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abstract indexed · arXiv 2610.10833 · updated 2026-10-18

On the Clock: Towards Punctual and Productive Time-Budgeted AI Agents

First page of On the Clock: Towards Punctual and Productive Time-Budgeted AI Agents
From the original paper · arXiv 2610.10833Page 1. Select the image to read the PDF.

The approach replaces unstated or prompt-only time budgets with harness-exposed timing signals, optional deadline-enforcement hooks, and optionally GRPO training with budget-aware rewards. The harness mechanisms cost little (minor instrumentation and prompt tokens for timing feedback), while the RL variant adds training compute and reward-engineering complexity. It can fail to convert adherence into productivity: agents that respect the budget still fill extra time with repeated actions, and multi-budget GRPO training tends to collapse toward the shortest-budget strategy.

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recommendation
test
research area
agent evaluation
technical change
Harness-injected timing feedback for budgeted agents
published
2026-10-07

Timing injection in the harness is cheap and fits constrained infrastructure, but the paper shows adherence gains without corresponding task-performance gains, so adoption must be validated against the reader's actual workloads before committing to the RL variant.

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  1. claim 01Paperraft inference
    Read the brief interpretation

    The approach replaces unstated or prompt-only time budgets with harness-exposed timing signals, optional deadline-enforcement hooks, and optionally GRPO training with budget-aware rewards. The harness mechanisms cost little (minor instrumentation and prompt tokens for timing feedback), while the RL variant adds training compute and reward-engineering complexity. It can fail to convert adherence into productivity: agents that respect the budget still fill extra time with repeated actions, and multi-budget GRPO training tends to collapse toward the shortest-budget strategy.

    This is a Paperraft inference. It is not pinned to a verified PDF passage.

    Inspect the source
  2. claim 02Paperraft inference

    Injecting timing information through the harness substantially improves wall-clock budget adherence for a 27B agent without measurable loss in task performance; RL with GRPO achieves near-perfect budget adherence on Zork I but does not improve task performance on MLE-Bench.

    This is a Paperraft inference. It is not pinned to a verified PDF passage.

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quality

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arXiv 2610.10833

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