Do AI Agents Know When a Task Is Simple? Toward Complexity-Aware Reasoning and Execution

arXiv cs.CL · 18 hours ago

Researchers formalized task-aware execution-scope estimation for LLM agents, proposing E3, a method where agents estimate task difficulty before committing resources rather than re-reading all available information. On MSE-Bench with 121 edits, E3 achieved 100% success while reducing token usage by 91% and inspected files by 92% compared to the strongest baseline, and real-world testing on open-source code confirmed the approach produces leaner execution with comparable task success. This work aims to reduce execution redundancy in AI agents through task complexity awareness before they perform multi-step workflows.