Probe-and-Resume: When and How to Evaluate Agent Execution
arXiv:2610.21088v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Test-time search can improve agent performance by exploring alternative actions and using a critic to select promising branches. We study this approach in terminal-based computer-use environments, which expose only a partial view of a large underlying state, and find that the Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) configuration we evaluate does not significantly improve task success. We identify two sources of poor critic performance: the agent's observat…