Organizations: Shenzhen University · University of Hong Kong · Hunan University · National University of Singapore · Evolvent Research Team · Fudan University
Long-horizon tasks expose a weakness of monolithic tool-use loops: one agent must decompose, execute, and verify a task within a single trajectory. We introduce LAGO, which treats specialized language agents as reusable temporally extended options. A meta-agent retrieves options from a persistent library or spawns new ones, dispatches sub-tasks, verifies results, and admits successful novel options. The library grows across tasks without updating model weights. On 500 SWE-bench Verified tasks, frozen Qwen3.5-35B-A3B in both roles resolves 58.6% under single-attempt evaluation with the official Docker evaluator. On a fixed 150-task subset, we re-run mini-SWE-agent, Terminus 2, and LAGO with the same policy, temperature, task IDs, and evaluator; their resolve rates are 49.3%, 57.3%, and 60.3%, respectively. Cross-model experiments provide evidence consistent with a role for decomposition quality. A 50-task component ablation finds four fewer resolved tasks without decomposition, two fewer with shuffled reused content, and six fewer without the library. These results support reusable agent-options as a practical abstraction for task streams, while leaving component-level causality task- and model-dependent.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: LAGO turns task decomposition into a reusable action space. (a) An illustrative SWE-bench-style issue is decomposed, routed to reusable or newly spawned options, executed, verified, and reused on a later task. (b) The overall framework shows the meta-agent dispatching parallel options and receiving verified results. (c) The option lifecycle governs specification, execution, verification, admission, and deduplicated library growth from L0 to LT .
Method
Mechanism
Resolve (%) ↑
Δ vs. mini-SWE ↑
Frozen Qwen3.5-35B-A3B; 150-task subset; temperature 0 ; single attempt; official Docker
mini-SWE-agent
single-agent ReAct loop
49.3 R
–
Terminus 2
terminal-agent scaffold
57.3 R
+8.0
LAGO (ours)
hierarchical meta-agent with growing options
60.3 R
+11.0
Table 1: Controlled scaffold comparison on a 150-task subset of SWE-bench Verified (repo-stratified, seed 42; identical task ids in every row). All rows use the same frozen Qwen3.5-35B-A3B at temperature 0 , one attempt per task, and the official Docker evaluator. Δ is the descriptive percentage-point difference from mini-SWE-agent in this run. Each row is one end-to-end rerun ( R ) under the shared task protocol; Terminus 2 is run at temperature 0 for comparability.
Configuration
Resolved
Resolve (%)
Δ vs. full
LAGO (full)
30/50
60.0±13.6
–
Disable decomposition
26/50
52.0±13.8
−4
Shuffle reused content
28/50
56.0±13.8
−2
Disable library
24/50
48.0±13.8
−6
Table 2: Component ablation on a fixed 50-task split. All rows use denominator 50; unfinished rollouts are unresolved in this end-to-end accounting. The ± values are approximate 95% binomial intervals, and Δ is the absolute difference in resolved tasks.
Table 4Table 5Figure 6
Appendix figures & tables5 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Figure 4: SWE-bench Pro resolve rate by configuration (visualizing the numbers in Table 4 ). LAGO with DeepSeek-V3.2 as both meta-agent and executor reaches 50%, a 16-point gain over the single-agent baseline. With the executor fixed to DeepSeek-V3.2, an SFT Qwen3-30B meta-agent improves over the base variant by 6 points, while the base variant matches the baseline.
Figure 5: Instance-level comparison of base and SFT Qwen3-30B meta-agents on the SWE-bench Pro 50-task split (DeepSeek executor). The two systems share 15 jointly-solved and 28 jointly-failed instances; SFT uniquely solves 5 and regresses on 2, for a net gain of 3 instances (17 to 20 solved).
Figure 6: Agent library dynamics for a separate 50-task Dual DeepSeek stream, distinct from the 150-task Qwen3.5-35B-A3B rollout in the main text. Left: library size before and after deduplication (red labels show agents merged). Right: agents merged and net growth per batch.
Figure 7: Failure modes on the 150-task subset. (a) Patch provenance: most tasks reach a submit , a further 31 are recovered by the unconditional final-diff fallback, and 27 end with no patch. (b) Among those 27, the dominant causes are malformed-tool-call retries, abandonment after a sub-agent reaches its execution limit, and turn-limit exhaustion.
Method
Eval set
Orig. (%)
Setup note
Self-Harness
100 tasks
41.5
self-modifying harness; mean of 2 runs; 67 held-in / 33 held-out
Table 7: Training-free (weight-frozen) methods on SWE-bench Verified that use the same Qwen3.5-35B-A3B policy but evaluate only on a subset , listed for provenance and not ranked against our re-run results (Self-Harness: arXiv:2606.09498, v3; CODESKILL: arXiv:2605.25430; CoACT: arXiv:2607.02911; TDAD: arXiv:2603.17973, whose 25-task stage uses a 4-bit quantized policy—its 100-task stage uses Qwen3-Coder-30B and is not this model). Ranges span each method’s reported variants. RL-trained methods (e.g., LEGO-RL, CompactionRL) are outside our weight-frozen scope and omitted.
Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly undertake long-horizon tasks that require sustained reasoning, tool use, and revision across many interdependent steps. However, existing agent harnesses maintain task execution, task state, and completion assessment within a growing context, making the state difficult to track and allowing incorrect self-assessments to propagate into later decisions. We reformulate long-horizon execution as a task-state management problem and propose LongHorizon-Harness, which maintains the task state explicitly outside execution and updates it only with facts independently verified from the environment. Its Manage-Execute-Audit(MEA) loop uses a manager to maintain the task state and determine the next subtask, a fresh-context executor to perform it, and a read-only auditor to verify the resulting environment state before the next round. A lightweight AgentAdapter supports interchangeable model and harness backends without modifying their native agent loops. LongHorizon-Harness improves Qwen3.7-Plus from 51.8% to 80.7% on WeaveBench, from 69.7% to 77.2% on Terminal-Bench2.1, and from 2.8% to 8.3% on OSWorld2.0. It also raises Claude Opus4.7 from 20.0% to 34.3% on an OSWorld2.0 subset, demonstrating consistent gains across models, harnesses, and interaction domains.
Language-model agents that run long tasks often redo work they have already done: they re-issue a tool call they made earlier and get back exactly the same observation, a step that adds no new information. We identify this failure as a loop. Loops appear natively in Qwen, Llama, and Gemini agents and become far more common once the agent's history is compressed to fit its context window. To reduce these loops, we propose DeLoop, a self-supervised training method. DeLoop builds on a simple observation: the agent's own rollout can provide the supervision needed to learn from its loops. We use a looping action as a negative example and the first later non-looping action in the same rollout as a positive example. DeLoop learns from these pairs through direct preference optimization and does not require task rewards, gold answers, or LLM judges. On CodeGym under compression, DeLoop reduces the share of Qwen3-8B tasks containing loops from 57.3% to 6.1%. It also uses about one third as many steps per task, with similar task success. On Qwen3-32B, DeLoop reduces loops and steps while raising task success from 37.7% to 44.8%.
Tianle Chen, Pushkar Singh, Ketan Todi +8
Google · Boston University · University of Washington +2
Large language models are increasingly expected to handle complex, long-horizon real-world tasks whose context demands can grow without bound, yet model context windows remain inherently finite. Recent work explores a paradigm where a main agent decomposes tasks and dispatches subtasks to subagents, which execute and return only summarized results, conserving the main agent's context budget. However, performing this well requires delegation intelligence: the ability to decompose complex tasks, determine when and what to delegate, and integrate returned results into the ongoing workflow. Training data for this capability is scarce in naturally occurring text, and to our knowledge, how to synthesize such data and train models to acquire this capability remains largely unexplored in the open-source community. To bridge this gap, we present a preliminary exploration targeting deep research, a representative long-horizon agent task. Specifically, we design a harness that guides the model toward high-quality task decomposition and delegation, while constraining subagents to return results properly to support the main agent's workflow. The harness-guided trajectories naturally encode correct delegation decisions, which we use as supervised fine-tuning data to internalize delegation intelligence into model weights. Our resulting model, SearchSwarm-30B-A3B, achieves 68.1 on BrowseComp and 73.3 on BrowseComp-ZH, the best results among all models of comparable scale. We will release our harness, model weights, and training data to facilitate future research.
Pu Ning, Quan Chen, Kun Tao +7
Tsinghua University · Peking University · Ant Group +1