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Digital agents are considered a general-purpose technology. They spread quickly in private and organizational contexts, including education. Yet, research lacks a conceptual framing to describe interaction with such agents in a holistic…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2024-08-09 Mateusz Dolata , Dzmitry Katsiuba , Natalie Wellnhammer , Gerhard Schwabe

To enable human oversight, agentic AI systems often provide a trace of reasoning and action steps. Designing traces to have an informative, but not overwhelming, level of detail remains a critical challenge. In three user studies on a…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Madeleine Grunde-McLaughlin , Hussein Mozannar , Maya Murad , Jingya Chen , Saleema Amershi , Adam Fourney

Theories for reasoning about programs with effects initially focused on basic manipulation of lists and other mutable data. The next challenge was to consider higher-order programming, adding functions as first class objects to mutable…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2023-06-22 Ian A. Mason , Carolyn L. Talcott

Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents have rapidly evolved from specialized, rule-based programs to versatile, learning-driven autonomous systems capable of perception, reasoning, and action in complex environments. The explosion of data,…

This paper engages in a speculative exploration of the concept of an artificial agent capable of conducting research. Initially, it examines how the act of research can be conceptually characterized, aiming to provide a starting point for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-12-07 Shiro Takagi

Web-based 'deep research' agents aim to solve complex question - answering tasks through long-horizon interactions with online tools. These tasks remain challenging, as the underlying language models are often not optimized for long-horizon…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Shrey Pandit , Xuan-Phi Nguyen , Yifei Ming , Austin Xu , Jiayu Wang , Caiming Xiong , Shafiq Joty

Web browsers are a portal to the internet, where much of human activity is undertaken. Thus, there has been significant research work in AI agents that interact with the internet through web browsing. However, there is also another…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Yueqi Song , Frank Xu , Shuyan Zhou , Graham Neubig

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents extend large language models from text generation to action execution in real-world digital environments. Unlike conversational systems, GUI agents perform irreversible operations such as submitting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Yucheng Shi , Wenhao Yu , Jingyuan Huang , Wenlin Yao , Wenhu Chen , Ninghao Liu

AI-powered web agents have the potential to automate repetitive tasks, such as form filling, information retrieval, and scheduling, but they struggle to reliably execute these tasks without human intervention, requiring users to provide…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Yimeng Liu , Misha Sra , Jeevana Priya Inala , Chenglong Wang

Information seeking is a fundamental requirement for humans. However, existing LLM agents rely heavily on open-web search, which exposes two fundamental weaknesses: online content is noisy and unreliable, and many real-world tasks require…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Yaxin Du , Yuanshuo Zhang , Xiyuan Yang , Yifan Zhou , Cheng Wang , Gongyi Zou , Xianghe Pang , Wenhao Wang , Menglan Chen , Shuo Tang , Zhiyu Li , Feiyu Xiong , Siheng Chen

The introduction of new tools in people's workflow has always been promotive of new creative paths. This paper discusses the impact of using computational tools in the performance of creative tasks, especially focusing on graphic design.…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2021-03-11 Daniel Lopes , Jéssica Parente , Pedro Silva , Licínio Roque , Penousal machado

Language models (LMs) are powerful yet mostly for text generation tasks. Tools have substantially enhanced their performance for tasks that require complex skills. However, many works adopt the term "tool" in different ways, raising the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Zhiruo Wang , Zhoujun Cheng , Hao Zhu , Daniel Fried , Graham Neubig

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly act as autonomous agents that must decide when to answer directly vs. when to invoke external tools. Prior work studying adaptive tool use has largely treated tool necessity as a model-agnostic…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Yize Cheng , Chenrui Fan , Mahdi JafariRaviz , Keivan Rezaei , Soheil Feizi

Recent LLM agents have made great use of chain of thought reasoning and function calling. As their capabilities grow, an important question arises: can this software represent not only a smart problem-solving tool, but an entity in its own…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Asen Nachkov , Xi Wang , Luc Van Gool

Tool-augmented reasoning has become a popular direction for LLM-based agents, and it is widely assumed to improve reasoning and reliability. However, we demonstrate that this consensus does not always hold: in the presence of semantic…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Kaituo Zhang , Zhen Xiong , Mingyu Zhong , Zhimeng Jiang , Zhouyuan Yuan , Zhecheng Li , Ying Lin

Tool learning empowers large language models (LLMs) as agents to use external tools and extend their utility. Existing methods employ one single LLM-based agent to iteratively select and execute tools, thereafter incorporating execution…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Zhengliang Shi , Shen Gao , Xiuyi Chen , Yue Feng , Lingyong Yan , Haibo Shi , Dawei Yin , Pengjie Ren , Suzan Verberne , Zhaochun Ren

With recent advancements in multi-agent generative AI (Gen AI), technology organizations like Microsoft are adopting these complex tools, redefining AI agents as active collaborators in complex workflows rather than as passive tools. In…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-10-09 Suchismita Naik , Austin L. Toombs , Amanda Snellinger , Scott Saponas , Amanda K. Hall

Recently, tool learning with large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a promising paradigm for augmenting the capabilities of LLMs to tackle highly complex problems. Despite growing attention and rapid advancements in this field, the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Changle Qu , Sunhao Dai , Xiaochi Wei , Hengyi Cai , Shuaiqiang Wang , Dawei Yin , Jun Xu , Ji-Rong Wen

Recent years, multimodal models have made remarkable strides and pave the way for intelligent browser use agents. However, when solving tasks on real world webpages in multi-turn, long-horizon trajectories, current agents still suffer from…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Kaiwen He , Zhiwei Wang , Chenyi Zhuang , Jinjie Gu

World wide technological advancement has brought in a widespread change in adoption and utilization of open source tools. Since, most of the organizations across the globe deal with a large amount of data to be updated online and…

Databases · Computer Science 2012-10-04 Sharon Christa , K. Lakshmi Madhuri , V. Suma