Agent-R$^2$: Scaling Agents for Realistic Productivity Work via Real-Source Data Synthesis

Teng Pan, Zixuan Wang, Yuchen Yan, Qifei Wu, Yao Chen +3

Large language models have made rapid progress in agentic reasoning and tool use, raising expectations for agents that can take over realistic productivity work from humans. However, current agents still struggle to finish such tasks, where success requires following long-horizon professional workflows, understanding heterogeneous file contexts, and producing usable deliverables under fine-grained requirements. A key bottleneck is the lack of scalable post-training data that reflects real work intent, authentic file environments, and deliverable-level evaluation. To close this gap, we introduce Agent-R$^2$, a $\textbf{r}$eal-source data synthesis framework that scales training data for $\textbf{r}$ealistic productivity work. Instead of relying on manually specified workflows or LLM-generated files, Agent-R$^2$ grounds synthesis throughout the pipeline in real occupational seeds, corpus-derived workflow evidence, and authentic web-sourced files. From 10k web-corpus candidates, Agent-R$^2$ distills 4k task instances that pair real multi-format attachments with fine-grained, deliverable-level rubrics. On this data, we train Agent-R$^2$-4B via supervised fine-tuning and rubric-based…