Skip to content
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access

Elastic Horizon: Discovering the Effective Interaction Frontier in Agentic Reinforcement Learning

Gangyi Zhang Junjie Meng Letian Zhang Wei Wu Yang Zheng Dong Wang Yang Liu Guanjun Jiang Chongming Gao
Sep 2026
Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Scaling the interaction horizon-the maximum number of environment interactions per episode-improves LLM agents on long-horizon tasks, and curriculum-based methods that progressively expand the horizon outperform fixed-horizon alternatives. However, existing schedules are open-loop: they monotonically increase the horizon until a manually specified maximum, with no mechanism to detect when further expansion stops helping. We propose the effective interaction frontier hypothesis: a dynamic boundary beyond which additional interactions yield diminishing returns while cost grows linearly. We then introduce Elastic Horizon, a closed-loop controller that tracks this boundary via the 90th percentile of successful trajectory lengths. On AppWorld and BFCL, fixed-horizon sweeps reveal clear saturation plateaus; Elastic Horizon stabilizes the horizon inside the saturation band from both under- and over-capacity initializations, attains the best success rates across 7B and 14B backbones, and saves up to 25% of per-step trajectory tokens. Our work shifts the paradigm from how to scale interaction horizons to when to stop scaling.

View source

Similar papers

#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 of such models.

Xiaotian Zhang, Chun-yan Li, Yi Zong et al. · 216 citations · ⚡17
#artificial intelligence Open access Jul 2024

Gender, Race, and Intersectional Bias in Resume Screening via Language Model Retrieval

This work investigates the possibilities of using LLMs in a resume screening setting via a document retrieval framework that simulates job candidate selection and finds that the MTEs are biased, significantly favoring White-associated names in 85% of cases and female-associated names in only 11.1% of cases.

Kyra Wilson, Aylin Caliskan · 131 citations · ⚡8

PRISM: Self-Pruning Intrinsic Selection Method for Training-Free Multimodal Data Selection

Empirically, PRISM reduces the end-to-end time for data selection and model tuning to just 30% of conventional pipelines, and achieves this efficiency while simultaneously enhancing performance, surpassing models fine-tuned on the full dataset across eight multimodal and three language understanding benchmarks.

Jinhe Bi, Yifan Wang, Danqi Yan et al. · 73 citations · ⚡4
#artificial intelligence Conference Open access Apr 2020

ECCOLA - a Method for Implementing Ethically Aligned AI Systems

The method, ECCOLA, is presented, which aims at making the high-level AI ethics principles more practical, making it possible for developers to more easily implement them in practice.

Ville Vakkuri, Kai-Kristian Kemell, P. Abrahamsson · 64 citations · ⚡6

Let the Flows Tell: Solving Graph Combinatorial Optimization Problems with GFlowNets

This paper designs Markov decision processes (MDPs) for different combinatorial problems and proposes to train conditional GFlowNets to sample from the solution space and demonstrates that GFlowNet policies can efficiently find high-quality solutions.

Dinghuai Zhang, H. Dai, Esmeralda S. Whitammer et al. · 59 citations · ⚡8

Ethically Aligned Design of Autonomous Systems: Industry viewpoint and an empirical study

An empirical study on the current state of practice in artificial intelligence ethics is conducted by means of a multiple case study of five case companies, which indicates a gap between research and practice in the area.

Ville Vakkuri, Kai-Kristian Kemell, Joni Kultanen et al. · 56 citations · ⚡6

Related blog posts

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