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Don't Solve, Just Compare: Tiny Advisors for Runtime Intervention in LLM Agents

Research LLM Agents

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TL;DR - COTA improves LLM agents at runtime using a small comparator that selects promising alternative actions rather than solving tasks or generating corrections itself. It improved performance across all nine tested actor-environment settings, suggesting weaker auxiliary models can still provide effective recovery guidance.

  • The comparator evaluates same-prefix alternative continuations against the agent’s proposed action using pairwise judgments.
  • Repeated comparisons determine whether intervention is needed; preferred alternatives are offered as non-binding advice so the original agent can replan.
  • Training uses pairwise supervision from counterfactual branches sharing the same task prefix.
  • COTA outperformed the compared baselines across WebShop, ALFWorld, and tauÂł-Retail with three different actors.

Sources (1)

Don't Solve, Just Compare: Tiny Advisors for Runtime Intervention in LLM Agents

arXiv cs.AI Yanze Jiang, Mingxuan Li, Yuhao Wang, Shengfang Zhai, Jiaheng Zhang 2026-08-21 arXiv:2608.21027
Public signals Semantic Scholar citations 0 · Semantic Scholar influential citations 0
Providers: Hugging Face · N/A OpenAlex · N/A Publisher · N/A Semantic Scholar · Citations 0 · Influential citations 0 X · N/A Fetched 2026-09-17 14:29:51.500343 UTC

TL;DR - COTA improves LLM agents at runtime using a small comparator that selects promising alternative actions rather than solving tasks or generating corrections itself. It improved performance across all nine tested actor-environment settings, suggesting weaker auxiliary models can still provide effective recovery guidance.

  • The comparator evaluates same-prefix alternative continuations against the agent’s proposed action using pairwise judgments.
  • Repeated comparisons determine whether intervention is needed; preferred alternatives are offered as non-binding advice so the original agent can replan.
  • Training uses pairwise supervision from counterfactual branches sharing the same task prefix.
  • COTA outperformed the compared baselines across WebShop, ALFWorld, and tauÂł-Retail with three different actors.
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