Clearing the Fog: Towards Installing and Refining Proactive Exploration Capabilities in LLM Agents — Paper

Abstract

-cross Abstract: We study proactive exploration in LLM agents, i.e., the ability to explore an environment to acquire information that improves future decision-making. In this regard, we first identify two fundamental bottlenecks that hinder this capability and then propose \ours, a novel method designed to instill and refine proactive exploration. Specifically, \ours\ consists of two components: (1) Exploratory Data Construction, which synthesizes exploration-rich trajectories to mitigate the hindsight bias of standard demonstrations; and (2) RL Optimization with Contrastive Signal Guidance, which leverages contrastive trajectory pairs to distinguish productive exploration from redundant wandering. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of \ours\ and provide insights into the characteristics of proactive exploration. Our code is available at: https://github.com/GuanZhizhao/SAFARI.

Authors 8

Zhizhao Guan, Chen Huang, Ziming Liu, Hongru Liang, Wenqiang Lei, See-Kiong Ng, Tat-Seng Chua, Anthony G Cohn

Specification

Official page: arxiv.org/abs/2608.14339
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 6 h agohigh
Arxiv announce type: replace
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 6 h agohigh
arXiv id: 2608.14339
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 6 h agohigh
Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 6 h agohigh
PDF: arxiv.org/pdf/2608.14339
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 6 h agohigh
Primary category: cs.AI
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 6 h agohigh
Published: 11 Sept 2026
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 6 h agohigh

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Attributed facts

9

Source tiers

T19

Freshest observation

6 h ago

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None

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Authors: Zhizhao Guan, Chen Huang, Ziming Liu

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Value	Valid from → to	Status	Source	Confidence	Extractor
cs.AI	11 Sept 2026 21:02 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

Claims are temporal and append-only: a new observation closes the previous claim (valid_to) instead of overwriting it. Conflicting claims from different sources are kept side by side and flagged — never averaged. Methodology →

11 Sept 2026
New paperPaperClearing the Fog: Towards Installing and Refining Proactive Exploration Capabilities in LLM Agents
New paper: Clearing the Fog: Towards Installing and Refining Proactive Exploration Capabilities in LLM Agents
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Source documents
Source	Document	Type	Tier	Last observed	Snapshots
arXiv (Atom API + RSS)	rss.arxiv.org/rss/cs.LG	feed	T1· Official	4 h ago	1

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