Goodfire says its new ‘inside-out’ monitors catch rogue AI agents at a fraction of the cost
Goodfire just launched what it says is a cheaper way to keep AI agents in check: instead of paying a second AI to read everything…
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Natura’s $99 smart ring puts AI agents on your finger
Natura’s $99 Interface smart ring lets you summon AI agents with the press of a finger to complete tasks, capture thoughts, and control devices …
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Google is launching a one-stop Gemini agent for your work tasks
Google is launching a "universal" Gemini AI agent that can work across apps and devices in the background. The tool, announced as part of the…
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Cal AI’s 19-year-old founder just raised $10M for his new AI startup
Zach Yadegari, the teen co-founder of popular Cal AI calorie tracking app, has launched a new personal AI agent startup that competes with Instinct, Muse…
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Can you trust Meta’s Muse or OpenAI’s Dots to run your life?
My Decoder guest today is Hayden Field, The Verge’s senior AI reporter, and we’re discussing the new wave of consumer-friendly AI agents. If you’ve been…
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DeltaReplay: Task-Relative Memory Reuse for Mobile GUI Agents
Memory-augmented mobile GUI agents store successful execution trajectories and reuse them in later tasks, but a stored trajectory rarely matches a new task exactly. The new task may use different parameters, share only some of its steps with a stored trajectory, or have no relevant record in memory. Forcing the agent to use irrelevant memory can mislead it, whereas discarding memory that may still be useful deprives it of guidance from past experience. To address this dilemma, we propose DeltaReplay, a step-level memory reuse framework that decides how to use existing memory without modifying it. We observe that the reusable part of a stored record is determined not by the record itself but by its relation to the new task, mainly through two factors: page-level consistency and action-level generality. We therefore store execution trajectories as paths in a transition graph, whose nodes (pages) and edges (actions between pages) capture these two factors. At reuse time, the action on each edge is split into a task-independent operation and task-specific parameters. DeltaReplay then compares each recorded step with the new task and the current screen, and decides whether to follow it, execute it after replacing its parameters, or leave it to the base agent. On AndroidWorld and SPA-Bench, DeltaReplay improves the task success rate over a base agent with the same backbone by up to 10.3 and 25.0 percentage points, respectively. These results indicate that deciding at each step how to use retrieved memory lets agents benefit even from partially matching trajectories.
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Intervention anchors and scientific verification in synthetic vascular predictive representations
Complete orthogonal predictive coordinates do not by themselves bind a latent direction to a named intervention. We present a mathematical and synthetic audit motivated by vascular device-vessel suitcordance. Capacity-matched least-squares predictors were exactly equivalent under complete fixed output transforms, whereas an anchor-only observer recovered interpretations only within the span of known perturbation signatures. Six three-dimensional configurations across 64 seeds gave a maximum paired prediction discrepancy of 6.7e-15 but a median untransported edit error of 1.513. Coordinate transport removed that error. Noisy and weak anchors constrained calibration stability, and changing the representation basis required recalibration or verified transport. Across 256 additional fits in dimensions 3-24, prediction equivalence persisted within 4.0e-15. We then evaluated nine deliberate runnable fault classes across 64 seeds. All 576 faulty executions completed, but each violated at least one reconstruction, prediction, delivered-edit or scope contract; all 320 valid control records passed. Repeating a faulty implementation gave exact self-agreement despite error against the separately computed simulator expectation. For one omitted-direction defect, probe coverage followed its analytic law, and rank-aware abstention protected unsupported interpretations. Scalar-noise experiments exposed both missed weak faults and excessive rejection under narrow relative tolerances. These controls provide an executable separation of prediction, semantic support and scientific acceptance. They are synthetic numerical audits, not clinical validation, neural JEPA-Anything replication, agent learning or patient treatment-effect estimation.
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A 3D Characterization Framework for Intelligent Sequential Decision Making
Puzzles are widely used to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) systems for sequential decision making, yet approaches originating from different paradigms are rarely compared under unified conditions. To address this gap, we introduce a three-dimensional characterization framework that enables the analysts of AI methods by 1) projecting them to the Markov decision process (MDP) sequential decision making formalism, 2) degree of autonomy through human prior ranking of their designs and, 3) skill and computational cost. Using this framework, we analyze how representative graph-based, reinforcement learning, and large language model (LLM)-based approaches differ in their design choices and performance characteristics, instantiated respectively by Neurosolver, forward-backward reinforcement learning (FBRL), and automated thought-of-search (AutoToS), including a double-agent extension of thought-of-search (DA-ToS). The analysis relies on the Tower of Hanoi puzzle that provides a controlled benchmark with well-defined rules and scalable complexity, enabling consistent comparison across increasing problem sizes. The 3D characterization reveals that LLM-based methods, due to their weakly constrained action-space design, shift complexity from architecture to inference-time verification, leading to substantially higher memory and runtime costs than Neurosolver and FBRL.
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TRACE: Diagnosing Verifier Brittleness in Agentic Evaluation
Verifier scores now serve as both benchmark metrics and training rewards for large language model (LLM) agents, and a change in score is routinely read as a change in capability. It may instead reflect a change in the evaluation. We introduce TRACE, a protocol that turns a score change from a verdict into a testable diagnosis: it applies a targeted change to one part of an evaluation, compares paired runs, checks whether the agent's behavior changed, and rescores unchanged trajectories to test whether the scoring rule is responsible. In a controlled suite of 25 synthetic tasks, renaming tools lowers a scripted agent's score by 0.250 even though it performs exactly the same operations; restoring the original names at scoring time closes the entire gap, while the same mutation exposes a genuine behavioral failure in a second agent. On public τ^2-bench tasks with four LLM agents, an initial 30-task study finds mixed reward changes whose one clear effect does not replicate. In a larger follow-up on 88 new tasks with repeated runs per condition, renaming tools or reformatting tool outputs leaves reward unchanged to within 0.10 for seven of eight agent-change pairs, whereas tool names that deliberately mislead lower every agent's reward by 0.20-0.44, showing that the setup can detect real effects. Identical reruns flip 15-36% of task outcomes, so single-run comparisons cannot separate presentation effects from run-to-run variation. Two frontier LLM judges give consistent verdicts when a fixed trajectory is presented differently, yet disagree with each other on 57% of the same records, largely because one grades procedure rather than outcome. TRACE thus separates what a score change says about the agent from what it says about the measurement.
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Constrained Command-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning with Bandit Strategy Selection in Real-Time Strategy Games
Deep reinforcement learning agents reach strong performance in real-time strategy games but can be brittle against opponents outside their training distribution. Separating strategic command selection from learned unit control allows different strategies to be selected for different opponents while reusing the same execution policy. This requires an executor that can follow different commands and measurable criteria for assessing whether it does so. We introduce a constrained command-conditioned Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) policy, the executor, for MicroRTS, a real-time strategy environment. Discrete commands specify strategic objectives and behavioral requirements for economy, army composition, military posture, and worker policy over multiple environment steps; the executor determines the unit-level actions used to fulfill them. A Thompson-sampling bandit acts as the strategist, selecting command tuples from an estimate of the opponent's strategy built from in-game observations rather than opponent identity. In a controlled comparison with a flat PPO baseline trained with the same architecture, budget, curriculum and self-play league, the strategist-executor system wins significantly more often against three of the four strongest opponents on a training map, including the two strongest held-out ones (0.55 to 0.97 and 0.01 to 0.34), with no significant difference against the others.
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Harness Evolution Hits a Ceiling: When Weight Training Should Begin
Improving a long-horizon LLM agent means evolving the harness around a frozen model or training its weights. We let a self-evolving harness make the system stronger first, then cross seed and evolved harnesses with base and trained weights to learn which gains the trained model keeps and which still need the runtime. We show that the right lever can be read off the agent's failure composition: labelling failed trajectories by the first signal that fires separates process failures (blocked calls, loops, exhausted step budgets) from content failures (a delivered plan that is poor). Harness evolution repairs the former, the behaviour it instils can be trained into the weights, and content failures are what weight training is for. On DeepPlanning, a self-evolving harness loop lifts the held-out score of Qwen3.5-4B from 0.16 to 0.30 and of Qwen3.5-9B from 0.32 to 0.44; for 4B, held-out delivery rises from 55% to 90% while content failures are left for the weights. LoRA adapters trained on evolved-harness trajectories internalise the gain: under the original harness they add +0.13 on held-out tasks for both sizes; on 4B they stack with the harness to more than double the held-out score, and on 9B the adapter alone matches the full evolution line, cutting content failures from a quarter of trajectories to one in twenty. A placebo adapter trained on answer-shuffled trajectories falls below the base model. The loop transfers to WebArena-Lite (+0.09 on 117 unseen tasks), where the gain lives in what the model sees and adapters do not add to it. The result is a diagnose-then-intervene rule applied twice: read the failure composition to choose between harness and weights, then read what the accepted edits changed to decide which gains to train in. Scores are four-rollout means against fresh anchors, same-night except where marked, across eight models from six families and two benchmarks.
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Evidence-Traceable Dynamic Interviewer Architecture for Expertise-Adaptive Qualitative Interviews Using Local LLMs
Automated interviewers and conversational agents are increasingly used in research, recruitment, customer service, and education. However, many existing systems rely on fixed question sequences and provide limited context-based personalization without considering participants' knowledge, which can lead to repetitive or irrelevant follow-up questions. Therefore, there is a need for an adaptive interviewing system that can adjust question depth while maintaining conversational continuity and semantic progression. To address this, an Evidence-Traceable Dynamic Interviewer Architecture is presented using a locally hosted Large Language Model (LLM), with the interview continuously adapted throughout the entire conversation based on the participant's responses and evolving context. The interviewer profiles participants' expertise in real time to generate knowledge-appropriate questions, well-articulated responses, and smooth transition messages that support conversational continuity. A five-module prompt-driven architecture and persistent interview-state record support these functions. The interviewer was evaluated with 246 participants. Expertise Profiling module (M3) showed 78.9% exact agreement with independently reported participant expertise, with a weighted Cohen's K of 0.80. Generate Iterative Questions module (M4) showed a strong expertise-complexity association (p=.79, p<.001), and participants reported high relevance (mean 4.41), engagement (mean 4.32), and satisfaction (mean 4.38), providing evidence that the architecture's adaptive components operated consistently with their intended functions while participants reported a positive interview experience.
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SkillContrast: Difference-Guided Text Selection for Agent Skill Reranking
Similar agent skills can share instructions but differ in their conditions of use. Query-based text selection may retain shared instructions and omit these distinctions. We introduce SkillContrast, a training-free selector that compares retrieved skills and retains their differing text with local context for a pretrained reranker. On 1,235 requests from SameCapRisk-Bench, it yields 54-72 more clean hits (requests that retrieve a helpful skill without its marked risky sibling) than TF-IDF query selection at identical per-candidate input lengths, across 2 retrievers and 2 reranker sizes. Length-matched component replacements identify differing text as the main contributor in the primary setting, with smaller, mixed context effects. Relative to full skill bodies, SkillContrast uses 51.1-58.8% fewer model-input tokens, with 10-18 fewer clean hits at 0.6B and matching or higher observed clean-hit counts at 4B. Candidate-relative differences thus complement query relevance in selecting compact reranking inputs.
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One Skill Too Many: How Co-Installed Skills Conflict in Coding Agents
Coding agents are extended with agent skills, directories whose SKILL.md tells the model when and how to perform a task. Because skills come from independent sources (teams, developers, plugins, copied collections), an installed skill can be co-installed with a similar skill doing the same job, and the model picks between them by name and description alone. In a conflict, the installed skill loses core functions (e.g., a ban on touching git) because the similar skill runs instead or changes what it does. The task still passes, so benchmarks that check only task completion miss such cases. We present the first empirical study of such conflicts. From snapshots of 20,947 repositories, we mine 822,109 candidate similar-skill pairs, have an LLM judge a stratified sample of 3,754, and run 312 confirmed pairs on three models (6,368 runs, 169,294 tool calls, 542 agent-hours). We report five findings. (1) Conflict-prone skills are common: nearly one in four installed skills is co-installed with one that does the same job, and 37% of judged skills sit inside copied collections. (2) Most such pairs involve normative skills, then capability skills. (3) Without lowering task completion, a similar skill takes one in five runs from the installed skill, and runs that open the similar skill first lose over a third of the exclusive core functions that only the installed skill fulfills. (4) Install location decides which skill runs, listing order barely matters, and the final reply names the skill used in only 0.9% of substituted runs. (5) Conflicts are decided at the first skill read, almost always before any file is changed, and a pre-tool hook at that read restores fidelity on exclusive core functions to the level of runs that open the installed skill first. Benchmarks should thus score exclusive core functions, and platforms should guard the first read and show which skill ran.
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AgentEvolver: System-Wide Self-Evolution Through Task Execution
An agent can complete a task without improving how it works. Turning task experience into reusable capability requires connecting the changed component to its evaluation and subsequent use. We present AgentEvolver, a system for developing capabilities during task execution while keeping the foundation model fixed. Eight entity families expose reusable operations, methods, agents, control flow, interfaces, and supporting state to revision through a common versioned lifecycle. A shared Runtime coordinates ongoing work, while persistent planning and recoverable context preserve task direction and supporting evidence. We evaluate task outcomes on SWE-bench Pro Public and examine capability changes in six application cases. The team reports an 82.08\% resolution rate with evolution, exceeding its reported baseline without evolution. The cases show retained capabilities entering later website, game, and research work, while also documenting incomplete objectives and an unsuccessful strategy. These findings distinguish improvement in a reusable component from success on the final task. AgentEvolver provides a concrete basis for studying capability accumulation through execution; independent-task transfer and total development cost remain open questions.
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Error-Propagation Modeling for Failure Attribution in LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems
LLM-based multi-agent systems (MASs) are increasingly used to solve complex tasks through coordinated reasoning, tool use, and interaction with external resources. However, attributing failures in such systems remains challenging because the observed outcome often does not directly reveal the error responsible for the failed execution. In this work, the attribution target is the decisive error, defined as the agent--step pair whose correction would recover the failed execution. Existing approaches largely identify suspicious steps without explicitly modeling how errors propagate across interactions or persist in unresolved loops, making decisive errors difficult to distinguish from downstream failure symptoms. We propose Error-Propagation Modeling for Failure Attribution (EMFA). EMFA constructs a structured representation of the failed trajectory, models both cascading propagation and persistent interaction loops, and uses propagation-aware candidate screening followed by counterfactual verification to identify the decisive agent--step pair. On the Who\&When benchmark, EMFA achieves state-of-the-art step-level attribution accuracy and remains competitive at the agent level. It improves the previous best step-level results by 3.45 and 4.40 percentage points on the Hand-Crafted and Algorithm-Generated subsets, respectively.
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Runnable Commit Untangling for Coding Agents
Coding agents produce large, tangled patches that mix multiple development purposes, making the code hard to review and maintain. Commit untangling offers the promise of organizing such large patches into untangled, manageable commits. This paper emphasizes two important limitations in existing commit untangling studies. First, they do not consider that untangled commits are ordered and should leave the code runnable. In practice, maintainers are unlikely to accept commits that prevent the code from running. Second, existing studies claim that commit untangling helps software maintenance. However, they conduct syntactic comparisons between the untangled commits and developers' original commits without directly showing the claimed maintenance benefits. To address these gaps, this paper makes two novel contributions: (1) RucTangle, the first agentic method that untangles commits while keeping the code runnable after each commit; and (2) TangleEval, the first evaluation framework that quantifies how untangled, manageable commit histories help coding agents repair bugs. We compare RucTangle against four untangling methods on 131 agent-generated patches. All histories produced by RucTangle are runnable, while baselines produce 20.6%-37.4% unrunnable commit histories. We further collect 453 agent-generated patches that introduce regressions (i.e., causing previously passing tests to fail) and ask two other coding agents to repair regressions. Augmenting agent context with RucTangle-produced histories yields 5.2% absolute improvement in pass@1. We also analyze agent trajectories to learn how they use untangled commits to navigate and fix bugs. Our findings demonstrate the value of adopting established software engineering practices in the era of coding agents, which broaden the future research agenda: how can agents actively use software history to make better development decisions?
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