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Ning-Hao Liu

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Preprint Aug 2026

Recursive Synthesis for Long-Horizon Terminal Tasks

High-quality long-horizon training data for terminal agents is expensive to produce, often costing hundreds to thousands of dollars per task, because each task must keep the instruction, environment, reference solution, and verifier mutually consistent. Human authoring does not scale, and direct generation with large language models (LLMs) often breaks these dependencies. We present Recursive Synthetic Terminal Tasks (RST), a recursive verified synthesis framework for constructing long-horizon terminal-agent tasks at scale. Starting from verified seed tasks, RST extends the reference solution, realigns the verifier and instruction to the new workflow, validates the result in a fresh sandbox, and reuses accepted tasks as seeds for subsequent rounds. Across fifteen recursive rounds, RST produces 37,484 synthesized terminal-agent tasks at roughly $0.05 per task. Task difficulty increases substantially over rounds: the median reference solution grows from 67 to 374 lines, the median number of executed commands grows from 40 to 244, and DeepSeek-V4-Pro pass@4 drops from 90% at R1 to 2.5% at R15. To demonstrate training utility, we collect rejection-sampled Qwen3.5 trajectories on the synthesized tasks and use them for supervised fine-tuning. Fine-tuning on these trajectories improves Qwen3.5-27B and Qwen3.5-122B-A10B by up to 10 points on Terminal-Bench 2, Terminal-Bench Hard, and Long-Horizon Terminal Bench, while agentic PPO lifts Qwen3.5-27B to 49.44%, 32.00%, and 22.07% on the three benchmarks, corresponding to relative gains of 20.0%, 41.2%, and 21.9% over the base model. Moreover, after 15 rounds, the recursion shows no ceiling: synthesis yield and validation rates remain stable as difficulty keeps climbing, indicating that the process can continue well beyond the scale reported here.

Zhongzhi Li, Yucheng Shi, Zongxia Li et al. · 5 citations
Preprint Aug 2026

SkillEval: Decomposing Agent Skill Quality into Interpretable Signals

Agent skills provide reusable procedural knowledge that helps agents solve specialized tasks. As their use expands, evaluating skill quality becomes increasingly important. Existing evaluations often measure skill quality by testing whether a skill improves performance on specific downstream tasks. However, a reusable skill may apply to multiple task scenarios. Downstream evaluation mainly reflects the compatibility between a skill and the evaluated task, provides only a partial view of skill quality, and does not identify which aspect of the skill should be improved. We find that general properties of the \texttt{SKILL.md} document play an important role in skill quality. To evaluate these properties, we propose \textbf{SkillEval}, an interpretable framework for document-level skill evaluation. SkillEval evaluates each property using a fixed and inspectable scoring direction, producing interpretable scores. It further measures and reduces the influence of unrelated document features, such as length and formatting, so that each score captures its intended semantic property more specifically. Specifically, SkillEval learns an interpretable direction for each quality property from controlled positive--negative skill pairs in the hidden representation space of the model, and scores a new skill by projecting its representation onto these fixed directions. We use SkillEval to evaluate skills in controlled quality tests and show that SkillEval reliably distinguishes skills of different quality. In addition, SkillEval scores closely reflect downstream task performance, providing an early indication of whether a skill is likely to help an agent complete a task. We further explore SkillEval for diagnosing weaknesses in skill documents and guiding targeted revisions. The revised skills improve the targeted properties and achieve higher pass rates on downstream tasks.

Jia-Hui Han, Qinuo Li, Ziheng Peng et al. · 0 citations
Jul 2026

Long-Horizon-Terminal-Bench: Testing the Limits of Agents on Long-Horizon Terminal Tasks with Dense Reward-Based Grading

This work introduces Long-Horizon-Terminal-Bench, a terminal benchmark of 46 long-horizon tasks spanning nine categories, including experiment reproduction, software engineering, multimodal analysis, interactive games, and scientific computing, and analyzes failure modes and error patterns to support future progress on long-horizon terminal agents.

Zongxia Li, Zhongzhi Li, Yucheng Shi et al. · 11 citations · ⚡2
Jul 2026

SymBOL: A General-Purpose Symbolic Learner for Scientific Discovery Using Bayesian Optimization-Enhanced Large Language Models.

SymBOL accurately recovers governing equations and provides interpretable pathways for equation discovery when applied to real-world systems in materials science and epidemiology, and underscores the potential of SymBOL for advancing scientific discovery.

Jiaxu Cui, Qifei Li, Wei-Ting Liu et al. · 0 citations

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