Skip to content
Preprint

Recursive Synthesis for Long-Horizon Terminal Tasks

Aug 2026 · 5 citations · 58 references
Computer Science

TL;DR

Recursive Synthetic Terminal Tasks (RST) is presented, a recursive verified synthesis framework for constructing long-horizon terminal-agent tasks at scale and shows no ceiling, indicating that the process can continue well beyond the scale reported here.

Abstract

High-quality long-horizon training data for terminal agents is expensive to produce, often costing hundreds to thousands of dollars per task, because each task must keep the instruction, environment, reference solution, and verifier mutually consistent. Human authoring does not scale, and direct generation with large language models (LLMs) often breaks these dependencies. We present Recursive Synthetic Terminal Tasks (RST), a recursive verified synthesis framework for constructing long-horizon terminal-agent tasks at scale. Starting from verified seed tasks, RST extends the reference solution, realigns the verifier and instruction to the new workflow, validates the result in a fresh sandbox, and reuses accepted tasks as seeds for subsequent rounds. Across fifteen recursive rounds, RST produces 37,484 synthesized terminal-agent tasks at roughly $0.05 per task. Task difficulty increases substantially over rounds: the median reference solution grows from 67 to 374 lines, the median number of executed commands grows from 40 to 244, and DeepSeek-V4-Pro pass@4 drops from 90% at R1 to 2.5% at R15. To demonstrate training utility, we collect rejection-sampled Qwen3.5 trajectories on the synthesized tasks and use them for supervised fine-tuning. Fine-tuning on these trajectories improves Qwen3.5-27B and Qwen3.5-122B-A10B by up to 10 points on Terminal-Bench 2, Terminal-Bench Hard, and Long-Horizon Terminal Bench, while agentic PPO lifts Qwen3.5-27B to 49.44%, 32.00%, and 22.07% on the three benchmarks, corresponding to relative gains of 20.0%, 41.2%, and 21.9% over the base model. Moreover, after 15 rounds, the recursion shows no ceiling: synthesis yield and validation rates remain stable as difficulty keeps climbing, indicating that the process can continue well beyond the scale reported here.

View source

Similar papers

#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

T1: Terminal Agent Reinforcement Learning for Long-Horizon Tasks

Agent usage is shifting toward long-horizon tasks such as coding and scientific discovery, among which terminal tasks are especially important. We introduce T1, a Mixture-of-Experts model of 122B total trained with reinforcement learning, operating a real shell in a cloud sandbox for up to 300+ tool-call turns per task, rewarded by executing each task's own verifier. We provide a comprehensive recipe: First, an aggressively warm-started to stabilize actor-critic training, with a dense process reward scoring trajectories by the absolute number of passing verifiers. Second, stable optimization through TITO construction, training on the exact sampled token identifiers with drift repair at turn boundaries, and rollout routing replay, recording the sampler's per-token expert choices at every MoE layer and replaying them during training. Third, fully out-of-distribution training corpus: isolated seeds and synthesized tasks disjoint from Terminal-Bench 2.1 ensures gains reflect genuine capability transfer over benchmark overfitting. Together, TITO and R3 cut the training-to-inference log-probability difference from 0.021 to 0.013, with exactly aligned zero token drift in the loss region. On Terminal-Bench 2.1, our post-train pipeline raises initial base model from 43.8% to T1 with 64.0% resolved. On Long-Horizon Terminal Bench, T1 reaches 27.9% and surpasses GPT-5.4 and GLM-5.1.

Jun-Yao Yang, Yucheng Shi, Zhongzhi Li et al. · 0 citations
Jul 2026

Meta-Task: Turning Terminal Task Synthesis into a Terminal Task for Scalable Agent Training

Meta-Task is proposed, a framework that redefines terminal task synthesis as a Terminal-Bench-format task itself: an agent operates within a real container environment to iteratively generate, execute, and verify tasks, so that synthesized components are checked for internal consistency and executability within the generation loop itself.

Zhi-Hong Pan, Ji-Yuan He, Kai Zhang et al. · 1 citation
Jul 2026

SearchArt: Training Long-Horizon Search Agent with Scalable Synthetic and Verified Task

SearchArt is introduced, a scalable framework for training long-horizon search agents through verification-driven task synthesis and a multi-stage post-training pipeline, which exhibits adaptive search planning, iterative evidence aggregation, and complex reasoning over extended interaction horizons.

Lang Mei, Xiao-Han Yu, Chong Chen et al. · 1 citation
Jul 2026

AgentOmnia: Scaling Agentic Models for Full-Scenario Applications

A one-round study provides initial evidence for PRD-guided self-evolution, motivating validation at larger scales and in industrial settings, and presents AgentOmnia, a framework coordinating task-space definition, data synthesis, post-training, evaluation, and improvement across To-Consumer (ToC), To-Business (ToB), and To-Employee (ToE) applications.

Hao Jiang, Gang-Tao Xin, Ying Huang et al. · 0 citations
Preprint Sep 2026

StageGuard: Learning Stage Transitions for Long-Horizon Robot Tasks via Agentic Distillation

Hierarchical planning frameworks combine skills from multiple robot control policies for long-horizon task execution, where determining when to terminate the current skill and advance to the next subtask is essential. Existing approaches often rely on pre-designed completion signal checkers that are hard to obtain in real-world execution. Large-scale vision-language models (VLMs) offer strong reasoning capabilities, but their decision boundaries are not inherently aligned with task completion criteria, while cloud deployment and lengthy reasoning introduce substantial latency, limiting real-time monitoring. We propose StageGuard, an agentic distillation framework for accurate and efficient stage-transition decisions. StageGuard combines teacher-model reasoning with demonstration trajectories to generate structured explanations of subtask completion and policy switching. A lightweight student VLM uses these explanations to generate compact self-explanations, which are used for supervised fine-tuning. We evaluate stage-transition prediction on trajectories from two benchmarks and assess closed-loop task success through integration into hierarchical robot control on BEHAVIOR-1K, with further validation on real robots. Results show substantial improvements in stage-transition prediction while supporting efficient online monitoring.

Jinbang Huang, Yuan Hu, Zhi-Yuan Li et al. · 0 citations
Preprint Aug 2026

Compiling and Benchmarking Task-State Horizons for Embodied Agents

This work introduces RoboGraph, a robotic task compiler that translates state-transition dependencies into executable symbolic graphs, and constructs task-state horizons from spatial and temporal causal dependencies, including those induced by unexpected failures and interventions during task execution.

Mei Wang, Shi-Chao Li · 0 citations

We use cookies to run the site and, with your consent, for analytics and to show ads. See our Cookie Policy.