Skip to content

One Readout, Many Repairs: Diffusion-Guided Hierarchical Search for Tool-Agent Repair

Xiang Xia Cheng Yan Fan Xu Zhijun Fan Shuyuan Zhang Wuyang Zhang
Sep 2026
Artificial Intelligence Natural Language Processing

Abstract

Tool agents use large language models to act through external tools, yet successfully executed calls can still leave user requests unfulfilled. Tool-agent repair seeks alternative call sequences that execute successfully and fulfill the original requests. However, repair requires exploring both operation choices and their concrete realizations, making complete-sequence regeneration costly. Moreover, regeneration repeats operation selection even when failure arises from how those operations are realized. The resulting challenge is to reduce this repetition while preserving exploration of alternative operations and realizations. Therefore, we formulate repair as hierarchical search over operation supports, which we introduce as sets of permitted operation types that define reusable search regions for concrete tool-call sequences. We propose ReCommit, a training-free, diffusion-guided framework for improving tool-agent failure recovery while reducing repair computation. ReCommit amortizes operation-level proposal computation across repair trials by reusing operation-type scores from a single parallel readout of a masked diffusion language model. These scores guide search across supports, while realization search explores alternative entity bindings, arguments, and action composition within each support. Experiments on real failures across four enterprise services in the Agent-Diff benchmark show 75.9\% and 63.2\% relative recovery gains with 61.3\% and 51.3\% reductions in mean full-budget repair time at repair budgets $B=3$ and $B=13$, respectively, over the strongest evaluated 8B comparison method. ReCommit achieves a favorable recovery--cost trade-off, including in comparisons with the evaluated 32B models.

View source

Similar papers

#artificial intelligence Conference Open access Jun 2018

Gibson Env: Real-World Perception for Embodied Agents

This paper investigates developing real-world perception for active agents, proposes Gibson Environment for this purpose, and showcases a set of perceptual tasks learned therein.

F. Xia, Amir Zamir, Zhi-Yang He et al. · 1,069 citations · ⚡112
#computer vision Review Sep 2017

Agile Software Development Methods: Review and Analysis

This publication proposes a definition and a classification of agile software development approaches and analyses ten software development methods that can be characterized as being "agile" against the defined criterion.

P. Abrahamsson, O. Salo, Jussi Ronkainen et al. · 727 citations · ⚡54
#computer vision Open access Jul 2017

What happens when software developers are (un)happy

Consequences of happiness and unhappiness that are beneficial and detrimental for developers' mental well-being, the software development process, and the produced artifacts are found.

D. Graziotin, Fabian Fagerholm, Xiaofeng Wang et al. · 236 citations · ⚡13
#computer vision Open access Oct 2004

Mobile-D: an agile approach for mobile application development

The Mobile-D approach is briefly outlined here and the experiences gained from four case studies are discussed, which helped develop an agile development approach for mobile application development.

P. Abrahamsson, Antti Hanhineva, H. Hulkko et al. · 225 citations · ⚡18
#artificial intelligence Open access May 2023

Evaluating the Performance of Large Language Models on GAOKAO Benchmark

GAOKAO-Bench is introduced, an intuitive benchmark that employs questions from the Chinese GAOKAO examination as test samples, including both subjective and objective questions that contribute a robust evaluation benchmark for future large language models and offers valuable insights into the advantages and limitations...

Xiaotian Zhang, Chun-yan Li, Yi Zong et al. · 216 citations · ⚡17
#computer vision Open access Mar 2014

Happy software developers solve problems better: psychological measurements in empirical software engineering

A study with 42 participants investigates the relationship between the affective states, creativity, and analytical problem-solving skills of software developers and offers support for the claim that happy developers are indeed better problem solvers in terms of their analytical abilities.

D. Graziotin, Xiaofeng Wang, P. Abrahamsson · 216 citations · ⚡13

Related blog posts

We use cookies to run the site and, with your consent, for analytics and to show ads. See our Cookie Policy.