AIApr 13
Escaping the Context Bottleneck: Active Context Curation for LLM Agents via Reinforcement LearningXiaozhe Li, Tianyi Lyu, Yizhao Yang et al.
Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with long-horizon tasks due to the "context bottleneck" and the "lost-in-the-middle" phenomenon, where accumulated noise from verbose environments degrades reasoning over multi-turn interactions. To address this issue, we introduce a symbiotic framework that decouples context management from task execution. Our architecture pairs a lightweight, specialized policy model, ContextCurator, with a powerful frozen foundation model, TaskExecutor. Trained via reinforcement learning, ContextCurator actively reduces information entropy in the working memory. It aggressively prunes environmental noise while preserving reasoning anchors, that is, sparse data points that are critical for future deductions. On WebArena, our framework improves the success rate of Gemini-3.0-flash from 36.4% to 41.2% while reducing token consumption by 8.8% (from 47.4K to 43.3K). On DeepSearch, it achieves a 57.1% success rate, compared with 53.9%, while reducing token consumption by a factor of 8. Remarkably, a 7B ContextCurator matches the context management performance of GPT-4o, providing a scalable and computationally efficient paradigm for autonomous long-horizon agents.
IRMar 22
COINBench: Moving Beyond Individual Perspectives to Collective Intent UnderstandingXiaozhe Li, Tianyi Lyu, Siyi Yang et al.
Understanding human intent is a high-level cognitive challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs), requiring sophisticated reasoning over noisy, conflicting, and non-linear discourse. While LLMs excel at following individual instructions, their ability to distill Collective Intent - the process of extracting consensus, resolving contradictions, and inferring latent trends from multi-source public discussions - remains largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce COIN-BENCH, a dynamic, real-world, live-updating benchmark specifically designed to evaluate LLMs on collective intent understanding within the consumer domain. Unlike traditional benchmarks that focus on transactional outcomes, COIN-BENCH operationalizes intent as a hierarchical cognitive structure, ranging from explicit scenarios to deep causal reasoning. We implement a robust evaluation pipeline that combines a rule-based method with an LLM-as-the-Judge approach. This framework incorporates COIN-TREE for hierarchical cognitive structuring and retrieval-augmented verification (COIN-RAG) to ensure expert-level precision in analyzing raw, collective human discussions. An extensive evaluation of 20 state-of-the-art LLMs across four dimensions - depth, breadth, informativeness, and correctness - reveals that while current models can handle surface-level aggregation, they still struggle with the analytical depth required for complex intent synthesis. COIN-BENCH establishes a new standard for advancing LLMs from passive instruction followers to expert-level analytical agents capable of deciphering the collective voice of the real world. See our project page on COIN-BENCH.
CLOct 15, 2025
ConsintBench: Evaluating Language Models on Real-World Consumer Intent UnderstandingXiaozhe Li, TianYi Lyu, Siyi Yang et al.
Understanding human intent is a complex, high-level task for large language models (LLMs), requiring analytical reasoning, contextual interpretation, dynamic information aggregation, and decision-making under uncertainty. Real-world public discussions, such as consumer product discussions, are rarely linear or involve a single user. Instead, they are characterized by interwoven and often conflicting perspectives, divergent concerns, goals, emotional tendencies, as well as implicit assumptions and background knowledge about usage scenarios. To accurately understand such explicit public intent, an LLM must go beyond parsing individual sentences; it must integrate multi-source signals, reason over inconsistencies, and adapt to evolving discourse, similar to how experts in fields like politics, economics, or finance approach complex, uncertain environments. Despite the importance of this capability, no large-scale benchmark currently exists for evaluating LLMs on real-world human intent understanding, primarily due to the challenges of collecting real-world public discussion data and constructing a robust evaluation pipeline. To bridge this gap, we introduce \bench, the first dynamic, live evaluation benchmark specifically designed for intent understanding, particularly in the consumer domain. \bench is the largest and most diverse benchmark of its kind, supporting real-time updates while preventing data contamination through an automated curation pipeline.