Deepak George Thomas

Niful Islam, Ragib Shahriar Ayon, Deepak George Thomas et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized intelligent application development. While standalone LLMs cannot perform any actions, LLM agents address the limitation by integrating tools. However, debugging LLM agents is difficult and costly as the field is still in it's early stage and the community is underdeveloped. To understand the bugs encountered during agent development, we present the first comprehensive study of bug types, root causes, and effects in LLM agent-based software. We collected and analyzed 1,187 bug-related posts and code snippets from Stack Overflow, GitHub, and Hugging Face forums, focused on LLM agents built with seven widely used LLM frameworks as well as custom implementations. For a deeper analysis, we have also studied the component where the bug occurred, along with the programming language and framework. This study also investigates the feasibility of automating bug identification. For that, we have built a ReAct agent named BugReAct, equipped with adequate external tools to determine whether it can detect and annotate the bugs in our dataset. According to our study, we found that BugReAct equipped with Gemini 2.5 Flash achieved a remarkable performance in annotating bug characteristics with an average cost of 0.01 USD per post/code snippet.

Deepak George Thomas, Tichakorn Wongpiromsarn, Ali Jannesari

The function approximators employed by traditional image-based Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms usually lack a temporal learning component and instead focus on learning the spatial component. We propose a technique, Temporal Shift Reinforcement Learning (TSRL), wherein both temporal, as well as spatial components are jointly learned. Moreover, TSRL does not require additional parameters to perform temporal learning. We show that TSRL outperforms the commonly used frame stacking heuristic on both of the Atari environments we test on while beating the SOTA for one of them. This investigation has implications in the robotics as well as sequential decision-making domains.