Definition

Long-horizon tasks are tasks whose solution requires many sequential decisions, often with delayed feedback — planning a research project, refactoring a large codebase, navigating a multi-day workflow. They expose every weakness of current agents because errors compound.

Episodes covering this

  1. 276
    An AI Agent Rewrote Its Own Scaffolding For Eight Days. Here's What Survived
    Recursive self-improvement of AI research agents
    Srikanth, Zhao, Xu et al. · Weco AI·14 min·Sep 23, 2026
  2. 270
    The Agent Said It Read 240 Files. The Log Says One.
    Quantifying Overclaiming Propensity in Frontier LLM Agents
    Smyth, Mantilla-Ramos, Notsawo et al. · Tara Research·14 min·Sep 19, 2026
  3. 237
    The Model Built a Perfect Map of the Puzzle, Then Lost It
    Transformers Struggle to Use Their Emergent World Models: Revisiting the Tower of Hanoi, and the Illusion of Thinking
    Pereira, Zuidema · Artificial Intelligence Program·19 min·Aug 10, 2026
  4. 194
    How a Robot Builds a Debugging Notebook It Can Read, Edit, and Hand to Another Robot
    ASPIRE: Agentic /Skills Discovery for Robotics
    Lu, Wu, Kou et al. · NVIDIA·24 min·Jul 02, 2026
  5. 192
    A 32B Open Model Matched Frontier Systems By Learning to Take Notes
    AutoMem: Automated Learning of Memory as a Cognitive Skill
    Wu, Zhu, Zhang et al. · Stanford University·22 min·Jul 02, 2026
  6. 189
    Why Phone Agents Ace the Test and Crash on Your Actual Phone
    Xiaomi-GUI-0 Technical Report
    Team, Qu, Luan · Xiaomi·24 min·Jul 02, 2026
  7. 183
    Why You Can't Fine-Tune Foresight Into an AI Agent
    Internalizing the Future: A Unified Agentic Training Paradigm for World Model Planning
    Zhang, Zhou, Qiao et al. · Fudan University / Shanghai Innovation Institute / Tencent Youtu Lab·23 min·Jun 29, 2026
  8. 182
    How a Tiny Model Too Weak to Plan Cuts a Bigger Agent's Hallucinations by 80%
    Grounded Iterative Language Planning: How Parameterized World Models Reduce Hallucination Propagation in LLM Agents
    Song, Cai · Emory University·17 min·Jun 29, 2026
  9. 173
    The Free Step-Level Grader Hiding in Every RL Training Run
    Neglected Free Lunch from Post-training: Progress Advantage for LLM Agents
    Oh, Li, Park et al. · University of Wisconsin–Madison·22 min·Jun 25, 2026
  10. 165
    A Free-Lunch Tweak That Lets a Tiny Agent Beat Frontier Giants
    Group-Graph Policy Optimization for Long-Horizon Agentic Reinforcement Learning
    Wang, Song, Zhang et al. · Peking University·22 min·Jun 23, 2026
  11. 160
    Training an AI to Take Its Own Notes, So Its Future Self Works Better
    Connect the Dots: Training LLMs for Long-Lifecycle Agents with Cross-Domain Generalization Via Reinforcement Learning
    Chen, Shi, Xie et al. · Alibaba Group·23 min·Jun 19, 2026
  12. 157
    When an AI Coding Agent Drives a Phone Through the Terminal, No Screen Needed
    Beyond the GUI Paradigm: Do Mobile Agents Need the Phone Screen?
    Gu, Jiang, Guo et al. · Mila–Québec AI Institute / Concordia University·24 min·Jun 19, 2026
  13. 155
    Why a Flawless Demo Makes a Worse Computer-Using Agent, And the Fix
    Skill-Guided Continuation Distillation for GUI Agents
    Fan, Yu, Shen et al. · StepFun·22 min·Jun 18, 2026
  14. 154
    How a 7B Model Out-Investigates a 72B One by Choosing What to Look At
    Native Active Perception as Reasoning for Omni-Modal Understanding
    Xing, Xu, Wang et al. · The Chinese University of Hong Kong·21 min·Jun 18, 2026
  15. 150
    Don't Kill the Loser: A Different Way to Handle Two AI Agents Colliding
    CoAgent: Concurrency Control for Multi-Agent Systems
    Lyu, Zhang, Wu et al. · Shanghai Jiao Tong University·32 min·Jun 16, 2026
  16. 142
    Training a Tiny Model to Run the Plumbing Between an Agent and the World
    HarnessBridge: Learnable Bidirectional Controller for LLM Agent Harness
    Wang, Wang, Taylor et al. · University of California·24 min·Jun 12, 2026
  17. 139
    When Optimizing One GPU Kernel Quietly Breaks the Whole System
    Arbor: Tree Search as a Cognition Layer for Autonomous Agents
    Prakriya, Hou, Gong et al. · AMD·30 min·Jun 12, 2026
  18. 131
    Why Autonomous Research Agents Forget Their Own Lessons, and Arbor's Fix
    Toward Generalist Autonomous Research via Hypothesis-Tree Refinement
    Jin, Hu, Qiu et al. · Renmin University of China·33 min·Jun 11, 2026
  19. 125
    AI Coding Agents Run a Marathon, and Fewer Than One in Three Finish
    SWE-Marathon: Can Agents Autonomously Complete Ultra-Long-Horizon Software Work?
    Desai, Hu, Cabezas et al. · Abundant·27 min·Jun 09, 2026
  20. 123
    Five Identical Worlds, One Swapped Model: What Happens When AI Agents Run for Fifteen Days
    Emergence World: A Platform for Evaluating Long-Horizon Multi-Agent Autonomy
    Akkil, Kokku, Vikram et al. · Emergence AI·30 min·Jun 09, 2026
  21. 122
    When Your Coding Agent Lies About the Fix: Verifying the Plan Before the Model Runs
    Lean4Agent: Formal Modeling and Verification for Agent Workflow and Trajectory
    Wang, Huang, Wang et al. · University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign·24 min·Jun 09, 2026
  22. 120
    How an AI Agent Rewrites Its Own Tools, Without an Answer Key
    Retrospective Harness Optimization: Improving LLM Agents via Self-Preference over Trajectory Rollouts
    Pan, Liu, Lin et al. · City University of Hong Kong·30 min·Jun 05, 2026
  23. 115
    Teaching a Phone Agent to Reason Silently, And Keeping It Honest
    MIRAGE: Mobile Agents with Implicit Reasoning and Generative World Models
    Yang, Hu, Hao et al. · Beihang University·24 min·Jun 04, 2026
  24. 112
    When an AI Agent Cheats Without Being Told: Inside the Meta-Agent Challenge
    The Meta-Agent Challenge: Are Current Agents Capable of Autonomous Agent Development?
    Lu, Wang, Wang et al. · Institute of Software·22 min·Jun 04, 2026
  25. 108
    The Reasoning Cliff: Why Thinking Longer Makes Models Worse at Exact Step-by-Step Tasks
    The Deterministic Horizon: When Extended Reasoning Fails and Tool Delegation Becomes Necessary
    Guo, Wu, Yiu · The University of Hong Kong·32 min·Jun 03, 2026
  26. 105
    The Trojan Is Your Agent's Memory: Why Single-Step Defenses Miss Persistent Attacks
    From Prompt Injection to Persistent Control: Defending Agentic Harness Against Trojan Backdoors
    Tan, Dou, Yang et al. · Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence·26 min·Jun 01, 2026
  27. 096
    How Treating an AI Agent's Execution Like Git Recovers a Coordination Penalty
    Shepherd: A Runtime Substrate Empowering Meta-Agents with a Formalized Execution Trace
    Yu, Chong, Nandi et al. · Northeastern University·22 min·May 28, 2026
  28. 095
    Seven Wins to Zero: How Organizing AI Agents Like a Lab Changes the Search
    AutoScientists: Self-Organizing Agent Teams for Long-Running Scientific Experimentation
    Gao, Fang, Zitnik · Harvard University·24 min·May 28, 2026
  29. 092
    When Search Agents Don't Really Search: The Memory Shortcut Hiding in Browsing Benchmarks
    LiveBrowseComp: Are Search Agents Searching, or Just Verifying What They Already Know?
    Fan, Wang, Chu et al. · Harbin Institute of Technology·27 min·May 28, 2026
  30. 090
    How MiniMax-M2 Bets That Sparsity Plus Verifiable Rewards Can Match Frontier Agents
    The MiniMax-M2 Series: Mini Activations Unleashing Max Real-World Intelligence
    MiniMax · MiniMax·28 min·May 27, 2026
  31. 084
    Terminal Agents Get Free Supervision From The Tokens We've Been Throwing Away
    ECHO: Terminal Agents Learn World Models for Free
    Shrivastava, Kauffmann, Awadallah et al. · Microsoft Research·26 min·May 26, 2026
  32. 083
    Training the Translator: How a Small Communication Model Lets Agent Teams Outperform Themselves
    AgentFugue: Agent Scaling for Long-Horizon Tasks through Collective Reasoning
    Hu, Qian, Wang et al. · GSAI·24 min·May 26, 2026
  33. 076
    Same Model, Organized Differently: How an Agent Architecture Beat Frontier Systems at Research Math
    RMA: an Agentic System for Research-Level Mathematical Problems
    Zhao, Yuan, Choi et al. · Georgia Institute of Technology·22 min·May 25, 2026
  34. 072
    A Robot Made Graphene Without Help, And Caught Itself Hallucinating
    Qumus: Realization of An Embodied AI Quantum Material Experimentalist
    Shi, Zheng, Juan et al. · Princeton University·29 min·May 23, 2026
  35. 068
    The OS Trick That Makes Tree Search Practical for Coding Agents
    DeltaBox: Scaling Stateful AI Agents with Millisecond-Level Sandbox Checkpoint/Rollback
    Dong, He, Hou et al. · Institute of Parallel and Distributed Systems·27 min·May 22, 2026
  36. 046
    When the AI Optimizer Edits the Grade Book: Why Harnessing Evolution Needs a Wall
    Harnessing Agentic Evolution
    Zhang, Gu, Ruan et al. · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) / DeepWisdom·24 min·May 15, 2026
  37. 017
    When the Agent Grades Its Own Homework: A Brutal New Benchmark for AI Workers
    Gym-Anything: Turn any Software into an Agent Environment
    Aggarwal, Neubig, Welleck · CMU·31 min·May 03, 2026
  38. 008
    Why Long-Horizon AI Agents Get Stuck, and a Milestone-Based Fix That Helps
    A Subgoal-driven Framework for Improving Long-Horizon LLM Agents
    Wang, Gooding, Hartmann et al. · Google DeepMind·24 min·May 02, 2026
  39. 003
    How to Pick the Best of Sixteen Coding Agent Rollouts
    Scaling Test-Time Compute for Agentic Coding
    Kim, Yang, Niu et al. · Meta Superintelligence Labs / University of Washington·17 min·May 01, 2026
  40. 002
    An AI Ran a Real Optics Lab for 21 Hours and Found a Transformer-Shaped Pattern in Light
    End-to-end autonomous scientific discovery on a real optical platform
    Yang, Chen, Zhao et al. · Zhejiang University·29 min·May 01, 2026

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