#01Nov 7, 2026
cs.AI
Sampling Is Not Curiosity: Why LLM Agents Should Investigate
Alfonso Amayuelas, Piotr Piękos, Xin Eric Wang and 3 more
LLM agents are increasingly used for open-ended tasks, very common in research scenarios where they are required to explore, investigate, or act curiously. At inference time, an LLM is a fixed map from context to next-token distribution, the pretrained weights determine the function, and only its conditioning changes as context accumulates. Mechanisms like temperature, best-of-N, tree search, or RAG vary how the distribution is sampled or what it is conditioned on, but do not update the agent's model of the environment. We argue that current LLM agents do not explore curiously; they explore stochastically. From how curiosity is understood in the RL literature, it requires a predictive structure over how the environment responds to the agent's actions, which improves online from current interaction, drives action selection through its predicted improvement, and persists beyond the context window. Additionally, in its open-ended form, the agent should intrinsically originate what to investigate. Thus, we propose a framework defining curiosity in LLM agents, reserving the term for systems that satisfy it. In doing so, we identify the research directions its implementation opens up.
#02Nov 7, 2026
cs.AI
TurnFlow: Benchmarking User-State Reasoning in Multi-Turn LLM Agents via Scene-Guided User Simulation
Zhixun Chen, Ming Li, Anjie Liu and 3 more
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed through conversational interfaces, yet strong single-turn performance does not imply reliability in multi-turn settings. Multi-turn assistance requires a model to maintain an evolving representation of user requirements and to reason over it before complying with later requests. Failures can therefore be subtle: models may fail to recognize a changed constraint or hidden conflict, or recognize it without enforcing it in the final response. Existing benchmarks primarily test fully specified prompts, long-context recall, or controlled domain environments, leaving open-domain requirement reconciliation undermeasured. We introduce TurnFlow, an interactive benchmark for evaluating whether models preserve, revise, and act on user requirements across turns. TurnFlow combines adaptive user simulation with verifiable judging, allowing conversations to unfold naturally while keeping hidden requirements and pass/fail criteria controlled. In our evaluation, nine LLMs achieve overall pass rates from 42.86% to 59.59% on 490 scenarios. Performance varies substantially across challenge types: models perform well on Stateful Multi-Constraint Following but remain considerably less reliable on Scope Creep and Goal Shift. These results reveal persistent limitations in reasoning over evolving user requirements across turns.
#03Nov 7, 2026
cs.AI
Represented but Not Used: Value-Policy Dissociation in LLM Agents
Yuzhang Luo, Mohamed Aghzal, Liangming Pan and 1 more
Large language model (LLM) agents need to choose actions whose consequences unfold over multiple future steps, yet poor decisions do not reveal whether the model failed to represent those consequences or failed to use them. Mechanistic interpretability has studied internal representations of environment state and plans, but sequential decision making also requires evaluating how candidate actions change future outcomes. Reinforcement learning formalizes this as action value. We study this computation in Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct, and GPT-OSS-20B across a partially observed Grid environment and WebShop, a simulated web shopping environment. We find that the relative values of candidate actions are linearly decodable from intermediate hidden states, including at states where the policy prefers a worse action. We call this gap between value representation and policy choice value-policy dissociation. To investigate how represented value relates to action selection, we compare direct interventions along the value readout direction with Natural Value Transport (NVT), a transformation learned from hidden state changes that naturally result from differences in action value. While readout-direction interventions have limited and inconsistent effects, NVT more consistently influences action preferences, particularly at later layers. We also test a closed-loop controller that uses the value readout as a sensor and NVT as an actuator, observing improvements in task outcomes. These results suggest that LLM agents can represent useful prospective value without reliably translating it into policy choice.
#04Nov 7, 2026
math.OC
Zeroth-Order Langevin Dynamics for Stochastic Nonconvex Optimization: Curvature Regularization and Non-Asymptotic Guarantees
Stefano Bruno, Dong-Young Lim
Zeroth-order methods provide a way to optimize stochastic nonconvex objectives using only noisy function evaluations. However, the smoothing inherent in their gradient estimators effectively modifies the objective being optimized. In particular, Gaussian smoothing with smoothing parameter $η>0$ induces, to leading order, an implicit Hessian-trace regularization, which motivates the study of the curvature-regularized objective of the form $f(x)+(η^2/2) tr(\nabla^2 f(x))$. We develop a non-asymptotic theory in the nonconvex setting for a class of algorithms called stochastic zeroth-order Langevin dynamics (ZOLD), which use only noisy function evaluations and do not have access to first- or higher-order derivative information, and derive excess-risk guarantees for the curvature-regularized objective. We first control the finite-time distribution of the ZOLD iterates in Wasserstein distance with respect to the Gibbs measure associated with the Gaussian-smoothed objective. An explicit coupling between the smoothing and inverse temperature parameters then quantifies the proximity of this measure to the Gibbs measure associated with the corresponding Hessian-trace-regularized objective. These distributional estimates in Wasserstein distance lead to excess-risk bounds for the curvature-regularized objective. Our analysis accommodates assumptions under which the stochastic function evaluations are allowed to have non-uniform dependence on the data stream. In addition, the constants in the non-asymptotic bounds do not rely on log-Sobolev or Poincaré inequalities as in prior zeroth-order Langevin analyses. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first non-asymptotic analysis of a zeroth-order Langevin method that simultaneously establishes excess-risk guarantees for a curvature-regularized objective and Wasserstein guarantees for the associated Gibbs measure in the nonconvex setting.
#05Nov 7, 2026
cs.LG
HexIt: Learning Hexahedral Block Decomposition with Expert Iteration on Combinatorial Maps
Arjun Narayanan, Per-Olof Persson
Decomposing a polyhedral solid into a few well-shaped hexahedral blocks is a long-standing open problem in mesh generation. We cast it as a sequential decision problem on a 3-dimensional generalised map: an agent splits edges, faces and volumes with three insert operations until every cell is a hexahedron and the mesh passes a quality threshold, and a policy that convolves over the map's involutions chooses each insert. A successful decomposition takes over a hundred decisions, and a uniformly random policy never finds one. We clone a policy from constructed decompositions and improve it by expert iteration. On held-out chamfered solids that share no boundary topology with the cloning data, the final policy solves an expected $94.4\%$ in $20$ samples, and expert iteration raises the best-of-20 solve rate on large chamfered solids from $0.203$ to $0.355$. At matched compute, PPO, GRPO and VinePPO updates all make the cloned policy worse.