Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Jiang, Mingjian, Ruan, Yangjun, Lastras, Luis, Kapanipathi, Pavan, Hashimoto, Tatsunori
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.08120
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866910941057122304
author Jiang, Mingjian
Ruan, Yangjun
Lastras, Luis
Kapanipathi, Pavan
Hashimoto, Tatsunori
author_facet Jiang, Mingjian
Ruan, Yangjun
Lastras, Luis
Kapanipathi, Pavan
Hashimoto, Tatsunori
contents Recent advances in language model (LM) agents have demonstrated significant potential for automating complex real-world tasks. To make progress on these difficult tasks, LM agent architectures have become increasingly complex, often incorporating multi-step retrieval tools, multiple agents, and scaffolding adapted to the underlying LM. In this work, we investigate whether all of this complexity is necessary, or if parts of these scaffolds can be removed on challenging tasks like SWE-bench. We show that in the case of SWE-bench, simply putting the entire environment into the context of a long context language model (LCLM) and properly prompting the model makes it competitive with carefully tuned, complex agent scaffolds. We show that a Gemini-1.5-Pro model without any scaffolding or tools achieves 38% on SWE-Bench-Verified, comparable with approaches using carefully tuned agent scaffolds (32%). While the unscaffolded approach with Gemini-1.5-Pro falls short of the strongest agentic architectures, we demonstrate that the more capable Gemini-2.5-Pro using the same unscaffolded approach directly attains a 50.8% solve rate. Additionally, a two-stage approach combining Gemini-1.5-Pro with Claude-3.7 achieves a competitive 48.6% solve rate.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_08120
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Putting It All into Context: Simplifying Agents with LCLMs
Jiang, Mingjian
Ruan, Yangjun
Lastras, Luis
Kapanipathi, Pavan
Hashimoto, Tatsunori
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Recent advances in language model (LM) agents have demonstrated significant potential for automating complex real-world tasks. To make progress on these difficult tasks, LM agent architectures have become increasingly complex, often incorporating multi-step retrieval tools, multiple agents, and scaffolding adapted to the underlying LM. In this work, we investigate whether all of this complexity is necessary, or if parts of these scaffolds can be removed on challenging tasks like SWE-bench. We show that in the case of SWE-bench, simply putting the entire environment into the context of a long context language model (LCLM) and properly prompting the model makes it competitive with carefully tuned, complex agent scaffolds. We show that a Gemini-1.5-Pro model without any scaffolding or tools achieves 38% on SWE-Bench-Verified, comparable with approaches using carefully tuned agent scaffolds (32%). While the unscaffolded approach with Gemini-1.5-Pro falls short of the strongest agentic architectures, we demonstrate that the more capable Gemini-2.5-Pro using the same unscaffolded approach directly attains a 50.8% solve rate. Additionally, a two-stage approach combining Gemini-1.5-Pro with Claude-3.7 achieves a competitive 48.6% solve rate.
title Putting It All into Context: Simplifying Agents with LCLMs
topic Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.08120