Skip to content
Preprint

AgentRewind: Recoverable Execution for Long-Horizon LLM Agents

Aug 2026 · 2 citations · 46 references
Computer Science

TL;DR

AgentRewind is presented, a runtime recovery framework that records aligned checkpoints of the agent context and controlled environment, allowing agents to return to an earlier state and resume execution with information from previous attempts, improving task success rate and average checklist progress over the compared baselines.

Abstract

Many real-world tasks require LLM agents to interact with their environments over long execution horizons. Errors that occur early in execution may propagate through both the agent context and environment state, and their effects may be difficult to reverse through subsequent actions. Existing methods mainly seek to reduce such errors through plan refinement and safety checks but provide little support after errors occur. To enable recovery during long-horizon execution, we present AgentRewind, a runtime recovery framework that records aligned checkpoints of the agent context and controlled environment, allowing agents to return to an earlier state and resume execution with information from previous attempts. We also construct MettleBench, a benchmark for evaluating task completion and partial progress on long-horizon engineering assignments containing a series of related requirements. Experiments across tasks, multiple models, execution strategies, and agent harnesses show that AgentRewind improves task success rate and average checklist progress over the compared baselines.

View source

Similar papers

Preprint Aug 2026

LongHorizon-Harness: Advancing Long-Horizon Agents for Real-World Tasks

This work reformulate long-horizon execution as a task-state management problem and proposes LongHorizon-Harness, which maintains the task state explicitly outside execution and updates it only with facts independently verified from the environment.

Ziyu Ma, Hailang Huang, Shun Zou et al. · 2 citations
Preprint Aug 2026

PILOT in the Loop: Live Self-Improvement for Long-Horizon Agents

Long-horizon agent runs generate experience that can improve both the current run and future work. Most self-improvement methods process this experience only after execution ends, so they cannot redirect the active run or immediately apply and validate lessons learned from it. We argue that self-improvement should instead be live, using emerging experience both to redirect the active run and to update the persistent harness. Existing agent architectures do not fully support this goal. Single-agent self-correction combines task execution and trajectory assessment within one context, while subagent delegation separates execution but typically cannot redirect an active subagent. We present PILOT, a supervisor-worker harness for live self-improvement through two coupled mechanisms: (1) live steering lets a separate supervisor redirect or abort the active worker during execution; and (2) live self-evolution distils procedures and failure modes revealed during execution into reusable skills and memory. Across two frozen backbones and three benchmarks, PILOT ranks first in five of six configurations. On Terminal-Bench 2.0, PILOT outperforms counterpart harnesses by up to 9.8 percentage points. In the self-improvement setting, PILOT gains 14.6 points with GLM-5.1 and 12.4 points with Kimi-K2.6. Mean output tokens fall by 42.9% and 47.4%, while successful evaluations per million output tokens rise by 110.3% and 134.0%, respectively.

Yang Xiao, Yusong Sun, Haoming Wu et al. · 0 citations
Preprint Aug 2026

AstronOS: A Unified Execution Model and Runtime for Long-Horizon Agentic Systems

A unified execution model that maintains a work item's persistent identity and versioned authoritative state across calls is introduced that is associated with higher end-to-end pass rates across fresh sessions in this benchmark, at a measurable time cost.

Zhenhang Nie, Gui Zheng, Xudong Sun et al. · 0 citations
Preprint Aug 2026

SyncPlan: Long-Horizon LLM Coordination with Explicit Synchronization and Adaptive Correction

LLM-based multi-agent coordination faces a fundamental trade-off between efficiency and adaptivity in dynamic environments. Existing approaches typically rely on repeated LLM invocations or multi-round communication to adapt decisions during execution, introducing substantial latency and making coordination vulnerable to asynchronous progress and environmental changes. Conversely, one-shot planning reduces coordination overhead but produces open-loop plans that can quickly become stale or fail when actions depend on other agents and the environment. We introduce SyncPlan, a plan-execute-correct framework for long-horizon coordination through explicit synchronization and adaptive correction. Given the state and team-level task, a centralized LLM coordinator generates per-agent action chains in a single planning call. During execution, explicit wait primitives and deadlock detection enforce inter-agent and agent-environment dependencies, while a lightweight Plan Staleness Detector continuously assesses the remaining plan and triggers replanning when environmental changes invalidate its assumptions. We further optimize the coordinator through SFT and planning-oriented RL with dense task progress and outcome-level execution feedback. Experiments on the public Overcooked benchmark and the complex Honor of Kings environment show that SyncPlan achieves state-of-the-art task success rates while using less than 0.05% of the wall-clock runtime compared with existing LLM-based coordinators. Code and datasets will be made publicly available.

Shen You, Xiaoming Zhu, Weining Weng et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Aug 2026

SKILL.state: Scalable Long-Horizon Agent Skills

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly act as autonomous agents executing complex, long-running procedural skills. Existing agent runtimes maintain execution by continually appending observations, actions, and intermediate reasoning traces to an ever-growing conversation history, causing latency degradation and context-poisoning failures over long horizons. We present SKILL.state, a runtime architecture that replaces append-only conversational history with an explicit, mutable execution state. At each execution step, the model receives only the immutable skill specification, the current structured execution state, and the latest observation. Intermediate reasoning is discarded immediately after producing a validated state update, preventing prompt growth with execution history. Across diverse datasets, models, and execution environments, SKILL. state improves task accuracy while substantially reducing cumulative token consumption. Our results demonstrate that explicit execution state is an effective and architecture-agnostic abstraction for scalable long-horizon agent skills.

Sanket Badhe, Priyanka Tiwari, J. Chung · 0 citations
Preprint Jul 2026

StructAgent: Harness Long-horizon Digital Agents with Unified Causal Structure

This paper presents StructAgent, a state-centered framework that introduces a unified state for maintaining compact, verifiable task progress and a structured workflow that regulates progress through verifier-backed state transitions and generalizes beyond desktop environments to Minecraft, demonstrating the generality of the design.

Wenyi Wu, Sibo Zhu, Kun Zhou et al. · 1 citation