82.6%, and producing effective data. We train agents based on Qwen 3 1.7B that are competitive with frontier LLMs as web agents, while being smaller and faster. Our top agent reaches a success rate of 56.9%, outperforming the data collection policy Qwen 3 235B, a 235 times larger Llama 4 Maverick, and reaching 94.7% of the performance of Gemini 2.5 Flash. We are releasing code, models and data at: https://data-for-agents.github.io.

LLM agents are rapidly becoming the practical interface for task automation, yet the ecosystem lacks a principled way to choose among an exploding space of deployable configurations. Existing LLM leaderboards and tool/agent benchmarks evaluate components in isolation and remain fragmented across tasks, metrics, and candidate pools, leaving a critical research gap: there is little query-conditioned supervision for learning to recommend end-to-end agent configurations that couple a backbone model with a toolkit. We address this gap with AgentSelect, a benchmark that reframes agent selection as narrative query-to-agent recommendation over capability profiles and systematically converts heterogeneous evaluation artifacts into unified, positive-only interaction data. AgentSelectcomprises 111,179 queries, 107,721 deployable agents, and 251,103 interaction records aggregated from 40+ sources, spanning LLM-only, toolkit-only, and compositional agents. Our analyses reveal a regime shift from dense head reuse to long-tail, near one-off supervision, where popularity-based CF/GNN methods become fragile and content-aware capability matching is essential. We further show that Part~III synthesized compositional interactions are learnable, induce capability-sensitive behavior under controlled counterfactual edits, and improve coverage over realistic compositions; models trained on AgentSelect also transfer to a public agent marketplace (MuleRun), yielding consistent gains on an unseen catalog. Overall, AgentSelect provides the first unified data and evaluation infrastructure for agent recommendation, which establishes a reproducible foundation to study and accelerate the emerging agent ecosystem.

Since the advent of personal computing devices, intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) have been one of the key technologies that researchers and engineers have focused on, aiming to help users efficiently obtain information and execute tasks, and provide users with more intelligent, convenient, and rich interaction experiences. With the development of smartphones and IoT, computing and sensing devices have become ubiquitous, greatly expanding the boundaries of IPAs. However, due to the lack of capabilities such as user intent understanding, task planning, tool using, and personal data management etc., existing IPAs still have limited practicality and scalability. Recently, the emergence of foundation models, represented by large language models (LLMs), brings new opportunities for the development of IPAs. With the powerful semantic understanding and reasoning capabilities, LLM can enable intelligent agents to solve complex problems autonomously. In this paper, we focus on Personal LLM Agents, which are LLM-based agents that are deeply integrated with personal data and personal devices and used for personal assistance. We envision that Personal LLM Agents will become a major software paradigm for end-users in the upcoming era. To realize this vision, we take the first step to discuss several important questions about Personal LLM Agents, including their architecture, capability, efficiency and security. We start by summarizing the key components and design choices in the architecture of Personal LLM Agents, followed by an in-depth analysis of the opinions collected from domain experts. Next, we discuss several key challenges to achieve intelligent, efficient and secure Personal LLM Agents, followed by a comprehensive survey of representative solutions to address these challenges.

Most language-based assistants follow a reactive ask-and-respond paradigm, requiring users to explicitly state their needs. As a result, relevant but unexpressed needs often go unmet. Existing proactive agents attempt to address this gap either by eliciting further clarification, preserving this burden, or by extrapolating future needs from context, often leading to unnecessary or mistimed interventions. We introduce ProPer, Proactivity-driven Personalized agents, a novel two-agent architecture consisting of a Dimension Generating Agent (DGA) and a Response Generating Agent (RGA). DGA, a fine-tuned LLM agent, leverages explicit user data to generate multiple implicit dimensions (latent aspects relevant to the user's task but not considered by the user) or knowledge gaps. These dimensions are selectively filtered using a reranker based on quality, diversity, and task relevance. RGA then balances explicit and implicit dimensions to tailor personalized responses with timely and proactive interventions. We evaluate ProPer across multiple domains using a structured, gap-aware rubric that measures coverage, initiative appropriateness, and intent alignment. Our results show that ProPer improves quality scores and win rates across all domains, achieving up to 84% gains in single-turn evaluation and consistent dominance in multi-turn interactions.

In recent years, LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) have advanced rapidly, using a router to decompose tasks and delegate subtasks to specialized agents. A natural way to expand capability is to scale up the agent pool by continually integrating new functional agents or tool interfaces, but naive expansion can trigger performance collapse when the router cold-starts on newly added, heterogeneous, and unreliable agents. We propose MonoScale, an expansion-aware update framework that proactively generates a small set of agent-conditioned familiarization tasks, harvests evidence from both successful and failed interactions, and distills it into auditable natural-language memory to guide future routing. We formalize sequential augmentation as a contextual bandit and perform trust-region memory updates, yielding a monotonic non-decreasing performance guarantee across onboarding rounds. Experiments on GAIA and Humanity's Last Exam show stable gains as the agent pool grows, outperforming naive scale-up and strong-router fixed-pool baselines.

The rise of LLM-based agents has opened new frontiers in AI applications, yet evaluating these agents remains a complex and underdeveloped area. This survey provides an in-depth overview of the emerging field of LLM agent evaluation, introducing a two-dimensional taxonomy that organizes existing work along (1) evaluation objectives -- what to evaluate, such as agent behavior, capabilities, reliability, and safety -- and (2) evaluation process -- how to evaluate, including interaction modes, datasets and benchmarks, metric computation methods, and tooling. In addition to taxonomy, we highlight enterprise-specific challenges, such as role-based access to data, the need for reliability guarantees, dynamic and long-horizon interactions, and compliance, which are often overlooked in current research. We also identify future research directions, including holistic, more realistic, and scalable evaluation. This work aims to bring clarity to the fragmented landscape of agent evaluation and provide a framework for systematic assessment, enabling researchers and practitioners to evaluate LLM agents for real-world deployment.

LLM agents are increasingly applied to open-ended everyday requests that span work, study, and life. These tasks are long-horizon, cross-environment, and multimodal, forcing the agent to preserve goals and constraints across many steps while navigating heterogeneous tools and attachments. While prior work has addressed individual failure modes such as goals drift, states loss, and context overflow, whether a single harness can manage them jointly and remain effective across backends has received less study. We present OneDayAgent, a long-horizon harness for autonomous agents. OneDayAgent turns an open-ended request into a managed execution process that decomposes tasks into bounded subtasks, maintains execution memory under context pressure, and verifies and repairs the final deliverable. We evaluate OneDayAgent on AgentIF-OneDay across 104 tasks. With the GLM-5.2 backend, OneDayAgent sets a new state of the art with an overall score of 0.821. The same harness runs across five backend LLMs from three model families, indicating the harness generalizes across backends without tuning, even as different models induce distinct execution styles under the same workflow.

The advent of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, PaLM, and GPT-4 has catalyzed remarkable advances in natural language processing, demonstrating human-like language fluency and reasoning capacities. This position paper introduces the concept of Professional Agents (PAgents), an application framework harnessing LLM capabilities to create autonomous agents with controllable, specialized, interactive, and professional-level competencies. We posit that PAgents can reshape professional services through continuously developed expertise. Our proposed PAgents framework entails a tri-layered architecture for genesis, evolution, and synergy: a base tool layer, a middle agent layer, and a top synergy layer. This paper aims to spur discourse on promising real-world applications of LLMs. We argue the increasing sophistication and integration of PAgents could lead to AI systems exhibiting professional mastery over complex domains, serving critical needs, and potentially achieving artificial general intelligence.

The recent advance in Large Language Models (LLMs) has shaped a new paradigm of AI agents, i.e., LLM-based agents. Compared to standalone LLMs, LLM-based agents substantially extend the versatility and expertise of LLMs by enhancing LLMs with the capabilities of perceiving and utilizing external resources and tools. To date, LLM-based agents have been applied and shown remarkable effectiveness in Software Engineering (SE). The synergy between multiple agents and human interaction brings further promise in tackling complex real-world SE problems. In this work, we present a comprehensive and systematic survey on LLM-based agents for SE. We collect 106 papers and categorize them from two perspectives, i.e., the SE and agent perspectives. In addition, we discuss open challenges and future directions in this critical domain. The repository of this survey is at https://github.com/FudanSELab/Agent4SE-Paper-List.

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

LLM agents rely on prompts to implement task-specific capabilities based on foundation LLMs, making agent prompts valuable intellectual property. However, in untrusted deployments, adversaries can copy and reuse these prompts with other proprietary LLMs, causing economic losses. To protect these prompts, we identify four key challenges: proactivity, runtime protection, usability, and non-portability that existing approaches fail to address. We present PragLocker, a prompt protection scheme that satisfies these requirements. PragLocker constructs function-preserving obfuscated prompts by anchoring semantics with code symbols and then using target-model feedback to inject noise, yielding prompts that only work on the target LLM. Experiments across multiple agent systems, datasets, and foundation LLMs show that PragLocker substantially reduces cross-LLM portability, maintains target performance, and remains robust against adaptive attackers.

The rise of LLM-based agents shows great potential to revolutionize task planning, capturing significant attention. Given that these agents will be integrated into high-stake domains, ensuring their reliability and safety is crucial. This paper presents an Agent-Constitution-based agent framework, TrustAgent, with a particular focus on improving the LLM-based agent safety. The proposed framework ensures strict adherence to the Agent Constitution through three strategic components: pre-planning strategy which injects safety knowledge to the model before plan generation, in-planning strategy which enhances safety during plan generation, and post-planning strategy which ensures safety by post-planning inspection. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework can effectively enhance an LLM agent's safety across multiple domains by identifying and mitigating potential dangers during the planning. Further analysis reveals that the framework not only improves safety but also enhances the helpfulness of the agent. Additionally, we highlight the importance of the LLM reasoning ability in adhering to the Constitution. This paper sheds light on how to ensure the safe integration of LLM-based agents into human-centric environments. Data and code are available at https://github.com/agiresearch/TrustAgent.

Leveraging multiple large language model (LLM) agents has shown to be a promising approach for tackling complex tasks, while the effective design of multiple agents for a particular application remains an art. It is thus intriguing to answer a critical question: Given a task, how can we build a team of LLM agents to solve it effectively? Our new adaptive team-building paradigm offers a flexible solution, realized through a novel agent design named Captain Agent. It dynamically forms and manages teams for each step of a task-solving process, utilizing nested group conversations and reflection to ensure diverse expertise and prevent stereotypical outputs. It allows for a flexible yet structured approach to problem-solving and can help reduce redundancy and enhance output diversity. A comprehensive evaluation across six real-world scenarios demonstrates that Captain Agent significantly outperforms existing multi-agent methods with 21.94% improvement in average accuracy, providing outstanding performance without requiring task-specific prompt engineering.

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

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

Frontier LLM agents are automating many business tasks, but their high inference cost makes large-scale deployment unsustainable. Small language models (SLMs) offer a cheaper alternative, yet they typically fall short when swapped into a harness designed for a frontier LLM. We show that for many routine business tasks, SLM agents can match LLM performance at 90% lower cost, when paired with an adapted harness that can be automatically discovered by a meta agent. The key insight is that much of the task difficulty is shared across instances and can be lifted from the model into the harness via tailored instructions, tools, and orchestration loops. To study this systematically, we create a framework that maps agent failure modes to harness adaptation strategies, and build a harness optimizer that automatically discovers effective adaptations from failure trajectories. Across seven business-oriented agentic tasks and three SLM families, we found optimized harnesses significantly improve performance on 16 of 21 task-SLM pairs, with seven pairs closing the SLM-LLM performance gap and the best SLM agent recovering 89.7% of LLM performance at 4% of the cost. Our analysis further shows that adaptation works best for tasks with more repetitive workflows and for SLMs with sufficient base capabilities. Together, these results suggest that harness adaptation can expand the practical deployment range of SLM agents in routine business tasks.

LLM-based agents increasingly solve complex tasks through long trajectories involving reasoning steps, tool calls, and inter-agent communication. However, when these agents fail, it is often unclear which agent caused the failure and which step introduced the decisive error. This attribution problem is challenging because mistakes can propagate across the trajectory: later actions may appear incorrect, but only because they depend on an earlier corrupted state. Therefore, failure attribution cannot be treated as independent step-level classification. We propose FALAT, a diagnostic framework for failure attribution in LLM agent trajectories. FALAT frames attribution as a dependency-guided search problem. It first constructs an expectation of how the task should be solved and uses this expectation to identify suspicious regions in the trajectory. It then traces dependencies among decisions, tool outputs, and agent messages to distinguish error-introducing steps from steps that merely inherit or propagate prior mistakes. Finally, FALAT evaluates whether correcting a candidate step would be sufficient to recover the expected outcome, allowing it to identify both the responsible agent and the decisive failure step. We evaluate FALAT on the Who&When benchmark, which includes both algorithm-generated and hand-crafted multi-agent failure trajectories. The results show that FALAT consistently improves responsible-agent and decisive-step attribution. Its best configurations achieve 46.0% step-level accuracy on algorithm-generated trajectories and 29.1% on the more challenging hand-crafted trajectories, outperforming specialized attribution baselines and direct prompting with standalone LLMs. These findings suggest that dependency-aware reasoning is essential for reliable failure diagnosis in LLM agent systems.

In recent developments within the research community, the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) in creating fully autonomous agents has garnered significant interest. Despite this, LLM-based agents frequently demonstrate notable shortcomings in adjusting to dynamic environments and fully grasping human needs. In this work, we introduce the problem of LLM-based human-agent collaboration for complex task-solving, exploring their synergistic potential. In addition, we propose a Reinforcement Learning-based Human-Agent Collaboration method, ReHAC. This approach includes a policy model designed to determine the most opportune stages for human intervention within the task-solving process. We construct a human-agent collaboration dataset to train this policy model in an offline reinforcement learning environment. Our validation tests confirm the model's effectiveness. The results demonstrate that the synergistic efforts of humans and LLM-based agents significantly improve performance in complex tasks, primarily through well-planned, limited human intervention. Datasets and code are available at: https://github.com/XueyangFeng/ReHAC.

As LLMs are increasingly studied as role-playing agents to generate synthetic data for human behavioral research, ensuring that their outputs remain coherent with their assigned roles has become a critical concern. In this paper, we investigate how consistently LLM-based role-playing agents' stated beliefs about the behavior of the people they are asked to role-play ("what they say") correspond to their actual behavior during role-play ("how they act"). Specifically, we establish an evaluation framework to rigorously measure how well beliefs obtained by prompting the model can predict simulation outcomes in advance. Using an augmented version of the GenAgents persona bank and the Trust Game (a standard economic game used to quantify players' trust and reciprocity), we introduce a belief-behavior consistency metric to systematically investigate how it is affected by factors such as: (1) the types of beliefs we elicit from LLMs, like expected outcomes of simulations versus task-relevant attributes of individual characters LLMs are asked to simulate; (2) when and how we present LLMs with relevant information about Trust Game; and (3) how far into the future we ask the model to forecast its actions. We also explore how feasible it is to impose a researcher's own theoretical priors in the event that the originally elicited beliefs are misaligned with research objectives. Our results reveal systematic inconsistencies between LLMs' stated (or imposed) beliefs and the outcomes of their role-playing simulation, at both an individual- and population-level. Specifically, we find that, even when models appear to encode plausible beliefs, they may fail to apply them in a consistent way. These findings highlight the need to identify how and when LLMs' stated beliefs align with their simulated behavior, allowing researchers to use LLM-based agents appropriately in behavioral studies.

LLM-based agents have emerged as promising tools, which are crafted to fulfill complex tasks by iterative planning and action. However, these agents are susceptible to undesired planning hallucinations when lacking specific knowledge for expertise-intensive tasks. To address this, preliminary attempts are made to enhance planning reliability by incorporating external workflow-related knowledge. Despite the promise, such infused knowledge is mostly disorganized and diverse in formats, lacking rigorous formalization and comprehensive comparisons. Motivated by this, we formalize different formats of workflow knowledge and present FlowBench, the first benchmark for workflow-guided planning. FlowBench covers 51 different scenarios from 6 domains, with knowledge presented in diverse formats. To assess different LLMs on FlowBench, we design a multi-tiered evaluation framework. We evaluate the efficacy of workflow knowledge across multiple formats, and the results indicate that current LLM agents need considerable improvements for satisfactory planning. We hope that our challenging benchmark can pave the way for future agent planning research.

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed to automate productivity tasks (e.g., email, scheduling, document management), but evaluating them on live services is risky due to potentially irreversible changes. Existing benchmarks rely on simplified environments and fail to capture realistic, stateful, multi-service workflows. We introduce ClawsBench, a benchmark for evaluating and improving LLM agents in realistic productivity settings. It includes five high-fidelity mock services (Gmail, Slack, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Drive) with full state management and deterministic snapshot/restore, along with 44 structured tasks covering single-service, cross-service, and safety-critical scenarios. We decompose agent scaffolding into two independent levers (domain skills that inject API knowledge via progressive disclosure, and a meta prompt that coordinates behavior across services) and vary both to measure their separate and combined effects. Experiments across 6 models, 4 agent harnesses, and 33 conditions show that with full scaffolding, agents achieve task success rates of 39-64% but exhibit unsafe action rates of 7-33%. On OpenClaw, the top five models fall within a 10 percentage-point band on task success (53-63%), with unsafe action rates from 7% to 23% and no consistent ordering between the two metrics. We identify eight recurring patterns of unsafe behavior, including multi-step sandbox escalation and silent contract modification.

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly used to operate browsers, files, code and tools, making personal assistants a natural deployment target. Yet personal agents face a privacy-cost-capability tension: cloud models execute multi-step workflows well but expose sensitive intermediate context to external APIs, while local models preserve privacy but remain less reliable. Both settings also pay repeatedly for long skill prompts and growing histories. We propose constant-context skill learning, a context-to-weights framework for recurring agent workflows: reusable procedures are learned in lightweight task-family modules, while inference conditions only on the current observation and a compact state block. A deterministic tracker renders this state block from task progress and supplies aligned subgoal rewards, so each module can be trained with step-level SFT and refined through online RL. Across ALFWorld, WebShop, and SciWorld, our agents achieve strong performance across Qwen3-4B, Qwen3-8B and Llama-3.1-8B. With Qwen3-8B, SFT+RL reaches 89.6\% unseen success on ALFWorld, 76.8\% success on WebShop, and 66.4\% unseen success on SciWorld. They match or exceed strong published agent-training results while reducing prompt tokens per turn by 2--7times relative to controlled ReAct prompting baselines, showing that procedural context can be moved from prompts into weights.

Large language model (LLM) agents are evolving from request-response assistants into long-running software actors: they maintain state across model calls, fork subtasks, wait for external events, request human authority, generate tools, and perform side effects that must be resumed and audited. This paper presents Agent libOS, a library-OS-inspired runtime substrate for LLM agents. Agent libOS runs above a conventional host operating system; it does not implement hardware drivers, kernel-mode isolation, or a POSIX-compatible operating system. Instead, it treats an agent as an AgentProcess: a schedulable execution subject with process identity, parent-child lineage, lifecycle state, a tool table derived from an AgentImage, typed Object Memory, explicit capabilities, human queues, checkpoints, events, and audit records. Its central design rule is tools are libc-like wrappers; runtime primitives are the authority boundary. Filesystem access, object access, sleeps, human approval, JIT tool registration, and external side effects are checked at primitive boundaries under explicit capabilities and policy. We describe the design, threat model, Python prototype, and safety-oriented evaluation. The current prototype implements async scheduling, namespace-local Object Memory, runtime-integrated human approval, one-shot permission grants, per-process working directories, shell and image-registration primitives, Deno/TypeScript JIT tools over a libOS syscall broker, filesystem/object bridge tools, an injectable Resource Provider Substrate, deterministic demos, real-model smoke scripts, and 123 regression tests at the time of writing. Rather than improving planner accuracy, Agent libOS demonstrates a runtime substrate in which long-running LLM agents can be scheduled, authorized, resumed, and audited without treating tool dispatch as the trust boundary.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are autonomous systems powered by LLMs, capable of reasoning and planning to solve problems by leveraging a set of tools. However, the integration of multi-tool capabilities in LLM agents introduces challenges in securely managing tools, ensuring their compatibility, handling dependency relationships, and protecting control flows within LLM agent workflows. In this paper, we present the first systematic security analysis of task control flows in multi-tool-enabled LLM agents. We identify a novel threat, Cross-Tool Harvesting and Polluting (XTHP), which includes multiple attack vectors to first hijack the normal control flows of agent tasks, and then collect and pollute confidential or private information within LLM agent systems. To understand the impact of this threat, we developed Chord, a dynamic scanning tool designed to automatically detect real-world agent tools susceptible to XTHP attacks. Our evaluation of 66 real-world tools from the repositories of two major LLM agent development frameworks, LangChain and LlamaIndex, revealed a significant security concern: 75\% are vulnerable to XTHP attacks, highlighting the prevalence of this threat.

With the rise of large language models (LLMs), researchers are increasingly exploring their applications in var ious vertical domains, such as software engineering. LLMs have achieved remarkable success in areas including code generation and vulnerability detection. However, they also exhibit numerous limitations and shortcomings. LLM-based agents, a novel tech nology with the potential for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), combine LLMs as the core for decision-making and action-taking, addressing some of the inherent limitations of LLMs such as lack of autonomy and self-improvement. Despite numerous studies and surveys exploring the possibility of using LLMs in software engineering, it lacks a clear distinction between LLMs and LLM based agents. It is still in its early stage for a unified standard and benchmarking to qualify an LLM solution as an LLM-based agent in its domain. In this survey, we broadly investigate the current practice and solutions for LLMs and LLM-based agents for software engineering. In particular we summarise six key topics: requirement engineering, code generation, autonomous decision-making, software design, test generation, and software maintenance. We review and differentiate the work of LLMs and LLM-based agents from these six topics, examining their differences and similarities in tasks, benchmarks, and evaluation metrics. Finally, we discuss the models and benchmarks used, providing a comprehensive analysis of their applications and effectiveness in software engineering. We anticipate this work will shed some lights on pushing the boundaries of LLM-based agents in software engineering for future research.

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

Large language models (LLMs) have evolved beyond simple text generation to power software agents that directly translate natural language commands into tangible actions. While API-based LLM agents initially rose to prominence for their robust automation capabilities and seamless integration with programmatic endpoints, recent progress in multimodal LLM research has enabled GUI-based LLM agents that interact with graphical user interfaces in a human-like manner. Although these two paradigms share the goal of enabling LLM-driven task automation, they diverge significantly in architectural complexity, development workflows, and user interaction models. This paper presents the first comprehensive comparative study of API-based and GUI-based LLM agents, systematically analyzing their divergence and potential convergence. We examine key dimensions and highlight scenarios in which hybrid approaches can harness their complementary strengths. By proposing clear decision criteria and illustrating practical use cases, we aim to guide practitioners and researchers in selecting, combining, or transitioning between these paradigms. Ultimately, we indicate that continuing innovations in LLM-based automation are poised to blur the lines between API- and GUI-driven agents, paving the way for more flexible, adaptive solutions in a wide range of real-world applications.

In this work, we introduce MedAgentSim, an open-source simulated clinical environment with doctor, patient, and measurement agents designed to evaluate and enhance LLM performance in dynamic diagnostic settings. Unlike prior approaches, our framework requires doctor agents to actively engage with patients through multi-turn conversations, requesting relevant medical examinations (e.g., temperature, blood pressure, ECG) and imaging results (e.g., MRI, X-ray) from a measurement agent to mimic the real-world diagnostic process. Additionally, we incorporate self improvement mechanisms that allow models to iteratively refine their diagnostic strategies. We enhance LLM performance in our simulated setting by integrating multi-agent discussions, chain-of-thought reasoning, and experience-based knowledge retrieval, facilitating progressive learning as doctor agents interact with more patients. We also introduce an evaluation benchmark for assessing the LLM's ability to engage in dynamic, context-aware diagnostic interactions. While MedAgentSim is fully automated, it also supports a user-controlled mode, enabling human interaction with either the doctor or patient agent. Comprehensive evaluations in various simulated diagnostic scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Our code, simulation tool, and benchmark are available at https://medagentsim.netlify.app/.

Proactivity is a core expectation for AGI. Prior work remains largely confined to laboratory settings, leaving a clear gap in real-world proactive agent: depth, complexity, ambiguity, precision and real-time constraints. We study this setting, where useful intervention requires inferring latent needs from ongoing context and grounding actions in evolving user memory under latency and long-horizon constraints. We first propose DD-MM-PAS (Demand Detection, Memory Modeling, Proactive Agent System) as a general paradigm for streaming proactive AI agent. We instantiate this paradigm in Pask, with streaming IntentFlow model for DD, a hybrid memory (workspace, user, global) for long-term MM, PAS infra framework and introduce how these components form a closed loop. We also introduce LatentNeeds-Bench, a real-world benchmark built from user-consented data and refined through thousands of rounds of human editing. Experiments show that IntentFlow matches leading Gemini3-Flash models under latency constraints, while identifying deeper user intent.

While AI agents demonstrate remarkable capabilities in reasoning and tool use, they remain fundamentally reactive: they compute responses only after explicit user prompts. This paradigm ignores a critical opportunity: the idle time between interactions is largely wasted, leaving agents unable to prepare for future user needs. To bridge this gap, we introduce ProAct, a proactive agent architecture that leverages idle-time compute to anticipate and fulfill likely upcoming user needs. By analyzing evolving dialogue history together with persistent memory, ProAct predicts upcoming needs and iteratively acquires information, allowing the agent to resolve knowledge gaps and prepare evidence before the user initiates a query.To rigorously evaluate proactive capabilities, we also introduce ProActEval, a comprehensive benchmark comprising 200 scenarios across 40 domains, featuring predictable need chains and diverse user cognitive profiles. Empirical results demonstrate significant advantages over reactive baselines. ProAct accelerates task completion by reducing required turns by 14.8%, decreases user effort by 11.7%, and cuts hallucination rates by 28.1% on ProActEval. Furthermore, MemBench evaluations confirm that ProAct achieves state-of-the-art reflective accuracy, underscoring its sustained and robust performance.

LLM-based agents are becoming central to software engineering tasks, yet evaluating them remains fragmented and largely model-centric. Existing studies overlook how architectural components, such as planners, memory, and tool routers, shape agent behavior, limiting diagnostic power. We propose a lightweight, architecture-informed approach that links agent components to their observable behaviors and to the metrics capable of evaluating them. Our method clarifies what to measure and why, and we illustrate its application through real world agents, enabling more targeted, transparent, and actionable evaluation of LLM-based agents.

Mathematical modeling is a cornerstone of scientific discovery and engineering practice, enabling the translation of real-world problems into formal systems across domains such as physics, biology, and economics. Unlike mathematical reasoning, which assumes a predefined formulation, modeling requires open-ended problem analysis, abstraction, and principled formalization. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong reasoning capabilities, they fall short in rigorous model construction, limiting their utility in real-world problem-solving. To this end, we formalize the task of LLM-powered real-world mathematical modeling, where agents must analyze problems, construct domain-appropriate formulations, and generate complete end-to-end solutions. We introduce MM-Bench, a curated benchmark of 111 problems from the Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM/ICM), spanning the years 2000 to 2025 and across ten diverse domains such as physics, biology, and economics. To tackle this task, we propose MM-Agent, an expert-inspired framework that decomposes mathematical modeling into four stages: open-ended problem analysis, structured model formulation, computational problem solving, and report generation. Experiments on MM-Bench show that MM-Agent significantly outperforms baseline agents, achieving an 11.88\% improvement over human expert solutions while requiring only 15 minutes and \$0.88 per task using GPT-4o. Furthermore, under official MCM/ICM protocols, MM-Agent assisted two undergraduate teams in winning the Finalist Award (top 2.0\% among 27,456 teams) in MCM/ICM 2025, demonstrating its practical effectiveness as a modeling copilot. Our code is available at https://github.com/usail-hkust/LLM-MM-Agent

The dark patterns, deceptive interface designs manipulating user behaviors, have been extensively studied for their effects on human decision-making and autonomy. Yet, with the rising prominence of LLM-powered GUI agents that automate tasks from high-level intents, understanding how dark patterns affect agents is increasingly important. We present a two-phase empirical study examining how agents, human participants, and human-AI teams respond to 16 types of dark patterns across diverse scenarios. Phase 1 highlights that agents often fail to recognize dark patterns, and even when aware, prioritize task completion over protective action. Phase 2 revealed divergent failure modes: humans succumb due to cognitive shortcuts and habitual compliance, while agents falter from procedural blind spots. Human oversight improved avoidance but introduced costs such as attentional tunneling and cognitive load. Our findings show neither humans nor agents are uniformly resilient, and collaboration introduces new vulnerabilities, suggesting design needs for transparency, adjustable autonomy, and oversight.

LLM-based agents can act on behalf of a user to access cloud services, call tools, or invoke agents. At session start, the agent's permissions are set but remain static, and each request is evaluated independently, without considering prior actions. Within its permissions, an agent may act contrary to the delegated task, combine individually permitted actions into a prohibited outcome, or delegate authority to a sub-agent without limiting it. A prompt injection poses a risk only if the agent has authority to perform such actions; this is therefore a problem of authorization architecture, not just the model. The Agentic Principal Chain (APC) tracks delegated authority from one principal to the next. APC evaluates each request against the accumulated session state using six authorization checks. APC carries forward and restricts delegated scope and budgets. Using composition closure, APC checks requests against prior actions to prevent prohibited combinations and enforces the decision outside the model. We prove Blast Radius Monotonicity and Composition Soundness for APC implementations; Composition Soundness is limited to prohibited combinations under a complete restriction set and serialized admission. We evaluated 3,154 instances including InjecAgent, AgentDojo, and ASB. Our compromised-model evaluation tests APC independently of model behavior by inserting the ground-truth attack call after the first legitimate tool call. AgentDojo exfiltration fell from 75-100% to 0% across all four domains; APC blocked all 544 InjecAgent data-stealing cases. Intent binding reduced destruction from 38.6% to 4.0% and manipulation from 90.5% to 12.1%. Authorization latency was 0.24 ms at the 99th percentile on an idle host; across 949 AgentDojo task-injection pairs, utility was 8.6 and 13.9 percentage points lower in the two settings. Implementation, evaluation tools, and data are publicly available.

Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise in biomedicine but lack true causal understanding, relying instead on correlations. This paper envisions causal LLM agents that integrate multimodal data (text, images, genomics, etc.) and perform intervention-based reasoning to infer cause-and-effect. Addressing this requires overcoming key challenges: designing safe, controllable agentic frameworks; developing rigorous benchmarks for causal evaluation; integrating heterogeneous data sources; and synergistically combining LLMs with structured knowledge (KGs) and formal causal inference tools. Such agents could unlock transformative opportunities, including accelerating drug discovery through automated hypothesis generation and simulation, enabling personalized medicine through patient-specific causal models. This research agenda aims to foster interdisciplinary efforts, bridging causal concepts and foundation models to develop reliable AI partners for biomedical progress.

Multi-Modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), despite being successful, exhibit limited generality and often fall short when compared to specialized models. Recently, LLM-based agents have been developed to address these challenges by selecting appropriate specialized models as tools based on user inputs. However, such advancements have not been extensively explored within the medical domain. To bridge this gap, this paper introduces the first agent explicitly designed for the medical field, named Multi-modal Medical Agent (MMedAgent). We curate an instruction-tuning dataset comprising six medical tools solving seven tasks across five modalities, enabling the agent to choose the most suitable tools for a given task. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MMedAgent achieves superior performance across a variety of medical tasks compared to state-of-the-art open-source methods and even the closed-source model, GPT-4o. Furthermore, MMedAgent exhibits efficiency in updating and integrating new medical tools. Codes and models are all available.

Effective guardrails are essential for safely deploying LLM-based agents in critical applications. Despite recent advances, existing guardrails suffer from two fundamental limitations: (i) they apply uniform guardrail policies to all users, ignoring that the same agent behavior can harm some users while being safe for others; (ii) they check each response in isolation, missing how risks evolve and accumulate across multiple interactions. To solve these issues, we propose PSG-Agent, a personalized and dynamic system for LLM-based agents. First, PSG-Agent creates personalized guardrails by mining the interaction history for stable traits and capturing real-time states from current queries, generating user-specific risk thresholds and protection strategies. Second, PSG-Agent implements continuous monitoring across the agent pipeline with specialized guards, including Plan Monitor, Tool Firewall, Response Guard, Memory Guardian, that track cross-turn risk accumulation and issue verifiable verdicts. Finally, we validate PSG-Agent in multiple scenarios including healthcare, finance, and daily life automation scenarios with diverse user profiles. It significantly outperform existing agent guardrails including LlamaGuard3 and AGrail, providing an executable and auditable path toward personalized safety for LLM-based agents.

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly revolutionized web search. The emergence of LLM-based Search Agents marks a pivotal shift towards deeper, dynamic, autonomous information seeking. These agents can comprehend user intentions and environmental context and execute multi-turn retrieval with dynamic planning, extending search capabilities far beyond the web. Leading examples like OpenAI's Deep Research highlight their potential for deep information mining and real-world applications. This survey provides the first systematic analysis of search agents. We comprehensively analyze and categorize existing works from the perspectives of architecture, optimization, application, and evaluation, ultimately identifying critical open challenges and outlining promising future research directions in this rapidly evolving field. Our repository is available on https://github.com/YunjiaXi/Awesome-Search-Agent-Papers.

AI agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant advances, enabling them to assist humans in diverse complex tasks and leading to a revolution in human-AI coordination. LLM-powered agents typically require invoking LLM APIs and employing artificially designed complex prompts, which results in high inference latency. While this paradigm works well in scenarios with minimal interactive demands, such as code generation, it is unsuitable for highly interactive and real-time applications, such as gaming. Traditional gaming AI often employs small models or reactive policies, enabling fast inference but offering limited task completion and interaction abilities. In this work, we consider Overcooked as our testbed where players could communicate with natural language and cooperate to serve orders. We propose a Hierarchical Language Agent (HLA) for human-AI coordination that provides both strong reasoning abilities while keeping real-time execution. In particular, HLA adopts a hierarchical framework and comprises three modules: a proficient LLM, referred to as Slow Mind, for intention reasoning and language interaction, a lightweight LLM, referred to as Fast Mind, for generating macro actions, and a reactive policy, referred to as Executor, for transforming macro actions into atomic actions. Human studies show that HLA outperforms other baseline agents, including slow-mind-only agents and fast-mind-only agents, with stronger cooperation abilities, faster responses, and more consistent language communications.

The integration of tools in LLM-based agents overcame the difficulties of standalone LLMs and traditional agents' limited capabilities. However, the conjunction of these technologies and the proposed enhancements in several state-of-the-art works followed a non-unified software architecture resulting in a lack of modularity. Indeed, they focused mainly on functionalities and overlooked the definition of the component's boundaries within the agent. This caused terminological and architectural ambiguities between researchers which we addressed in this paper by proposing a unified framework that establishes a clear foundation for LLM-based agents' development from both functional and software architectural perspectives. Our framework, LLM-Agent-UMF (LLM-based Agent Unified Modeling Framework), clearly distinguishes between the different components of an agent, setting LLMs, and tools apart from a newly introduced element: the core-agent, playing the role of the central coordinator of the agent which comprises five modules: planning, memory, profile, action, and security, the latter often neglected in previous works. Differences in the internal structure of core-agents led us to classify them into a taxonomy of passive and active types. Based on this, we proposed different multi-core agent architectures combining unique characteristics of various individual agents. For evaluation purposes, we applied this framework to a selection of state-of-the-art agents, thereby demonstrating its alignment with their functionalities and clarifying the overlooked architectural aspects. Moreover, we thoroughly assessed four of our proposed architectures by integrating distinctive agents into hybrid active/passive core-agents' systems. This analysis provided clear insights into potential improvements and highlighted the challenges involved in the combination of specific agents.

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

This paper develops an agentic framework that employs large language models (LLMs) to automate the generation of persuasive and grounded marketing content, using real estate listing descriptions as our focal application domain. Our method is designed to align the generated content with user preferences while highlighting useful factual attributes. This agent consists of three key modules: (1) Grounding Module, mimicking expert human behavior to predict marketable features; (2) Personalization Module, aligning content with user preferences; (3) Marketing Module, ensuring factual accuracy and the inclusion of localized features. We conduct systematic human-subject experiments in the domain of real estate marketing, with a focus group of potential house buyers. The results demonstrate that marketing descriptions generated by our approach are preferred over those written by human experts by a clear margin. Our findings suggest a promising LLM-based agentic framework to automate large-scale targeted marketing while ensuring responsible generation using only facts.