Ryan Ming

Xiaochuan Li, Ryan Ming, Pranav Setlur et al.

LLM agents are increasingly expected to function as general-purpose systems capable of resolving open-ended user requests. While existing benchmarks focus on domain-aware environments for developing specialized agents, evaluating general-purpose agents requires more realistic settings that challenge them to operate across multiple skills and tools within a unified environment. We introduce General AgentBench, a benchmark that provides such a unified framework for evaluating general LLM agents across search, coding, reasoning, and tool-use domains. Using General AgentBench, we systematically study test-time scaling behaviors under sequential scaling (iterative interaction) and parallel scaling (sampling multiple trajectories). Evaluation of ten leading LLM agents reveals a substantial performance degradation when moving from domain-specific evaluations to this general-agent setting. Moreover, we find that neither scaling methodology yields effective performance improvements in practice, due to two fundamental limitations: context ceiling in sequential scaling and verification gap in parallel scaling. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/cxcscmu/General-AgentBench.

Xiaochuan Li, Ryan Ming, Meng Chu et al.

Agentic tasks are inherently long-horizon and multi-turn, constantly accumulating context through interactions with the environment. Existing context compression methods inevitably incur information loss and are triggered by rigid heuristic rules, leaving them misaligned with the agent's evolving reasoning focus. We propose Agentic Context Management (ACM), a framework that equips agents with purpose-built context editing tools for lossless context management. Inspired by the interaction between short-term and long-term human memory, the agent autonomously decides when to compress its context, offloads discarded content to an external memory system, and queries it on demand for later retrieval. Building on this framework, we further develop a post-training pipeline that constructs high-quality demonstrations of context management and improves model performance on both agentic search and coding tasks. Further analysis reveals that effective context management reduces peak token pressure, enables extended explorations, and yields more consistent solutions across independent trials. Code, data, and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/lixiaochuan2020/agentic-context-management.