ProAct: Proactive Agent Architecture Using Idle-Time Compute to Anticipate User Needs
ProAct is a proactive agent architecture that uses idle time between user interactions to predict upcoming needs, pre-fetch information, and resolve knowledge gaps before queries are issued. The system analyzes dialogue history and persistent memory to iteratively acquire relevant information in advance. Evaluated on the new ProActEval benchmark (200 scenarios, 40 domains), ProAct reduces required turns by 14.8%, user effort by 11.7%, and hallucination rates by 28.1% compared to reactive baselines. The work also achieves state-of-the-art reflective accuracy on MemBench.
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ENPMR-Bench: Benchmarking Proactive Memory Retrieval for Emotional Support Agents
This paper introduces ENPMR-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating Emotional Need-aware Proactive Memory Retrieval in memory-augmented language agents deployed for emotional support applications. The benchmark includes over 1,800 memory-augmented dialogues grounded in Maslow's hierarchy of needs, with structured mappings between emotional needs and supportive memory types. Experiments show that both embedding-based and LLM-driven retrieval paradigms fall significantly short of golden memory conditions on empathy scores, and while chain-of-thought prompting helps, a substantial performance gap remains. The work highlights a systematic gap in current agent memory systems when applied to affective rather than purely factual retrieval tasks.
RePro: Retrospective Progress-Aware Self-Refinement for LLM Agent Training
Researchers introduce RePro (Retrospective Progress-Aware Training), a framework addressing the gap between step-wise RL optimization and metacognitive task-progress awareness in LLM agents. The approach uses a forward-then-reflect rollout paradigm where agents execute actions online and then retrospectively assess step-wise progress given the completed trajectory and known outcome. Evaluated on WebShop, ALFWorld, and Sokoban, RePro achieves up to 12% absolute success rate gains over baseline Qwen-family models without requiring continuous external supervision.
Claw-Anything: Benchmark for Always-On Personal Assistants with Broad Digital World Access
Claw-Anything is a new benchmark designed to evaluate LLM agents acting as always-on personal assistants with access to long-horizon activity histories, interdependent backend services, and multi-device GUI/CLI interaction. The benchmark simulates months of user activity to create complex, noisy world states and evaluates both reactive and proactive assistance. GPT-5.5 achieves only 34.5% pass@1, revealing a substantial capability gap versus prior narrower benchmarks. An accompanying automated data-generation pipeline produces 2,000 training environments and yields a 23.7% improvement over the base model.
RedAct framework protects procedural skills in agent execution traces via selective redaction and watermarking
Researchers introduce RedAct, a framework for releasing agent execution traces without exposing proprietary procedural skills (tool invocations, decision logic, error-recovery strategies). The system localizes sensitive information, rewrites traces while preserving audit-critical evidence, and embeds behavioral watermarks for provenance tracking. To evaluate the approach, the authors construct CapTraceBench, a benchmark of 75 long-horizon tasks and 154 skills across seven domains. RedAct reduces normalized skill transfer from 44.7–67.1% on raw traces to below the no-skill baseline, while watermark detection achieves 93.6–100% true positive rate with under 2% false alarms.
Moving from intent-based bots to proactive AI agents
OpenAI published a post describing a shift from traditional intent-based chatbot architectures toward proactive AI agents, in the context of a partnership or deployment with Zendesk. The piece signals OpenAI's positioning of its agent capabilities within enterprise customer service workflows. The announcement reflects a broader industry trend of replacing rule-based bots with autonomous, goal-directed AI systems.
AXPO: Agent Explorative Policy Optimization Addresses Thinking-Acting Gap in Multimodal Agentic Reasoning
This paper identifies a structural asymmetry in agentic reasoning called the 'Thinking-Acting Gap,' where tool use is attempted in only ~30% of rollouts under standard RL training (GRPO), and all-wrong tool-using subgroups suppress learning signals. The authors propose AXPO (Agent eXplorative Policy Optimization), which fixes the thinking prefix and resamples tool calls for all-wrong subgroups, combined with uncertainty-based prefix selection. Evaluated across nine multimodal benchmarks on Qwen3-VL-Thinking at multiple scales, SFT+AXPO outperforms SFT+GRPO by +1.8pp on both Pass@1 and Pass@4 at 8B, with the 8B model surpassing the 32B baseline on Pass@4 using 4× fewer parameters.
PACT: Hybrid SLM deliberation architecture improves reactive RL policies in unfamiliar environments
Researchers propose PACT (Plan, Align, Commit, Think), a hybrid architecture pairing a fast reactive RL policy with an asynchronous small language model planner for deliberation. The SLM generates and validates candidate action plans via simulation before committing to execution, bypassing the RL policy without retraining. Evaluated on FrozenLake configurations of increasing difficulty, PACT outperforms baselines using only a 2B-parameter SLM, suggesting complementary strengths between deliberative planning and reactive execution.
Agent JIT Compilation for Latency-Optimizing Web Agent Planning and Scheduling
This paper introduces agent just-in-time (JIT) compilation as an alternative to the sequential fetch-screenshot-execute loop used by current computer-use agents. The approach compiles natural language task descriptions directly into executable code that can include LLM calls, tool calls, and parallelization, using three components: JIT-Planner, JIT-Scheduler, and an invariant-enforcing tool protocol. Across five web applications, JIT-Planner achieves 10.4× speedup and +28% accuracy over Browser-Use, while JIT-Scheduler achieves 2.4× speedup and +9% accuracy over OpenAI CUA.