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Related papers: Ask Early, Ask Late, Ask Right: When Does Clarific…

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LLM agents can reason and use tools, but they often break down on long-horizon tasks due to unbounded context growth and accumulated errors. Common remedies such as context compression or retrieval-augmented prompting introduce trade-offs…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Chenglin Yu , Yuchen Wang , Songmiao Wang , Hongxia Yang , Ming Li

Recent advances in AI-assisted programming have empowered agents to execute complex workflows via command-line interfaces, however, existing benchmarks are limited by short task horizons, data contamination from GitHub scraping, and a lack…

Real-world visual question answering (VQA) is often context-dependent: an image-question pair may be under-specified, such that the correct answer depends on external information that is not observable in the image. In such cases, directly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Zongwan Cao , Bingbing Wen , Lucy Lu Wang

Solving temporally-extended tasks is a challenge for most reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms [arXiv:1906.07343]. We investigate the ability of an RL agent to learn to ask natural language questions as a tool to understand its…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-09-14 Ross Murphy , Sergey Mosesov , Javier Leguina Peral , Thymo ter Doest

A long-lived LLM agent, such as OpenClaw, earns its value by acting on a user's preferences and constraints across sessions, not just the current request. Yet today's agents keep what a user volunteers but rarely ask for what stays…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Bin Wu , Guanyun Zou , Bingbing Wang , Huan Zhao , Chuan Shi

Explainable AI (XAI) methods are commonly evaluated with functional metrics such as correctness, which computationally estimate how accurately an explanation reflects the model's reasoning. Higher correctness is assumed to produce better…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Gregor Baer , Chao Zhang , Isel Grau , Pieter Van Gorp

Large language models (LLMs) must often respond to highly ambiguous user requests. In such cases, the LLM's best response may be to ask a clarifying question to elicit more information. Existing LLMs often respond by presupposing a single…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Michael J. Q. Zhang , W. Bradley Knox , Eunsol Choi

Frontier coding agents solve complex tasks when given complete context but collapse when specifications are incomplete or ambiguous. The bottleneck is not raw capability, but judgment: knowing when to act autonomously and when to ask for…

A common problem for agents operating in real-world environments is that the response of an environment to their actions may be non-deterministic and observed through noise. This renders environmental state and progress towards completing a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-05-21 William E Bishop , Alice Li , Christopher Rawles , Oriana Riva

Prompt injection is the most critical vulnerability in deployed AI agents. Despite recent progress, we show that the prevailing defense paradigm (data-instruction separation) both fails to detect attacks that operate through contextual…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Sahar Abdelnabi , Eugene Bagdasarian

This paper addresses the problem of both actively searching and tracking multiple unknown dynamic objects in a known environment with multiple cooperative autonomous agents with partial observability. The tracking of a target ends when the…

Humans often specify tasks incompletely, so assistants must know when and how to ask clarifying questions. However, effective clarification remains challenging in software engineering tasks as not all missing information is equally…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Sanidhya Vijayvargiya , Vijay Viswanathan , Graham Neubig

Large language models (LLMs) often respond even when prompts omit critical details or include misleading information, leading to hallucinations or reinforced misconceptions. We study how to evaluate and improve LLMs' ability to decide when…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Jiale Zhao , Ke Fang , Lu Cheng

During the first step of practical reasoning, i.e. deliberation or goals selection, an intelligent agent generates a set of pursuable goals and then selects which of them he commits to achieve. Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-09-15 Mariela Morveli-Espinoza , Cesar Augusto Tacla , Henrique Jasinski

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a range of text-generation tasks. However, LLMs still struggle with problems requiring multi-step decision-making and environmental feedback, such as online…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Zhenfang Chen , Delin Chen , Rui Sun , Wenjun Liu , Chuang Gan

Large language model (LLM) agents perform strongly on short- and mid-horizon tasks, but often break down on long-horizon tasks that require extended, interdependent action sequences. Despite rapid progress in agentic systems, these…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Xinyu Jessica Wang , Haoyue Bai , Yiyou Sun , Haorui Wang , Shuibai Zhang , Wenjie Hu , Mya Schroder , Bilge Mutlu , Dawn Song , Robert D Nowak

Coding agents are rapidly changing the landscape of software development, moving from inline completion to autonomous systems that edit repositories, open pull requests, respond to issues, and run scheduled or webhook triggered routines…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Nghi D. Q. Bui , Georgios Evangelopoulos

Deep research agents extend the role of search engines from retrieving keyword-matched pages to synthesizing knowledge, fundamentally changing how humans interact with information. However, frontier systems remain proprietary, while…

The prevailing assumption in agent orchestration is that more context is better. We test this on multi-agent software design across 10 tasks, 7 context-injection conditions, and over 2,700 runs, and find a crossover effect: the same…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Saranyan Vigraham

Large language models can perform well on many isolated tasks, yet they continue to struggle on multi-turn, long-horizon agentic problems that require skills such as planning, state tracking, and long context processing. In this work, we…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Amin Rakhsha , Thomas Hehn , Pietro Mazzaglia , Fabio Valerio Massoli , Arash Behboodi , Tribhuvanesh Orekondy