小模型可替代大模型完成智能体终端执行任务,节省30%令牌消耗。
Terminus-4B: Can a Smaller Model Replace Frontier LLMs at Agentic Execution Tasks?

- 用监督微调与强化学习训练40亿参数小模型,专攻终端执行任务。
- 相比无子智能体基线,主智能体令牌使用减少约30%,性能不变。
- 在多个基准测试中超越原始Qwen模型,甚至超过顶级大模型。
现代编程智能体越来越多地将搜索、调试或终端执行等专项任务交给小型子智能体处理,以保持主智能体上下文清晰。传统上,这些子智能体多采用前沿大模型。本文研究是否可通过微调的小语言模型(SLM)实现与前沿模型相当的终端执行性能。我们提出Terminus-4B,基于Qwen3-4B模型,通过监督微调(SFT)和基于评分标准的LLM作为裁判的强化学习(RL)进行后训练,专门优化此任务。在涵盖多种前沿模型、训练消融实验和主智能体配置的广泛评估中,发现Terminus-4B相比无子智能体基线,可使主智能体令牌使用量减少约30%,且在SWE-Bench Pro和内部SWE-Bench C#基准上性能无损,后者尤其依赖大量输出的执行任务。此外,该模型提升了主智能体依赖子智能体输出的能力,并减少自身直接执行任务次数。结果表明,其不仅缩小了原始Qwen模型与Claude Sonnet/Opus/GPT-5.3-Codex等前沿模型之间的差距,更常实现超越。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Modern coding agents increasingly delegate specialized subtasks to subagents, which are smaller, focused agentic loops that handle narrow responsibilities like search, debugging or terminal execution. This architectural pattern keeps the main agent's context window clean by isolating verbose outputs (e.g. build logs, test results, etc.) within the subagent context. Typically when agents employ subagents for such tasks, they use frontier models as these subagents. In this paper, we investigate whether a finetuned small language model (SLM) can achieve comparable performance to frontier models in the task of agentic terminal execution. We present Terminus-4B, which is a post-trained Qwen3-4B model via Supervised Finetuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) using rubric-based LLM-as-judge reward, specifically for this task. In our extensive evaluation spanning various frontier models, training ablations and main agent configurations, we find that Terminus-4B is able to reduce the token usage of the main agent by up to ~30% compared to the No Subagent baseline with no impact to agent performance on benchmarks like SWE-Bench Pro and our internal SWE-Bench C# benchmark, which tends to be heavy in verbose execution tasks. Furthermore, Terminus-4B improves key metrics showing the main agent relying on the outputs of the subagent and doing fewer terminal execution tasks by itself. We see that our model not only closes the gap between the Vanilla Qwen model and frontier models like Claude Sonnet / Opus / GPT-5.3-Codex, but often even exceeds their performance.
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。