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Apr 30

Synthesizing Multi-Agent Harnesses for Vulnerability Discovery

LLM agents have begun to find real security vulnerabilities that human auditors and automated fuzzers missed for decades, in source-available targets where the analyst can build and instrument the code. In practice the work is split among several agents, wired together by a harness: the program that fixes which roles exist, how they pass information, which tools each may call, and how retries are coordinated. When the language model is held fixed, changing only the harness can still change success rates by several-fold on public agent benchmarks, yet most harnesses are written by hand; recent harness optimizers each search only a narrow slice of the design space and rely on coarse pass/fail feedback that gives no diagnostic signal about why a trial failed. AgentFlow addresses both limitations with a typed graph DSL whose search space jointly covers agent roles, prompts, tools, communication topology, and coordination protocol, paired with a feedback-driven outer loop that reads runtime signals from the target program itself to diagnose which part of the harness caused the failure and rewrite it accordingly. We evaluate AgentFlow on TerminalBench-2 with Claude Opus 4.6 and on Google Chrome with Kimi K2.5. AgentFlow reaches 84.3% on TerminalBench-2, the highest score in the public leaderboard snapshot we evaluate against, and discovers ten previously unknown zero-day vulnerabilities in Google Chrome, including two Critical sandbox-escape vulnerabilities (CVE-2026-5280 and CVE-2026-6297).

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 21

Endless Terminals: Scaling RL Environments for Terminal Agents

Environments are the bottleneck for self-improving agents. Current terminal benchmarks were built for evaluation, not training; reinforcement learning requires a scalable pipeline, not just a dataset. We introduce Endless Terminals, a fully autonomous pipeline that procedurally generates terminal-use tasks without human annotation. The pipeline has four stages: generating diverse task descriptions, building and validating containerized environments, producing completion tests, and filtering for solvability. From this pipeline we obtain 3255 tasks spanning file operations, log management, data processing, scripting, and database operations. We train agents using vanilla PPO with binary episode level rewards and a minimal interaction loop: no retrieval, multi-agent coordination, or specialized tools. Despite this simplicity, models trained on Endless Terminals show substantial gains: on our held-out dev set, Llama-3.2-3B improves from 4.0% to 18.2%, Qwen2.5-7B from 10.7% to 53.3%, and Qwen3-8B-openthinker-sft from 42.6% to 59.0%. These improvements transfer to human-curated benchmarks: models trained on Endless Terminals show substantial gains on held out human curated benchmarks: on TerminalBench 2.0, Llama-3.2-3B improves from 0.0% to 2.2%, Qwen2.5-7B from 2.2% to 3.4%, and Qwen3-8B-openthinker-sft from 1.1% to 6.7%, in each case outperforming alternative approaches including models with more complex agentic scaffolds. These results demonstrate that simple RL succeeds when environments scale.

A Self-Evolving Framework for Efficient Terminal Agents via Observational Context Compression

As model capabilities advance, research has increasingly shifted toward long-horizon, multi-turn terminal-centric agentic tasks, where raw environment feedback is often preserved in the interaction history to support future decisions. However, repeatedly retaining such feedback introduces substantial redundancy and causes cumulative token cost to grow quadratically with the number of steps, hindering long-horizon reasoning. Although observation compression can mitigate this issue, the heterogeneity of terminal environments makes heuristic-based or fixed-prompt methods difficult to generalize. We propose TACO, a plug-and-play, self-evolving Terminal Agent Compression framework that automatically discovers and refines compression rules from interaction trajectories for existing terminal agents. Experiments on TerminalBench (TB 1.0 and TB 2.0) and four additional terminal-related benchmarks (i.e., SWE-Bench Lite, CompileBench, DevEval, and CRUST-Bench) show that TACO consistently improves performance across mainstream agent frameworks and strong backbone models. With MiniMax-2.5, it improves performance on most benchmarks while reducing token overhead by around 10%. On TerminalBench, it brings consistent gains of 1%-4% across strong agentic models, and further improves accuracy by around 2%-3% under the same token budget. These results demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of self-evolving, task-aware compression for terminal agents.

How Well Do Agentic Skills Work in the Wild: Benchmarking LLM Skill Usage in Realistic Settings

Agent skills, which are reusable, domain-specific knowledge artifacts, have become a popular mechanism for extending LLM-based agents, yet formally benchmarking skill usage performance remains scarce. Existing skill benchmarking efforts focus on overly idealized conditions, where LLMs are directly provided with hand-crafted, narrowly-tailored task-specific skills for each task, whereas in many realistic settings, the LLM agent may have to search for and select relevant skills on its own, and even the closest matching skills may not be well-tailored for the task. In this paper, we conduct the first comprehensive study of skill utility under progressively challenging realistic settings, where agents must retrieve skills from a large collection of 34k real-world skills and may not have access to any hand-curated skills. Our findings reveal that the benefits of skills are fragile: performance gains degrade consistently as settings become more realistic, with pass rates approaching no-skill baselines in the most challenging scenarios. To narrow this gap, we study skill refinement strategies, including query-specific and query-agnostic approaches, and we show that query-specific refinement substantially recovers lost performance when the initial skills are of reasonable relevance and quality. We further demonstrate the generality of retrieval and refinement on Terminal-Bench 2.0, where they improve the pass rate of Claude Opus 4.6 from 57.7% to 65.5%. Our results, consistent across multiple models, highlight both the promise and the current limitations of skills for LLM-based agents. Our code is available at https://github.com/UCSB-NLP-Chang/Skill-Usage.

Agents Explore but Agents Ignore: LLMs Lack Environmental Curiosity

LLM-based agents are assumed to integrate environmental observations into their reasoning: discovering highly relevant but unexpected information should naturally lead to a model exploiting its own discoveries. We show that this assumption is false for current LLM-based agents, which struggle to reflect or react to unexpected information. Across three benchmarks (Terminal-Bench, SWE-Bench, AppWorld), we inject complete task solutions into the agent environments to deliberately expose a task's solution to a model. While agents discover these solutions on Terminal-Bench in 79-81% of runs, they interact, or exploit, them in only 37-50% of cases. This gap is starkest in AppWorld: agents see documentation stating that a command "returns the complete solution to this task" in over 90% of attempts but exploit this in fewer than 7% of trials. We show that agents lack what we call environmental curiosity: the capability to recognize and investigate unexpected but relevant observations in response to environmental stimuli. We identify three main factors influencing environmental curiosity: available tools in the agent scaffold, test-time compute, and training data distribution. Our findings identify configurations that maximize curiosity also achieve the best performance on the unmodified benchmarks. Yet even jointly optimized agents still ignore discovered solutions in the majority of trials: current agents use the environment to fetch expected information, but not to revise their strategy or maximally exploit useful stimuli.

Cohere Cohere
·
Apr 18 2

Let It Flow: Agentic Crafting on Rock and Roll, Building the ROME Model within an Open Agentic Learning Ecosystem

Agentic crafting requires LLMs to operate in real-world environments over multiple turns by taking actions, observing outcomes, and iteratively refining artifacts. Despite its importance, the open-source community lacks a principled, end-to-end ecosystem to streamline agent development. We introduce the Agentic Learning Ecosystem (ALE), a foundational infrastructure that optimizes the production pipeline for agent LLMs. ALE consists of three components: ROLL, a post-training framework for weight optimization; ROCK, a sandbox environment manager for trajectory generation; and iFlow CLI, an agent framework for efficient context engineering. We release ROME (ROME is Obviously an Agentic Model), an open-source agent grounded by ALE and trained on over one million trajectories. Our approach includes data composition protocols for synthesizing complex behaviors and a novel policy optimization algorithm, Interaction-based Policy Alignment (IPA), which assigns credit over semantic interaction chunks rather than individual tokens to improve long-horizon training stability. Empirically, we evaluate ROME within a structured setting and introduce Terminal Bench Pro, a benchmark with improved scale and contamination control. ROME demonstrates strong performance across benchmarks like SWE-bench Verified and Terminal Bench, proving the effectiveness of the ALE infrastructure.

alibaba-inc alibaba-inc
·
Dec 31, 2025 5

Combee: Scaling Prompt Learning for Self-Improving Language Model Agents

Recent advances in prompt learning allow large language model agents to acquire task-relevant knowledge from inference-time context without parameter changes. For example, existing methods (like ACE or GEPA) can learn system prompts to improve accuracy based on previous agent runs. However, these methods primarily focus on single-agent or low-parallelism settings. This fundamentally limits their ability to efficiently learn from a large set of collected agentic traces. It would be efficient and beneficial to run prompt learning in parallel to accommodate the growing trend of learning from many agentic traces or parallel agent executions. Yet without a principled strategy for scaling, current methods suffer from quality degradation with high parallelism. To improve both the efficiency and quality of prompt learning, we propose Combee, a novel framework to scale parallel prompt learning for self-improving agents. Combee speeds up learning and enables running many agents in parallel while learning from their aggregate traces without quality degradation. To achieve this, Combee leverages parallel scans and employs an augmented shuffle mechanism; Combee also introduces a dynamic batch size controller to balance quality and delay. Evaluations on AppWorld, Terminal-Bench, Formula, and FiNER demonstrate that Combee achieves up to 17x speedup over previous methods with comparable or better accuracy and equivalent cost.

Scaling Test-Time Compute for Agentic Coding

Test-time scaling has become a powerful way to improve large language models. However, existing methods are best suited to short, bounded outputs that can be directly compared, ranked or refined. Long-horizon coding agents violate this premise: each attempt produces an extended trajectory of actions, observations, errors, and partial progress taken by the agent. In this setting, the main challenge is no longer generating more attempts, but representing prior experience in a form that can be effectively selected from and reused. We propose a test-time scaling framework for agentic coding based on compact representations of rollout trajectories. Our framework converts each rollout into a structured summary that preserves its salient hypotheses, progress, and failure modes while discarding low-signal trace details. This representation enables two complementary forms of inference-time scaling. For parallel scaling, we introduce Recursive Tournament Voting (RTV), which recursively narrows a population of rollout summaries through small-group comparisons. For sequential scaling, we adapt Parallel-Distill-Refine (PDR) to the agentic setting by conditioning new rollouts on summaries distilled from prior attempts. Our method consistently improves the performance of frontier coding agents across SWE-Bench Verified and Terminal-Bench v2.0. For example, by using our method Claude-4.5-Opus improves from 70.9% to 77.6% on SWE-Bench Verified (mini-SWE-agent) and 46.9% to 59.1% on Terminal-Bench v2.0 (Terminus 1). Our results suggest that test-time scaling for long-horizon agents is fundamentally a problem of representation, selection, and reuse.

facebook AI at Meta
·
Apr 15 2

CVE-Factory: Scaling Expert-Level Agentic Tasks for Code Security Vulnerability

Evaluating and improving the security capabilities of code agents requires high-quality, executable vulnerability tasks. However, existing works rely on costly, unscalable manual reproduction and suffer from outdated data distributions. To address these, we present CVE-Factory, the first multi-agent framework to achieve expert-level quality in automatically transforming sparse CVE metadata into fully executable agentic tasks. Cross-validation against human expert reproductions shows that CVE-Factory achieves 95\% solution correctness and 96\% environment fidelity, confirming its expert-level quality. It is also evaluated on the latest realistic vulnerabilities and achieves a 66.2\% verified success. This automation enables two downstream contributions. First, we construct LiveCVEBench, a continuously updated benchmark of 190 tasks spanning 14 languages and 153 repositories that captures emerging threats including AI-tooling vulnerabilities. Second, we synthesize over 1,000 executable training environments, the first large-scale scaling of agentic tasks in code security. Fine-tuned Qwen3-32B improves from 5.3\% to 35.8\% on LiveCVEBench, surpassing Claude 4.5 Sonnet, with gains generalizing to Terminal Bench (12.5\% to 31.3\%). We open-source CVE-Factory, LiveCVEBench, Abacus-cve (fine-tuned model), training dataset, and leaderboard. All resources are available at https://github.com/livecvebench/CVE-Factory .

  • 11 authors
·
Feb 2