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arXiv — cs.AI preprintsInternational9 October 2026

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

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arXiv:2610.10833v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study whether small LLM agents can operate effectively under explicit wall-clock time budgets by both respecting the allocated runtime and using available time productively. We evaluate Qwen3.6-27B on five competitions from MLE-Bench Lite and Qwen3-4B on Zork I (Jericho), two agentic benchmarks where additional computational time can meaningfully improve performance. In the simplest setting, where the budget is stated only in the prompt, agents fail to translate the stated budget into controlled use of time. These failures arise from gaps in t
— arXiv — cs.AI preprints

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