mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

LIMI: Less is More for Agency

arXiv 2509.17567 ↗First posted 22 Sep 2025cs.AIcited by 17

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks

Abstract (arXiv)

We define Agency as the emergent capacity of AI systems to function as autonomous agents actively discovering problems, formulating hypotheses, and executing solutions through self-directed engagement with environments and tools. This fundamental capability marks the dawn of the Age of AI Agency, driven by a critical industry shift: the urgent need for AI systems that don't just think, but work. While current AI excels at reasoning and generating responses, industries demand autonomous agents that can execute tasks, operate tools, and drive real-world outcomes. As agentic intelligence becomes the defining characteristic separating cognitive systems from productive workers, efficiently cultivating machine autonomy becomes paramount. Current approaches assume that more data yields better agency, following traditional scaling laws from language modeling. We fundamentally challenge this paradigm. LIMI (Less Is More for Intelligent Agency) demonstrates that agency follows radically different development principles. Through strategic focus on collaborative software development and scientific research workflows, we show that sophisticated agentic intelligence can emerge from minimal but strategically curated demonstrations of autonomous behavior. Using only 78 carefully designed training samples, LIMI achieves 73.5% on comprehensive agency benchmarks, dramatically outperforming state-of-the-art models: Kimi-K2-Instruct (24.1%), DeepSeek-V3.1 (11.9%), Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct (27.5%), and GLM-4.5 (45.1%). Most strikingly, LIMI demonstrates 53.7% improvement over models trained on 10,000 samples-achieving superior agentic intelligence with 128 times fewer samples. Our findings establish the Agency Efficiency Principle: machine autonomy emerges not from data abundance but from strategic curation of high-quality agentic demonstrations.

Key facts. Cited by 17 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 30 of its 42 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 22 Sep 2025.

Builds on

30 of 42 references.

Closest ancestors · 7

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025GLM-4.5: Agentic, Reasoning, and Coding (ARC) Foundation Models8 Aug
  2. 2025Chain-of-Agents: End-to-End Agent Foundation Models via Multi-Agent Distillation and Agentic RL6 Aug
  3. 2024τ-bench: A Benchmark for Tool-Agent-User Interaction in Real-World Domains17 Jun
  4. 2023The Rise and Potential of Large Language Model Based Agents: A Survey14 Sep
  5. 2023A Survey on Large Language Model based Autonomous Agents22 Aug
  6. 2023ChatEval: Towards Better LLM-based Evaluators through Multi-Agent Debate14 Aug
  7. 2023CAMEL: Communicative Agents for "Mind" Exploration of Large Language Model Society31 Mar

Other references · 23

  1. 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,419
  2. 2023LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Modelscited by 14,132
  3. 2025Qwen3 Technical Reportcited by 8,820
  4. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,695
  5. 2020Scaling Laws for Neural Language Modelscited by 6,586
  6. 2022PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathwayscited by 5,326
  7. 2023Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Toolscited by 4,182
  8. 2022OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Modelscited by 3,512
  9. 2022BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Modelcited by 1,984
  10. 2023Improving Factuality and Reasoning in Language Models through Multiagent Debatecited by 1,784
  11. 2023Is Your Code Generated by ChatGPT Really Correct? Rigorous Evaluation of Large Language Models for Code Generationcited by 1,391
  12. 2021Scaling Language Models: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Training Gophercited by 1,202
11 more
  1. 2023LIMA: Less Is More for Alignmentcited by 1,100
  2. 2023Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Language Modelscited by 752
  3. 2025τ2-Bench: Evaluating Conversational Agents in a Dual-Control Environmentcited by 627
  4. 2023MM-REACT: Prompting ChatGPT for Multimodal Reasoning and Actioncited by 517
  5. 2025LIMO: Less is More for Reasoningcited by 498
  6. 2022DS-1000: A Natural and Reliable Benchmark for Data Science Code Generationcited by 452
  7. 2025The Landscape of Agentic Reinforcement Learning for LLMs: A Surveycited by 205
  8. 2024Evaluating Language Models for Efficient Code Generationcited by 73
  9. 2025Towards Dynamic Theory of Mind: Evaluating LLM Adaptation to Temporal Evolution of Human Statescited by 19
  10. 2025LIMOPro: Reasoning Refinement for Efficient and Effective Test-time Scalingcited by 15
  11. 2025Robust Preference Optimization via Dynamic Target Marginscited by 13

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 4; 2026: 13.

17 papers.

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By area:

  1. 2025GenEnv: Difficulty-Aligned Co-Evolution Between LLM Agents and Environment Simulatorscited by 42
  2. 2025Agentic Entropy-Balanced Policy Optimizationcited by 40
  3. 2026AgencyBench: Benchmarking the Frontiers of Autonomous Agents in 1M-Token Real-World Contextscited by 28
  4. 2026CoEvolve: Training LLM Agents via Agent-Data Mutual Evolutioncited by 23
  5. 2025Context Engineering 2.0: The Context of Context Engineeringcited by 18
  6. 2026SimCT: Recovering Lost Supervision for Cross-Tokenizer On-Policy Distillationcited by 12
  7. 2026daVinci-Agency: Unlocking Long-Horizon Agency Data-Efficientlycited by 3
  8. 2026Beyond Accuracy: Unveiling Inefficiency Patterns in Tool-Integrated Reasoningcited by 3
  9. 2026From Scoring to Acting: Outcome-Verified Comparative Self-Distillation for LLM Agentscited by 2
  10. 2025Interaction as Intelligence Part II: Asynchronous Human-Agent Rollout for Long-Horizon Task Trainingcited by 1
  11. 2026InstructDiff: Domain-Adaptive Data Selection via Differential Entropy for Efficient LLM Fine-Tuningcited by 1
  12. 2026Aligned Agents, Biased Swarm: Measuring Bias Amplification in Multi-Agent Systemscited by 1
5 more
  1. 2026DLT-Corpus: A Large-Scale Text Collection for the Distributed Ledger Technology Domaincited by 0
  2. 2026The Cost of Knowing: A Resource-Aware Protocol for Benchmarking Hallucination Beyond Static Leaderboardscited by 0
  3. 2026LU-500: A Logo Benchmark for Concept Unlearningcited by 0
  4. 2026Palmyra x6 Technical Report: An Agentic, Tool-Use Model Post-Trained via Anchored Supervised Fine-Tuningcited by 0
  5. 2026LIMIT: Less Is More for Instruction Tuning in Text-to-SQLcited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025Is the `Agent' Paradigm a Limiting Framework for Next-Generation Intelligent Systems?
  2. 2025AI Agents vs. Agentic AI: A Conceptual Taxonomy, Applications and Challenges
  3. 2026Critique of Agent Model
  4. 2026Atria Dawn: The Dawn of Agentic Superintelligence
  5. 2025Agentic AI Needs a Systems Theory
  6. 2026Active Inference: A method for Phenotyping Agency in AI systems?
  7. 2025Exploring Agentic Artificial Intelligence Systems: Towards a Typological Framework
  8. 2026Agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI): Architectures, Taxonomies, and Evaluation of Large Language Model Agents