As foundation models evolve from information generation to digital work execution, agents are increasingly capable of completing complex tasks across tools, applications, and workflows. However, existing research lacks a unified perspective on how agents reliably accomplish delegated work. To address this gap, we present a work-centric, system-level perspective that views work agents as systems combining foundation models and runtime harnesses to execute tasks in stateful workspaces and deliver verifiable outcomes. We introduce two complementary dimensions, work persistence and work openness, to characterize working conditions, and classify digital work into five forms according to task scope and organization. Building on this framework, we identify five core capability families required for reliable work execution and examine approaches to model optimization, harness optimization, and their joint optimization. We further analyze existing evaluation methods and metrics from the perspective of work outcomes. Finally, we discuss future research directions, including sustained work delegation, adaptation to open environments, and the interaction between work execution and capability improvement. This paper provides a unified framework for understanding, optimizing, and evaluating work agents, supporting the development of systems capable of delivering reliable, verifiable, and practically valuable work outcomes.
With the advancement of vision-language models, web automation has made significant progress. However, deploying autonomous agents in real-world settings remains challenging, primarily due to site heterogeneity, where generalist models lack domain-specific priors for diverse interfaces, and long-horizon instability, characterized by the accumulation of decision drift over extended interactions. To address these challenges, we introduce ColorBrowserAgent (Complex Long-Horizon Browser Agent), a knowledge-evolving agent for robust web automation. Our approach addresses these challenges through two synergistic mechanisms: human-in-the-loop knowledge adaptation that transforms sparse human feedback into reusable domain knowledge, and knowledge-aligned progressive summarization that stabilizes long interactions through memory compression. Extensive experiments on WebArena, WebChoreArena and industrial deployment show that ColorBrowserAgent consistently outperforms strong baselines. It achieves a state-of-the-art success rate of 71.2% on WebArena and maintains 47.4% performance under zero-shot transfer setting on WebChoreArena. In commercial deployment, it improves user satisfaction by 19.3% relatively, verifying its robustness in real-world scenarios.
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track) · 2026 · 正式发表
Lingyue Fu, Hao Guan, Bolun Zhang, Haowei Yuan, Yaoming Zhu, Lin Qiu, ZongYu Wang Meituan, Xuezhi Cao Meituan 等 12 位作者
The evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) for software engineering has shifted towards complex, repository-level tasks. However, existing benchmarks predominantly rely on coarse-grained pass rates that treat programming proficiency as a monolithic capability, obscuring specific cognitive bottlenecks. Furthermore, the static nature of these benchmarks renders them vulnerable to data contamination and performance saturation. To address these limitations, we introduce CoreCodeBench, a configurable repository-level benchmark designed to dissect coding capabilities through atomized tasks. Leveraging our automated framework, CorePipe, we extract and transform Python repositories into a comprehensive suite of tasks that isolate distinct cognitive demands within identical code contexts. Unlike static evaluations, CoreCodeBench supports controllable difficulty scaling to prevent saturation and ensures superior data quality. It achieves a 78.55% validity yield, significantly surpassing the 31.7% retention rate of SWE-bench-Verified. Extensive experiments with state-of-the-art LLMs reveal a significant capability misalignment, evidenced by distinct ranking shifts across cognitive dimensions. This indicates that coding proficiency is non-monolithic, as strength in one aspect does not necessarily translate to others. These findings underscore the necessity of our fine-grained taxonomy in diagnosing model deficiencies and offer a sustainable, rigorous framework for evolving code intelligence. Code of CorePipe framework and data of CoreCodeBench are available in https://github.com/AGI-Eval-Official/CoreCodeBench and https://huggingface.co/collections/tubehhh/corecodebench.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Zhiyuan Yao Zhejiang University, Zishan Xu, Yifu Guo, Zhiguang Han, Cheng Yang Tencent Hunyuan, Shuo Zhang Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Weinan Zhang Shanghai Jiaotong University, Xingshan Zeng Noah's Ark Lab, Huawei Technologies Ltd. 等 9 位作者
With the rise of the Agent Web and Model Context Protocol (MCP), the agent ecosystem is evolving into an open collaborative network, exponentially increasing accessible tools. However, current architectures face severe scalability and generality bottlenecks. To address this, we propose ACE-Router, a pipeline for training history-aware routers to empower precise navigation in large-scale ecosystems. By leveraging a dependency-rich candidate Graph to synthesize multi-turn trajectories, we effectively train routers with dynamic context understanding to create the plug-and-play Light Routing Agent. Experiments on the real-world benchmarks MCP-Universe and MCP-Mark demonstrate superior performance. Notably, ACE-Router exhibits critical properties for the future Agent Web: it not only generalizes to multi-agent collaboration with minimal adaptation but also maintains exceptional robustness against noise and scales effectively to massive candidate spaces. These findings provide a strong empirical foundation for universal orchestration in open-ended ecosystems.Our code is available at https://github.com/euyis1019/ACE-Router.
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cs.CL · cs.MA
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Yunjia Xi Shanghai Jiaotong University, Jianghao Lin Shanghai Jiaotong University, Yongzhao Xiao, Zheli Zhou, Rong Shan Shanghai Jiaotong University, Te Gao, Jiachen Zhu, Weiwen Liu Shanghai Jiao Tong University 等 10 位作者
The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly revolutionized web search. The emergence of LLM-based Search Agents marks a pivotal shift towards deeper, dynamic, autonomous information seeking. These agents can comprehend user intentions and environment context and execute multi-turn retrieval with dynamic planning, extending search capabilities far beyond the web. Leading examples like OpenAI’s Deep Research highlight their potential for deep information mining and real-world applications. This survey provides the first systematic analysis of search agents. We comprehensively analyze and categorize existing works from the perspectives of architecture, optimization, application, and evaluation, ultimately identifying critical open challenges and outlining promising future research directions in this rapidly evolving field.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Kangning Zhang, Weiwen Liu Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Wenxiang Jiao, Kounianhua Du Shanghai Jiaotong University, Yuan Lu Xiaohongshu, Weinan Zhang Shanghai Jiaotong University, Yong Yu Shanghai Jiaotong University
Augmenting Large Language Models (LLMs) with external tools enables them to execute complex, multi-step tasks. However, tool learning is hampered by the static synthetic data pipelines, where data generation and model training are executed as two separate, non-interactive processes. This approach fails to focus on the model’s specific weaknesses adaptively and allows noisy labels to persist, degrading training efficiency. We introduce LoopTool, a fully automated, model-aware data evolution framework that closes this loop by tightly integrating data synthesis and model training. LoopTool iteratively evolves both the data and the model through three synergistic modules: (1) Greedy Capability Probing (GCP) diagnoses the model’s mastered and failed capabilities; (2) Judgement-Guided Label Verification (JGLV) uses an open-source judge model to find and correct annotation errors, progressively purifying the dataset; and (3) Error-Driven Data Expansion (EDDE) generates new, challenging samples based on identified failures. This closed-loop process is tightly integrated with reinforcement learning training and operates within a cost-efficient, open-source ecosystem, thereby eliminating reliance on costly APIs. Experiments show that LoopTool-8B significantly surpasses its 32B data generator and achieves new state-of-the-art results on the BFCL-v3 and ACEBench benchmarks for its scale. Our work demonstrates that closed-loop, self-refining data pipelines can dramatically enhance the tool-use capabilities of LLMs.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
AI 速览：ToolACE提出一种自动化的智能体流水线，用于生成准确、复杂且多样的工具学习数据，以提升大语言模型的函数调用能力。
Function calling significantly extends the application boundary of large language models, where high-quality and diverse training data is critical for unlocking this capability. However, real function-calling data is quite challenging to collect and annotate, while synthetic data generated by existing pipelines tends to lack coverage and accuracy. In this paper, we present ToolACE, an automatic agentic pipeline designed to generate accurate, complex, and diverse tool-learning data. ToolACE leverages a novel self-evolution synthesis process to curate a comprehensive API pool of 26,507 diverse APIs. Dialogs are further generated through the interplay among multiple agents, guided by a formalized thinking process. To ensure data accuracy, we implement a dual-layer verification system combining rule-based and model-based checks. We demonstrate that models trained on our synthesized data, even with only 8B parameters, achieve state-of-the-art performance on the Berkeley Function-Calling Leaderboard, rivaling the latest GPT-4 models. Our model and a subset of the data are publicly available at https://huggingface.co/Team-ACE.