arXiv:2604.17609cs.CLcs.LG2026-04被引 1

大模型代理发现关键信息却不懂利用,缺乏环境好奇心。

Agents Explore but Agents Ignore: LLMs Lack Environmental Curiosity

  • 让代理在环境中意外发现任务解法,观察其是否主动利用。
  • 发现解法率79%-81%,但真正利用的仅37%-50%,最低仅不足7%。
  • 适合研究智能体推理缺陷或提升自主探索能力的开发者。

基于大模型的智能体被假设能将环境观测融入推理:发现高度相关但意外的信息应自然触发模型对其利用。我们发现当前大模型代理在此假设上存在严重缺陷,难以响应或利用意外信息。在三个基准测试(Terminal-Bench、SWE-Bench、AppWorld)中,我们刻意向代理环境注入完整任务解决方案,以暴露模型。尽管在Terminal-Bench中代理发现解法的比例达79%-81%,但实际交互或利用的比例仅为37%-50%。这一差距在AppWorld尤为显著:超过90%的尝试中代理看到文档明确说明某命令“返回任务完整解法”,但实际利用该信息的不足7%。我们揭示了代理缺乏一种称为环境好奇心的能力——即对环境刺激下意外但相关观测做出识别与探究。影响该能力的三大因素包括:代理框架中的可用工具、测试时计算资源、训练数据分布。我们发现最大化好奇心的配置也带来基准测试最优表现,但即使联合优化后,多数情况下代理仍忽略已发现的解法:它们仅用环境获取预期信息,而不调整策略或最大化利用有用刺激。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

LLM-based agents are assumed to integrate environmental observations into their reasoning: discovering highly relevant but unexpected information should naturally lead to a model exploiting its own discoveries. We show that this assumption is false for current LLM-based agents, which struggle to reflect or react to unexpected information. Across three benchmarks (Terminal-Bench, SWE-Bench, AppWorld), we inject complete task solutions into the agent environments to deliberately expose a task's solution to a model. While agents discover these solutions on Terminal-Bench in 79-81% of runs, they interact, or exploit, them in only 37-50% of cases. This gap is starkest in AppWorld: agents see documentation stating that a command "returns the complete solution to this task" in over 90% of attempts but exploit this in fewer than 7% of trials. We show that agents lack what we call environmental curiosity: the capability to recognize and investigate unexpected but relevant observations in response to environmental stimuli. We identify three main factors influencing environmental curiosity: available tools in the agent scaffold, test-time compute, and training data distribution. Our findings identify configurations that maximize curiosity also achieve the best performance on the unmodified benchmarks. Yet even jointly optimized agents still ignore discovered solutions in the majority of trials: current agents use the environment to fetch expected information, but not to revise their strategy or maximally exploit useful stimuli.

大模型代理环境好奇心推理缺陷自主探索

Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。