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FastMCP6 releases this week
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Open problems in Agents

Long-horizon task execution and memory3 papers raise it · 3 address it
Agents fail to retain, retrieve, and use past information over long interactions, limiting real-world deployment.
- RealCompanion: Benchmarking Human Understanding from Reasoning over Longitudinal Real-World Conversationsraises
- Scaling Agentic Data for Long-Horizon Terminal Intelligenceraises · addresses
- Learn2Play Bench: How Well Do LLM Agents Learn from Experience in Unfamiliar Environments?raises · addresses
- Agent-Reflex: Teaching Language Agents to Act Reflectivelyaddresses
Real-world task ambiguity and unstated constraints3 papers raise it · 2 address it
Agents struggle with ambiguous, incomplete, or evolving requirements in live systems, unlike controlled benchmarks.
- OR-License: Evaluating LLM Agents as Real-World Operations Research Practitionersraises · addresses
- FDE-Gym: The Last Mile of AI Deliveryraises · addresses
- AgentSWE: Can Coding Agents Build the Agent You Actually Want?raises
Faithful agent development from requirements1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it
Coding agents often produce systems that appear correct but fail to meet the actual requirements.
- AgentSWE: Can Coding Agents Build the Agent You Actually Want?raises · addresses
Sequential distraction in multimodal GUI agents1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it
Omni-modal inputs cause agents to focus on irrelevant signals, leading to compounding errors.
- Focused Omni-Modal GUI Agentsraises · addresses
Open, reproducible agent stacks and evaluation1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it
Closed systems and lack of open benchmarks hinder systematic study and improvement of agent designs.
- OpenGCUA: Toward a Fully Open Stack for Generalist Computer Useraises · addresses

Named by an AI from these papers' abstracts.

Open problems

Recently funded

Market

FirstWorkSeries A · Oct 21$15M
Asymptote LabsSeed · Oct 20$5.5M
LumilabPre-seed · Oct 20undisclosed
GreptileSeries B+ · Oct 19$50M
VesslaPre-seed · Oct 19$3.3M

Recently funded

Topics in this field

coding agents · code generation · coding agent303 papers89 this week
skills · tasks · ai315 papers60 this week
recursive self improvement · harness evolution · adaptive271 papers50 this week
tool using agents · agent systems · multi agent216 papers45 this week
ai agents · indirect prompt injection · adversarial319 papers43 this week
agent · agentic · llm agents172 papers42 this week

Topics in this field

Active contributors · 90 days

Active contributors

Activity · 12 weeks

Activity

Recent papers

All papers in Research

arXiv cs.CROct 15
Approve What, Exactly? Effect Binding and Trusted Rendering for Agent Step-Up Authorization
Sai Varun Kodathala, Prashanth Pollishetty, Jaylen Cargill
AI agents now pause for approval before they send money, delete files or email outsiders, and that approval is usually treated as a second factor. We argue it is one only when compromising the agent cannot produce it and when it names exactly what it approves, and we test both conditions. We define twelve attacks on the approval path, including decoy recipients, amount cancellation, card padding, label spoofing, enrollment squatting and threshold splitting, and run them against the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), the Microsoft action-bound approval design and Model Context Protocol (MCP) elicitation. An audit of ten agent runtimes finds no third-party verifiable approval record, no flood limits where measurable, and post-approval argument changes in four of eight runtimes with measurable binding. As a reference defense we build ASU (Agent Step-Up), a gateway that renders the approval card from a canonical effect descriptor, has a passkey on the phone of the user sign its digest, and executes only the stored call. Tamarin proves its binding, single-use and key-level non-repudiation properties under three stated hypotheses (53 lemmas). Across 27,108 scripted trials and 609 AgentDojo…
PDF arXiv
arXiv cs.AIOct 15▲ 11
Athanor: An Agent-Native System for Autonomous Post-Training Research
Yufa Zhou, Yichen Wang, Jiakun Fan, Ziqi Shu, Zhichao Liu +3
Recursive self-improvement, in which AI systems build stronger AI systems, is one promising route to superintelligence. We study a weaker form that can be measured today: frontier agents post-training a small raw base model with public data, as a test of their research potential. We build Athanor, an open agent-native system for autonomous post-training research (AutoPostTrain) on real GPUs. We give the agents full research autonomy, low-friction engineering tools, and efficient starter code. The agents carry out the research themselves: they read datasets and evaluation results, build their training data, write and modify training algorithms, tune hyperparameters, and analyze the results to decide what to try next. They work in a sandbox and cannot use external teacher models. Athanor's services supply frozen evaluation, managed jobs, decontaminated data, a persistent research record, and a held-out suite the agents are unaware of. In a 104-hour campaign, a team of four Claude Opus 5.5 agents, each on an eight-GPU node and given no research advice, improves Qwen3-4B-Base from 15.9 to 67.3 on a six-task development suite and from 9.2 to 48.2 on a held-out suite, against 66.5 and…
PDF arXiv
arXiv cs.AIOct 15
Learning When to Withdraw: Curriculum Coverage and Rule-Specific Failures in Fine-Tuned Language Agents
Mohamed Abouzahra
Tool-using language agents must revise prepared actions when evidence changes or authority is revoked. Selective withdrawal means suspending affected actions, preserving supported work, and resuming only after sufficient repair. We study supervised fine-tuning in NAQD-Env, a synthetic environment with explicit dependencies and a deterministic reference policy. Four LoRA checkpoints of Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct compare an original curriculum with an enriched one, the latter under three system-prompt framings with identical views and targets. Three instruction-tuned baselines and all four checkpoints are evaluated under three inference prompts on fresh validation cases, held-out dependency families, and held-out structural combinations. Under the naqd prompt, SFT checkpoints reach decision agreement of 0.77-0.92 and withdrawal recall of 0.46-0.86, versus 0.45-0.63 and at most 0.06 for the baselines. Rule-level diagnostics qualify these gains. The original-curriculum checkpoint wrongly withdraws 26 of 34 actions with surviving alternative support; enriched checkpoints withdraw 0-1. Conversely, all SFT checkpoints narrow prohibited combinations less often than the 7B and 8B baselines, a…
PDF arXiv
arXiv cs.MAOct 15
SCARCE: Emergent Institutions in Long-Horizon Multi-Agent Coding Systems
Abhinav Kumar, Rediet Abebe, Eugene Bagdasarian, Sahar Abdelnabi
As autonomous agents become widely deployed, coordinating access to shared computing resources and services will become increasingly important. Recent incidents have already revealed unplanned coordination between agents, highlighting the safety implications of these interactions. Yet prior studies of agent negotiation often use stylized games and simulated bargaining, leaving open how these behaviors develop during sustained, long-horizon tasks. We propose SCARCE (Shared Compute ARena for Coding agEnts), a framework in which agents solve sequences of coding tasks under individual deadlines while negotiating access to a shared execution resource. This negotiation determines when and for how long they can inspect programs, compile code, and run tests. We find that agents spontaneously develop informal institutions: persistent rules and commitments grounded in reputation, reciprocity, and precedent. These arrangements, which we call institutional behaviors, carry across tasks and influence resource allocation, with agents sometimes forgoing immediate advantages to honor earlier agreements. We develop a 21-category taxonomy of negotiation strategies and emergent norms and use it to…
PDF arXiv
arXiv cs.AIOct 14
Failure Is the Mother of Success: Recovering Supervision with Grounding Hindsight
Sheldon Yu, Tong Yu, Nikki Lijing Kuang, Zhendong Chu, Zhenwei Tang +4
When every rollout for a problem fails, GRPO receives neither a successful exemplar nor a nonzero group-relative advantage, so it learns nothing from exactly the problems it most needs to learn. The failed reasoning can nevertheless suggest what to try next. We present Replay-Selected Hindsight Distillation (RSHD), which turns failed attempts into an additional, tested source of supervision during GRPO training. The policy writes a corrective note about each failed attempt without seeing a reference answer or solution, then re-solves the problem with the note in context. A note is admitted only if its replays succeed more often than the original group did, after screening for notes that state the answer, and an admitted replay is distilled into the plain-prompt policy. Because admission is decided by fresh successes rather than by the failed rollout itself, the procedure can recover supervision from groups in which every attempt failed, and it applies equally to failures in mixed groups. Only the policy is trained, the only judge is the outcome verifier, and deployment requires no notes or extra inference. Across model families and sizes and two training domains, RSHD…
PDF arXiv
arXiv cs.LGOct 14
CausalEvo: Causal Skill Self-Evolution for Health LLM Agents
Yuchen Zhang
Large language model (LLM) agents for health can accumulate reusable textual skills from task feedback, such as calculation criteria, measurement time points, and formula units. Deciding which skills to retain is consequential: useful rules improve later answers, while faulty generalizations propagate errors. We propose CausalEvo, a method for causal skill self-evolution that estimates the relative effects of deliberately changed skill sets while holding the model weights, feedback cases, and rule count fixed. At each evolution step, a frozen LLM proposes candidate rules, which are pooled with the incumbent skills so that the current skill set remains a feasible choice. Paired skill replacements against shared background rules are scored on the same feedback cases; least squares converts the score differences into relative skill values, and the top-ranked rules are retained, favoring incumbents on ties. A decision-loss bound separates candidate support, approximation, and estimation errors. On six MedCalc-Bench-Verified tasks with 120 held-out cases, CausalEvo achieves 60.00% accuracy, compared with 55.83% for SkillOpt and 51.67% without skills. Across the recorded training…
PDF arXiv

Papers

Top tools here

All tools

Agno5 releases this week
FastMCP6 releases this week
Pydantic AI+17% downloads · 1.5M/wk+17.0%
n8n+25% downloads · 148.3k/wk+25.0%
smolagents+19% downloads · 125.9k/wk+18.7%

Topics in this field

coding agents · code generation · coding agent303 papers89 this week
skills · tasks · ai315 papers60 this week
recursive self improvement · harness evolution · adaptive271 papers50 this week
tool using agents · agent systems · multi agent216 papers45 this week
ai agents · indirect prompt injection · adversarial319 papers43 this week
agent · agentic · llm agents172 papers42 this week

Recently funded

Market

FirstWorkSeries A · Oct 21$15M
Asymptote LabsSeed · Oct 20$5.5M
LumilabPre-seed · Oct 20undisclosed
GreptileSeries B+ · Oct 19$50M
VesslaPre-seed · Oct 19$3.3M

Active contributors · 90 days

Recent papers

All papers in Research

arXiv cs.CROct 15
Approve What, Exactly? Effect Binding and Trusted Rendering for Agent Step-Up Authorization
Sai Varun Kodathala, Prashanth Pollishetty, Jaylen Cargill
AI agents now pause for approval before they send money, delete files or email outsiders, and that approval is usually treated as a second factor. We argue it is one only when compromising the agent cannot produce it and when it names exactly what it approves, and we test both conditions. We define twelve attacks on the approval path, including decoy recipients, amount cancellation, card padding, label spoofing, enrollment squatting and threshold splitting, and run them against the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), the Microsoft action-bound approval design and Model Context Protocol (MCP) elicitation. An audit of ten agent runtimes finds no third-party verifiable approval record, no flood limits where measurable, and post-approval argument changes in four of eight runtimes with measurable binding. As a reference defense we build ASU (Agent Step-Up), a gateway that renders the approval card from a canonical effect descriptor, has a passkey on the phone of the user sign its digest, and executes only the stored call. Tamarin proves its binding, single-use and key-level non-repudiation properties under three stated hypotheses (53 lemmas). Across 27,108 scripted trials and 609 AgentDojo…
PDF arXiv
arXiv cs.AIOct 15▲ 11
Athanor: An Agent-Native System for Autonomous Post-Training Research
Yufa Zhou, Yichen Wang, Jiakun Fan, Ziqi Shu, Zhichao Liu +3
Recursive self-improvement, in which AI systems build stronger AI systems, is one promising route to superintelligence. We study a weaker form that can be measured today: frontier agents post-training a small raw base model with public data, as a test of their research potential. We build Athanor, an open agent-native system for autonomous post-training research (AutoPostTrain) on real GPUs. We give the agents full research autonomy, low-friction engineering tools, and efficient starter code. The agents carry out the research themselves: they read datasets and evaluation results, build their training data, write and modify training algorithms, tune hyperparameters, and analyze the results to decide what to try next. They work in a sandbox and cannot use external teacher models. Athanor's services supply frozen evaluation, managed jobs, decontaminated data, a persistent research record, and a held-out suite the agents are unaware of. In a 104-hour campaign, a team of four Claude Opus 5.5 agents, each on an eight-GPU node and given no research advice, improves Qwen3-4B-Base from 15.9 to 67.3 on a six-task development suite and from 9.2 to 48.2 on a held-out suite, against 66.5 and…
PDF arXiv
arXiv cs.AIOct 15
Learning When to Withdraw: Curriculum Coverage and Rule-Specific Failures in Fine-Tuned Language Agents
Mohamed Abouzahra
Tool-using language agents must revise prepared actions when evidence changes or authority is revoked. Selective withdrawal means suspending affected actions, preserving supported work, and resuming only after sufficient repair. We study supervised fine-tuning in NAQD-Env, a synthetic environment with explicit dependencies and a deterministic reference policy. Four LoRA checkpoints of Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct compare an original curriculum with an enriched one, the latter under three system-prompt framings with identical views and targets. Three instruction-tuned baselines and all four checkpoints are evaluated under three inference prompts on fresh validation cases, held-out dependency families, and held-out structural combinations. Under the naqd prompt, SFT checkpoints reach decision agreement of 0.77-0.92 and withdrawal recall of 0.46-0.86, versus 0.45-0.63 and at most 0.06 for the baselines. Rule-level diagnostics qualify these gains. The original-curriculum checkpoint wrongly withdraws 26 of 34 actions with surviving alternative support; enriched checkpoints withdraw 0-1. Conversely, all SFT checkpoints narrow prohibited combinations less often than the 7B and 8B baselines, a…
PDF arXiv
arXiv cs.MAOct 15
SCARCE: Emergent Institutions in Long-Horizon Multi-Agent Coding Systems
Abhinav Kumar, Rediet Abebe, Eugene Bagdasarian, Sahar Abdelnabi
As autonomous agents become widely deployed, coordinating access to shared computing resources and services will become increasingly important. Recent incidents have already revealed unplanned coordination between agents, highlighting the safety implications of these interactions. Yet prior studies of agent negotiation often use stylized games and simulated bargaining, leaving open how these behaviors develop during sustained, long-horizon tasks. We propose SCARCE (Shared Compute ARena for Coding agEnts), a framework in which agents solve sequences of coding tasks under individual deadlines while negotiating access to a shared execution resource. This negotiation determines when and for how long they can inspect programs, compile code, and run tests. We find that agents spontaneously develop informal institutions: persistent rules and commitments grounded in reputation, reciprocity, and precedent. These arrangements, which we call institutional behaviors, carry across tasks and influence resource allocation, with agents sometimes forgoing immediate advantages to honor earlier agreements. We develop a 21-category taxonomy of negotiation strategies and emergent norms and use it to…
PDF arXiv
arXiv cs.AIOct 14
Failure Is the Mother of Success: Recovering Supervision with Grounding Hindsight
Sheldon Yu, Tong Yu, Nikki Lijing Kuang, Zhendong Chu, Zhenwei Tang +4
When every rollout for a problem fails, GRPO receives neither a successful exemplar nor a nonzero group-relative advantage, so it learns nothing from exactly the problems it most needs to learn. The failed reasoning can nevertheless suggest what to try next. We present Replay-Selected Hindsight Distillation (RSHD), which turns failed attempts into an additional, tested source of supervision during GRPO training. The policy writes a corrective note about each failed attempt without seeing a reference answer or solution, then re-solves the problem with the note in context. A note is admitted only if its replays succeed more often than the original group did, after screening for notes that state the answer, and an admitted replay is distilled into the plain-prompt policy. Because admission is decided by fresh successes rather than by the failed rollout itself, the procedure can recover supervision from groups in which every attempt failed, and it applies equally to failures in mixed groups. Only the policy is trained, the only judge is the outcome verifier, and deployment requires no notes or extra inference. Across model families and sizes and two training domains, RSHD…
PDF arXiv
arXiv cs.LGOct 14
CausalEvo: Causal Skill Self-Evolution for Health LLM Agents
Yuchen Zhang
Large language model (LLM) agents for health can accumulate reusable textual skills from task feedback, such as calculation criteria, measurement time points, and formula units. Deciding which skills to retain is consequential: useful rules improve later answers, while faulty generalizations propagate errors. We propose CausalEvo, a method for causal skill self-evolution that estimates the relative effects of deliberately changed skill sets while holding the model weights, feedback cases, and rule count fixed. At each evolution step, a frozen LLM proposes candidate rules, which are pooled with the incumbent skills so that the current skill set remains a feasible choice. Paired skill replacements against shared background rules are scored on the same feedback cases; least squares converts the score differences into relative skill values, and the top-ranked rules are retained, favoring incumbents on ties. A decision-loss bound separates candidate support, approximation, and estimation errors. On six MedCalc-Bench-Verified tasks with 120 held-out cases, CausalEvo achieves 60.00% accuracy, compared with 55.83% for SkillOpt and 51.67% without skills. Across the recorded training…
PDF arXiv

Activity · 12 weeks

Fields · AI · updated 1h ago

Agents

LLM agents: planning, tool use, multi-agent systems, computer/web agents and agent benchmarks.

550papers this week0.0% vs last week

All papers · 2.6k With code · 121

Newest Most relevant

2.4k papers this month

Open problems in Agents

Long-horizon task execution and memory3 papers raise it · 3 address it
Agents fail to retain, retrieve, and use past information over long interactions, limiting real-world deployment.
- RealCompanion: Benchmarking Human Understanding from Reasoning over Longitudinal Real-World Conversationsraises
- Scaling Agentic Data for Long-Horizon Terminal Intelligenceraises · addresses
- Learn2Play Bench: How Well Do LLM Agents Learn from Experience in Unfamiliar Environments?raises · addresses
- Agent-Reflex: Teaching Language Agents to Act Reflectivelyaddresses
Real-world task ambiguity and unstated constraints3 papers raise it · 2 address it
Agents struggle with ambiguous, incomplete, or evolving requirements in live systems, unlike controlled benchmarks.
- OR-License: Evaluating LLM Agents as Real-World Operations Research Practitionersraises · addresses
- FDE-Gym: The Last Mile of AI Deliveryraises · addresses
- AgentSWE: Can Coding Agents Build the Agent You Actually Want?raises
Faithful agent development from requirements1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it
Coding agents often produce systems that appear correct but fail to meet the actual requirements.
- AgentSWE: Can Coding Agents Build the Agent You Actually Want?raises · addresses
Sequential distraction in multimodal GUI agents1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it
Omni-modal inputs cause agents to focus on irrelevant signals, leading to compounding errors.
- Focused Omni-Modal GUI Agentsraises · addresses
Open, reproducible agent stacks and evaluation1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it
Closed systems and lack of open benchmarks hinder systematic study and improvement of agent designs.
- OpenGCUA: Toward a Fully Open Stack for Generalist Computer Useraises · addresses

Named by an AI from these papers' abstracts.