Atula Tejaswi

Negin Raoof, Richard Zhuang, Marianna Nezhurina et al.

Agentic language models dramatically expand the applications of AI yet little is publicly known about how to curate training data for broadly capable agents. Existing open efforts such as SWE-Smith, SERA, and Nemotron-Terminal typically target a single benchmark, leaving open the question of how to train models that generalize across diverse agentic tasks. The OpenThoughts-Agent (OT-Agent) project addresses this gap with a fully open data curation pipeline for training agentic models. We conduct more than 100 controlled ablation experiments to systematically investigate each stage of the pipeline, yielding insights on the importance of task sources and diversity. We then assemble a training set of 100K examples from our pipeline and fine-tune Qwen3-32B on this dataset, which yields an average accuracy of 44.8% across seven agentic benchmarks and a 3.9 percentage point improvement over the strongest existing open data agentic model (Nemotron-Terminal-32B, 40.9%). Moreover, our training data exhibits strong scaling properties, outperforming alternative open datasets at every training set size in compute-controlled comparisons. We publicly release our training sets, data pipeline, experimental data, and models at openthoughts.ai to support future open research on agentic model training.

Atula Tejaswi, Yoonsang Lee, Sujay Sanghavi et al. · princeton

We investigate whether in-context examples, widely used in decoder-only language models (LLMs), can improve embedding model performance in retrieval tasks. Unlike in LLMs, naively prepending in-context examples (query-document pairs) to the target query at inference time does not work out of the box. We introduce a simple approach to enable retrievers to use in-context examples. Our approach, RARe, finetunes a pre-trained model with in-context examples whose query is semantically similar to the target query. This can be applied to adapt various base architectures (i.e., decoder-only language models, retriever models) and consistently achieves performance gains of up to +2.72% nDCG across various open-domain retrieval datasets (BeIR, RAR-b). In particular, we find RARe exhibits stronger out-of-domain generalization compared to models using queries without in-context examples, similar to what is seen for in-context learning in LLMs. We further provide analysis on the design choices of in-context example augmentation and lay the foundation for future work in this space.

Atula Tejaswi, Litu Rout, Constantine Caramanis et al.

Reward guidance has been applied to great success in the test-time adaptation of continuous diffusion models; it updates each denoising step using the gradients from a downstream reward model. We study reward guidance for discrete diffusion language models, where one cannot differentiate through the natural outputs of the model because they are discrete tokens. Existing approaches either replace these discrete tokens with continuous relaxations, or employ techniques like the straight-through estimator. In this work, we show the downsides of both these methods. The former degrades gradient feedback because the reward model has never been trained with continuous inputs. The latter involves incorrect optimization because the gradient evaluated at discrete tokens is used to update continuous logits. Our key innovation is to go beyond this tradeoff by introducing a novel mechanism called EntRGi: Entropy aware Reward Guidance that dynamically regulates the gradients from the reward model. By modulating the continuous relaxation using the model's confidence, our approach substantially improves reward guidance while providing reliable inputs to the reward model. We empirically validate our approach on a 7B-parameter diffusion language model across 3 diverse reward models and 3 multi-skill benchmarks, showing consistent improvements over state-of-the-art methods.