# Proactive Agent: Shifting LLM Agents from Reactive Responses to Active Assistance

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.12361 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12361/

## Key facts

- Cited by 87 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 19 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Oct 2024.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/agents/general-llm-agent-frameworks-and-benchmarks/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04761/) (2023)
- [Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03442/) (2023)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10601/) (2023)
- [CAMEL: Communicative Agents for "Mind" Exploration of Large Language Model Society](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17760/) (2023)
- [ChatDev: Communicative Agents for Software Development](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07924/) (2023)
- [GLM-130B: An Open Bilingual Pre-trained Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02414/) (2022)
- [CogAgent: A Visual Language Model for GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08914/) (2023)
- [PAL: Program-aided Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10435/) (2022)
- [Tool Learning with Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08354/) (2023)
- [Personal LLM Agents: Insights and Survey about the Capability, Efficiency and Security](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05459/) (2024)
- [Foundation Models in Robotics: Applications, Challenges, and the Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07843/) (2023)
- [WebCPM: Interactive Web Search for Chinese Long-form Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06849/) (2023)
- [Tell Me More! Towards Implicit User Intention Understanding of Language Model Driven Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09205/) (2024)
- [Toolink: Linking Toolkit Creation and Using through Chain-of-Solving on Open-Source Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05155/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 87)

- [CollabLLM: From Passive Responders to Active Collaborators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00640/) (2025)
- [UserBench: An Interactive Gym Environment for User-Centric Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22034/) (2025)
- [Fully Autonomous AI Agents Should Not be Developed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02649/) (2025)
- [ContextAgent: Context-Aware Proactive LLM Agents with Open-World Sensory Perceptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14668/) (2025)
- [UserRL: Training Interactive User-Centric Agent via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19736/) (2025)
- [Large Language Models Miss the Multi-Agent Mark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21298/) (2025)
- [FingerTip 20K: A Benchmark for Proactive and Personalized Mobile LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21071/) (2025)
- [ProAgentBench: Evaluating LLM Agents for Proactive Assistance with Real-World Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04482/) (2026)
- [Proactive Agent Research Environment: Simulating Active Users to Evaluate Proactive Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00842/) (2026)
- [ProactiveVA: Proactive Visual Analytics with LLM-Based UI Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18165/) (2025)
- [Position: The Real Barrier to LLM Agent Usability is Agentic ROI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17767/) (2025)
- [Agent.xpu: Efficient Scheduling of Agentic LLM Workloads on Heterogeneous SoC](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.24045/) (2025)
- [ProPerSim: Developing Proactive and Personalized AI Assistants through User-Assistant Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21730/) (2025)
- [Beyond Reactivity: Measuring Proactive Problem Solving in LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19771/) (2025)
- [ProAgent: Harnessing On-Demand Sensory Contexts for Proactive LLM Agent Systems in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06721/) (2025)
- [A Desideratum for Conversational Agents: Capabilities, Challenges, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16939/) (2025)
- [ProactiveEval: A Unified Evaluation Framework for Proactive Dialogue Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.20973/) (2025)
- [PASK: Toward Intent-Aware Proactive Agents with Long-Term Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08000/) (2026)
- [LLAMAPIE: Proactive In-Ear Conversation Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04066/) (2025)
- [Clarify Before You Draw: Proactive Agents for Robust Text-to-CAD Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03045/) (2026)
- [Multi-User Large Language Model Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08567/) (2026)
- [User as Code: Executable Memory for Personalized Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.16707/) (2026)
- [Towards Evaluating Proactive Risk Awareness of Multimodal Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17455/) (2025)
- [OS-MAP: How Far Can Computer-Using Agents Go in Breadth and Depth?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19132/) (2025)
- [AppAgent-Pro: A Proactive GUI Agent System for Multidomain Information Integration and User Assistance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18689/) (2025)
- [Agentic Services Computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24380/) (2025)
- [ProactiveMobile: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Boosting Proactive Intelligence on Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.21858/) (2026)
- [ModelingAgent: Bridging LLMs and Mathematical Modeling for Real-World Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15068/) (2025)
- [Building Egocentric Procedural AI Assistant: Methods, Benchmarks, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13261/) (2025)
- [Hunt Instead of Wait: Evaluating Deep Data Research on Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02039/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Agents powered by large language models have shown remarkable abilities in solving complex tasks. However, most agent systems remain reactive, limiting their effectiveness in scenarios requiring foresight and autonomous decision-making. In this paper, we tackle the challenge of developing proactive agents capable of anticipating and initiating tasks without explicit human instructions. We propose a novel data-driven approach for this problem. Firstly, we collect real-world human activities to generate proactive task predictions. These predictions are then labeled by human annotators as either accepted or rejected. The labeled data is used to train a reward model that simulates human judgment and serves as an automatic evaluator of the proactiveness of LLM agents. Building on this, we develop a comprehensive data generation pipeline to create a diverse dataset, ProactiveBench, containing 6,790 events. Finally, we demonstrate that fine-tuning models with the proposed ProactiveBench can significantly elicit the proactiveness of LLM agents. Experimental results show that our fine-tuned model achieves an F1-Score of 66.47% in proactively offering assistance, outperforming all open-source and close-source models. These results highlight the potential of our method in creating more proactive and effective agent systems, paving the way for future advancements in human-agent collaboration.