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Dec 8

Demystifying Reinforcement Learning in Agentic Reasoning

Recently, the emergence of agentic RL has showcased that RL could also effectively improve the agentic reasoning ability of LLMs, yet the key design principles and optimal practices remain unclear. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive and systematic investigation to demystify reinforcement learning in agentic reasoning from three key perspectives: data, algorithm, and reasoning mode. We highlight our key insights: (i) Replacing stitched synthetic trajectories with real end-to-end tool-use trajectories yields a far stronger SFT initialization; high-diversity, model-aware datasets sustain exploration and markedly improve RL performance. (ii) Exploration-friendly techniques are crucial for agentic RL, such as clip higher, overlong reward shaping, and maintaining adequate policy entropy could improve the training efficiency. (iii) A deliberative strategy with fewer tool calls outperforms frequent tool calls or verbose self-reasoning, improving tool efficiency and final accuracy. Together, these simple practices consistently enhance agentic reasoning and training efficiency, achieving strong results on challenging benchmarks with smaller models, and establishing a practical baseline for future agentic RL research. Beyond these empirical insights, we further contribute a high-quality, real end-to-end agentic SFT dataset along with a high-quality RL dataset, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our insights in boosting the agentic reasoning ability of LLMs across four challenging benchmarks, including AIME2024/AIME2025, GPQA-Diamond, and LiveCodeBench-v6. With our recipes, 4B-sized models could also achieve superior agentic reasoning performance compared to 32B-sized models. Code and models: https://github.com/Gen-Verse/Open-AgentRL

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 13 2

ReWatch-R1: Boosting Complex Video Reasoning in Large Vision-Language Models through Agentic Data Synthesis

While Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) significantly advances image reasoning in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), its application to complex video reasoning remains underdeveloped. This gap stems primarily from a critical data bottleneck: existing datasets lack the challenging, multi-hop questions and high-quality, video-grounded Chain-of-Thought (CoT) data necessary to effectively bootstrap RLVR. To address this, we introduce ReWatch, a large-scale dataset built to foster advanced video reasoning. We propose a novel multi-stage synthesis pipeline to synthesize its three components: ReWatch-Caption, ReWatch-QA, and ReWatch-CoT. A core innovation is our Multi-Agent ReAct framework for CoT synthesis, which simulates a human-like "re-watching" process to generate video-grounded reasoning traces by explicitly modeling information retrieval and verification. Building on this dataset, we develop ReWatch-R1 by post-training a strong baseline LVLM with Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and our RLVR framework. This framework incorporates a novel Observation \& Reasoning (O\&R) reward mechanism that evaluates both the final answer's correctness and the reasoning's alignment with video content, directly penalizing hallucination. Our experiments show that ReWatch-R1 achieves state-of-the-art average performance on five challenging video reasoning benchmarks. Project Page: https://rewatch-r1.github.io

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 28

Agent Data Protocol: Unifying Datasets for Diverse, Effective Fine-tuning of LLM Agents

Public research results on large-scale supervised finetuning of AI agents remain relatively rare, since the collection of agent training data presents unique challenges. In this work, we argue that the bottleneck is not a lack of underlying data sources, but that a large variety of data is fragmented across heterogeneous formats, tools, and interfaces. To this end, we introduce the agent data protocol (ADP), a light-weight representation language that serves as an "interlingua" between agent datasets in diverse formats and unified agent training pipelines downstream. The design of ADP is expressive enough to capture a large variety of tasks, including API/tool use, browsing, coding, software engineering, and general agentic workflows, while remaining simple to parse and train on without engineering at a per-dataset level. In experiments, we unified a broad collection of 13 existing agent training datasets into ADP format, and converted the standardized ADP data into training-ready formats for multiple agent frameworks. We performed SFT on these data, and demonstrated an average performance gain of ~20% over corresponding base models, and delivers state-of-the-art or near-SOTA performance on standard coding, browsing, tool use, and research benchmarks, without domain-specific tuning. All code and data are released publicly, in the hope that ADP could help lower the barrier to standardized, scalable, and reproducible agent training.

DatasetResearch: Benchmarking Agent Systems for Demand-Driven Dataset Discovery

The rapid advancement of large language models has fundamentally shifted the bottleneck in AI development from computational power to data availability-with countless valuable datasets remaining hidden across specialized repositories, research appendices, and domain platforms. As reasoning capabilities and deep research methodologies continue to evolve, a critical question emerges: can AI agents transcend conventional search to systematically discover any dataset that meets specific user requirements, enabling truly autonomous demand-driven data curation? We introduce DatasetResearch, the first comprehensive benchmark evaluating AI agents' ability to discover and synthesize datasets from 208 real-world demands across knowledge-intensive and reasoning-intensive tasks. Our tri-dimensional evaluation framework reveals a stark reality: even advanced deep research systems achieve only 22% score on our challenging DatasetResearch-pro subset, exposing the vast gap between current capabilities and perfect dataset discovery. Our analysis uncovers a fundamental dichotomy-search agents excel at knowledge tasks through retrieval breadth, while synthesis agents dominate reasoning challenges via structured generation-yet both catastrophically fail on "corner cases" outside existing distributions. These findings establish the first rigorous baseline for dataset discovery agents and illuminate the path toward AI systems capable of finding any dataset in the digital universe. Our benchmark and comprehensive analysis provide the foundation for the next generation of self-improving AI systems and are publicly available at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/DatasetResearch.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 9

StarCraftImage: A Dataset For Prototyping Spatial Reasoning Methods For Multi-Agent Environments

Spatial reasoning tasks in multi-agent environments such as event prediction, agent type identification, or missing data imputation are important for multiple applications (e.g., autonomous surveillance over sensor networks and subtasks for reinforcement learning (RL)). StarCraft II game replays encode intelligent (and adversarial) multi-agent behavior and could provide a testbed for these tasks; however, extracting simple and standardized representations for prototyping these tasks is laborious and hinders reproducibility. In contrast, MNIST and CIFAR10, despite their extreme simplicity, have enabled rapid prototyping and reproducibility of ML methods. Following the simplicity of these datasets, we construct a benchmark spatial reasoning dataset based on StarCraft II replays that exhibit complex multi-agent behaviors, while still being as easy to use as MNIST and CIFAR10. Specifically, we carefully summarize a window of 255 consecutive game states to create 3.6 million summary images from 60,000 replays, including all relevant metadata such as game outcome and player races. We develop three formats of decreasing complexity: Hyperspectral images that include one channel for every unit type (similar to multispectral geospatial images), RGB images that mimic CIFAR10, and grayscale images that mimic MNIST. We show how this dataset can be used for prototyping spatial reasoning methods. All datasets, code for extraction, and code for dataset loading can be found at https://starcraftdata.davidinouye.com

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 8, 2024

KAT-Coder Technical Report

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled progress in agentic coding, where models autonomously reason, plan, and act within interactive software development workflows. However, bridging the gap between static text-based training and dynamic real-world agentic execution remains a core challenge. In this technical report, we present KAT-Coder, a large-scale agentic code model trained through a multi-stage curriculum encompassing Mid-Term Training, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT), and Reinforcement-to-Deployment Adaptation. The Mid-Term stage enhances reasoning, planning, and reflection capabilities through a corpus of real software engineering data and synthetic agentic interactions. The SFT stage constructs a million-sample dataset balancing twenty programming languages, ten development contexts, and ten task archetypes. The RFT stage introduces a novel multi-ground-truth reward formulation for stable and sample-efficient policy optimization. Finally, the Reinforcement-to-Deployment phase adapts the model to production-grade IDE environments using Error-Masked SFT and Tree-Structured Trajectory Training. In summary, these stages enable KAT-Coder to achieve robust tool-use reliability, instruction alignment, and long-context reasoning, forming a deployable foundation for real-world intelligent coding agents. Our KAT series 32B model, KAT-Dev, has been open-sourced on https://huggingface.co/Kwaipilot/KAT-Dev.

  • 40 authors
·
Oct 21

GUI-360: A Comprehensive Dataset and Benchmark for Computer-Using Agents

We introduce GUI-360^circ, a large-scale, comprehensive dataset and benchmark suite designed to advance computer-using agents (CUAs). CUAs present unique challenges and is constrained by three persistent gaps: a scarcity of real-world CUA tasks, the lack of automated collection-and-annotation pipelines for multi-modal trajectories, and the absence of a unified benchmark that jointly evaluates GUI grounding, screen parsing, and action prediction. GUI-360^circ addresses these gaps with an LLM-augmented, largely automated pipeline for query sourcing, environment-template construction, task instantiation, batched execution, and LLM-driven quality filtering. The released corpus contains over 1.2M executed action steps across thousands of trajectories in popular Windows office applications, and includes full-resolution screenshots, accessibility metadata when available, instantiated goals, intermediate reasoning traces, and both successful and failed action trajectories. The dataset supports three canonical tasks, GUI grounding, screen parsing, and action prediction, and a hybrid GUI+API action space that reflects modern agent designs. Benchmarking state-of-the-art vision--language models on GUI-360^circ reveals substantial out-of-the-box shortcomings in grounding and action prediction; supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning yield significant gains but do not close the gap to human-level reliability. We release GUI-360^circ and accompanying code to facilitate reproducible research and accelerate progress on robust desktop CUAs. The full dataset has been made public on https://huggingface.co/datasets/vyokky/GUI-360.

microsoft Microsoft
·
Nov 6 2

AgentInstruct: Toward Generative Teaching with Agentic Flows

Synthetic data is becoming increasingly important for accelerating the development of language models, both large and small. Despite several successful use cases, researchers also raised concerns around model collapse and drawbacks of imitating other models. This discrepancy can be attributed to the fact that synthetic data varies in quality and diversity. Effective use of synthetic data usually requires significant human effort in curating the data. We focus on using synthetic data for post-training, specifically creating data by powerful models to teach a new skill or behavior to another model, we refer to this setting as Generative Teaching. We introduce AgentInstruct, an extensible agentic framework for automatically creating large amounts of diverse and high-quality synthetic data. AgentInstruct can create both the prompts and responses, using only raw data sources like text documents and code files as seeds. We demonstrate the utility of AgentInstruct by creating a post training dataset of 25M pairs to teach language models different skills, such as text editing, creative writing, tool usage, coding, reading comprehension, etc. The dataset can be used for instruction tuning of any base model. We post-train Mistral-7b with the data. When comparing the resulting model Orca-3 to Mistral-7b-Instruct (which uses the same base model), we observe significant improvements across many benchmarks. For example, 40% improvement on AGIEval, 19% improvement on MMLU, 54% improvement on GSM8K, 38% improvement on BBH and 45% improvement on AlpacaEval. Additionally, it consistently outperforms other models such as LLAMA-8B-instruct and GPT-3.5-turbo.

  • 14 authors
·
Jul 3, 2024 16

Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Web

We introduce Mind2Web, the first dataset for developing and evaluating generalist agents for the web that can follow language instructions to complete complex tasks on any website. Existing datasets for web agents either use simulated websites or only cover a limited set of websites and tasks, thus not suitable for generalist web agents. With over 2,000 open-ended tasks collected from 137 websites spanning 31 domains and crowdsourced action sequences for the tasks, Mind2Web provides three necessary ingredients for building generalist web agents: 1) diverse domains, websites, and tasks, 2) use of real-world websites instead of simulated and simplified ones, and 3) a broad spectrum of user interaction patterns. Based on Mind2Web, we conduct an initial exploration of using large language models (LLMs) for building generalist web agents. While the raw HTML of real-world websites are often too large to be fed to LLMs, we show that first filtering it with a small LM significantly improves the effectiveness and efficiency of LLMs. Our solution demonstrates a decent level of performance, even on websites or entire domains the model has never seen before, but there is still a substantial room to improve towards truly generalizable agents. We open-source our dataset, model implementation, and trained models (https://osu-nlp-group.github.io/Mind2Web) to facilitate further research on building a generalist agent for the web.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 9, 2023 3

MaskSearch: A Universal Pre-Training Framework to Enhance Agentic Search Capability

Retrieval-Augmented Language Models (RALMs) represent a classic paradigm where models enhance generative capabilities using external knowledge retrieved via a specialized module. Recent advancements in Agent techniques enable Large Language Models (LLMs) to autonomously utilize tools for retrieval, planning, and reasoning. While existing training-based methods show promise, their agentic abilities are limited by inherent characteristics of the task-specific data used during training. To further enhance the universal search capability of agents, we propose a novel pre-training framework, MaskSearch. In the pre-training stage, we introduce the Retrieval Augmented Mask Prediction (RAMP) task, where the model learns to leverage search tools to fill masked spans on a large number of pre-training data, thus acquiring universal retrieval and reasoning capabilities for LLMs. After that, the model is trained on downstream tasks to achieve further improvement. We apply both Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) for training. For SFT, we combine agent-based and distillation-based methods to generate training data, starting with a multi-agent system consisting of a planner, rewriter, observer, and followed by a self-evolving teacher model. While for RL, we employ DAPO as the training framework and adopt a hybrid reward system consisting of answer rewards and format rewards. Additionally, we introduce a curriculum learning approach that allows the model to learn progressively from easier to more challenging instances based on the number of masked spans. We evaluate the effectiveness of our framework in the scenario of open-domain multi-hop question answering. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that MaskSearch significantly enhances the performance of LLM-based search agents on both in-domain and out-of-domain downstream tasks.

  • 9 authors
·
May 26 2

OpenCUA: Open Foundations for Computer-Use Agents

Vision-language models have demonstrated impressive capabilities as computer-use agents (CUAs) capable of automating diverse computer tasks. As their commercial potential grows, critical details of the most capable CUA systems remain closed. As these agents will increasingly mediate digital interactions and execute consequential decisions on our behalf, the research community needs access to open CUA frameworks to study their capabilities, limitations, and risks. To bridge this gap, we propose OpenCUA, a comprehensive open-source framework for scaling CUA data and foundation models. Our framework consists of: (1) an annotation infrastructure that seamlessly captures human computer-use demonstrations; (2) AgentNet, the first large-scale computer-use task dataset spanning 3 operating systems and 200+ applications and websites; (3) a scalable pipeline that transforms demonstrations into state-action pairs with reflective long Chain-of-Thought reasoning that sustain robust performance gains as data scales. Our end-to-end agent models demonstrate strong performance across CUA benchmarks. In particular, OpenCUA-32B achieves an average success rate of 34.8% on OSWorld-Verified, establishing a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) among open-source models and surpassing OpenAI CUA (GPT-4o). Further analysis confirms that our approach generalizes well across domains and benefits significantly from increased test-time computation. We release our annotation tool, datasets, code, and models to build open foundations for further CUA research.

  • 39 authors
·
Aug 12 2

AgentSwift: Efficient LLM Agent Design via Value-guided Hierarchical Search

Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated strong capabilities across diverse domains. However, designing high-performing agentic systems remains challenging. Existing agent search methods suffer from three major limitations: (1) an emphasis on optimizing agentic workflows while under-utilizing proven human-designed components such as memory, planning, and tool use; (2) high evaluation costs, as each newly generated agent must be fully evaluated on benchmarks; and (3) inefficient search in large search space. In this work, we introduce a comprehensive framework to address these challenges. First, We propose a hierarchical search space that jointly models agentic workflow and composable functional components, enabling richer agentic system designs. Building on this structured design space, we introduce a predictive value model that estimates agent performance given agentic system and task description, allowing for efficient, low-cost evaluation during the search process. Finally, we present a hierarchical Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) strategy informed by uncertainty to guide the search. Experiments on seven benchmarks, covering embodied, math, web, tool, and game, show that our method achieves an average performance gain of 8.34\% over state-of-the-art baselines and exhibits faster search progress with steeper improvement trajectories. Code repo is available at https://github.com/Ericccc02/AgentSwift.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 6

APIGen-MT: Agentic Pipeline for Multi-Turn Data Generation via Simulated Agent-Human Interplay

Training effective AI agents for multi-turn interactions requires high-quality data that captures realistic human-agent dynamics, yet such data is scarce and expensive to collect manually. We introduce APIGen-MT, a two-phase framework that generates verifiable and diverse multi-turn agent data. In the first phase, our agentic pipeline produces detailed task blueprints with ground-truth actions, leveraging a committee of LLM reviewers and iterative feedback loops. These blueprints are then transformed into complete interaction trajectories through simulated human-agent interplay. We train a family of models -- the xLAM-2-fc-r series with sizes ranging from 1B to 70B parameters. Our models outperform frontier models such as GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 on tau-bench and BFCL benchmarks, with the smaller models surpassing their larger counterparts, particularly in multi-turn settings, while maintaining superior consistency across multiple trials. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our verified blueprint-to-details approach yields high-quality training data, enabling the development of more reliable, efficient, and capable agents. We open-source both the synthetic data collected and the trained xLAM-2-fc-r models to advance research in AI agents. Models are available on HuggingFace at https://huggingface.co/collections/Salesforce/xlam-2-67ef5be12949d8dcdae354c4 and project website is https://apigen-mt.github.io

MMAT-1M: A Large Reasoning Dataset for Multimodal Agent Tuning

Large Language Models (LLMs), enhanced through agent tuning, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and tool utilization, significantly surpassing the performance of standalone models. However, the multimodal domain still lacks a large-scale, high-quality agent tuning dataset to unlock the full potential of multimodal large language models. To bridge this gap, we introduce MMAT-1M, the first million-scale multimodal agent tuning dataset designed to support CoT, reflection, and dynamic tool usage. Our dataset is constructed through a novel four-stage data engine: 1) We first curate publicly available multimodal datasets containing question-answer pairs; 2) Then, leveraging GPT-4o, we generate rationales for the original question-answer pairs and dynamically integrate API calls and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) information through a multi-turn paradigm; 3) Furthermore, we refine the rationales through reflection to ensure logical consistency and accuracy, creating a multi-turn dialogue dataset with both Rationale and Reflection (RR); 4) Finally, to enhance efficiency, we optionally compress multi-turn dialogues into a One-turn Rationale and Reflection (ORR) format. By fine-tuning open-source multimodal models on the MMAT-1M, we observe significant performance gains. For instance, the InternVL2.5-8B-RR model achieves an average improvement of 2.7% across eight public benchmarks and 8.8% on the RAG benchmark Dyn-VQA, demonstrating the dataset's effectiveness in enhancing multimodal reasoning and tool-based capabilities. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/VIS-MPU-Agent/MMAT-1M.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 29

SciTextures: Collecting and Connecting Visual Patterns, Models, and Code Across Science and Art

The ability to connect visual patterns with the processes that form them represents one of the deepest forms of visual understanding. Textures of clouds and waves, the growth of cities and forests, or the formation of materials and landscapes are all examples of patterns emerging from underlying mechanisms. We present the Scitextures dataset, a large-scale collection of textures and visual patterns from all domains of science, tech, and art, along with the models and code that generate these images. Covering over 1,200 different models and 100,000 images of patterns and textures from physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, technology, mathematics, and art, this dataset offers a way to explore the connection between the visual patterns that shape our world and the mechanisms that produce them. Created by an agentic AI pipeline that autonomously collects and implements models in standardized form, we use SciTextures to evaluate the ability of leading AI models to link visual patterns to the models and code that generate them, and to identify different patterns that emerged from the same process. We also test AIs ability to infer and recreate the mechanisms behind visual patterns by providing a natural image of a real-world pattern and asking the AI to identify, model, and code the mechanism that formed the pattern, then run this code to generate a simulated image that is compared to the real image. These benchmarks show that vision-language models (VLMs) can understand and simulate the physical system beyond a visual pattern. The dataset and code are available at: https://zenodo.org/records/17485502

  • 2 authors
·
Nov 3

AutoData: A Multi-Agent System for Open Web Data Collection

The exponential growth of data-driven systems and AI technologies has intensified the demand for high-quality web-sourced datasets. While existing datasets have proven valuable, conventional web data collection approaches face significant limitations in terms of human effort and scalability. Current data-collecting solutions fall into two categories: wrapper-based methods that struggle with adaptability and reproducibility, and large language model (LLM)-based approaches that incur substantial computational and financial costs. To address these challenges, we propose AutoData, a novel multi-agent system for Automated web Data collection, that requires minimal human intervention, i.e., only necessitating a natural language instruction specifying the desired dataset. In addition, AutoData is designed with a robust multi-agent architecture, featuring a novel oriented message hypergraph coordinated by a central task manager, to efficiently organize agents across research and development squads. Besides, we introduce a novel hypergraph cache system to advance the multi-agent collaboration process that enables efficient automated data collection and mitigates the token cost issues prevalent in existing LLM-based systems. Moreover, we introduce Instruct2DS, a new benchmark dataset supporting live data collection from web sources across three domains: academic, finance, and sports. Comprehensive evaluations over Instruct2DS and three existing benchmark datasets demonstrate AutoData's superior performance compared to baseline methods. Case studies on challenging tasks such as picture book collection and paper extraction from surveys further validate its applicability. Our source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/GraphResearcher/AutoData.

  • 12 authors
·
May 21

Agentic Neural Networks: Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Systems via Textual Backpropagation

Leveraging multiple Large Language Models(LLMs) has proven effective for addressing complex, high-dimensional tasks, but current approaches often rely on static, manually engineered multi-agent configurations. To overcome these constraints, we present the Agentic Neural Network(ANN), a framework that conceptualizes multi-agent collaboration as a layered neural network architecture. In this design, each agent operates as a node, and each layer forms a cooperative "team" focused on a specific subtask. Agentic Neural Network follows a two-phase optimization strategy: (1) Forward Phase-Drawing inspiration from neural network forward passes, tasks are dynamically decomposed into subtasks, and cooperative agent teams with suitable aggregation methods are constructed layer by layer. (2) Backward Phase-Mirroring backpropagation, we refine both global and local collaboration through iterative feedback, allowing agents to self-evolve their roles, prompts, and coordination. This neuro-symbolic approach enables ANN to create new or specialized agent teams post-training, delivering notable gains in accuracy and adaptability. Across four benchmark datasets, ANN surpasses leading multi-agent baselines under the same configurations, showing consistent performance improvements. Our findings indicate that ANN provides a scalable, data-driven framework for multi-agent systems, combining the collaborative capabilities of LLMs with the efficiency and flexibility of neural network principles. We plan to open-source the entire framework.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 10

Deep Research Agents: A Systematic Examination And Roadmap

The rapid progress of Large Language Models (LLMs) has given rise to a new category of autonomous AI systems, referred to as Deep Research (DR) agents. These agents are designed to tackle complex, multi-turn informational research tasks by leveraging a combination of dynamic reasoning, adaptive long-horizon planning, multi-hop information retrieval, iterative tool use, and the generation of structured analytical reports. In this paper, we conduct a detailed analysis of the foundational technologies and architectural components that constitute Deep Research agents. We begin by reviewing information acquisition strategies, contrasting API-based retrieval methods with browser-based exploration. We then examine modular tool-use frameworks, including code execution, multimodal input processing, and the integration of Model Context Protocols (MCPs) to support extensibility and ecosystem development. To systematize existing approaches, we propose a taxonomy that differentiates between static and dynamic workflows, and we classify agent architectures based on planning strategies and agent composition, including single-agent and multi-agent configurations. We also provide a critical evaluation of current benchmarks, highlighting key limitations such as restricted access to external knowledge, sequential execution inefficiencies, and misalignment between evaluation metrics and the practical objectives of DR agents. Finally, we outline open challenges and promising directions for future research. A curated and continuously updated repository of DR agent research is available at: {https://github.com/ai-agents-2030/awesome-deep-research-agent}.

Bee: A High-Quality Corpus and Full-Stack Suite to Unlock Advanced Fully Open MLLMs

Fully open multimodal large language models (MLLMs) currently lag behind proprietary counterparts, primarily due to a significant gap in data quality for supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Existing open-source datasets are often plagued by widespread noise and a critical deficit in complex reasoning data, such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT), which hinders the development of advanced model capabilities. Addressing these challenges, our work makes three primary contributions. First, we introduce Honey-Data-15M, a new SFT dataset comprising approximately 15 million QA pairs, processed through multiple cleaning techniques and enhanced with a novel dual-level (short and long) CoT enrichment strategy. Second, we introduce HoneyPipe, the data curation pipeline, and its underlying framework DataStudio, providing the community with a transparent and adaptable methodology for data curation that moves beyond static dataset releases. Finally, to validate our dataset and pipeline, we train Bee-8B, an 8B model on Honey-Data-15M. Experiments show that Bee-8B establishes a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) for fully open MLLMs, achieving performance that is competitive with, and in some cases surpasses, recent semi-open models such as InternVL3.5-8B. Our work delivers to the community a suite of foundational resources, including: the Honey-Data-15M corpus; the full-stack suite comprising HoneyPipe and DataStudio; training recipes; an evaluation harness; and the model weights. This effort demonstrates that a principled focus on data quality is a key pathway to developing fully open MLLMs that are highly competitive with their semi-open counterparts.

Open-Bee Open-Bee
·
Oct 15 2

SpeakerVid-5M: A Large-Scale High-Quality Dataset for Audio-Visual Dyadic Interactive Human Generation

The rapid development of large-scale models has catalyzed significant breakthroughs in the digital human domain. These advanced methodologies offer high-fidelity solutions for avatar driving and rendering, leading academia to focus on the next major challenge: audio-visual dyadic interactive virtual human. To facilitate research in this emerging area, we present SpeakerVid-5M dataset, the first large-scale, high-quality dataset designed for audio-visual dyadic interactive virtual human generation. Totaling over 8,743 hours, SpeakerVid-5M contains more than 5.2 million video clips of human portraits. It covers diverse scales and interaction types, including monadic talking, listening, and dyadic conversations. Crucially, the dataset is structured along two key dimensions: interaction type and data quality. First, it is categorized into four types (dialogue branch, single branch, listening branch and multi-turn branch) based on the interaction scenario. Second, it is stratified into a large-scale pre-training subset and a curated, high-quality subset for Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). This dual structure accommodates a wide array of 2D virtual human tasks. In addition, we provide an autoregressive (AR)-based video chat baseline trained on this data, accompanied by a dedicated set of metrics and test data to serve as a benchmark VidChatBench for future work. Both the dataset and the corresponding data processing code will be publicly released. Project page: https://dorniwang.github.io/SpeakerVid-5M/

  • 9 authors
·
Jul 13 3

Mind2Web 2: Evaluating Agentic Search with Agent-as-a-Judge

Agentic search such as Deep Research systems, where large language models autonomously browse the web, synthesize information, and return comprehensive citation-backed answers, represents a major shift in how users interact with web-scale information. While promising greater efficiency and cognitive offloading, the growing complexity and open-endedness of agentic search have outpaced existing evaluation benchmarks and methodologies, which largely assume short search horizons and static answers. In this paper, we introduce Mind2Web 2, a benchmark of 130 realistic, high-quality, and long-horizon tasks that require real-time web browsing and extensive information synthesis, constructed with over 1,000 hours of human labor. To address the challenge of evaluating time-varying and complex answers, we propose a novel Agent-as-a-Judge framework. Our method constructs task-specific judge agents based on a tree-structured rubric design to automatically assess both answer correctness and source attribution. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of nine frontier agentic search systems and human performance, along with a detailed error analysis to draw insights for future development. The best-performing system, OpenAI Deep Research, can already achieve 50-70% of human performance while spending half the time, showing a great potential. Altogether, Mind2Web 2 provides a rigorous foundation for developing and benchmarking the next generation of agentic search systems.

  • 26 authors
·
Jun 26 1

LongWriter: Unleashing 10,000+ Word Generation from Long Context LLMs

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

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 13, 2024 6

A Survey on Agentic Multimodal Large Language Models

With the recent emergence of revolutionary autonomous agentic systems, research community is witnessing a significant shift from traditional static, passive, and domain-specific AI agents toward more dynamic, proactive, and generalizable agentic AI. Motivated by the growing interest in agentic AI and its potential trajectory toward AGI, we present a comprehensive survey on Agentic Multimodal Large Language Models (Agentic MLLMs). In this survey, we explore the emerging paradigm of agentic MLLMs, delineating their conceptual foundations and distinguishing characteristics from conventional MLLM-based agents. We establish a conceptual framework that organizes agentic MLLMs along three fundamental dimensions: (i) Agentic internal intelligence functions as the system's commander, enabling accurate long-horizon planning through reasoning, reflection, and memory; (ii) Agentic external tool invocation, whereby models proactively use various external tools to extend their problem-solving capabilities beyond their intrinsic knowledge; and (iii) Agentic environment interaction further situates models within virtual or physical environments, allowing them to take actions, adapt strategies, and sustain goal-directed behavior in dynamic real-world scenarios. To further accelerate research in this area for the community, we compile open-source training frameworks, training and evaluation datasets for developing agentic MLLMs. Finally, we review the downstream applications of agentic MLLMs and outline future research directions for this rapidly evolving field. To continuously track developments in this rapidly evolving field, we will also actively update a public repository at https://github.com/HJYao00/Awesome-Agentic-MLLMs.

  • 11 authors
·
Oct 13

Utility-Diversity Aware Online Batch Selection for LLM Supervised Fine-tuning

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a commonly used technique to adapt large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks. In practice, SFT on a full dataset is computationally expensive and sometimes suffers from overfitting or bias amplification. This facilitates the rise of data curation in SFT, which prioritizes the most valuable data to optimze. This work studies the online batch selection family that dynamically scores and filters samples during the training process. However, existing popular methods often (i) rely merely on the utility of data to select a subset while neglecting other crucial factors like diversity, (ii) rely on external resources such as reference models or validation sets, and (iii) incur extra training time over full-dataset training. To address these limitations, this work develops UDS (Utility-Diversity Sampling), a framework for efficient online batch selection in SFT. UDS leverages the nuclear norm of the logits matrix to capture both data utility and intra-sample diversity, while estimating inter-sample diversity through efficient low-dimensional embedding comparisons with a lightweight memory buffer of historical samples. Such a design eliminates the need for external resources and unnecessary backpropagation, securing computational efficiency. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that UDS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art online batch selection methods under varying data budgets, and significantly reduces training time compared to full-dataset fine-tuning. Code is available at https://github.com/gfyddha/UDS.

  • 5 authors
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Oct 19

Reinforcement Learning Foundations for Deep Research Systems: A Survey

Deep research systems, agentic AI that solve complex, multi-step tasks by coordinating reasoning, search across the open web and user files, and tool use, are moving toward hierarchical deployments with a Planner, Coordinator, and Executors. In practice, training entire stacks end-to-end remains impractical, so most work trains a single planner connected to core tools such as search, browsing, and code. While SFT imparts protocol fidelity, it suffers from imitation and exposure biases and underuses environment feedback. Preference alignment methods such as DPO are schema and proxy-dependent, off-policy, and weak for long-horizon credit assignment and multi-objective trade-offs. A further limitation of SFT and DPO is their reliance on human defined decision points and subskills through schema design and labeled comparisons. Reinforcement learning aligns with closed-loop, tool-interaction research by optimizing trajectory-level policies, enabling exploration, recovery behaviors, and principled credit assignment, and it reduces dependence on such human priors and rater biases. This survey is, to our knowledge, the first dedicated to the RL foundations of deep research systems. It systematizes work after DeepSeek-R1 along three axes: (i) data synthesis and curation; (ii) RL methods for agentic research covering stability, sample efficiency, long context handling, reward and credit design, multi-objective optimization, and multimodal integration; and (iii) agentic RL training systems and frameworks. We also cover agent architecture and coordination, as well as evaluation and benchmarks, including recent QA, VQA, long-form synthesis, and domain-grounded, tool-interaction tasks. We distill recurring patterns, surface infrastructure bottlenecks, and offer practical guidance for training robust, transparent deep research agents with RL.

SciAgents: Automating scientific discovery through multi-agent intelligent graph reasoning

A key challenge in artificial intelligence is the creation of systems capable of autonomously advancing scientific understanding by exploring novel domains, identifying complex patterns, and uncovering previously unseen connections in vast scientific data. In this work, we present SciAgents, an approach that leverages three core concepts: (1) the use of large-scale ontological knowledge graphs to organize and interconnect diverse scientific concepts, (2) a suite of large language models (LLMs) and data retrieval tools, and (3) multi-agent systems with in-situ learning capabilities. Applied to biologically inspired materials, SciAgents reveals hidden interdisciplinary relationships that were previously considered unrelated, achieving a scale, precision, and exploratory power that surpasses traditional human-driven research methods. The framework autonomously generates and refines research hypotheses, elucidating underlying mechanisms, design principles, and unexpected material properties. By integrating these capabilities in a modular fashion, the intelligent system yields material discoveries, critique and improve existing hypotheses, retrieve up-to-date data about existing research, and highlights their strengths and limitations. Our case studies demonstrate scalable capabilities to combine generative AI, ontological representations, and multi-agent modeling, harnessing a `swarm of intelligence' similar to biological systems. This provides new avenues for materials discovery and accelerates the development of advanced materials by unlocking Nature's design principles.

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 9, 2024

FunReason-MT Technical Report: Overcoming the Complexity Barrier in Multi-Turn Function Calling

Function calling (FC) empowers large language models (LLMs) and autonomous agents to interface with external tools, a critical capability for solving complex, real-world problems. As this ability becomes increasingly central to advanced AI systems, the need for high-quality, multi-turn training data to develop and refine it cannot be overstated. Existing data synthesis methods, such as random environment sampling or multi-agent role-playing, are not powerful enough to generate high-quality data in real-world environments. Practical challenges come in three folds: targeted model training, isolation of tool architecture, and multi-turn logical dependency. To address these structural deficiencies, we present FunReason-MT, a novel data synthesis framework for real-world multi-turn tool use. FunReason-MT resolves the complexity barrier in multi-turn FC data by employing 1) Environment-API Graph Interactions to gather varied high-quality trajectories, 2) Advanced Tool-Query Synthesis to simplify hard query construction, and 3) Guided Iterative Chain for sophisticated CoT generation. Evaluations on Berkeley Function-Calling Leaderboard (BFCLv3) demonstrate the power of our framework: a 4B model built upon FunReason-MT generated data achieves state-of-the-art performance among comparable-sized models, outperforming most close-source models. Further performance improvements on BFCLv4 confirm that FunReason-MT provides a reliable and robust source for agentic learning.

inclusionAI inclusionAI
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Oct 28 1

WideSearch: Benchmarking Agentic Broad Info-Seeking

From professional research to everyday planning, many tasks are bottlenecked by wide-scale information seeking, which is more repetitive than cognitively complex. With the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs), automated search agents powered by LLMs offer a promising solution to liberate humans from this tedious work. However, the capability of these agents to perform such "wide-context" collection reliably and completely remains largely unevaluated due to a lack of suitable benchmarks. To bridge this gap, we introduce WideSearch, a new benchmark engineered to evaluate agent reliability on these large-scale collection tasks. The benchmark features 200 manually curated questions (100 in English, 100 in Chinese) from over 15 diverse domains, grounded in real user queries. Each task requires agents to collect large-scale atomic information, which could be verified one by one objectively, and arrange it into a well-organized output. A rigorous five-stage quality control pipeline ensures the difficulty, completeness, and verifiability of the dataset. We benchmark over 10 state-of-the-art agentic search systems, including single-agent, multi-agent frameworks, and end-to-end commercial systems. Most systems achieve overall success rates near 0\%, with the best performer reaching just 5\%. However, given sufficient time, cross-validation by multiple human testers can achieve a near 100\% success rate. These results demonstrate that present search agents have critical deficiencies in large-scale information seeking, underscoring urgent areas for future research and development in agentic search. Our dataset, evaluation pipeline, and benchmark results have been publicly released at https://widesearch-seed.github.io/

  • 13 authors
·
Aug 11 3

The Rise of AI Teammates in Software Engineering (SE) 3.0: How Autonomous Coding Agents Are Reshaping Software Engineering

The future of software engineering--SE 3.0--is unfolding with the rise of AI teammates: autonomous, goal-driven systems collaborating with human developers. Among these, autonomous coding agents are especially transformative, now actively initiating, reviewing, and evolving code at scale. This paper introduces AIDev, the first large-scale dataset capturing how such agents operate in the wild. Spanning over 456,000 pull requests by five leading agents--OpenAI Codex, Devin, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Claude Code--across 61,000 repositories and 47,000 developers, AIDev provides an unprecedented empirical foundation for studying autonomous teammates in software development. Unlike prior work that has largely theorized the rise of AI-native software engineering, AIDev offers structured, open data to support research in benchmarking, agent readiness, optimization, collaboration modeling, and AI governance. The dataset includes rich metadata on PRs, authorship, review timelines, code changes, and integration outcomes--enabling exploration beyond synthetic benchmarks like SWE-bench. For instance, although agents often outperform humans in speed, their PRs are accepted less frequently, revealing a trust and utility gap. Furthermore, while agents accelerate code submission--one developer submitted as many PRs in three days as they had in three years--these are structurally simpler (via code complexity metrics). We envision AIDev as a living resource: extensible, analyzable, and ready for the SE and AI communities. Grounding SE 3.0 in real-world evidence, AIDev enables a new generation of research into AI-native workflows and supports building the next wave of symbiotic human-AI collaboration. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/SAILResearch/AI_Teammates_in_SE3. > AI Agent, Agentic AI, Coding Agent, Agentic Coding, Software Engineering Agent

  • 3 authors
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Jul 20

Beneficial Reasoning Behaviors in Agentic Search and Effective Post-training to Obtain Them

Agentic search leverages LLMs to solve complex user information needs by executing a multi-step process of planning, searching, and synthesizing information to provide answers. This paradigm introduces unique challenges for LLMs' agentic reasoning capabilities when interacting with search systems. In this paper, we propose an LLM-based pipeline to study effective reasoning behavior patterns in agentic search by analyzing agentic search trajectories. Using this pipeline, we identify four beneficial reasoning behaviors: Information Verification, Authority Evaluation, Adaptive Search, and Error Recovery. Based on these findings, we propose a technique called Behavior Priming to train agentic search models. It synthesizes trajectories that exhibit these four behaviors and integrates them into the agentic search model through SFT, followed by standard reinforcement learning. Experiments on Qwen3-1.7B and Llama3.2-3B-Instruct across three web benchmarks and seven multi-hop QA benchmarks demonstrate that behavior priming 1) yields significant performance gains compared to training with direct RL, and 2) outperforms other SFT-then-RL baselines, such as those SFT on randomly selected trajectories or on trajectories with merely correct outcomes. Crucially, we demonstrate that the reasoning behaviors, rather than the correctness of the final answer, is the critical factor for achieving strong performance in RL: SFT on trajectories with reasoning behaviors but incorrect answers leads to comparable performance with SFT on those with reasoning behaviors and correct answers. Our analysis further reveals that the introduced reasoning behaviors endow models with more effective exploration (higher pass@k and entropy) and test-time scaling (longer trajectories) capabilities, providing a strong foundation for RL. Our code are avalible at https://github.com/cxcscmu/Behavior_Priming_For_Agentic_Search.

  • 3 authors
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Oct 7

Learn-by-interact: A Data-Centric Framework for Self-Adaptive Agents in Realistic Environments

Autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have the potential to enhance human capabilities, assisting with digital tasks from sending emails to performing data analysis. The abilities of existing LLMs at such tasks are often hindered by the lack of high-quality agent data from the corresponding environments they interact with. We propose Learn-by-interact, a data-centric framework to adapt LLM agents to any given environments without human annotations. Learn-by-interact synthesizes trajectories of agent-environment interactions based on documentations, and constructs instructions by summarizing or abstracting the interaction histories, a process called backward construction. We assess the quality of our synthetic data by using them in both training-based scenarios and training-free in-context learning (ICL), where we craft innovative retrieval approaches optimized for agents. Extensive experiments on SWE-bench, WebArena, OSWorld and Spider2-V spanning across realistic coding, web, and desktop environments show the effectiveness of Learn-by-interact in various downstream agentic tasks -- baseline results are improved by up to 12.2\% for ICL with Claude-3.5 and 19.5\% for training with Codestral-22B. We further demonstrate the critical role of backward construction, which provides up to 14.0\% improvement for training. Our ablation studies demonstrate the efficiency provided by our synthesized data in ICL and the superiority of our retrieval pipeline over alternative approaches like conventional retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). We expect that Learn-by-interact will serve as a foundation for agent data synthesis as LLMs are increasingly deployed at real-world environments.

  • 6 authors
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Jan 18 2

WebCanvas: Benchmarking Web Agents in Online Environments

For web agents to be practically useful, they must adapt to the continuously evolving web environment characterized by frequent updates to user interfaces and content. However, most existing benchmarks only capture the static aspects of the web. To bridge this gap, we introduce WebCanvas, an innovative online evaluation framework for web agents that effectively addresses the dynamic nature of web interactions. WebCanvas contains three main components to facilitate realistic assessments: (1) A novel evaluation metric which reliably capture critical intermediate actions or states necessary for task completions while disregarding noise caused by insignificant events or changed web-elements. (2) A benchmark dataset called Mind2Web-Live, a refined version of original Mind2Web static dataset containing 542 tasks with 2439 intermediate evaluation states; (3) Lightweight and generalizable annotation tools and testing pipelines that enables the community to collect and maintain the high-quality, up-to-date dataset. Building on WebCanvas, we open-source an agent framework with extensible modules for reasoning, providing a foundation for the community to conduct online inference and evaluations. Our best-performing agent achieves a task success rate of 23.1% and a task completion rate of 48.8% on the Mind2Web-Live test set. Additionally, we analyze the performance discrepancies across various websites, domains, and experimental environments. We encourage the community to contribute further insights on online agent evaluation, thereby advancing this field of research.

  • 11 authors
·
Jun 18, 2024

ResearchCodeAgent: An LLM Multi-Agent System for Automated Codification of Research Methodologies

In this paper we introduce ResearchCodeAgent, a novel multi-agent system leveraging large language models (LLMs) agents to automate the codification of research methodologies described in machine learning literature. The system bridges the gap between high-level research concepts and their practical implementation, allowing researchers auto-generating code of existing research papers for benchmarking or building on top-of existing methods specified in the literature with availability of partial or complete starter code. ResearchCodeAgent employs a flexible agent architecture with a comprehensive action suite, enabling context-aware interactions with the research environment. The system incorporates a dynamic planning mechanism, utilizing both short and long-term memory to adapt its approach iteratively. We evaluate ResearchCodeAgent on three distinct machine learning tasks with distinct task complexity and representing different parts of the ML pipeline: data augmentation, optimization, and data batching. Our results demonstrate the system's effectiveness and generalizability, with 46.9% of generated code being high-quality and error-free, and 25% showing performance improvements over baseline implementations. Empirical analysis shows an average reduction of 57.9% in coding time compared to manual implementation. We observe higher gains for more complex tasks. ResearchCodeAgent represents a significant step towards automating the research implementation process, potentially accelerating the pace of machine learning research.

  • 5 authors
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Apr 28

Synthesizing Agentic Data for Web Agents with Progressive Difficulty Enhancement Mechanisms

Web-based 'deep research' agents aim to solve complex question - answering tasks through long-horizon interactions with online tools. These tasks remain challenging, as the underlying language models are often not optimized for long-horizon reasoning and exploration. Prior work has proposed workflows for constructing instruction-tuning datasets, often leveraging knowledge graphs. However, such methods typically lack fine-grained control over difficulty and quality, yielding synthetic data that falls short of capturing the complexity required for long-horizon reasoning. Furthermore, many studies conflate data and training effects by comparing models trained under different optimization recipes, making it difficult to isolate and evaluate the effectiveness of the data itself. We introduce a two-pronged data synthesis pipeline that generates question - answer pairs by progressively increasing task complexity until a frontier baseline web agent fails. The baseline agent plays multiple roles in this process: attempting the questions, validating factuality, checking for alternative answers, and enforcing filtering. To evaluate the effectiveness of our synthesis methods, we adopt a controlled training setup based on distillation from strong web agents. Experiments across multiple web-based benchmarks show that our dataset - despite being smaller - enables the training of more effective web agents than existing datasets. In particular, our data exhibits twice the diversity in tool-use actions, allowing models trained on it to achieve stronger performance while avoiding repetitive tool-calling behaviors.

  • 7 authors
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Oct 15 2

Automated Design of Agentic Systems

Researchers are investing substantial effort in developing powerful general-purpose agents, wherein Foundation Models are used as modules within agentic systems (e.g. Chain-of-Thought, Self-Reflection, Toolformer). However, the history of machine learning teaches us that hand-designed solutions are eventually replaced by learned solutions. We formulate a new research area, Automated Design of Agentic Systems (ADAS), which aims to automatically create powerful agentic system designs, including inventing novel building blocks and/or combining them in new ways. We further demonstrate that there is an unexplored yet promising approach within ADAS where agents can be defined in code and new agents can be automatically discovered by a meta agent programming ever better ones in code. Given that programming languages are Turing Complete, this approach theoretically enables the learning of any possible agentic system: including novel prompts, tool use, control flows, and combinations thereof. We present a simple yet effective algorithm named Meta Agent Search to demonstrate this idea, where a meta agent iteratively programs interesting new agents based on an ever-growing archive of previous discoveries. Through extensive experiments across multiple domains including coding, science, and math, we show that our algorithm can progressively invent agents with novel designs that greatly outperform state-of-the-art hand-designed agents. Importantly, we consistently observe the surprising result that agents invented by Meta Agent Search maintain superior performance even when transferred across domains and models, demonstrating their robustness and generality. Provided we develop it safely, our work illustrates the potential of an exciting new research direction toward automatically designing ever-more powerful agentic systems to benefit humanity.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 15, 2024 3

AstaBench: Rigorous Benchmarking of AI Agents with a Scientific Research Suite

AI agents hold the potential to revolutionize scientific productivity by automating literature reviews, replicating experiments, analyzing data, and even proposing new directions of inquiry; indeed, there are now many such agents, ranging from general-purpose "deep research" systems to specialized science-specific agents, such as AI Scientist and AIGS. Rigorous evaluation of these agents is critical for progress. Yet existing benchmarks fall short on several fronts: they (1) fail to provide holistic, product-informed measures of real-world use cases such as science research; (2) lack reproducible agent tools necessary for a controlled comparison of core agentic capabilities; (3) do not account for confounding variables such as model cost and tool access; (4) do not provide standardized interfaces for quick agent prototyping and evaluation; and (5) lack comprehensive baseline agents necessary to identify true advances. In response, we define principles and tooling for more rigorously benchmarking agents. Using these, we present AstaBench, a suite that provides the first holistic measure of agentic ability to perform scientific research, comprising 2400+ problems spanning the entire scientific discovery process and multiple scientific domains, and including many problems inspired by actual user requests to deployed Asta agents. Our suite comes with the first scientific research environment with production-grade search tools that enable controlled, reproducible evaluation, better accounting for confounders. Alongside, we provide a comprehensive suite of nine science-optimized classes of Asta agents and numerous baselines. Our extensive evaluation of 57 agents across 22 agent classes reveals several interesting findings, most importantly that despite meaningful progress on certain individual aspects, AI remains far from solving the challenge of science research assistance.

Dialogue Agents 101: A Beginner's Guide to Critical Ingredients for Designing Effective Conversational Systems

Sharing ideas through communication with peers is the primary mode of human interaction. Consequently, extensive research has been conducted in the area of conversational AI, leading to an increase in the availability and diversity of conversational tasks, datasets, and methods. However, with numerous tasks being explored simultaneously, the current landscape of conversational AI becomes fragmented. Therefore, initiating a well-thought-out model for a dialogue agent can pose significant challenges for a practitioner. Towards highlighting the critical ingredients needed for a practitioner to design a dialogue agent from scratch, the current study provides a comprehensive overview of the primary characteristics of a dialogue agent, the supporting tasks, their corresponding open-domain datasets, and the methods used to benchmark these datasets. We observe that different methods have been used to tackle distinct dialogue tasks. However, building separate models for each task is costly and does not leverage the correlation among the several tasks of a dialogue agent. As a result, recent trends suggest a shift towards building unified foundation models. To this end, we propose UNIT, a UNified dIalogue dataseT constructed from conversations of existing datasets for different dialogue tasks capturing the nuances for each of them. We also examine the evaluation strategies used to measure the performance of dialogue agents and highlight the scope for future research in the area of conversational AI.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 14, 2023

Diagnosing Failure Root Causes in Platform-Orchestrated Agentic Systems: Dataset, Taxonomy, and Benchmark

Agentic systems consisting of multiple LLM-driven agents coordinating through tools and structured interactions, are increasingly deployed for complex reasoning and problem-solving tasks. At the same time, emerging low-code and template-based agent development platforms (e.g., Dify) enable users to rapidly build and orchestrate agentic systems, which we refer to as platform-orchestrated agentic systems. However, these systems are also fragile and it remains unclear how to systematically identify their potential failure root cause. This paper presents a study of root cause identification of these platform-orchestrated agentic systems. To support this initiative, we construct a dataset AgentFail containing 307 failure logs from ten agentic systems, each with fine-grained annotations linking failures to their root causes. We additionally utilize counterfactual reasoning-based repair strategy to ensure the reliability of the annotation. Building on the dataset, we develop a taxonomy that characterizes failure root causes and analyze their distribution across different platforms and task domains. Furthermore, we introduce a benchmark that leverages LLMs for automatically identifying root causes, in which we also utilize the proposed taxonomy as guidance for LLMs. Results show that the taxonomy can largely improve the performance, thereby confirming its utility. Nevertheless, the accuracy of root cause identification reaches at most 33.6%, which indicates that this task still remains challenging. In light of these results, we also provide actionable guidelines for building such agentic systems. In summary, this paper provides a reliable dataset of failure root cause for platform-orchestrated agentic systems, corresponding taxonomy and benchmark, which serves as a foundation for advancing the development of more reliable agentic systems.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 28

Analyzing and Internalizing Complex Policy Documents for LLM Agents

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agentic systems rely on in-context policy documents encoding diverse business rules. As requirements grow, these documents expand rapidly, causing high computational overhead. This motivates developing internalization methods that embed policy documents into model priors while preserving performance. Prior prompt compression work targets generic prompts, but agentic policy documents span multiple complexity levels and require deeper reasoning, making internalization harder. We introduce CC-Gen, an agentic benchmark generator with Controllable Complexity across four levels, enabling systematic evaluation of agents' ability to handle complexity and offering a unified framework for assessing policy internalization. Our analysis shows that complex policy specifications governing workflows pose major reasoning challenges. Supporting internalization with gold user agent interaction trajectories containing chain-of-thought (CoT) annotations via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is data-intensive and degrades sharply as policy complexity increases. To mitigate data and reasoning burdens, we propose Category-Aware Policy Continued Pretraining (CAP-CPT). Our automated pipeline parses policy documents to extract key specifications, grouping them into factual, behavioral, and conditional categories, and isolating complex conditions that drive workflow complexity. This guides targeted data synthesis and enables agents to internalize policy information through an autoregressive pretraining loss. Experiments show CAP-CPT improves SFT baselines in all settings, with up to 41% and 22% gains on Qwen-3-32B, achieving 97.3% prompt length reduction on CC-Gen and further enhancing tau-Bench with minimal SFT data.

  • 9 authors
·
Oct 13

Chain-of-Agents: End-to-End Agent Foundation Models via Multi-Agent Distillation and Agentic RL

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and multi-agent systems have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex problem-solving tasks such as deep research, vibe coding, and mathematical reasoning. However, most existing multi-agent systems are built upon manual prompt/workflow engineering with sophisticated agent frameworks, making them computationally inefficient, less capable, and can not benefit from data-centric learning. In this work, we introduce Chain-of-Agents (CoA), a novel paradigm of LLM reasoning that enables native end-to-end complex problem-solving in the same way as a multi-agent system (i.e., multi-turn problem solving with multiple tools and multiple agents) within one model. In chain-of-agents problem-solving, the model dynamically activates different tool agents and role-playing agents to simulate multi-agent collaboration in an end-to-end fashion. To elicit end-to-end chain-of-agents problem-solving abilities in LLMs, we introduce a multi-agent distillation framework to distill state-of-the-art multi-agent systems into chain-of-agents trajectories for agentic supervised fine-tuning. We then use agentic reinforcement learning on verifiable agentic tasks to further improve the models' capabilities on chain-of-agents problem solving. We call the resulting models Agent Foundation Models (AFMs). Our empirical studies demonstrate that AFM establishes new state-of-the-art performance across diverse benchmarks in both web agent and code agent settings. We make the entire research, including the model weights, code for training and evaluation, and the training data, fully open-sourced, which offers a solid starting point for future research on agent models and agentic RL.

Benchmarking Filtered Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search Algorithms on Transformer-based Embedding Vectors

Advances in embedding models for text, image, audio, and video drive progress across multiple domains, including retrieval-augmented generation, recommendation systems, vehicle/person reidentification, and face recognition. Many applications in these domains require an efficient method to retrieve items that are close to a given query in the embedding space while satisfying a filter condition based on the item's attributes, a problem known as Filtered Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search (FANNS). In this work, we present a comprehensive survey and taxonomy of FANNS methods and analyze how they are benchmarked in the literature. By doing so, we identify a key challenge in the current FANNS landscape: the lack of diverse and realistic datasets, particularly ones derived from the latest transformer-based text embedding models. To address this, we introduce a novel dataset consisting of embedding vectors for the abstracts of over 2.7 million research articles from the arXiv repository, accompanied by 11 real-world attributes such as authors and categories. We benchmark a wide range of FANNS methods on our novel dataset and find that each method has distinct strengths and limitations; no single approach performs best across all scenarios. ACORN, for example, supports various filter types and performs reliably across dataset scales but is often outperformed by more specialized methods. SeRF shows excellent performance for range filtering on ordered attributes but cannot handle categorical attributes. Filtered-DiskANN and UNG excel on the medium-scale dataset but fail on the large-scale dataset, highlighting the challenge posed by transformer-based embeddings, which are often more than an order of magnitude larger than earlier embeddings. We conclude that no universally best method exists.

  • 5 authors
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Jul 29

FABRIC: Framework for Agent-Based Realistic Intelligence Creation

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as agents, expected to decompose goals, invoke tools, and verify results in dynamic environments. Realizing these capabilities requires access to agentic data-structured interaction records that couple user intents with tool specifications, argument-grounded calls, and verifiable execution traces. However, collecting such data from human annotators is costly, time-consuming, and difficult to scale. We present a unified framework for synthesizing agentic data using only LLMs, without any human-in-the-loop supervision. This framework decomposes generation into modular pipelines that produce complete interaction records spanning task specifications, tool definitions, policy pseudocode, natural language exchanges, and execution traces. Records conform to strict syntactic and semantic constraints, ensuring machine-parseability and faithful alignment across inputs, outputs, and tool calls. Beyond single tasks, there is support for both multi-task and multi-turn agent interactions, enabling the construction of datasets that reflect the full spectrum of tool-use competencies. To ensure quality and consistency, the framework integrates constrained generation formats, JSON-schema validation, and judge-based filtering. This paper formalizes the schema for agentic records, details the prompt design principles that guide generation, and introduces scalable pipelines for high-quality synthetic data. By providing a reproducible, LLM-only alternative to manual collection, hence advancing the development of agentic LLMs capable of robust tool use.

  • 4 authors
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Oct 20

FML-bench: A Benchmark for Automatic ML Research Agents Highlighting the Importance of Exploration Breadth

Large language models (LLMs) have sparked growing interest in automatic machine learning research agents. Among them, agents capable of autonomously proposing ideas and conducting machine learning experiments are particularly promising, as they maximize research automation and accelerate scientific progress by iteratively refining ideas based on experimental results. However, comprehensively evaluating such agents remains challenging. Existing benchmarks tend to overemphasize engineering aspects while neglecting academic rigor, creating barriers that obscure a clear assessment of an agent's scientific capabilities in machine learning research. They also suffer from limited task diversity, an overemphasis on application-oriented tasks over fundamental research problems, and limited scalability to realistic research settings. To address these limitations, we introduce FML-bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate automatic machine learning research agents on 8 diverse and fundamental machine learning research problems. It reduces coding burden, emphasizes fundamental problems rather than specific use cases, offers high task diversity, and is extensible to real-world machine learning GitHub repositories. Furthermore, we present a unified evaluation framework with five complementary metrics, designed to comprehensively assess agent performance on our benchmark. We evaluate state-of-the-art automatic research agents on FML-bench, and find that agents employing broad research exploration strategies outperform those focusing on narrow but deep exploration. These findings suggest that emphasizing the breadth of exploration may lead to more effective research outcomes than focusing solely on incremental refinement. Our benchmark is available at https://github.com/qrzou/FML-bench.

LongCat-Flash Technical Report

We introduce LongCat-Flash, a 560-billion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language model designed for both computational efficiency and advanced agentic capabilities. Stemming from the need for scalable efficiency, LongCat-Flash adopts two novel designs: (a) Zero-computation Experts, which enables dynamic computational budget allocation and activates 18.6B-31.3B (27B on average) per token depending on contextual demands, optimizing resource usage. (b) Shortcut-connected MoE, which enlarges the computation-communication overlap window, demonstrating notable gains in inference efficiency and throughput compared to models of a comparable scale. We develop a comprehensive scaling framework for large models that combines hyperparameter transfer, model-growth initialization, a multi-pronged stability suite, and deterministic computation to achieve stable and reproducible training. Notably, leveraging the synergy among scalable architectural design and infrastructure efforts, we complete model training on more than 20 trillion tokens within 30 days, while achieving over 100 tokens per second (TPS) for inference at a cost of \$0.70 per million output tokens. To cultivate LongCat-Flash towards agentic intelligence, we conduct a large-scale pre-training on optimized mixtures, followed by targeted mid- and post-training on reasoning, code, and instructions, with further augmentation from synthetic data and tool use tasks. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that, as a non-thinking foundation model, LongCat-Flash delivers highly competitive performance among other leading models, with exceptional strengths in agentic tasks. The model checkpoint of LongCat-Flash is open-sourced to foster community research. LongCat Chat: https://longcat.ai Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/meituan-longcat GitHub: https://github.com/meituan-longcat

meituan-longcat LongCat
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Sep 1

AgentTTS: Large Language Model Agent for Test-time Compute-optimal Scaling Strategy in Complex Tasks

Test-time scaling (TTS) enhances the performance of large language models (LLMs) by allocating additional compute resources during inference. However, existing research primarily investigates TTS in single-stage tasks; while many real-world problems are multi-stage complex tasks, composed of a sequence of heterogeneous subtasks with each subtask requires LLM of specific capability. Therefore, we study a novel problem: the test-time compute-optimal scaling in multi-stage complex tasks, aiming to select suitable models and allocate budgets per subtask to maximize overall performance. TTS in multi-stage tasks introduces two fundamental challenges: (i) The combinatorial search space of model and budget allocations, combined with the high cost of inference, makes brute-force search impractical. (ii) The optimal model and budget allocations across subtasks are interdependent, increasing the complexity of the compute-optimal search. To address this gap, we conduct extensive pilot experiments on four tasks across six datasets, deriving three empirical insights characterizing the behavior of LLMs in multi-stage complex tasks. Informed by these insights, we propose AgentTTS, an LLM-agent-based framework that autonomously searches for compute-optimal allocations through iterative feedback-driven interactions with the execution environment. Experimental results demonstrate that AgentTTS significantly outperforms traditional and other LLM-based baselines in search efficiency, and shows improved robustness to varying training set sizes and enhanced interpretability.

AgentSense: Virtual Sensor Data Generation Using LLM Agents in Simulated Home Environments

A major challenge in developing robust and generalizable Human Activity Recognition (HAR) systems for smart homes is the lack of large and diverse labeled datasets. Variations in home layouts, sensor configurations, and individual behaviors further exacerbate this issue. To address this, we leverage the idea of embodied AI agents -- virtual agents that perceive and act within simulated environments guided by internal world models. We introduce AgentSense, a virtual data generation pipeline in which agents live out daily routines in simulated smart homes, with behavior guided by Large Language Models (LLMs). The LLM generates diverse synthetic personas and realistic routines grounded in the environment, which are then decomposed into fine-grained actions. These actions are executed in an extended version of the VirtualHome simulator, which we augment with virtual ambient sensors that record the agents' activities. Our approach produces rich, privacy-preserving sensor data that reflects real-world diversity. We evaluate AgentSense on five real HAR datasets. Models pretrained on the generated data consistently outperform baselines, especially in low-resource settings. Furthermore, combining the generated virtual sensor data with a small amount of real data achieves performance comparable to training on full real-world datasets. These results highlight the potential of using LLM-guided embodied agents for scalable and cost-effective sensor data generation in HAR. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ZikangLeng/AgentSense.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 13

DCA-Bench: A Benchmark for Dataset Curation Agents

The quality of datasets plays an increasingly crucial role in the research and development of modern artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the proliferation of open dataset platforms nowadays, data quality issues, such as insufficient documentation, inaccurate annotations, and ethical concerns, remain common in datasets widely used in AI. Furthermore, these issues are often subtle and difficult to be detected by rule-based scripts, requiring expensive manual identification and verification by dataset users or maintainers. With the increasing capability of large language models (LLMs), it is promising to streamline the curation of datasets with LLM agents. In this work, as the initial step towards this goal, we propose a dataset curation agent benchmark, DCA-Bench, to measure LLM agents' capability of detecting hidden dataset quality issues. Specifically, we collect diverse real-world dataset quality issues from eight open dataset platforms as a testbed. Additionally, to establish an automatic pipeline for evaluating the success of LLM agents, which requires a nuanced understanding of the agent outputs, we implement a dedicated Evaluator using another LLM agent. We demonstrate that the LLM-based Evaluator empirically aligns well with human evaluation, allowing reliable automatic evaluation on the proposed benchmark. We further conduct experiments on several baseline LLM agents on the proposed benchmark and demonstrate the complexity of the task, indicating that applying LLMs to real-world dataset curation still requires further in-depth exploration and innovation. Finally, the proposed benchmark can also serve as a testbed for measuring the capability of LLMs in problem discovery rather than just problem-solving. The benchmark suite is available at https://github.com/TRAIS-Lab/dca-bench.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 11, 2024

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

Designing effective agentic systems requires the seamless composition and integration of agents, tools, and models within dynamic and uncertain environments. Most existing methods rely on static, semantic retrieval approaches for tool or agent discovery. However, effective reuse and composition of existing components remain challenging due to incomplete capability descriptions and the limitations of retrieval methods. Component selection suffers because the decisions are not based on capability, cost, and real-time utility. To address these challenges, we introduce a structured, automated framework for agentic system composition that is inspired by the knapsack problem. Our framework enables a composer agent to systematically identify, select, and assemble an optimal set of agentic components by jointly considering performance, budget constraints, and compatibility. By dynamically testing candidate components and modeling their utility in real-time, our approach streamlines the assembly of agentic systems and facilitates scalable reuse of resources. Empirical evaluation with Claude 3.5 Sonnet across five benchmarking datasets shows that our online-knapsack-based composer consistently lies on the Pareto frontier, achieving higher success rates at significantly lower component costs compared to our baselines. In the single-agent setup, the online knapsack composer shows a success rate improvement of up to 31.6% in comparison to the retrieval baselines. In multi-agent systems, the online knapsack composer increases success rate from 37% to 87% when agents are selected from an agent inventory of 100+ agents. The substantial performance gap confirms the robust adaptability of our method across diverse domains and budget constraints.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 18 2

DeepAnalyze: Agentic Large Language Models for Autonomous Data Science

Autonomous data science, from raw data sources to analyst-grade deep research reports, has been a long-standing challenge, and is now becoming feasible with the emergence of powerful large language models (LLMs). Recent workflow-based data agents have shown promising results on specific data tasks but remain fundamentally limited in achieving fully autonomous data science due to their reliance on predefined workflows. In this paper, we introduce DeepAnalyze-8B, the first agentic LLM designed for autonomous data science, capable of automatically completing the end-toend pipeline from data sources to analyst-grade deep research reports. To tackle high-complexity data science tasks, we propose a curriculum-based agentic training paradigm that emulates the learning trajectory of human data scientists, enabling LLMs to progressively acquire and integrate multiple capabilities in real-world environments. We also introduce a data-grounded trajectory synthesis framework that constructs high-quality training data. Through agentic training, DeepAnalyze learns to perform a broad spectrum of data tasks, ranging from data question answering and specialized analytical tasks to open-ended data research. Experiments demonstrate that, with only 8B parameters, DeepAnalyze outperforms previous workflow-based agents built on most advanced proprietary LLMs. The model, code, and training data of DeepAnalyze are open-sourced, paving the way toward autonomous data science.

RUC-DataLab RUC-DataLab
·
Oct 19 4

SmartAgent: Chain-of-User-Thought for Embodied Personalized Agent in Cyber World

Recent advances in embodied agents with multimodal perception and reasoning capabilities based on large vision-language models (LVLMs), excel in autonomously interacting either real or cyber worlds, helping people make intelligent decisions in complex environments. However, the current works are normally optimized by golden action trajectories or ideal task-oriented solutions toward a definitive goal. This paradigm considers limited user-oriented factors, which could be the reason for their performance reduction in a wide range of personal assistant applications. To address this, we propose Chain-of-User-Thought (COUT), a novel embodied reasoning paradigm that takes a chain of thought from basic action thinking to explicit and implicit personalized preference thought to incorporate personalized factors into autonomous agent learning. To target COUT, we introduce SmartAgent, an agent framework perceiving cyber environments and reasoning personalized requirements as 1) interacting with GUI to access an item pool, 2) generating users' explicit requirements implied by previous actions, and 3) recommending items to fulfill users' implicit requirements. To demonstrate SmartAgent's capabilities, we also create a brand-new dataset SmartSpot that offers a full-stage personalized action-involved environment. To our best knowledge, our work is the first to formulate the COUT process, serving as a preliminary attempt towards embodied personalized agent learning. Our extensive experiments on SmartSpot illuminate SmartAgent's functionality among a series of embodied and personalized sub-tasks. We will release code and data upon paper notification at https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/SmartAgent.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 10, 2024

TinyAgent: Function Calling at the Edge

Recent large language models (LLMs) have enabled the development of advanced agentic systems that can integrate various tools and APIs to fulfill user queries through function calling. However, the deployment of these LLMs on the edge has not been explored since they typically require cloud-based infrastructure due to their substantial model size and computational demands. To this end, we present TinyAgent, an end-to-end framework for training and deploying task-specific small language model agents capable of function calling for driving agentic systems at the edge. We first show how to enable accurate function calling for open-source models via the LLMCompiler framework. We then systematically curate a high-quality dataset for function calling, which we use to fine-tune two small language models, TinyAgent-1.1B and 7B. For efficient inference, we introduce a novel tool retrieval method to reduce the input prompt length and utilize quantization to further accelerate the inference speed. As a driving application, we demonstrate a local Siri-like system for Apple's MacBook that can execute user commands through text or voice input. Our results show that our models can achieve, and even surpass, the function-calling capabilities of larger models like GPT-4-Turbo, while being fully deployed at the edge. We open-source our dataset, models, and installable package and provide a demo video for our MacBook assistant agent.

  • 10 authors
·
Sep 1, 2024

When Can Models Learn From Explanations? A Formal Framework for Understanding the Roles of Explanation Data

Many methods now exist for conditioning model outputs on task instructions, retrieved documents, and user-provided explanations and feedback. Rather than relying solely on examples of task inputs and outputs, these approaches use valuable additional data for improving model correctness and aligning learned models with human priors. Meanwhile, a growing body of evidence suggests that some language models can (1) store a large amount of knowledge in their parameters, and (2) perform inference over tasks in textual inputs at test time. These results raise the possibility that, for some tasks, humans cannot explain to a model any more about the task than it already knows or could infer on its own. In this paper, we study the circumstances under which explanations of individual data points can (or cannot) improve modeling performance. In order to carefully control important properties of the data and explanations, we introduce a synthetic dataset for experiments, and we also make use of three existing datasets with explanations: e-SNLI, TACRED, and SemEval. We first give a formal framework for the available modeling approaches, in which explanation data can be used as model inputs, as targets, or as a prior. After arguing that the most promising role for explanation data is as model inputs, we propose to use a retrieval-based method and show that it solves our synthetic task with accuracies upwards of 95%, while baselines without explanation data achieve below 65% accuracy. We then identify properties of datasets for which retrieval-based modeling fails. With the three existing datasets, we find no improvements from explanation retrieval. Drawing on findings from our synthetic task, we suggest that at least one of six preconditions for successful modeling fails to hold with these datasets. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/peterbhase/ExplanationRoles

  • 2 authors
·
Feb 3, 2021

GraphMaster: Automated Graph Synthesis via LLM Agents in Data-Limited Environments

The era of foundation models has revolutionized AI research, yet Graph Foundation Models (GFMs) remain constrained by the scarcity of large-scale graph corpora. Traditional graph data synthesis techniques primarily focus on simplistic structural operations, lacking the capacity to generate semantically rich nodes with meaningful textual attributes: a critical limitation for real-world applications. While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional text generation capabilities, their direct application to graph synthesis is impeded by context window limitations, hallucination phenomena, and structural consistency challenges. To address these issues, we introduce GraphMaster, the first multi-agent framework specifically designed for graph data synthesis in data-limited environments. GraphMaster orchestrates four specialized LLM agents (Manager, Perception, Enhancement, and Evaluation) that collaboratively optimize the synthesis process through iterative refinement, ensuring both semantic coherence and structural integrity. To rigorously evaluate our approach, we create new data-limited "Sub" variants of six standard graph benchmarks, specifically designed to test synthesis capabilities under realistic constraints. Additionally, we develop a novel interpretability assessment framework that combines human evaluation with a principled Grassmannian manifold-based analysis, providing both qualitative and quantitative measures of semantic coherence. Experimental results demonstrate that GraphMaster significantly outperforms traditional synthesis methods across multiple datasets, establishing a strong foundation for advancing GFMs in data-scarce environments.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 1

Long Grounded Thoughts: Distilling Compositional Visual Reasoning Chains at Scale

Recent progress in multimodal reasoning has been driven largely by undisclosed datasets and proprietary data synthesis recipes, leaving open questions about how to systematically build large-scale, vision-centric reasoning datasets, particularly for tasks that go beyond visual math. In this work, we introduce a new reasoning data generation framework spanning diverse skills and levels of complexity with over 1M high-quality synthetic vision-centric questions. The dataset also includes preference data and instruction prompts supporting both offline and online RL. Our synthesis framework proceeds in two stages: (1) scale; and (2) complexity. Reasoning traces are then synthesized through a two-stage process that leverages VLMs and reasoning LLMs, producing CoT traces for VLMs that capture the richness and diverse cognitive behaviors found in frontier reasoning models. Remarkably, we show that finetuning Qwen2.5-VL-7B on our data outperforms all open-data baselines across all evaluated vision-centric benchmarks, and even surpasses strong closed-data models such as MiMo-VL-7B-RL on V* Bench, CV-Bench and MMStar-V. Perhaps most surprising, despite being entirely vision-centric, our data transfers positively to text-only reasoning (MMLU-Pro) and audio reasoning (MMAU), demonstrating its effectiveness. Similarly, despite not containing videos or embodied visual data, we observe notable gains when evaluating on a single-evidence embodied QA benchmark (NiEH). Finally, we use our data to analyze the entire VLM post-training pipeline. Our empirical analysis highlights that (i) SFT on high-quality data with non-linear reasoning traces is essential for effective online RL, (ii) staged offline RL matches online RL's performance while reducing compute demands, and (iii) careful SFT on high quality data can substantially improve out-of-domain, cross-modality transfer.

nvidia NVIDIA
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Nov 7 2

Android in the Wild: A Large-Scale Dataset for Android Device Control

There is a growing interest in device-control systems that can interpret human natural language instructions and execute them on a digital device by directly controlling its user interface. We present a dataset for device-control research, Android in the Wild (AITW), which is orders of magnitude larger than current datasets. The dataset contains human demonstrations of device interactions, including the screens and actions, and corresponding natural language instructions. It consists of 715k episodes spanning 30k unique instructions, four versions of Android (v10-13),and eight device types (Pixel 2 XL to Pixel 6) with varying screen resolutions. It contains multi-step tasks that require semantic understanding of language and visual context. This dataset poses a new challenge: actions available through the user interface must be inferred from their visual appearance. And, instead of simple UI element-based actions, the action space consists of precise gestures (e.g., horizontal scrolls to operate carousel widgets). We organize our dataset to encourage robustness analysis of device-control systems, i.e., how well a system performs in the presence of new task descriptions, new applications, or new platform versions. We develop two agents and report performance across the dataset. The dataset is available at https://github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/android_in_the_wild.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 19, 2023 1

Fathom-DeepResearch: Unlocking Long Horizon Information Retrieval and Synthesis for SLMs

Tool-integrated reasoning has emerged as a key focus for enabling agentic applications. Among these, DeepResearch Agents have gained significant attention for their strong performance on complex, open-ended information-seeking tasks. We introduce Fathom-DeepResearch, an agentic system composed of two specialized models. The first is Fathom-Search-4B, a DeepSearch model trained from Qwen3-4B and optimized for evidence-based investigation through live web search and targeted webpage querying. Its training combines three advances: (i) DUETQA, a 5K-sample dataset generated via multi-agent self-play that enforces strict web-search dependence and heterogeneous source grounding; (ii) RAPO, a zero-overhead extension of GRPO that stabilizes multi-turn Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards through curriculum pruning, reward-aware advantage scaling, and per-prompt replay buffers; and (iii) a steerable step-level reward that classifies each tool call by cognitive behavior and marginal utility, enabling explicit control over search trajectory breadth, depth, and horizon. These improvements enable reliable extension of tool-calling beyond 20 calls when warranted. The second is Fathom-Synthesizer-4B, trained from Qwen3-4B, which converts multi-turn DeepSearch traces into structured, citation-dense DeepResearch Reports for comprehensive synthesis. Evaluated on DeepSearch benchmarks (SimpleQA, FRAMES, WebWalker, Seal0, MuSiQue) and DeepResearch-Bench, the system achieves state-of-the-art performance in the open-weights category while demonstrating strong generalization to diverse reasoning tasks including HLE, AIME-25, GPQA-Diamond, and MedQA.

Preference-Oriented Supervised Fine-Tuning: Favoring Target Model Over Aligned Large Language Models

Alignment, endowing a pre-trained Large language model (LLM) with the ability to follow instructions, is crucial for its real-world applications. Conventional supervised fine-tuning (SFT) methods formalize it as causal language modeling typically with a cross-entropy objective, requiring a large amount of high-quality instruction-response pairs. However, the quality of widely used SFT datasets can not be guaranteed due to the high cost and intensive labor for the creation and maintenance in practice. To overcome the limitations associated with the quality of SFT datasets, we introduce a novel preference-oriented supervised fine-tuning approach, namely PoFT. The intuition is to boost SFT by imposing a particular preference: favoring the target model over aligned LLMs on the same SFT data. This preference encourages the target model to predict a higher likelihood than that predicted by the aligned LLMs, incorporating assessment information on data quality (i.e., predicted likelihood by the aligned LLMs) into the training process. Extensive experiments are conducted, and the results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. PoFT achieves stable and consistent improvements over the SFT baselines across different training datasets and base models. Moreover, we prove that PoFT can be integrated with existing SFT data filtering methods to achieve better performance, and further improved by following preference optimization procedures, such as DPO.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 17, 2024

Platonic Representations for Poverty Mapping: Unified Vision-Language Codes or Agent-Induced Novelty?

We investigate whether socio-economic indicators like household wealth leave recoverable imprints in satellite imagery (capturing physical features) and Internet-sourced text (reflecting historical/economic narratives). Using Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data from African neighborhoods, we pair Landsat images with LLM-generated textual descriptions conditioned on location/year and text retrieved by an AI search agent from web sources. We develop a multimodal framework predicting household wealth (International Wealth Index) through five pipelines: (i) vision model on satellite images, (ii) LLM using only location/year, (iii) AI agent searching/synthesizing web text, (iv) joint image-text encoder, (v) ensemble of all signals. Our framework yields three contributions. First, fusing vision and agent/LLM text outperforms vision-only baselines in wealth prediction (e.g., R-squared of 0.77 vs. 0.63 on out-of-sample splits), with LLM-internal knowledge proving more effective than agent-retrieved text, improving robustness to out-of-country and out-of-time generalization. Second, we find partial representational convergence: fused embeddings from vision/language modalities correlate moderately (median cosine similarity of 0.60 after alignment), suggesting a shared latent code of material well-being while retaining complementary details, consistent with the Platonic Representation Hypothesis. Although LLM-only text outperforms agent-retrieved data, challenging our Agent-Induced Novelty Hypothesis, modest gains from combining agent data in some splits weakly support the notion that agent-gathered information introduces unique representational structures not fully captured by static LLM knowledge. Third, we release a large-scale multimodal dataset comprising more than 60,000 DHS clusters linked to satellite images, LLM-generated descriptions, and agent-retrieved texts.

Proactive Agent: Shifting LLM Agents from Reactive Responses to Active Assistance

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.

  • 15 authors
·
Oct 16, 2024

BLADE: Benchmarking Language Model Agents for Data-Driven Science

Data-driven scientific discovery requires the iterative integration of scientific domain knowledge, statistical expertise, and an understanding of data semantics to make nuanced analytical decisions, e.g., about which variables, transformations, and statistical models to consider. LM-based agents equipped with planning, memory, and code execution capabilities have the potential to support data-driven science. However, evaluating agents on such open-ended tasks is challenging due to multiple valid approaches, partially correct steps, and different ways to express the same decisions. To address these challenges, we present BLADE, a benchmark to automatically evaluate agents' multifaceted approaches to open-ended research questions. BLADE consists of 12 datasets and research questions drawn from existing scientific literature, with ground truth collected from independent analyses by expert data scientists and researchers. To automatically evaluate agent responses, we developed corresponding computational methods to match different representations of analyses to this ground truth. Though language models possess considerable world knowledge, our evaluation shows that they are often limited to basic analyses. However, agents capable of interacting with the underlying data demonstrate improved, but still non-optimal, diversity in their analytical decision making. Our work enables the evaluation of agents for data-driven science and provides researchers deeper insights into agents' analysis approaches.

  • 16 authors
·
Aug 18, 2024

AutoSDT: Scaling Data-Driven Discovery Tasks Toward Open Co-Scientists

Despite long-standing efforts in accelerating scientific discovery with AI, building AI co-scientists remains challenging due to limited high-quality data for training and evaluation. To tackle this data scarcity issue, we present AutoSDT, an automatic pipeline that collects high-quality coding tasks in real-world data-driven discovery workflows. AutoSDT leverages the coding capabilities and parametric knowledge of LLMs to search for diverse sources, select ecologically valid tasks, and synthesize accurate task instructions and code solutions. Using our pipeline, we construct AutoSDT-5K, a dataset of 5,404 coding tasks for data-driven discovery that covers four scientific disciplines and 756 unique Python packages. To the best of our knowledge, AutoSDT-5K is the only automatically collected and the largest open dataset for data-driven scientific discovery. Expert feedback on a subset of 256 tasks shows the effectiveness of AutoSDT: 93% of the collected tasks are ecologically valid, and 92.2% of the synthesized programs are functionally correct. Trained on AutoSDT-5K, the Qwen2.5-Coder-Instruct LLM series, dubbed AutoSDT-Coder, show substantial improvement on two challenging data-driven discovery benchmarks, ScienceAgentBench and DiscoveryBench. Most notably, AutoSDT-Coder-32B reaches the same level of performance as GPT-4o on ScienceAgentBench with a success rate of 7.8%, doubling the performance of its base model. On DiscoveryBench, it lifts the hypothesis matching score to 8.1, bringing a 17.4% relative improvement and closing the gap between open-weight models and GPT-4o.

  • 19 authors
·
Jun 9

Expanding continual few-shot learning benchmarks to include recognition of specific instances

Continual learning and few-shot learning are important frontiers in progress towards broader Machine Learning (ML) capabilities. There is a growing body of work in both, but few works combining the two. One exception is the Continual few-shot Learning (CFSL) framework of Antoniou et al. arXiv:2004.11967. In this study, we extend CFSL in two ways that capture a broader range of challenges, important for intelligent agent behaviour in real-world conditions. First, we modify CFSL to make it more comparable to standard continual learning experiments, where usually a much larger number of classes are presented. Second, we introduce an 'instance test' which requires recognition of specific instances of classes -- a capability of animal cognition that is usually neglected in ML. For an initial exploration of ML model performance under these conditions, we selected representative baseline models from the original CFSL work and added a model variant with replay. As expected, learning more classes is more difficult than the original CFSL experiments, and interestingly, the way in which image instances and classes are presented affects classification performance. Surprisingly, accuracy in the baseline instance test is comparable to other classification tasks, but poor given significant occlusion and noise. The use of replay for consolidation improves performance substantially for both types of tasks, but particularly the instance test.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 26, 2022

Paper2Code: Automating Code Generation from Scientific Papers in Machine Learning

Despite the rapid growth of machine learning research, corresponding code implementations are often unavailable, making it slow and labor-intensive for researchers to reproduce results and build upon prior work. In the meantime, recent Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at understanding scientific documents and generating high-quality code. Inspired by this, we introduce PaperCoder, a multi-agent LLM framework that transforms machine learning papers into functional code repositories. PaperCoder operates in three stages: planning, where it constructs a high-level roadmap, designs the system architecture with diagrams, identifies file dependencies, and generates configuration files; analysis, which focuses on interpreting implementation-specific details; and generation, where modular, dependency-aware code is produced. Moreover, each phase is instantiated through a set of specialized agents designed to collaborate effectively across the pipeline. We then evaluate PaperCoder on generating code implementations from machine learning papers based on both model-based and human evaluations, specifically from the original paper authors, with author-released repositories as ground truth if available. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of PaperCoder in creating high-quality, faithful implementations. Furthermore, it consistently shows strengths in the recently released PaperBench benchmark, surpassing strong baselines by substantial margins.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 23 6

Synatra: Turning Indirect Knowledge into Direct Demonstrations for Digital Agents at Scale

LLMs can now act as autonomous agents that interact with digital environments and complete specific objectives (e.g., arranging an online meeting). However, accuracy is still far from satisfactory, partly due to a lack of large-scale, direct demonstrations for digital tasks. Obtaining supervised data from humans is costly, and automatic data collection through exploration or reinforcement learning relies on complex environmental and content setup, resulting in datasets that lack comprehensive coverage of various scenarios. On the other hand, there is abundant knowledge that may indirectly assist task completion, such as online tutorials that were created for human consumption. In this work, we present Synatra, an approach that effectively transforms this indirect knowledge into direct supervision at scale. We define different types of indirect knowledge, and carefully study the available sources to obtain it, methods to encode the structure of direct demonstrations, and finally methods to transform indirect knowledge into direct demonstrations. We use 100k such synthetically-created demonstrations to finetune a 7B CodeLlama, and demonstrate that the resulting agent surpasses all comparably sized models on three web-based task benchmarks Mind2Web, MiniWoB++ and WebArena, as well as surpassing GPT-3.5 on WebArena and Mind2Web. In addition, while synthetic demonstrations prove to be only 3% the cost of human demonstrations (at $0.031 each), we show that the synthetic demonstrations can be more effective than an identical number of human demonstrations collected from limited domains.

  • 10 authors
·
Sep 23, 2024

Large Language Models Orchestrating Structured Reasoning Achieve Kaggle Grandmaster Level

We introduce Agent K v1.0, an end-to-end autonomous data science agent designed to automate, optimise, and generalise across diverse data science tasks. Fully automated, Agent K v1.0 manages the entire data science life cycle by learning from experience. It leverages a highly flexible structured reasoning framework to enable it to dynamically process memory in a nested structure, effectively learning from accumulated experience stored to handle complex reasoning tasks. It optimises long- and short-term memory by selectively storing and retrieving key information, guiding future decisions based on environmental rewards. This iterative approach allows it to refine decisions without fine-tuning or backpropagation, achieving continuous improvement through experiential learning. We evaluate our agent's apabilities using Kaggle competitions as a case study. Following a fully automated protocol, Agent K v1.0 systematically addresses complex and multimodal data science tasks, employing Bayesian optimisation for hyperparameter tuning and feature engineering. Our new evaluation framework rigorously assesses Agent K v1.0's end-to-end capabilities to generate and send submissions starting from a Kaggle competition URL. Results demonstrate that Agent K v1.0 achieves a 92.5\% success rate across tasks, spanning tabular, computer vision, NLP, and multimodal domains. When benchmarking against 5,856 human Kaggle competitors by calculating Elo-MMR scores for each, Agent K v1.0 ranks in the top 38\%, demonstrating an overall skill level comparable to Expert-level users. Notably, its Elo-MMR score falls between the first and third quartiles of scores achieved by human Grandmasters. Furthermore, our results indicate that Agent K v1.0 has reached a performance level equivalent to Kaggle Grandmaster, with a record of 6 gold, 3 silver, and 7 bronze medals, as defined by Kaggle's progression system.

  • 18 authors
·
Nov 5, 2024 6

Blending Supervised and Reinforcement Fine-Tuning with Prefix Sampling

Existing post-training techniques for large language models are broadly categorized into Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT). Each paradigm presents a distinct trade-off: SFT excels at mimicking demonstration data but can lead to problematic generalization as a form of behavior cloning. Conversely, RFT can significantly enhance a model's performance but is prone to learn unexpected behaviors, and its performance is highly sensitive to the initial policy. In this paper, we propose a unified view of these methods and introduce Prefix-RFT, a hybrid approach that synergizes learning from both demonstration and exploration. Using mathematical reasoning problems as a testbed, we empirically demonstrate that Prefix-RFT is both simple and effective. It not only surpasses the performance of standalone SFT and RFT but also outperforms parallel mixed-policy RFT methods. A key advantage is its seamless integration into existing open-source frameworks, requiring only minimal modifications to the standard RFT pipeline. Our analysis highlights the complementary nature of SFT and RFT, and validates that Prefix-RFT effectively harmonizes these two learning paradigms. Furthermore, ablation studies confirm the method's robustness to variations in the quality and quantity of demonstration data. We hope this work offers a new perspective on LLM post-training, suggesting that a unified paradigm that judiciously integrates demonstration and exploration could be a promising direction for future research.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 2