new

Get trending papers in your email inbox!

Subscribe

Daily Papers

byAK and the research community

Nov 9

ClawForge: Generating Executable Interactive Benchmarks for Command-Line Agents

Interactive agent benchmarks face a tension between scalable construction and realistic workflow evaluation. Hand-authored tasks are expensive to extend and revise, while static prompt evaluation misses failures that only appear when agents operate over persistent state. Existing interactive benchmarks have advanced agent evaluation significantly, but most initialize tasks from clean state and do not systematically test how agents handle pre-existing partial, stale, or conflicting artifacts. We present ClawForge, a generator-backed benchmark framework for executable command-line workflows under state conflict. The framework compiles scenario templates, grounded slots, initialized state, reference trajectories, and validators into reproducible task specifications, and evaluates agents step by step over persistent workflow surfaces using normalized end state and observable side effects rather than exact trajectory matching. We instantiate this framework as the ClawForge-Bench (17 scenarios, 6 ability categories). Results across seven frontier models show that the best model reaches only 45.3% strict accuracy, wrong-state replacement remains below 17\% for all models, and the widest model separation (17% to 90%) is driven by whether agents inspect existing state before acting. Partial-credit and step-efficiency analyses further reveal that many failures are near-miss closures rather than early breakdowns, and that models exhibit qualitatively different failure styles under state conflict.

  • 11 authors
·
May 12

LoCoBench-Agent: An Interactive Benchmark for LLM Agents in Long-Context Software Engineering

As large language models (LLMs) evolve into sophisticated autonomous agents capable of complex software development tasks, evaluating their real-world capabilities becomes critical. While existing benchmarks like LoCoBench~qiu2025locobench assess long-context code understanding, they focus on single-turn evaluation and cannot capture the multi-turn interactive nature, tool usage patterns, and adaptive reasoning required by real-world coding agents. We introduce LoCoBench-Agent, a comprehensive evaluation framework specifically designed to assess LLM agents in realistic, long-context software engineering workflows. Our framework extends LoCoBench's 8,000 scenarios into interactive agent environments, enabling systematic evaluation of multi-turn conversations, tool usage efficiency, error recovery, and architectural consistency across extended development sessions. We also introduce an evaluation methodology with 9 metrics across comprehension and efficiency dimensions. Our framework provides agents with 8 specialized tools (file operations, search, code analysis) and evaluates them across context lengths ranging from 10K to 1M tokens, enabling precise assessment of long-context performance. Through systematic evaluation of state-of-the-art models, we reveal several key findings: (1) agents exhibit remarkable long-context robustness; (2) comprehension-efficiency trade-off exists with negative correlation, where thorough exploration increases comprehension but reduces efficiency; and (3) conversation efficiency varies dramatically across models, with strategic tool usage patterns differentiating high-performing agents. As the first long-context LLM agent benchmark for software engineering, LoCoBench-Agent establishes a rigorous foundation for measuring agent capabilities, identifying performance gaps, and advancing autonomous software development at scale.

RiskWebWorld: A Realistic Interactive Benchmark for GUI Agents in E-commerce Risk Management

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents show strong capabilities for automating web tasks, but existing interactive benchmarks primarily target benign, predictable consumer environments. Their effectiveness in high-stakes, investigative domains such as authentic e-commerce risk management remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we present RiskWebWorld, the first highly realistic interactive benchmark for evaluating GUI agents in e-commerce risk management. RiskWebWorld features 1,513 tasks sourced from production risk-control pipelines across 8 core domains, and captures the authentic challenges of risk operations on uncooperative websites, partially environmental hijackments. To support scalable evaluation and agentic reinforcement learning (RL), we further build a Gymnasium-compliant infrastructure that decouples policy planning from environment mechanics. Our evaluation across diverse models reveals a dramatic capability gap: top-tier generalist models achieve 49.1% success, while specialized open-weights GUI models lag at near-total failure. This highlights that foundation model scale currently matters more than zero-shot interface grounding in long-horizon professional tasks. We also demonstrate the viability of our infrastructure through agentic RL, which improves open-source models by 16.2%. These results position RiskWebWorld as a practical testbed for developing robust digital workers.

  • 9 authors
·
Apr 14

OmniPlay: Benchmarking Omni-Modal Models on Omni-Modal Game Playing

While generalist foundation models like Gemini and GPT-4o demonstrate impressive multi-modal competence, existing evaluations fail to test their intelligence in dynamic, interactive worlds. Static benchmarks lack agency, while interactive benchmarks suffer from a severe modal bottleneck, typically ignoring crucial auditory and temporal cues. To bridge this evaluation chasm, we introduce OmniPlay, a diagnostic benchmark designed not just to evaluate, but to probe the fusion and reasoning capabilities of agentic models across the full sensory spectrum. Built on a core philosophy of modality interdependence, OmniPlay comprises a suite of five game environments that systematically create scenarios of both synergy and conflict, forcing agents to perform genuine cross-modal reasoning. Our comprehensive evaluation of six leading omni-modal models reveals a critical dichotomy: they exhibit superhuman performance on high-fidelity memory tasks but suffer from systemic failures in challenges requiring robust reasoning and strategic planning. We demonstrate that this fragility stems from brittle fusion mechanisms, which lead to catastrophic performance degradation under modality conflict and uncover a counter-intuitive "less is more" paradox, where removing sensory information can paradoxically improve performance. Our findings suggest that the path toward robust AGI requires a research focus beyond scaling to explicitly address synergistic fusion. Our platform is available for anonymous review at https://github.com/fuqingbie/omni-game-benchmark.

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 6, 2025

DiscoverPhysics: Benchmarking LLMs for Out-of-the-Box Scientific Thinking

Frontier LLMs now perform strongly across a wide range of physics evaluations, but it is hard to disentangle genuine reasoning from recall of established science. We introduce DiscoverPhysics, an interactive benchmark that asks a LLM agent to discover the laws of motion of a simulated world whose physics deliberately deviates from our own. We construct 22 worlds governed by, among others, screened and fractional-power gravity, multi-species couplings, hidden dark-matter-like particles, non-coordinate-free physics, and time-varying interactions. Each world is generated on demand by an N-body simulator, for which the agent proposes several rounds of experiments, observes raw trajectory data, and ultimately submits both a natural-language explanation of the world's physics and a Python implementation of the inferred law. Because solving a world requires the agent to design informative experiments and revise its hypotheses, the benchmark probes long-horizon reasoning over an experimental history. We evaluate submissions along two complementary axes: trajectory MSE on held-out particles and an LLM-judged explanation score following an expert-written rubric assessing conceptual understanding of each world. Across eleven frontier models, we find that the strongest agents pass only half of the worlds and consistently fail on those where latent structure must be uncovered. Open-source models lag substantially behind commercial models, both in their ability to design informative experiments and in extracting conclusions from the data. We further find that good predictive accuracy does not guarantee high explanation quality and that conceptual understanding depends on hypothesis refinement through well-chosen experiments.

  • 7 authors
·
May 24

InteractWeb-Bench: Can Multimodal Agent Escape Blind Execution in Interactive Website Generation?

With the advancement of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and coding agents, the website development has shifted from manual programming to agent-based project-level code synthesis. Existing benchmarks rely on idealized assumptions, especially for well-structured, information-rich inputs and static execution settings. In contrast, real-world development is constrained by a critical bottleneck: the semantic misalignment between ambiguous, low-quality instructions from non-expert users and model understanding, which results in a failure mode that we term blind execution. To address this gap, we introduce InteractWeb-Bench, the first multimodal interactive benchmark for website generation under non-expert low-code user conditions. InteractWeb-Bench introduces four types of user agents and persona-driven instruction perturbations to systematically simulate diverse user behaviors, including ambiguity, redundancy, and contradiction, grounded in requirement engineering defect taxonomies. We develop an interactive execution environment for agents, featuring a unified action space comprising Clarify, Implement, Verify, and Submit, enabling iterative intent refinement, code synthesis, and visual feedback-based validation. Extensive experiments and analysis reveal that frontier MLLM-based agents remain trapped in blind execution, exposing limitations in intent recognition and adaptive interaction.

ABF-Bench: A Verifiable Benchmark for Agentic Blockchain Forensics

Blockchain forensics is adversarial and open-ended: money launderers split, swap, and bridge funds, cut their trail at mixers or custodial services, and change tactics from one incident to the next. Investigators must keep adapting their tracing in response. Yet the immutability of public ledgers preserves every recorded movement in public view, making much of the investigation independently verifiable. We introduce ABF-Bench, an interactive benchmark that makes evidence-backed fund tracing a verifiable agent task, in which every claimed movement must cite ledger records the agent retrieved. A case-to-task pipeline builds well-posed tasks across ledgers: conservative rules halt tracing wherever the records leave a continuation unresolved, and each task's reference graph is the answer those rules determine. Built from real laundering activity, the tasks combine multi-hop transfers, DeFi exchanges, cross-chain round trips, custodial and mixer deposits, and address poisoning. We also propose the ABF agent harness, built around a working memory, and evaluate it alongside general-purpose agents and fixed-order tracers. The harness reaches 75% edge recall, against 47% for Codex with the same model and 10% for Claude Code, which loses recall to overconfidence: it cites records it left unretrieved. Compared with fixed-order tracers, the harness acquires evidence faster than the best of them early in the budget and recognizes undisclosed custodial services that they walk past (89% vs. 0%), with 98% fidelity. However, agents tend to stop early and lose recall on larger tasks, which holds their final recall below the best tracer. Beyond exposing these gaps, ABF-Bench opens blockchain forensics to LLM agents as a verifiable domain, where the verdicts that score agents also offer potential training signals.

Omni-Interactive Universal Embedder

Multimodal representation learning has been shifting from traditional two-tower architectures to large language model (LLM)-based embedders due to their strong instruction-following capabilities. Despite this progress, existing approaches primarily focus on language and image modalities, which also remain the dominant modalities for user-conditioned interactions in current embedders. In this paper, we propose the first Omni-Interactive Universal Embedder (OmniUE), which not only learns a unified embedding space across text, video, and audio by leveraging intermediate-layer representations from dedicated learnable tokens, but also supports omni-interactive querying, enabling users to provide inputs in the form of text, visual regions of interest, and audio spans. Within OmniUE, visual and audio segmenters process diverse user interactions and integrate them with an omni-LLM to produce user-conditioned any-to-any embeddings via context aggregation. To evaluate OmniUE's omni-interactive capabilities, we introduce OmniCHOIR, benchmarking models for omni-interactive compositional audio retrieval based on the given text, video, and audio as well as unimodal or multimodal interaction prompts. OmniUE consistently surpasses state-of-the-art baselines across diverse modalities, with average improvements of 10.4% on textual-interactive video benchmarks (MMEB-v2-video), 1.0% on audio tasks (MAEB), 83.1% on visual-interactive benchmarks (SCaR), and 21.9% on our omni-interactive OmniCHOIR benchmark. We believe that jointly advancing omni-modal representation learning and omni-interactive querying paves the way toward universal embedders. Project page: https://wywywang.github.io/omniue-demo/.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 18

CUEing User Simulators: Calibrated User Embeddings for Multi-Turn Benchmarking

Recent benchmarks rely on user simulators to evaluate AI agents in multi-turn interaction. While existing simulation techniques demonstrate surface fidelity to human style and behavior, ecologically valid interactive benchmarking also requires alignment in when and how agents fail across simulated and real user populations. We find that existing simulators lack outcome calibration: agreement with observed success rates and failure patterns when real users interact with the same agent. We introduce Calibrated User Embeddings (CUE), a framework that both encodes observed sessions and samples continuous representations, then decodes them into persona commands to steer LLMs to act as user simulators without training. Through this, we evaluate user-conditioned replay of past sessions and aggregate metric agreement when sampling novel personas for the same tasks. On τ^2-Bench, CUEd simulators commit fewer simulator-attributed errors and more faithfully reproduce real-user agent failure modes, aggregate success rates, and outcomes for specific task-user pairs than other persona-based simulation methods. These gains coexist with competitive user fidelity as measured using metrics established in prior work. After being fit to mostly customer support interactions, the same CUEd simulators generalize to document creation, math tutoring, and casual conversation, and remain effective across different simulator LLMs without CUE retraining.

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 30

Evaluating Large Language Models in Dynamic Clinical Decision-Making with Standardized Patient Cases

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly proposed as clinical agents, yet static, single-turn benchmarks cannot capture how a model dynamically delivers care across an encounter: gathering information, planning treatment, and adapting longitudinal management across successive patient states. Medical education has long addressed an analogous challenge through standardized patients (SPs): trained actors who consistently portray clinical cases, enabling realistic practice and objective, scripted assessment. Here we introduce MedSP1000, an SP-derived interactive benchmark for clinical-agent evaluation, including 1,638 SP cases with 24,602 trajectory-level peer-reviewed rubrics. MedSP1000 converts peer-reviewed SP teaching cases into executable scenarios with defined SP case scripts, clinical environment contexts, and human-validated structured rubric. In each simulation evaluation run, a clinical agent interacts in closed loop with a patient agent and an environment controller, and its behaviour is scored throughout the encounter against expert criteria specified in the original materials. Applying MedSP1000 to a range of general-purpose and medically specialized LLMs, we find that performance on static benchmarks does not reliably translate to such educational scenarios. The best-performing model, GPT-5.5, completes only 60.4% of expert-defined rubric items, whereas the strongest medically specialized model reaches 40.0%; increasing test-time compute produces no measurable gain. These results suggest that current LLMs, including agentic systems tuned for medicine, are not yet reliable enough to be safely integrated into actual clinical practice. More broadly, MedSP1000 shows how process-level, SP-style evaluation can reveal clinically relevant failure modes that single-turn benchmarks miss.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 2 1

AdaPlanBench: Evaluating Adaptive Planning in Large Language Model Agents under World and User Constraints

Planning for real-world problems by language models often involves both world and user constraints, which may not be fully specified upfront and are progressively disclosed through interaction. However, existing benchmarks still underexplore adaptive planning under such progressively revealed dual constraints. To address this gap, we introduce AdaPlanBench, a dynamic interactive benchmark for evaluating whether Large Language Model (LLM) agents can adaptively plan and re-plan under progressively revealed world and user constraints. AdaPlanBench is built on 307 household tasks, with a scalable constraint construction pipeline that augments each task with dual constraints. At runtime, agents interact with the environment in a multi-turn protocol where hidden constraints are revealed only when the agent proposes a plan that violates them, requiring iterative plan revision under accumulating feedback. This makes planning challenging, as agents must infer and track constraints from feedback while re-planning effectively. Experiments on ten leading LLMs show that adaptive planning under dual constraints remains challenging, with the best model reaching only 67.75% accuracy. We further observe that performance degrades as more constraints accumulate, with user constraints posing a particularly large challenge and failures often stemming from weaker physical grounding and reduced effectiveness. These results establish AdaPlanBench as a testbed for dual-constrained interactive planning and highlight the challenge of reliable adaptation to dynamically revealed constraints in LLM agents.

Travel Back To Move Forward: Retrospective Exploration and Evolving for Long Horizon Agents

Large language model agents increasingly operate in long-horizon environments where early mistakes can trigger cascading failures and trap agents in dead-end trajectories. Agents must therefore be able to proactively recover from such states and turn their exploratory experience into guidance for subsequent decisions. We introduce ReTRAIL, a framework that enables agents to rewind the environment to earlier states while preserving valid progress and carrying forward knowledge learned from abandoned exploration. The environment state moves backward while the agent's knowledge continues to move forward. ReTRAIL trains a shared policy with two complementary signals: State-Anchored GRPO compares alternative continuations from revisited states to improve execution, while a branch-advancement reward guides reflection through the progress of subsequent exploration. Experiments across four interactive benchmark MineSweeper, Sokoban, ALFWorld and ScienceWorld show that simply adding a rewind primitive provides limited benefit and can even degrade performance. In contrast, ReTRAIL enables agents to rewind from unproductive states and use insights from abandoned branches to guide subsequent exploration. These results demonstrate the value of coupling environment rewinding with experience reuse within an ongoing task for long-horizon task solving. The code is available at https://github.com/whi497/ReTRAIL.

  • 10 authors
·
Oct 8

GUI Exploration Lab: Enhancing Screen Navigation in Agents via Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning

With the rapid development of Large Vision Language Models, the focus of Graphical User Interface (GUI) agent tasks shifts from single-screen tasks to complex screen navigation challenges. However, real-world GUI environments, such as PC software and mobile Apps, are often complex and proprietary, making it difficult to obtain the comprehensive environment information needed for agent training and evaluation. This limitation hinders systematic investigation and benchmarking of agent navigation capabilities. To address this limitation, we introduce GUI Exploration Lab, a simulation environment engine for GUI agent navigation research that enables flexible definition and composition of screens, icons, and navigation graphs, while providing full access to environment information for comprehensive agent training and evaluation. Through extensive experiments, we find that supervised fine-tuning enables effective memorization of fundamental knowledge, serving as a crucial foundation for subsequent training. Building on this, single-turn reinforcement learning further enhances generalization to unseen scenarios. Finally, multi-turn reinforcement learning encourages the development of exploration strategies through interactive trial and error, leading to further improvements in screen navigation performance. We validate our methods on both static and interactive benchmarks, demonstrating that our findings generalize effectively to real-world scenarios. These findings demonstrate the advantages of reinforcement learning approaches in GUI navigation and offer practical guidance for building more capable and generalizable GUI agents.

  • 12 authors
·
Dec 2, 2025 3

Agentic Reinforcement Learning with Self-Distilled Reward Shaping

Agentic reinforcement learning enables LLM agents to learn through interaction, but sparse trajectory-level rewards reveal success without identifying which intermediate decisions deserve credit. Training-only privileged skills can provide denser supervision by allowing the same frozen policy snapshot to rescore fixed tokens from skill-free trajectories while conditioned on task-matched procedural skills. Existing methods, however, do not jointly calibrate teacher scores across interaction steps, relate teacher confidence to realized returns, and integrate the resulting signal into native reward-to-advantage construction. We introduce Agentic Reinforcement Learning with Self-Distilled Reward Shaping (ADRS), a framework for constructing return-associated token-level credit for multi-turn language agents. ADRS centers and normalizes privileged token scores within each step, modulates them with a return-associated Teacher Value Advantage (TVA) gate based on within-group confidence--return association, and incorporates the gated token signal into native RL credit construction. Together, these components determine what the teacher prefers, when that preference is return-relevant, and how it enters the native reinforcement-learning credit path, while keeping rollouts and inference skill-free. Finally, experiments across three interactive benchmarks show that ADRS consistently improves performance on long-horizon tasks, with gains persisting across RL backbones, reduced-data settings, unseen tasks, and extended training. For anonymous review, our code is available at the following the link: https://github.com/gitrxh/ADRS-arxiv

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 3

Evaluating the Search Agent in a Parallel World

Integrating web search tools has significantly extended the capability of LLMs to address open-world, real-time, and long-tail problems. However, evaluating these Search Agents presents formidable challenges. First, constructing high-quality deep search benchmarks is prohibitively expensive, while unverified synthetic data often suffers from unreliable sources. Second, static benchmarks face dynamic obsolescence: as internet information evolves, complex queries requiring deep research often degrade into simple retrieval tasks due to increased popularity, and ground truths become outdated due to temporal shifts. Third, attribution ambiguity confounds evaluation, as an agent's performance is often dominated by its parametric memory rather than its actual search and reasoning capabilities. Finally, reliance on specific commercial search engines introduces variability that hampers reproducibility. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework, Mind-ParaWorld, for evaluating Search Agents in a Parallel World. Specifically, MPW samples real-world entity names to synthesize future scenarios and questions situated beyond the model's knowledge cutoff. A ParaWorld Law Model then constructs a set of indivisible Atomic Facts and a unique ground-truth for each question. During evaluation, instead of retrieving real-world results, the agent interacts with a ParaWorld Engine Model that dynamically generates SERPs grounded in these inviolable Atomic Facts. We release MPW-Bench, an interactive benchmark spanning 19 domains with 1,608 instances. Experiments across three evaluation settings show that, while search agents are strong at evidence synthesis given complete information, their performance is limited not only by evidence collection and coverage in unfamiliar search environments, but also by unreliable evidence sufficiency judgment and when-to-stop decisions-bottlenecks.

S3Gym: Can LLMs Turn Self-Testing and Self-Judging into Self-Improvement?

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly interact with external environments and accumulate substantial behavioral experience, yet existing agent benchmarks largely evaluate them as fixed policies. It therefore remains unclear whether an agent can actively test its behavior, judge the resulting experience, and use that experience to improve future decisions. We introduce S\textsuperscript{3Gym}, an interactive benchmark for evaluating LLM self-improvement through three coupled capabilities: Self-Testing, Self-Judging, and Self-Improvement. S^3Gym separates permissive exploration from strict held-out evaluation and instantiates this protocol in seven text-based games with executable environment verifiers. We evaluate three pathways for incorporating interaction experience: direct History ICL, score-conditioned Summary Memory, and parameter Training. Our experiments reveal that self-improvement is neither automatic nor uniform. Context-level experience improves performance for several model--game pairs, but the most effective pathway depends strongly on the task structure: summaries are beneficial when experience can be compressed into reusable strategic rules, yet often underperform raw history when success depends on precise, state-contingent information. Parameter training produces substantial gains on some tasks, but also exhibits unstable improvement and severe negative transfer on others. These findings show that recognizing successful actions is insufficient; agents must also transform feedback into executable and transferable policies. S^3Gym provides a unified framework for diagnosing this process and identifying the bottlenecks that prevent agents from translating interaction experience into reliable self-improvement.

HiPER: Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning with Explicit Credit Assignment for Large Language Model Agents

Training LLMs as interactive agents for multi-turn decision-making remains challenging, particularly in long-horizon tasks with sparse and delayed rewards, where agents must execute extended sequences of actions before receiving meaningful feedback. Most existing reinforcement learning (RL) approaches model LLM agents as flat policies operating at a single time scale, selecting one action at each turn. In sparse-reward settings, such flat policies must propagate credit across the entire trajectory without explicit temporal abstraction, which often leads to unstable optimization and inefficient credit assignment. We propose HiPER, a novel Hierarchical Plan-Execute RL framework that explicitly separates high-level planning from low-level execution. HiPER factorizes the policy into a high-level planner that proposes subgoals and a low-level executor that carries them out over multiple action steps. To align optimization with this structure, we introduce a key technique called hierarchical advantage estimation (HAE), which carefully assigns credit at both the planning and execution levels. By aggregating returns over the execution of each subgoal and coordinating updates across the two levels, HAE provides an unbiased gradient estimator and provably reduces variance compared to flat generalized advantage estimation. Empirically, HiPER achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging interactive benchmarks, reaching 97.4\% success on ALFWorld and 83.3\% on WebShop with Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct (+6.6\% and +8.3\% over the best prior method), with especially large gains on long-horizon tasks requiring multiple dependent subtasks. These results highlight the importance of explicit hierarchical decomposition for scalable RL training of multi-turn LLM agents.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 17

Atomic Task Graph: A Unified Framework for Agentic Planning and Execution

LLM-based agents have shown strong potential for solving complex multi-step tasks, yet existing performance improvements often rely on either scaling to larger backbone models or task-specific fine-tuning. The former incurs substantial computational costs, while the latter typically generalizes poorly across different tasks. Although prompt-based control is training-free and broadly applicable, existing methods still leave input-output dependencies between subtasks implicit in textual trajectories, making verified intermediate results difficult to reuse. To address these limitations, we propose Atomic Task Graph (ATG), a unified control framework for planning and execution. Specifically, ATG maintains an explicit graph to expose dependencies and support reuse. During planning, it recursively decomposes a high-level task into subtasks, forming a sequence of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) whose evolution can be traced. During execution, the dependencies exposed by ATG allow independent branches to be executed in parallel, thereby improving execution efficiency. When failures are detected, ATG leverages the graph evolution history to localize the error source and repair only the affected region, preserving validated regions unchanged. Experiments show that ATG consistently outperforms strong baselines in success rate and execution efficiency across three interactive benchmarks using only 7B-8B backbones.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 1

PlanBench-XL: Evaluating Long-Horizon Planning of LLM Tool-Use Agents in Large-Scale Tool Ecosystems

LLM agents increasingly operate in large tool ecosystems, where real-world tasks require discovering relevant tools, inferring implicit sub-goals, and adapting to dynamic environments over long horizons. However, existing benchmarks rarely evaluate planning under retrieval-limited tool visibility. To address this gap, we introduce PlanBench-XL, an interactive benchmark of 327 retail tasks over 1,665 tools that tests whether agents can iteratively retrieve usable tools, invoke them to uncover intermediate evidence for subsequent calls toward the final goal. PlanBench-XL further features an optional blocking mechanism that simulates real-world unpredictability through missing, failing, or distracting tool functions, forcing agents to detect disrupted paths and adapt at runtime. Experiments on ten leading LLMs show that massive-tool planning remains challenging: while GPT-5.4 achieves 51.90% accuracy in block-free settings, it collapses to 11.36% under the most severe blocking condition. Further analysis shows that agents are especially vulnerable when failures lack explicit error signals or when recovery requires longer alternative tool-use paths. These results establish PlanBench-XL as a testbed for diagnosing agentic planning failures and highlight the need for robust adaptive planning in long-horizon tasks with large, imperfect tool environments.

Humans in Space: Can MLLMs Construct Human-Centric Spatial Understanding via Active Exocentric Exploration?

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at zero-shot reasoning, their spatial capabilities are primarily evaluated through static, passive observation. In complex, human-centric scenes, occlusion often hides crucial geometric evidence, and passive benchmarks force models to guess rather than recognize their own visual uncertainty. To bridge this gap, we introduce SATE-Bench, a novel interactive benchmark comprising 316 real-world scenes and 2,525 multi-turn QA pairs to evaluate visual self-awareness and active exocentric view-exploration. It combines a Passive multi-view control with an Active exploration setting, where models start from a severely occluded view and must iteratively query adjacent viewpoints until they gather enough evidence to fully ``sate'' the question, scored by a step-penalized efficiency reward. Evaluating state-of-the-art MLLMs reveals that they terminate exploration prematurely while reporting high confidence, and struggle with fine-grained 3D geometric tasks; matched-view controls further attribute the Active--Passive gap primarily to insufficient evidence acquisition. Moreover, fine-tuning with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) shows that rewarding view-seeking increases active exploration but lowers overall accuracy, as models over-explore and fail to fuse expanding multi-view contexts across turns. These findings indicate that scaling passive multi-view perception does not intrinsically yield active spatial reasoning, highlighting the need for models that know where to look, how to integrate what they see, and when to stop. Code and data are available at https://gtc-gh.github.io/SATE-Bench/

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 24 2

SkillX: Automatically Constructing Skill Knowledge Bases for Agents

Learning from experience is critical for building capable large language model (LLM) agents, yet prevailing self-evolving paradigms remain inefficient: agents learn in isolation, repeatedly rediscover similar behaviors from limited experience, resulting in redundant exploration and poor generalization. To address this problem, we propose SkillX, a fully automated framework for constructing a plug-and-play skill knowledge base that can be reused across agents and environments. SkillX operates through a fully automated pipeline built on three synergistic innovations: (i) Multi-Level Skills Design, which distills raw trajectories into three-tiered hierarchy of strategic plans, functional skills, and atomic skills; (ii) Iterative Skills Refinement, which automatically revises skills based on execution feedback to continuously improve library quality; and (iii) Exploratory Skills Expansion, which proactively generates and validates novel skills to expand coverage beyond seed training data. Using a strong backbone agent (GLM-4.6), we automatically build a reusable skill library and evaluate its transferability on challenging long-horizon, user-interactive benchmarks, including AppWorld, BFCL-v3, and τ^2-Bench. Experiments show that SkillKB consistently improves task success and execution efficiency when plugged into weaker base agents, highlighting the importance of structured, hierarchical experience representations for generalizable agent learning. Our code will be publicly available soon at https://github.com/zjunlp/SkillX.

zjunlp ZJUNLP
·
Apr 5 2

DivOPD: Spread Wide, Look Close for Asynchronous On-Policy Distillation of Multi-turn Agents

On-policy distillation (OPD) trains student agents through teacher supervision on their own interactions with an environment. However, in asynchronous multi-turn training, arrival-order batching can allow a few early or long rollouts to dominate learner updates while other valid rollouts become stale before being used, wasting already-generated experience. To address this problem, we introduce DivOPD, a simple learner-side batch-selection method that spreads a fixed turn budget across more rollouts and, within each rollout, prioritizes turns with larger cumulative teacher-student disagreement. Turns without usable teacher feedback are excluded. The per-turn loss and optimizer remain fixed; selection only changes which student-visited turns receive training weight. For no-progress rollouts, an optional extension briefly hands control to the teacher before returning it to the student. Across six teacher-student settings on the simulated ALFWorld, ScienceWorld, and WebShop benchmarks, with 1.5B-7B students, DivOPD raises cross-setting mean peak success rate from 77.4 to 84.4 and mean success over the last five evaluations from 71.5 to 78.6. It reaches all reported setting-specific targets with geometric-mean speedups of 1.84x in training tokens and 1.87x in learner GPU time relative to vanilla OPD. Teacher intervention further raises this last-five mean to 82.4 while retaining about 1.7x learner-GPU speedup over vanilla OPD. Code will be released at https://github.com/HanyangWang0418-oss/DivOPD.

  • 10 authors
·
Sep 27

PlanPO: Group Planning-Aware Policy Optimization for Multi-Turn Agentic LLMs

Group-relative policy optimization has emerged as a key paradigm for training agentic large language models (LLMs) on multi-turn interactive tasks. However, most existing variants fail to distinguish advantages among successful trajectories even when these trajectories differ substantially in their interaction efficiency. For instance, circuitous successes are often assigned the identical outcome reward, causing advantage collapse and severe performance bottlenecks. To this end, we propose Group Planning-aware Policy Optimization (PlanPO), a simple yet effective RL method for learning generalizable planning abilities beyond task-specific high-quality behavior patterns. Specifically, PlanPO introduces coarse-to-fine advantage signals, which capture the relative differences in trajectory-level lengths and turn-level response lengths conditioned on successful trajectories sampled for the same task. Within the group-relative optimization structure, this enables agents to actively learn generalizable and deliberate behaviors spanning interaction planning and textual generation from high-quality rollouts, without degenerating into vanilla length minimization. Experimentally, PlanPO improves over GRPO by 27.2\% on average across the challenging multi-turn benchmarks ALFWorld, WebShop, and SciWorld, outperforming recent powerful baselines while incurring negligible additional training cost.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 17

SpatialWorld: Benchmarking Interactive Spatial Reasoning of Multimodal Agents in Real-World Tasks

Spatial reasoning is a foundational capability for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to perceive and operate within the physical world. However, existing benchmarks predominantly rely on passive evaluation (e.g., static VQA) or simulator-specific pipelines, failing to assess general interactive spatial understanding. We introduce SpatialWorld, a unified benchmark designed specifically for evaluating the interactive spatial understanding of multimodal agents in complex real-world tasks. Integrating eight heterogeneous simulation backends under a shared, simulator-agnostic protocol, SpatialWorld features 760 human-annotated tasks across diverse domains (e.g., household routines, travel, social collaboration). Agents must solve tasks under vision-only partial observability, actively gathering egocentric visual evidence and expressing decisions via a unified, text-based action interface native to MLLMs. For reliable evaluation, each task includes a human-validated initial state, a reference trajectory, and a terminal-state verifier. Evaluating 15 advanced agents reveals that robust spatial task solving remains challenging: the strongest model, GPT-5, achieves an average task success rate (TSR) of only 17.4%, while the leading open-source model, Qwen-3.5, reaches 14.1%. Further analysis exposes a clear mismatch between task success and execution efficiency, alongside substantial domain-specific performance variations. These bottlenecks in active exploration and long-horizon planning position SpatialWorld as a rigorous testbed for future spatial agents.

PlaySuite: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Interactive Visual Intelligence

Recent advances in multimodal foundation models yield strong performance on static perception and reasoning benchmarks, yet such evaluations largely overlook a central aspect of intelligence: acting competently in dynamic environments over extended time horizons. We introduce PlaySuite, a large-scale benchmark for evaluating interactive visual intelligence across more than 5K open-source video games curated from PyWeek and itch.io. Spanning diverse genres and engines, including Pygame, HTML5, Godot, and Unity, these independent games are largely out-of-distribution for current models, reducing the likelihood that success can be achieved by retrieving memorized walkthroughs or web-scale training artifacts. To enable scalable evaluation across heterogeneous titles, we develop a unified closed-loop interaction framework optimized for HPC clusters alongside a Video-LLM-as-a-judge protocol that maps observable gameplay milestones to standardized progress levels. We evaluate fourteen recent open models spanning vision-language models, computer-use agents, and vision-language-action models. Our results yield strong evidence of a perception-action gap: despite strong reasoning capabilities, current models struggle to make sustained progress and exhibit recurring failures in spatial grounding, action execution, and self-correction. PlaySuite provides a reproducible and extensible testbed for measuring progress from visual perception to goal-directed interaction, and a foundation for developing models that can act, adapt, and generalize in dynamic visual environments.

InterCode: Standardizing and Benchmarking Interactive Coding with Execution Feedback

Humans write code in a fundamentally interactive manner and rely on constant execution feedback to correct errors, resolve ambiguities, and decompose tasks. While LLMs have recently exhibited promising coding capabilities, current coding benchmarks mostly consider a static instruction-to-code sequence transduction process, which has the potential for error propagation and a disconnect between the generated code and its final execution environment. To address this gap, we introduce InterCode, a lightweight, flexible, and easy-to-use framework of interactive coding as a standard reinforcement learning (RL) environment, with code as actions and execution feedback as observations. Our framework is language and platform agnostic, uses self-contained Docker environments to provide safe and reproducible execution, and is compatible out-of-the-box with traditional seq2seq coding methods, while enabling the development of new methods for interactive code generation. We use InterCode to create two interactive code environments with Bash and SQL as action spaces, leveraging data from the static Spider and NL2Bash datasets. We demonstrate InterCode's viability as a testbed by evaluating multiple state-of-the-art LLMs configured with different prompting strategies such as ReAct and Plan & Solve. Our results showcase the benefits of interactive code generation and demonstrate that InterCode can serve as a challenging benchmark for advancing code understanding and generation capabilities. InterCode is designed to be easily extensible and can even be used to incorporate new tasks such as Capture the Flag, a popular coding puzzle that is inherently multi-step and involves multiple programming languages. Project site with code and data: https://intercode-benchmark.github.io

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 26, 2023

EgoBench: An Interactive Egocentric Multimodal Benchmark for Tool-Using Agents

As AI agents increasingly operate in open, real-world environments, they require a deep synergy of multimodal perception, tool invocation with multi-hop reasoning, and dynamic interaction with users. However, existing benchmarks fail to jointly evaluate these capabilities due to challenges in designing strictly coupled multi-capability tasks, simulating natural and task-constrained user feedback, and ensuring objective evaluation of dynamic interaction. To bridge this gap, we introduce EgoBench, the first interactive multimodal benchmark for tool-using agents. EgoBench comprises 1,045 egocentric-video-grounded tasks covering four daily scenarios, along with a user-agent-tool interactive environment for evaluation. We implement a three-stage synergistic pipeline through which each task is designed to enforce the joint application of visual perception and tool-augmented multi-hop reasoning. We additionally develop a multi-agent simulated user within EgoBench to evaluate agents' interaction capabilities, which generates high-fidelity, task-aligned responses to agents. Furthermore, we establish a deterministic joint validation framework that guarantees objective assessment through process-based and result-based equivalence. Benchmarking eight SOTA video-MLLM agents on EgoBench reveals a severe performance ceiling: the best model achieves only 30.62% accuracy in the best-performing scenario, averaging 19.43% across all four scenarios. Finally, we conduct a multi-dimensional error analysis to disentangle failure modes, exposing capability bottlenecks for advancing future AI agents.

  • 7 authors
·
May 26

RClicks: Realistic Click Simulation for Benchmarking Interactive Segmentation

The emergence of Segment Anything (SAM) sparked research interest in the field of interactive segmentation, especially in the context of image editing tasks and speeding up data annotation. Unlike common semantic segmentation, interactive segmentation methods allow users to directly influence their output through prompts (e.g. clicks). However, click patterns in real-world interactive segmentation scenarios remain largely unexplored. Most methods rely on the assumption that users would click in the center of the largest erroneous area. Nevertheless, recent studies show that this is not always the case. Thus, methods may have poor performance in real-world deployment despite high metrics in a baseline benchmark. To accurately simulate real-user clicks, we conducted a large crowdsourcing study of click patterns in an interactive segmentation scenario and collected 475K real-user clicks. Drawing on ideas from saliency tasks, we develop a clickability model that enables sampling clicks, which closely resemble actual user inputs. Using our model and dataset, we propose RClicks benchmark for a comprehensive comparison of existing interactive segmentation methods on realistic clicks. Specifically, we evaluate not only the average quality of methods, but also the robustness w.r.t. click patterns. According to our benchmark, in real-world usage interactive segmentation models may perform worse than it has been reported in the baseline benchmark, and most of the methods are not robust. We believe that RClicks is a significant step towards creating interactive segmentation methods that provide the best user experience in real-world cases.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 23, 2024

MediQ: Question-Asking LLMs and a Benchmark for Reliable Interactive Clinical Reasoning

Users typically engage with LLMs interactively, yet most existing benchmarks evaluate them in a static, single-turn format, posing reliability concerns in interactive scenarios. We identify a key obstacle towards reliability: LLMs are trained to answer any question, even with incomplete context or insufficient knowledge. In this paper, we propose to change the static paradigm to an interactive one, develop systems that proactively ask questions to gather more information and respond reliably, and introduce an benchmark - MediQ - to evaluate question-asking ability in LLMs. MediQ simulates clinical interactions consisting of a Patient System and an adaptive Expert System; with potentially incomplete initial information, the Expert refrains from making diagnostic decisions when unconfident, and instead elicits missing details via follow-up questions. We provide a pipeline to convert single-turn medical benchmarks into an interactive format. Our results show that directly prompting state-of-the-art LLMs to ask questions degrades performance, indicating that adapting LLMs to proactive information-seeking settings is nontrivial. We experiment with abstention strategies to better estimate model confidence and decide when to ask questions, improving diagnostic accuracy by 22.3%; however, performance still lags compared to an (unrealistic in practice) upper bound with complete information upfront. Further analyses show improved interactive performance with filtering irrelevant contexts and reformatting conversations. Overall, we introduce a novel problem towards LLM reliability, an interactive MediQ benchmark and a novel question-asking system, and highlight directions to extend LLMs' information-seeking abilities in critical domains.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 2, 2024

PlayWorld: Benchmarking World Models with Agent Players over Long-Horizon Objectives

Video world models simulate future states conditioned on current observations and user actions. Recent systems have demonstrated impressive video consistency and action controllability over long sequences. However, fairly comparing these interactive models remains challenging. In practice, a human player typically evaluates a world model by pursuing long-horizon objectives through interaction. For example, a user may turn around 360 degrees to see whether the environment remains consistent, or walk into the water and inspect whether realistic water ripples are generated. The action sequence required to achieve the same objective may vary substantially between models, making fixed action-conditioned evaluation unsuitable for cross-model comparison. To address this, we employ multi-modal Agent Players to interact with world models toward specified long-horizon objectives. Building on this paradigm, we introduce PlayWorld, a benchmark providing 171 scenarios, each with a specified objective. To evaluate performance thoroughly, we assess models along four core dimensions: geometry consistency, interaction fidelity, out-of-sight evolution, and insight evolution. In addition, we incorporate basic ability metrics for video quality and controllability. Experiments across nine state-of-the-art world models reveal that current models remain unreliable on long-horizon interactive objectives, particularly in maintaining spatial consistency and persistent state evolution. Code and data are available at https://github.com/kxding/PlayWorld.

StreamEval: Evaluating Interactive Streaming Video Generation Models

As streaming video generation advances, enabling real-time interaction with generated video is becoming increasingly important. We introduce StreamEval, a unified benchmark for interactive streaming video generation spanning five tasks: avatar dialogue, avatar performance, world generation, instruction editing, and reference editing. StreamEval comprises 300 scripted test cases lasting 15-300s, each specifying initial assets, incrementally arriving multimodal requests, and explicit requirements for state changes and content preservation. Performance is assessed along four evaluation dimensions: task execution, state consistency, visual fidelity, and audiovisual coordination, instantiated through ten task-specific metrics on a 0-100 scale. Evaluating 37 distinct models across 300 test cases, we find that high visual quality and identity retention do not necessarily coincide with reliable request execution or sustained state consistency. In particular, request execution remains challenging: the highest task-specific scores are 36.90 for Following among seven avatar-performance models, 25.93 for Following in text-conditioned world generation, and 15.00 for Edit Success among three reported reference-editing models. These findings identify reliable request execution under timing and preservation constraints as a central challenge for advancing omni-modal real-time interactive systems. The leaderboard is available at https://streameval.ai

  • 1 authors
·
Oct 19 2

MobilePA-Bench: Benchmarking Mobile Planner Agents on Complex Real-World Tasks

As on-device LLM agents evolve into personal copilots, the mobile operating system has become a key testbed for this paradigm, making rigorous capability evaluation essential. Yet existing benchmarks fall into two camps, each with a critical blind spot: GUI-centric benchmarks test surface-level screen manipulation while overlooking background tool use and long-horizon planning, whereas static function-calling benchmarks rely on offline API matching that is detached from real runtime constraints. To close this gap, we present MobilePA-Bench, an interactive, stateful, and tool-centric benchmark for evaluating the tool-calling and planning abilities of mobile planning agents. MobilePA-Bench runs on an executable sandbox that maintains live application databases and returns structured feedback, spanning 13 functional domains and 212 realistic mobile tools. Beyond basic tool use, it evaluates a central planning agent along three advanced dimensions: (1)~Sub-agent Collaboration---decomposing a complex task and delegating specialized work to capable sub-agents; (2)~Memory Usage---recalling stored memories, user profiles, and past preferences to resolve implicit requests; and (3)~Skill Usage---invoking pre-packaged composite skills instead of planning every step from scratch. Extensive experiments show that current frontier LLMs remain unreliable in mobile settings: performance drops sharply under strict tool ordering, permission limits, and unexpected runtime errors. By pairing an interactive function-calling sandbox with evidence-based verification, MobilePA-Bench serves as both a practical diagnostic benchmark and an interactive foundation for agentic reinforcement learning---accelerating the development of dependable mobile agents.

Tongyi-MAI Tongyi-MAI
·
Aug 23 2

ConvCodeWorld: Benchmarking Conversational Code Generation in Reproducible Feedback Environments

Large language models (LLMs) have proven invaluable for code generation, particularly in interactive settings. However, existing code generation benchmarks fail to capture the diverse feedback encountered in multi-turn interactions, limiting our ability to evaluate LLMs in these contexts. To address this gap, we present a set of novel benchmarks that explicitly model the quality of feedback provided to code generation LLMs. Our contributions are threefold: First, we introduce CONVCODEWORLD, a novel and reproducible environment for benchmarking interactive code generation. CONVCODEWORLD simulates 9 distinct interactive code generation scenarios while systematically combining three types of feedback: (a) compilation feedback; (b) execution feedback with varying test coverage; (c) verbal feedback generated by GPT-4o with different levels of expertise. Second, we introduce CONVCODEBENCH, a fast, static version of benchmark that uses pre-generated feedback logs, eliminating the need for costly dynamic verbal feedback generation while maintaining strong Spearman's rank correlations (0.82 to 0.99) with CONVCODEWORLD. Third, extensive evaluations of both closed-source and open-source LLMs including R1-Distill on CONVCODEWORLD reveal key insights: (a) LLM performance varies significantly based on the feedback provided; (b) Weaker LLMs, with sufficient feedback, can outperform single-turn results of state-of-the-art LLMs without feedback; (c) Training on a specific feedback combination can limit an LLM's ability to utilize unseen combinations; (d) LLMs solve problems in fewer turns (high MRR) may not solve as many problems overall (high Recall), and vice versa. All implementations and benchmarks will be made publicly available at https://huggingface.co/spaces/ConvCodeWorld/ConvCodeWorld

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 27, 2025

GeoAgentBench: A Dynamic Execution Benchmark for Tool-Augmented Agents in Spatial Analysis

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into Geographic Information Systems (GIS) marks a paradigm shift toward autonomous spatial analysis. However, evaluating these LLM-based agents remains challenging due to the complex, multi-step nature of geospatial workflows. Existing benchmarks primarily rely on static text or code matching, neglecting dynamic runtime feedback and the multimodal nature of spatial outputs. To address this gap, we introduce GeoAgentBench (GABench), a dynamic and interactive evaluation benchmark tailored for tool-augmented GIS agents. GABench provides a realistic execution sandbox integrating 117 atomic GIS tools, encompassing 53 typical spatial analysis tasks across 6 core GIS domains. Recognizing that precise parameter configuration is the primary determinant of execution success in dynamic GIS environments, we designed the Parameter Execution Accuracy (PEA) metric, which utilizes a "Last-Attempt Alignment" strategy to quantify the fidelity of implicit parameter inference. Complementing this, a Vision-Language Model (VLM) based verification is proposed to assess data-spatial accuracy and cartographic style adherence. Furthermore, to address the frequent task failures caused by parameter misalignments and runtime anomalies, we developed a novel agent architecture, Plan-and-React, that mimics expert cognitive workflows by decoupling global orchestration from step-wise reactive execution. Extensive experiments with seven representative LLMs demonstrate that the Plan-and-React paradigm significantly outperforms traditional frameworks, achieving the optimal balance between logical rigor and execution robustness, particularly in multi-step reasoning and error recovery. Our findings highlight current capability boundaries and establish a robust standard for assessing and advancing the next generation of autonomous GeoAI.

  • 9 authors
·
Apr 15

CompanionBench: A Theory-Anchored, Real-World-Grounded Benchmark for AI Emotional Companionship

LLM companions are deployed at scale in personally consequential settings, yet poorly evaluated. Existing benchmarks use hand-authored scenarios and prompted simulators, aggregate empathy into one score, and overlook judge biases such as same-family favoritism and scale drift. We introduce CompanionBench, an interactive bilingual benchmark. To our knowledge, it is the first companion benchmark to ground both its scenarios and a trained user simulator in de-identified real-world data. A hidden disclosure gate branches each persona's trajectory on the agent's own behavior, controlling the interaction state space without scripting dialogue. We operationalize ten capabilities derived from 25 theories across psychology and counseling, four of them not graded explicitly by prior work: holding ambiguity, selfobject responsiveness, positive resonance and calibrated challenge. Agents are assessed on two complementary axes: a subjective ten-capability rubric and a deterministic measure of whether deeper disclosure was earned. A cross-family panel dilutes same-family favoritism; an Item Response Theory model separates agent quality from judge severity. Theory fixes what to measure and how personas are structured; real data supply events, history, and profiles -- coverage from theory, authenticity from data. Rankings are reproducible in both languages (rho = 0.996 ZH / 0.953 EN). Evaluating 28 agents reveals capability-level differences obscured by aggregate scores. Emotion regulation and calibrated challenge remain common weaknesses; holding ambiguity discriminates most. Role-play agents rank near the bottom: immersion does not imply relational competence. Across agents, the dominant failure mode is substituting surface warmth for substantive relational support. We will release 500 Chinese-English parallel pairs and the evaluation code.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 3

Explore More, Drift Less: Outcome-Only Reinforcement Learning Can Suffice for Long-Horizon Interactive Agents

Reinforcement learning is a natural way to post-train LLM agents for long-horizon interactive tasks judged only by end-of-task verification, yet a shared belief holds that outcome-only RL soon hits a ceiling on small open models. Recent work therefore compensates around the training with denser rewards, SFT priors, skill libraries, curated memory, or multi-agent orchestration. We argue the ceiling is an artifact of two failures of common practice. Signal starvation: group-relative RL with sparse outcome-only rewards yields a gradient only when a task's rollout group mixes successes and failures, so under-scaled exploration silences exactly the hardest, most instructive tasks. Policy drift: squeezing many updates out of a small task pool degrades the policy itself, as an unanchored objective lets the sampling distribution collapse exactly when saturation has already made informative groups rare. We present CANOPY (Coverage-ANchored On-PolicY RL), a minimalist protocol attacking both directly: scale same-task exploration until the natural signal reappears, keep every update on-policy, KL-anchored, and confined to the agent's own action tokens, then cash in an enlarged interaction budget at test time. On AppWorld, a long-horizon interactive coding benchmark, a Qwen3-14B policy trained with CANOPY through environment interaction alone--without task-specific supervision, auxiliary credit signals, or elaborate agent scaffolding--topped the public leaderboard (Feb. 2026; Test-Normal TGC 86.9, Test-Challenge 67.6), and the same design principles lift Qwen3.5-9B on SWE-bench Verified by 16.6 points. Agentic RL alone thus internalizes long-horizon capability directly into a small open model; we plan to release the complete training stack at https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/SignalCoverageRL.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 31

Ponder & Press: Advancing Visual GUI Agent towards General Computer Control

Most existing GUI agents typically depend on non-vision inputs like HTML source code or accessibility trees, limiting their flexibility across diverse software environments and platforms. Current multimodal large language models (MLLMs), which excel at using vision to ground real-world objects, offer a potential alternative. However, they often struggle with accurately localizing GUI elements -- a critical requirement for effective GUI automation -- due to the semantic gap between real-world objects and GUI elements. In this work, we introduce Ponder & Press, a divide-and-conquer framework for general computer control using only visual input. Our approach combines an general-purpose MLLM as an 'interpreter', responsible for translating high-level user instructions into detailed action descriptions, with a GUI-specific MLLM as a 'locator' that precisely locates GUI elements for action placement. By leveraging a purely visual input, our agent offers a versatile, human-like interaction paradigm applicable to a wide range of applications. Ponder & Press locator outperforms existing models by +22.5% on the ScreenSpot GUI grounding benchmark. Both offline and interactive agent benchmarks across various GUI environments -- including web pages, desktop software, and mobile UIs -- demonstrate that Ponder & Press framework achieves state-of-the-art performance, highlighting the potential of visual GUI agents. Refer to the project homepage https://invinciblewyq.github.io/ponder-press-page/

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 2, 2024

SkillForge: Co-Evolving Skills and Agents via Dynamic Skill Lifecycles

Memory-augmented reinforcement learning strengthens LLM agents' ability to solve complex long-horizon tasks. Skills are one such form of memory, pairing instructions with an applicability condition over task types. However, retaining every skill indiscriminately as the policy improves lets obsolete or harmful entries accumulate and mislead the agent. We propose SkillForge, an agentic RL method that compiles and evolves the skill library through a fitness-driven skill lifecycle of trial, active, stable, and retired states, so that the skills and the model co-evolve throughout training. A pre-RL evaluation phase first uses the base model's own rollouts to pre-retire low-fitness skills, yielding a filtered library that then seeds supervised fine-tuning. Reinforcement learning takes over from this checkpoint, and at each iteration selective retirement, stabilization, and LLM-guided mutation continue to forge the skill library alongside policy optimization. Across multiple interactive agent benchmarks, SkillForge achieves the highest aggregate success rate, delivering up to 7.8% relative improvement over the strongest baseline while keeping the skill library compact throughout training. We introduce SkillFurnace, a dataset of 5k+ annotated records bundling retirement-filtered SFT trajectories, evolved skill libraries with fitness annotations, and retirement events with human-annotated failure categories to support research on skill quality and lifecycle management.

EAU: Environment-Agent-User Co-evolution for Training User-Centric Agents

Training LLM agents to interact with users over multiple turns is challenging because the learning signal depends not only on the agent, but also on the user simulator and environment, which jointly shape the agent's experience. Simulated users can be stochastic or inconsistent, while environments may contain unreliable tools, incomplete state coverage, and incorrect verifiers. Prior work mainly addresses the resulting instability through reward shaping or denser supervision, while treating these components as fixed. We instead introduce EAU, a meta-agent framework for environment--agent--user co-evolution. During training, EAU monitors trajectories, tool traces, rewards, and training statistics; diagnoses failures and uninformative interactions; and proposes targeted modifications to the user simulator, environment, reward design, and RL configuration. Validated changes are hot-swapped into the ongoing run, allowing the training setup to evolve together with the policy. These adaptations also persist across runs, so later training can build on previously discovered improvements rather than restarting from a fixed setup. We enable this process through an editable symbolic representation of user and environment dynamics, while the agent remains a neural LLM optimized with RL. Across three interactive-agent benchmarks and two backbone models, EAU consistently outperforms prior RL methods, improving the overall score over the strongest baseline by 14.7--15.0% and increasing successful task completion on ColBench by up to 36.7%, showing that co-evolving the training system with the policy can substantially improve multi-turn RL.

Explore Before You Solve: The Speed--Depth Trade-off in Epistemic Agents for ARC-AGI-3

We systematically investigate all 25 public ARC-AGI-3 games and find that every one is reachable through non-intelligent strategies: 10 in a single blind step, 5 after one probing action, 1 via repeated ACTION1 presses, 1 via diverse exploration, and 8 via single repeated actions with sufficient budget (50-200 steps). A library-level null-coordinate vulnerability additionally bypasses 18 games in 1 step. This benchmark critique implies the public evaluation set cannot discriminate intelligent exploration from trivial heuristics - the private 55-game evaluation is the only genuine intelligence test. Against this backdrop, we present AERA (Adaptive Epistemic Reasoning Agent), a three-phase (EXPLORE / VERIFY / PLAN) agent achieving RHAE=0.2116 (4/25 solved) on these 25 games with Qwen2.5-0.5B, while random and no-explore baselines score 0.0000. We formalise AERA through a Speed--Depth trade-off framework: under a convexity assumption (proved for a class of environments in the Appendix), RHAE's quadratic form emerges as a second-order penalty for deviating from the Pareto frontier between action efficiency and information gain. Contributions: (i) a benchmark validity analysis showing that current interactive reasoning benchmarks fail to measure the exploration they claim to require, and (ii) the EXPLORE-before-PLAN framework and model-capability x exploration interaction. The linked code track entry achieves RHAE=0.30 on the full 55-game private evaluation. Code: CC0.

  • 1 authors
·
May 24

SERO: Learning from Executable Oracle Continuations for Long-Horizon Agentic Reinforcement Learning

Long-horizon agentic RL is constrained by the futures visited by the current policy. When rollouts fail to reach useful behaviors, improved credit assignment cannot provide supervision for states and actions that were never encountered. On-policy distillation (OPD) introduces teacher guidance on policy-induced states, and recent multi-turn variants improve how this guidance is scheduled, replayed, refined, or validated. However, they do not directly use the oracle-controlled future itself as the training trajectory. We introduce State-Rooted Executable Rollout Optimization (SERO), which augments on-policy agentic RL with executable oracle continuations. SERO restores a state actually reached by the current policy and lets a training-only oracle continue interacting with the real environment, making the downstream observations and oracle actions themselves available for learning. It then applies policy-reachability weighting, which weights each oracle step by the frozen behavior policy's compatibility with the preceding oracle actions. This allows deeper supervision to become effective as the policy becomes more compatible with the oracle branch. The oracle loss is optimized separately from the base RL estimator and no oracle is used at inference time. We evaluate SERO on two challenging interactive-agent benchmarks, ALFWorld and WebShop, using Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct and Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct. On ALFWorld, learning the full executable continuation is substantially more effective than supervising only the root oracle action, while policy-reachability weighting further improves out-of-distribution performance.

Ask When It Pays: Cost-Aware Open-Ended Interaction for Instance Goal Navigation

Instance Goal Navigation (IGN) requires an embodied agent to find a specific object instance among distractors from an under-specified natural-language description. Such ambiguity often cannot be resolved from perception and language alone, making interaction with an oracle a natural mechanism for disambiguation. Prior interactive methods allow oracle queries but treat lightweight clarification and route-level guidance alike, letting agents boost success rate through repeated high-information questions rather than by resolving the underlying ambiguity efficiently. We recast interactive IGN as a cost-sensitive uncertainty-reduction problem, where the agent should ask the question whose answer provides the largest reduction in navigation uncertainty relative to its penalty. To this end, we apply an information-gain analysis on existing navigation corpora to identify which cues reduce navigation uncertainty, yielding a compact set of question types and data-derived weights. However, existing interactive navigation benchmarks do not model the cost of different question types or evaluate how efficiently agents use interaction, making them unsuitable for studying cost-sensitive interaction. Based on this taxonomy, we construct a benchmark for diagnosing interaction behavior and efficiency, together with a Weighted Success Rate metric that penalizes each query by its derived cost. We further propose a zero-shot MLLM navigator that selectively queries at each decision step only when the expected uncertainty reduction justifies the interaction cost.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 2

EmbodiedEval: Evaluate Multimodal LLMs as Embodied Agents

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown significant advancements, providing a promising future for embodied agents. Existing benchmarks for evaluating MLLMs primarily utilize static images or videos, limiting assessments to non-interactive scenarios. Meanwhile, existing embodied AI benchmarks are task-specific and not diverse enough, which do not adequately evaluate the embodied capabilities of MLLMs. To address this, we propose EmbodiedEval, a comprehensive and interactive evaluation benchmark for MLLMs with embodied tasks. EmbodiedEval features 328 distinct tasks within 125 varied 3D scenes, each of which is rigorously selected and annotated. It covers a broad spectrum of existing embodied AI tasks with significantly enhanced diversity, all within a unified simulation and evaluation framework tailored for MLLMs. The tasks are organized into five categories: navigation, object interaction, social interaction, attribute question answering, and spatial question answering to assess different capabilities of the agents. We evaluated the state-of-the-art MLLMs on EmbodiedEval and found that they have a significant shortfall compared to human level on embodied tasks. Our analysis demonstrates the limitations of existing MLLMs in embodied capabilities, providing insights for their future development. We open-source all evaluation data and simulation framework at https://github.com/thunlp/EmbodiedEval.

  • 12 authors
·
Jan 20, 2025 2

ScrambleToolBench: Agents Search Exhaustively Even When Their Own Map Points to the Next Step

To operate robustly in open-world environments, autonomous agents should be able to infer the behavior of unfamiliar systems through interaction alone, even in the absence of documentation. However, existing tool-use benchmarks expose semantic tool schemas in static environments, allowing agents to rely on prior knowledge rather than autonomous discovery. To address this limitation, we introduce ScrambleToolBench, an interactive terminal benchmark designed to isolate behavioral reasoning. By removing semantic cues and enforcing a continuous task curriculum, the benchmark requires agents to uncover hidden tool behaviors entirely through trial-and-error interaction. The benchmark further introduces dynamic challenges, including mapping drift, stochastic action failures, and temporal execution windows, to evaluate whether agents can revise and adapt their hypotheses as the environment changes. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art language models reveals that successful initial discovery does not translate into robust adaptation. When faced with structural changes such as mapping drift, agents fail to use deductive strategies such as cycle tracing, and instead exhibit belief inertia or fall back to exhaustive search. Increasing test-time reasoning only amplifies this expensive brute-force search rather than enabling deductive recovery. While equipping agents with persistent memory reduces compounding errors, they remain unable to efficiently infer structural changes, highlighting a gap in current agent reasoning.

Mistake Notebook Learning: Batch-Clustered Failures for Training-Free Agent Adaptation

With the growing adoption of Large Language Model (LLM) agents in persistent, real-world roles, they naturally encounter continuous streams of tasks and inevitable failures. A key limitation, however, is their inability to systematically learn from these mistakes, forcing them to repeat identical errors in similar contexts. Unlike prior training-free methods that primarily store raw instance-level experience or focus on retrieving successful trajectories, we propose Mistake Notebook Learning (MNL), a novel memory framework that enables agents to self-curate generalizable guidance from batch-clustered failures. This mechanism allows agents to distill shared error patterns into structured "mistake notes," updating an external memory only when batch performance improves to ensure stability. To further amplify adaptability, we integrate MNL with test-time scaling, leveraging aggregated failure patterns to actively steer the search process away from known pitfalls. Experiments on mathematical reasoning, Text-to-SQL, and interactive agent benchmarks show that MNL achieves competitive performance compared to existing memory mechanisms and in-context methods in both effectiveness and efficiency. These findings position structured mistake abstraction as a critical lever for robust agent evolution, enabling continuous improvement without the cost of parameter updates. The code is available at https://github.com/Bairong-Xdynamics/MistakeNotebookLearning/tree/main.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 12, 2025

IRef-VLA: A Benchmark for Interactive Referential Grounding with Imperfect Language in 3D Scenes

With the recent rise of large language models, vision-language models, and other general foundation models, there is growing potential for multimodal, multi-task robotics that can operate in diverse environments given natural language input. One such application is indoor navigation using natural language instructions. However, despite recent progress, this problem remains challenging due to the 3D spatial reasoning and semantic understanding required. Additionally, the language used may be imperfect or misaligned with the scene, further complicating the task. To address this challenge, we curate a benchmark dataset, IRef-VLA, for Interactive Referential Vision and Language-guided Action in 3D Scenes with imperfect references. IRef-VLA is the largest real-world dataset for the referential grounding task, consisting of over 11.5K scanned 3D rooms from existing datasets, 7.6M heuristically generated semantic relations, and 4.7M referential statements. Our dataset also contains semantic object and room annotations, scene graphs, navigable free space annotations, and is augmented with statements where the language has imperfections or ambiguities. We verify the generalizability of our dataset by evaluating with state-of-the-art models to obtain a performance baseline and also develop a graph-search baseline to demonstrate the performance bound and generation of alternatives using scene-graph knowledge. With this benchmark, we aim to provide a resource for 3D scene understanding that aids the development of robust, interactive navigation systems. The dataset and all source code is publicly released at https://github.com/HaochenZ11/IRef-VLA.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 20, 2025

LiViBench: An Omnimodal Benchmark for Interactive Livestream Video Understanding

The development of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has advanced general video understanding. However, existing video evaluation benchmarks primarily focus on non-interactive videos, such as movies and recordings. To fill this gap, this paper proposes the first omnimodal benchmark for interactive livestream videos, LiViBench. It features a diverse set of 24 tasks, highlighting the perceptual, reasoning, and livestream-specific challenges. To efficiently construct the dataset, we design a standardized semi-automatic annotation workflow that incorporates the human-in-the-loop at multiple stages. The workflow leverages multiple MLLMs to form a multi-agent system for comprehensive video description and uses a seed-question-driven method to construct high-quality annotations. All interactive videos in the benchmark include audio, speech, and real-time comments modalities. To enhance models' understanding of interactive videos, we design tailored two-stage instruction-tuning and propose a Video-to-Comment Retrieval (VCR) module to improve the model's ability to utilize real-time comments. Based on these advancements, we develop LiVi-LLM-7B, an MLLM with enhanced knowledge of interactive livestreams. Experiments show that our model outperforms larger open-source models with up to 72B parameters, narrows the gap with leading proprietary models on LiViBench, and achieves enhanced performance on general video benchmarks, including VideoMME, LongVideoBench, MLVU, and VideoEval-Pro.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 21

CoMPAS3D: A Dataset and Benchmark for Interactive Motion

Socially interactive humanoid robots must engage with humans through their bodies, adapting in real time to a partner's movement, intent, and abilities. This requires models that understand not just how bodies move, but what movement means in a shared social context. Yet evaluation frameworks for interactive motion generation do not measure whether generated follower motion is legible within a shared movement vocabulary, nor whether it is appropriate to the partner's proficiency level. This gap has two causes: existing frameworks rely on kinematic metrics such as FID and beat alignment that cannot measure either property, and existing datasets lack the move annotations and proficiency variation needed. Salsa is well-suited as an evaluation domain: improvised, dyadic, and governed by a move vocabulary and judging criteria covering timing, musicality, technique, difficulty, partnering, and originality. We present CoMPAS3D, a motion capture dataset of improvised partner salsa paired with an evaluation framework covering kinematic quality, two objective metrics (move legibility and proficiency appropriateness), and six competition-based subjective dimensions. The dataset includes 3 hours of improvisation by 18 dancers spanning beginner, intermediate, and professional levels, with over 2,800 expert-annotated segments covering move types, errors, and stylistic elements. We define three benchmarks: move classification (analogous to transcription), proficiency estimation (fluency assessment), and follower generation (dialogue response). Fine-tuned vision-language models perform strongly on objective metrics applied to ground-truth motion sequences. Applied to Duolando and InterGen, the metrics reveal failures that kinematic metrics miss. Human evaluations confirm the gap between generated and ground-truth motion. CoMPAS3D, annotations, benchmark code, and baseline results are publicly available.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 1

Mobile-Env: An Evaluation Platform and Benchmark for Interactive Agents in LLM Era

Diverse evaluation benchmarks play a crucial role to assess a wide range of capabilities of large language models (LLM). Although plenty of endeavors have been dedicated to building valuable benchmarks, there is still little work aiming at evaluating the capability of LLM in multistep interactive environments. Noticing that LLM requires a text representation of the environment observations for interaction, we choose to fill such a blank by building a novel benchmark based on the information user interface (InfoUI). InfoUI consists of rich text contents and can be represented in some text formats, thus is suitable for the assessment of interaction ability of LLM. Additionally, the complex structures of InfoUI can further raise a challenge for LLM to understand structured texts rather than plain texts. An interaction platform is always used to evaluate an agent, however, there is still a lack of a satisfactory interaction platform dedicated to InfoUI. Consequently, we propose to build a novel easily-extendable, adaptable, and close-to-reality interaction platform, Mobile-Env, to provide a base for an appropriate benchmark. Based on Mobile-Env, an InfoUI task set WikiHow is then built to establish a benchmark for the multistep interaction capability of LLM in structured text-based environments. Agents based on a series of LLMs are tested on the task set to obtain an insight into the potential and challenge of LLM for InfoUI interaction. It is sincerely welcome that the community contribute new environments and new task sets for Mobile-Env to provide better test benchmarks and facilitate the development of the corresponding domains.

  • 5 authors
·
May 14, 2023

SILG: The Multi-environment Symbolic Interactive Language Grounding Benchmark

Existing work in language grounding typically study single environments. How do we build unified models that apply across multiple environments? We propose the multi-environment Symbolic Interactive Language Grounding benchmark (SILG), which unifies a collection of diverse grounded language learning environments under a common interface. SILG consists of grid-world environments that require generalization to new dynamics, entities, and partially observed worlds (RTFM, Messenger, NetHack), as well as symbolic counterparts of visual worlds that require interpreting rich natural language with respect to complex scenes (ALFWorld, Touchdown). Together, these environments provide diverse grounding challenges in richness of observation space, action space, language specification, and plan complexity. In addition, we propose the first shared model architecture for RL on these environments, and evaluate recent advances such as egocentric local convolution, recurrent state-tracking, entity-centric attention, and pretrained LM using SILG. Our shared architecture achieves comparable performance to environment-specific architectures. Moreover, we find that many recent modelling advances do not result in significant gains on environments other than the one they were designed for. This highlights the need for a multi-environment benchmark. Finally, the best models significantly underperform humans on SILG, which suggests ample room for future work. We hope SILG enables the community to quickly identify new methodologies for language grounding that generalize to a diverse set of environments and their associated challenges.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 20, 2021

Omni Demand Understanding: A Benchmark for Contextual User-Intent Inference in Multimodal Interaction

Natural audio-visual interaction is emerging as an important interface for AI assistants, allowing users to communicate through speech and vision rather than carefully composed text prompts. However, existing benchmarks of interactive capabilities still focus primarily on response quality, leaving a more fundamental question underexplored: can a model correctly infer the user's underlying demand from complex multimodal interaction? Real-world user demands are often underspecified in speech and must be inferred from multimodal cues and dialogue history. This inference is further complicated by ambiguous or disfluent expression and noisy acoustic environments. Conversely, request-like speech may not constitute a demand to the assistant, leading to false triggers. We establish Omni Demand Understanding (ODU) as a distinct multimodal contextual inference problem: given an interaction stream, a model must detect whether a user demand is present and infer intent from multimodal and conversational context. ODU evaluates this capability along five dimensions, covering both single-turn and multi-turn interactions. We construct ODU-Bench using a challenge-driven taxonomy, taxonomy-guided agentic video generation, and human-recorded interactions, followed by media-grounded annotation and human verification. We evaluate 14 native MLLMs. Even the strongest, Gemini 3.1 Pro, recovers only 44.7% of key information that must be inferred from visual, acoustic, or conversational context. Moreover, 11 of the 14 models exhibit false-trigger rates above 50% on non-demand scenarios. These results reveal a systematic capability gap in current MLLMs' ability to infer contextual user demands. We hope ODU can establish the evaluation of a previously underexplored yet essential capability in multimodal interaction: correctly understanding user demands before generating an appropriate response.

  • 18 authors
·
Sep 17

EIBench: A Simulator-Based Benchmark and Turn-Credit RL for Emotion Management

Emotional intelligence (EI) in Large Language Models (LLMs) is often evaluated through static understanding tasks or single-response dialogue generation. However, emotion management is interactive: a good model should not only recognize a user's emotion, but also improve the user's emotional and relational state over several turns. We introduce EIBench, a simulator-based benchmark for interactive emotion management. EIBench contains 2,222 scenarios, with 2,009 for training and 213 for held-out testing. The scenarios are organized by a 2x2 taxonomy covering Support, Defense, Repair, and Charm, which together capture different forms of support, boundary maintenance, trust repair, and rapport building. In each scenario, an LLM simulator plays the user, updates an emotion-relation state after each turn, and maps the final state to an anchor-based score. This design makes EIBench both an evaluation benchmark and a training environment: the final state gives the outcome reward, while the per-turn state updates provide dense feedback for RL. We evaluate 15 open- and closed-source LLMs. Current models perform well on support and rapport-building scenes, but struggle with boundary maintenance under user pressure. To improve the EI ability of LLMs, we propose Centered Turn-Credit GRPO (CTC-GRPO), a GRPO extension that reuses the simulator's per-turn state updates as dense turn-level feedback while preserving the final outcome reward. CTC-GRPO improves Qwen3-8B from -22.4 to +22.4 on EIBench and also improves on out-of-distribution evaluations including SAGE (+12.4) and EQBench3 (+20.9%). Our results show that simulator-tracked user states can support both evaluation and training for multi-turn emotion management.

  • 11 authors
·
Jun 13

Interactive Agents: Simulating Counselor-Client Psychological Counseling via Role-Playing LLM-to-LLM Interactions

Virtual counselors powered by large language models (LLMs) aim to create interactive support systems that effectively assist clients struggling with mental health challenges. To replicate counselor-client conversations, researchers have built an online mental health platform that allows professional counselors to provide clients with text-based counseling services for about an hour per session. Notwithstanding its effectiveness, challenges exist as human annotation is time-consuming, cost-intensive, privacy-protected, and not scalable. To address this issue and investigate the applicability of LLMs in psychological counseling conversation simulation, we propose a framework that employs two LLMs via role-playing for simulating counselor-client interactions. Our framework involves two LLMs, one acting as a client equipped with a specific and real-life user profile and the other playing the role of an experienced counselor, generating professional responses using integrative therapy techniques. We implement both the counselor and the client by zero-shot prompting the GPT-4 model. In order to assess the effectiveness of LLMs in simulating counselor-client interactions and understand the disparities between LLM- and human-generated conversations, we evaluate the synthetic data from various perspectives. We begin by assessing the client's performance through automatic evaluations. Next, we analyze and compare the disparities between dialogues generated by the LLM and those generated by professional counselors. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments to thoroughly examine the performance of our LLM-based counselor trained with synthetic interactive dialogues by benchmarking against state-of-the-art models for mental health.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 28, 2024

ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models

While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across tasks in language understanding and interactive decision making, their abilities for reasoning (e.g. chain-of-thought prompting) and acting (e.g. action plan generation) have primarily been studied as separate topics. In this paper, we explore the use of LLMs to generate both reasoning traces and task-specific actions in an interleaved manner, allowing for greater synergy between the two: reasoning traces help the model induce, track, and update action plans as well as handle exceptions, while actions allow it to interface with external sources, such as knowledge bases or environments, to gather additional information. We apply our approach, named ReAct, to a diverse set of language and decision making tasks and demonstrate its effectiveness over state-of-the-art baselines, as well as improved human interpretability and trustworthiness over methods without reasoning or acting components. Concretely, on question answering (HotpotQA) and fact verification (Fever), ReAct overcomes issues of hallucination and error propagation prevalent in chain-of-thought reasoning by interacting with a simple Wikipedia API, and generates human-like task-solving trajectories that are more interpretable than baselines without reasoning traces. On two interactive decision making benchmarks (ALFWorld and WebShop), ReAct outperforms imitation and reinforcement learning methods by an absolute success rate of 34% and 10% respectively, while being prompted with only one or two in-context examples. Project site with code: https://react-lm.github.io

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 5, 2022 1

ReSpAct: Harmonizing Reasoning, Speaking, and Acting Towards Building Large Language Model-Based Conversational AI Agents

Large language model (LLM)-based agents have been increasingly used to interact with external environments (e.g., games, APIs, etc.) and solve tasks. However, current frameworks do not enable these agents to work with users and interact with them to align on the details of their tasks and reach user-defined goals; instead, in ambiguous situations, these agents may make decisions based on assumptions. This work introduces ReSpAct (Reason, Speak, and Act), a novel framework that synergistically combines the essential skills for building task-oriented "conversational" agents. ReSpAct addresses this need for agents, expanding on the ReAct approach. The ReSpAct framework enables agents to interpret user instructions, reason about complex tasks, execute appropriate actions, and engage in dynamic dialogue to seek guidance, clarify ambiguities, understand user preferences, resolve problems, and use the intermediate feedback and responses of users to update their plans. We evaluated ReSpAct in environments supporting user interaction, such as task-oriented dialogue (MultiWOZ) and interactive decision-making (AlfWorld, WebShop). ReSpAct is flexible enough to incorporate dynamic user feedback and addresses prevalent issues like error propagation and agents getting stuck in reasoning loops. This results in more interpretable, human-like task-solving trajectories than relying solely on reasoning traces. In two interactive decision-making benchmarks, AlfWorld and WebShop, ReSpAct outperform the strong reasoning-only method ReAct by an absolute success rate of 6% and 4%, respectively. In the task-oriented dialogue benchmark MultiWOZ, ReSpAct improved Inform and Success scores by 5.5% and 3%, respectively.

Learning to Wander: Improving the Global Image Geolocation Ability of LMMs via Actionable Reasoning

Geolocation, the task of identifying the geographic location of an image, requires abundant world knowledge and complex reasoning abilities. Though advanced large multimodal models (LMMs) have shown superior aforementioned capabilities, their performance on the geolocation task remains unexplored. To this end, we introduce WanderBench, the first open access global geolocation benchmark designed for actionable geolocation reasoning in embodied scenarios. WanderBench contains over 32K panoramas across six continents, organized as navigable graphs that enable physical actions such as rotation and movement, transforming geolocation from static recognition into interactive exploration. Building on this foundation, we propose GeoAoT (Action of Thought), a Geolocation framework with Action of Though, which couples reasoning with embodied actions. Instead of generating textual reasoning chains, GeoAoT produces actionable plans such as, approaching landmarks or adjusting viewpoints, to actively reduce uncertainty. We further establish an evaluation protocol that jointly measures geolocation accuracy and difficulty-aware geolocation questioning ability. Experiments on 19 large multimodal models show that GeoAoT achieves superior fine-grained localization and stronger generalization in dynamic environments. WanderBench and GeoAoT define a new paradigm for actionable, reasoning driven geolocation in embodied visual understanding.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 10

Personalized Reasoning: Just-In-Time Personalization and Why LLMs Fail At It

Current large language model (LLM) development treats task-solving and preference alignment as separate challenges, optimizing first for objective correctness, then for alignment to aggregated human preferences. This paradigm fails in human-facing applications where solving a problem correctly is insufficient if the response mismatches the user's needs. This challenge intensifies in just-in-time scenarios where no prior user interaction history exists due to cold-start conditions or privacy constraints. LLMs need to identify what they don't know about user preferences, strategically elicit preference values through questioning, then adapt their reasoning processes and responses accordingly -- a complicated chain of cognitive processes which we term personalized reasoning. We introduce PREFDISCO, an evaluation methodology that transforms static benchmarks into interactive personalization tasks using psychologically-grounded personas with sparse preferences. Our framework creates scenarios where identical questions require different reasoning chains depending on user context, as optimal explanation approaches vary by individual expertise and preferences while maintaining factual accuracy. Evaluation of 21 frontier models across 10 tasks reveals 29.0% of naive personalization attempts produce worse preference alignment than generic responses, yet generic responses also fail to serve individual user needs effectively. These findings suggest personalized reasoning requires dedicated development rather than emerging naturally. PREFDISCO establishes personalized reasoning as a measurable research frontier and reveals fundamental limitations in current LLMs' interactive capabilities, providing a foundation for developing systems that can adapt to individual users in education, healthcare, and technical domains where personalization is critical.

Harnessing LLMs for Educational Content-Driven Italian Crossword Generation

In this work, we unveil a novel tool for generating Italian crossword puzzles from text, utilizing advanced language models such as GPT-4o, Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3, and Llama3-8b-Instruct. Crafted specifically for educational applications, this cutting-edge generator makes use of the comprehensive Italian-Clue-Instruct dataset, which comprises over 30,000 entries including diverse text, solutions, and types of clues. This carefully assembled dataset is designed to facilitate the creation of contextually relevant clues in various styles associated with specific texts and keywords. The study delves into four distinctive styles of crossword clues: those without format constraints, those formed as definite determiner phrases, copular sentences, and bare noun phrases. Each style introduces unique linguistic structures to diversify clue presentation. Given the lack of sophisticated educational tools tailored to the Italian language, this project seeks to enhance learning experiences and cognitive development through an engaging, interactive platform. By meshing state-of-the-art AI with contemporary educational strategies, our tool can dynamically generate crossword puzzles from Italian educational materials, thereby providing an enjoyable and interactive learning environment. This technological advancement not only redefines educational paradigms but also sets a new benchmark for interactive and cognitive language learning solutions.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 25, 2024

Ragnarök: A Reusable RAG Framework and Baselines for TREC 2024 Retrieval-Augmented Generation Track

Did you try out the new Bing Search? Or maybe you fiddled around with Google AI~Overviews? These might sound familiar because the modern-day search stack has recently evolved to include retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. They allow searching and incorporating real-time data into large language models (LLMs) to provide a well-informed, attributed, concise summary in contrast to the traditional search paradigm that relies on displaying a ranked list of documents. Therefore, given these recent advancements, it is crucial to have an arena to build, test, visualize, and systematically evaluate RAG-based search systems. With this in mind, we propose the TREC 2024 RAG Track to foster innovation in evaluating RAG systems. In our work, we lay out the steps we've made towards making this track a reality -- we describe the details of our reusable framework, Ragnar\"ok, explain the curation of the new MS MARCO V2.1 collection choice, release the development topics for the track, and standardize the I/O definitions which assist the end user. Next, using Ragnar\"ok, we identify and provide key industrial baselines such as OpenAI's GPT-4o or Cohere's Command R+. Further, we introduce a web-based user interface for an interactive arena allowing benchmarking pairwise RAG systems by crowdsourcing. We open-source our Ragnar\"ok framework and baselines to achieve a unified standard for future RAG systems.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 24, 2024

LPM 1.0: Video-based Character Performance Model

Performance, the externalization of intent, emotion, and personality through visual, vocal, and temporal behavior, is what makes a character alive. Learning such performance from video is a promising alternative to traditional 3D pipelines. However, existing video models struggle to jointly achieve high expressiveness, real-time inference, and long-horizon identity stability, a tension we call the performance trilemma. Conversation is the most comprehensive performance scenario, as characters simultaneously speak, listen, react, and emote while maintaining identity over time. To address this, we present LPM 1.0 (Large Performance Model), focusing on single-person full-duplex audio-visual conversational performance. Concretely, we build a multimodal human-centric dataset through strict filtering, speaking-listening audio-video pairing, performance understanding, and identity-aware multi-reference extraction; train a 17B-parameter Diffusion Transformer (Base LPM) for highly controllable, identity-consistent performance through multimodal conditioning; and distill it into a causal streaming generator (Online LPM) for low-latency, infinite-length interaction. At inference, given a character image with identity-aware references, LPM 1.0 generates listening videos from user audio and speaking videos from synthesized audio, with text prompts for motion control, all at real-time speed with identity-stable, infinite-length generation. LPM 1.0 thus serves as a visual engine for conversational agents, live streaming characters, and game NPCs. To systematically evaluate this setting, we propose LPM-Bench, the first benchmark for interactive character performance. LPM 1.0 achieves state-of-the-art results across all evaluated dimensions while maintaining real-time inference.

  • 25 authors
·
Apr 8 4

DreamStream: Towards Policy-Oriented Generative Simulation for End-to-End Driving

Faithfully evaluating end-to-end driving policies in simulation requires observations that are not merely photo-realistic, but preserve the scene features a policy relies on to make decisions. Existing platforms, however, exhibit a sim-to-real visual gap that corrupts policy perception, undermining their ability to assess a policy's closed-loop decision-making. To this end, we propose DreamStream, a generative, closed-loop simulator that achieves policy-oriented fidelity using a simulator-grounded autoregressive video model. Our video model is distilled from a large pretrained video model via traffic layout guidance, varying visual appearance while preserving policy-relevant features such as scenario layout and the temporal consistency of dynamic objects. We further observe that perceptual metrics like FID misrank how well these features are preserved. To tackle this, we introduce FDπ, a new multi-representation metric that measures the sim-to-real gap as the Fréchet distance over scene-context features from public E2E policies. Under FDπ, DreamStream improves over the strongest prior closed-loop simulator by 1.6times on nuScenes and 4.7times on NAVSIM, and induces the least perturbation to policy's perceptual observability. Based on DreamStream, we construct Navhard-CL benchmark, which turns non-reactive real-world benchmark NAVSIM into interactive testing environments with adversarial driving behaviors and weather variations. This benchmark exposes many failure modes of driving policies, such as scorer bias and lack of recovery behaviors, that prior closed-loop benchmarks overlook. Code and data are available at https://github.com/VAIL-UCLA/DreamStream.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 21

Does Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Help Mobile GUI Agent? An Empirical Study

Reasoning capabilities have significantly improved the performance of vision-language models (VLMs) in domains such as mathematical problem-solving, coding, and visual question-answering. However, their impact on real-world applications remains unclear. This paper presents the first empirical study on the effectiveness of reasoning-enabled VLMs in mobile GUI agents, a domain that requires interpreting complex screen layouts, understanding user instructions, and executing multi-turn interactions. We evaluate two pairs of commercial models--Gemini 2.0 Flash and Claude 3.7 Sonnet--comparing their base and reasoning-enhanced versions across two static benchmarks (ScreenSpot and AndroidControl) and one interactive environment (AndroidWorld). We surprisingly find the Claude 3.7 Sonnet reasoning model achieves state-of-the-art performance on AndroidWorld. However, reasoning VLMs generally offer marginal improvements over non-reasoning models on static benchmarks and even degrade performance in some agent setups. Notably, reasoning and non-reasoning VLMs fail on different sets of tasks, suggesting that reasoning does have an impact, but its benefits and drawbacks counterbalance each other. We attribute these inconsistencies to the limitations of benchmarks and VLMs. Based on the findings, we provide insights for further enhancing mobile GUI agents in terms of benchmarks, VLMs, and their adaptability in dynamically invoking reasoning VLMs. The experimental data are publicly available at https://github.com/LlamaTouch/VLM-Reasoning-Traces.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 20, 2025

Interactive Medical Image Segmentation: A Benchmark Dataset and Baseline

Interactive Medical Image Segmentation (IMIS) has long been constrained by the limited availability of large-scale, diverse, and densely annotated datasets, which hinders model generalization and consistent evaluation across different models. In this paper, we introduce the IMed-361M benchmark dataset, a significant advancement in general IMIS research. First, we collect and standardize over 6.4 million medical images and their corresponding ground truth masks from multiple data sources. Then, leveraging the strong object recognition capabilities of a vision foundational model, we automatically generated dense interactive masks for each image and ensured their quality through rigorous quality control and granularity management. Unlike previous datasets, which are limited by specific modalities or sparse annotations, IMed-361M spans 14 modalities and 204 segmentation targets, totaling 361 million masks-an average of 56 masks per image. Finally, we developed an IMIS baseline network on this dataset that supports high-quality mask generation through interactive inputs, including clicks, bounding boxes, text prompts, and their combinations. We evaluate its performance on medical image segmentation tasks from multiple perspectives, demonstrating superior accuracy and scalability compared to existing interactive segmentation models. To facilitate research on foundational models in medical computer vision, we release the IMed-361M and model at https://github.com/uni-medical/IMIS-Bench.

  • 13 authors
·
Nov 19, 2024 2

DashboardQA: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Question Answering on Interactive Dashboards

Dashboards are powerful visualization tools for data-driven decision-making, integrating multiple interactive views that allow users to explore, filter, and navigate data. Unlike static charts, dashboards support rich interactivity, which is essential for uncovering insights in real-world analytical workflows. However, existing question-answering benchmarks for data visualizations largely overlook this interactivity, focusing instead on static charts. This limitation severely constrains their ability to evaluate the capabilities of modern multimodal agents designed for GUI-based reasoning. To address this gap, we introduce DashboardQA, the first benchmark explicitly designed to assess how vision-language GUI agents comprehend and interact with real-world dashboards. The benchmark includes 112 interactive dashboards from Tableau Public and 405 question-answer pairs with interactive dashboards spanning five categories: multiple-choice, factoid, hypothetical, multi-dashboard, and conversational. By assessing a variety of leading closed- and open-source GUI agents, our analysis reveals their key limitations, particularly in grounding dashboard elements, planning interaction trajectories, and performing reasoning. Our findings indicate that interactive dashboard reasoning is a challenging task overall for all the VLMs evaluated. Even the top-performing agents struggle; for instance, the best agent based on Gemini-Pro-2.5 achieves only 38.69% accuracy, while the OpenAI CUA agent reaches just 22.69%, demonstrating the benchmark's significant difficulty. We release DashboardQA at https://github.com/vis-nlp/DashboardQA

  • 11 authors
·
Aug 24, 2025

WorldMark: A Unified Benchmark Suite for Interactive Video World Models

Interactive video generation models such as Genie, YUME, HY-World, and Matrix-Game are advancing rapidly, yet every model is evaluated on its own benchmark with private scenes and trajectories, making fair cross-model comparison impossible. Existing public benchmarks offer useful metrics such as trajectory error, aesthetic scores, and VLM-based judgments, but none supplies the standardized test conditions -- identical scenes, identical action sequences, and a unified control interface -- needed to make those metrics comparable across models with heterogeneous inputs. We introduce WorldMark, the first benchmark that provides such a common playing field for interactive Image-to-Video world models. WorldMark contributes: (1) a unified action-mapping layer that translates a shared WASD-style action vocabulary into each model's native control format, enabling apples-to-apples comparison across six major models on identical scenes and trajectories; (2) a hierarchical test suite of 500 evaluation cases covering first- and third-person viewpoints, photorealistic and stylized scenes, and three difficulty tiers from Easy to Hard spanning 20-60s; and (3) a modular evaluation toolkit for Visual Quality, Control Alignment, and World Consistency, designed so that researchers can reuse our standardized inputs while plugging in their own metrics as the field evolves. We will release all data, evaluation code, and model outputs to facilitate future research. Beyond offline metrics, we launch World Model Arena (warena.ai), an online platform where anyone can pit leading world models against each other in side-by-side battles and watch the live leaderboard.

  • 8 authors
·
Apr 22 3

Interaction2Code: Benchmarking MLLM-based Interactive Webpage Code Generation from Interactive Prototyping

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on the design-to-code task, i.e., generating UI code from UI mock-ups. However, existing benchmarks only contain static web pages for evaluation and ignore the dynamic interaction, limiting the practicality, usability and user engagement of the generated webpages. To bridge these gaps, we present the first systematic investigation of MLLMs in generating interactive webpages. Specifically, we formulate the Interaction-to-Code task and establish the Interaction2Code benchmark, encompassing 127 unique webpages and 374 distinct interactions across 15 webpage types and 31 interaction categories. Through comprehensive experiments utilizing state-of-the-art (SOTA) MLLMs, evaluated via both automatic metrics and human assessments, we identify four critical limitations of MLLM on Interaction-to-Code task: (1) inadequate generation of interaction compared with full page, (2) prone to ten types of failure, (3) poor performance on visually subtle interactions, and (4) insufficient undestanding on interaction when limited to single-modality visual descriptions. To address these limitations, we propose four enhancement strategies: Interactive Element Highlighting, Failureaware Prompting (FAP), Visual Saliency Enhancement, and Visual-Textual Descriptions Combination, all aiming at improving MLLMs' performance on the Interaction-toCode task. The Interaction2Code benchmark and code are available in https://github. com/WebPAI/Interaction2Code.

  • 9 authors
·
Feb 28

Multi-interactive Feature Learning and a Full-time Multi-modality Benchmark for Image Fusion and Segmentation

Multi-modality image fusion and segmentation play a vital role in autonomous driving and robotic operation. Early efforts focus on boosting the performance for only one task, e.g., fusion or segmentation, making it hard to reach~`Best of Both Worlds'. To overcome this issue, in this paper, we propose a Multi-interactive Feature learning architecture for image fusion and Segmentation, namely SegMiF, and exploit dual-task correlation to promote the performance of both tasks. The SegMiF is of a cascade structure, containing a fusion sub-network and a commonly used segmentation sub-network. By slickly bridging intermediate features between two components, the knowledge learned from the segmentation task can effectively assist the fusion task. Also, the benefited fusion network supports the segmentation one to perform more pretentiously. Besides, a hierarchical interactive attention block is established to ensure fine-grained mapping of all the vital information between two tasks, so that the modality/semantic features can be fully mutual-interactive. In addition, a dynamic weight factor is introduced to automatically adjust the corresponding weights of each task, which can balance the interactive feature correspondence and break through the limitation of laborious tuning. Furthermore, we construct a smart multi-wave binocular imaging system and collect a full-time multi-modality benchmark with 15 annotated pixel-level categories for image fusion and segmentation. Extensive experiments on several public datasets and our benchmark demonstrate that the proposed method outputs visually appealing fused images and perform averagely 7.66% higher segmentation mIoU in the real-world scene than the state-of-the-art approaches. The source code and benchmark are available at https://github.com/JinyuanLiu-CV/SegMiF.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 3, 2023

LongMemEval: Benchmarking Chat Assistants on Long-Term Interactive Memory

Recent large language model (LLM)-driven chat assistant systems have integrated memory components to track user-assistant chat histories, enabling more accurate and personalized responses. However, their long-term memory capabilities in sustained interactions remain underexplored. This paper introduces LongMemEval, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate five core long-term memory abilities of chat assistants: information extraction, multi-session reasoning, temporal reasoning, knowledge updates, and abstention. With 500 meticulously curated questions embedded within freely scalable user-assistant chat histories, LongMemEval presents a significant challenge to existing long-term memory systems, with commercial chat assistants and long-context LLMs showing 30% accuracy drop on memorizing information across sustained interactions. We then present a unified framework that breaks down the long-term memory design into four design choices across the indexing, retrieval, and reading stages. Built upon key experimental insights, we propose several memory designs including session decomposition for optimizing value granularity, fact-augmented key expansion for enhancing the index structure, and time-aware query expansion for refining the search scope. Experiment results show that these optimizations greatly improve both memory recall and downstream question answering on LongMemEval. Overall, our study provides valuable resources and guidance for advancing the long-term memory capabilities of LLM-based chat assistants, paving the way toward more personalized and reliable conversational AI.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 14, 2024 2

VitaBench: Benchmarking LLM Agents with Versatile Interactive Tasks in Real-world Applications

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

meituan-longcat LongCat
·
Sep 30, 2025 2

Bench-NPIN: Benchmarking Non-prehensile Interactive Navigation

Mobile robots are increasingly deployed in unstructured environments where obstacles and objects are movable. Navigation in such environments is known as interactive navigation, where task completion requires not only avoiding obstacles but also strategic interactions with movable objects. Non-prehensile interactive navigation focuses on non-grasping interaction strategies, such as pushing, rather than relying on prehensile manipulation. Despite a growing body of research in this field, most solutions are evaluated using case-specific setups, limiting reproducibility and cross-comparison. In this paper, we present Bench-NPIN, the first comprehensive benchmark for non-prehensile interactive navigation. Bench-NPIN includes multiple components: 1) a comprehensive range of simulated environments for non-prehensile interactive navigation tasks, including navigating a maze with movable obstacles, autonomous ship navigation in icy waters, box delivery, and area clearing, each with varying levels of complexity; 2) a set of evaluation metrics that capture unique aspects of interactive navigation, such as efficiency, interaction effort, and partial task completion; and 3) demonstrations using Bench-NPIN to evaluate example implementations of established baselines across environments. Bench-NPIN is an open-source Python library with a modular design. The code, documentation, and trained models can be found at https://github.com/IvanIZ/BenchNPIN.

  • 5 authors
·
May 17, 2025