Yet Even Less Is Even Better For Agentic, Reasoning, and Coding LLMs
On the map: LLM reasoning → Reasoning for agents, planning and code
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Abstract (arXiv)
Training effective software engineering agents requires large volumes of task-specific trajectories, incurring substantial data construction costs. Inspired by the "Less-Is-More" hypothesis in mathematical reasoning, we investigate its extension to agentic scenarios and propose an end-to-end training framework that achieves superior agentic capabilities with fewer but higher-quality training trajectories. This is achieved via STITCH (Sliding-memory Trajectory Inference and Task Chunking Heuristic), a coarse-to-fine mechanism that filters low-value noise and retains decision-critical tokens to maximize training signal quality. We conduct experiments across multiple agent frameworks (e.g., mini-SWE-agent, MSWE-agent), model scales (30B to 355B), and multilingual settings (Python, Java, and ArkTS). On SWE-bench Verified, models trained with STITCH achieve up to 63.16% relative improvement over base models. On Multi-SWE-bench (Java), MiniMax-M2.5-STITCH achieves 43.75% with our CodeArts Agent scaffold (+16.67%). On HarmonyOS (ArkTS), GLM-4.7-STITCH improves the compilation pass rate to 61.31% (+43.34%) with less than 1K training trajectories. Our results confirm that the "Less-Is-More" paradigm generalizes effectively to complex agentic tasks across diverse languages and model scales.
Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Reasoning for agents, planning and code, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 17 of its 20 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 1 Apr 2026.
Builds on
17 of 20 references.
Closest ancestors · 1
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Other references · 16
- 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
- 2025Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilitiescited by 3,655
- 2023SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?cited by 3,193
- 2023A Survey on Large Language Model based Autonomous Agentscited by 2,203
- 2024SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineeringcited by 1,628
- 2023The Rise and Potential of Large Language Model Based Agents: A Surveycited by 1,422
- 2025LIMO: Less is More for Reasoningcited by 488
- 2025GLM-4.5: Agentic, Reasoning, and Coding (ARC) Foundation Modelscited by 446
- 2024Training Software Engineering Agents and Verifiers with SWE-Gymcited by 300
- 2025OpenCodeInstruct: A Large-scale Instruction Tuning Dataset for Code LLMscited by 57
- 2025Toward Training Superintelligent Software Agents through Self-Play SWE-RLcited by 37
- 2024SWE-bench-java: A GitHub Issue Resolving Benchmark for Javacited by 34
4 more
- 2026SWE-rebench V2: Language-Agnostic SWE Task Collection at Scalecited by 24
- 2025MaskSearch: A Universal Pre-Training Framework to Enhance Agentic Search Capabilitycited by 22
- 2026SWE-World: Building Software Engineering Agents in Docker-Free Environmentscited by 21
- 2026SWE-Master: Unleashing the Potential of Software Engineering Agents via Post-Trainingcited by 18
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.
2 papers.
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- 2025Kimi-Dev: Agentless Training as Skill Prior for SWE-Agents
- 2025Reducing Cost of LLM Agents with Trajectory Reduction
- 2026Latent Programming Horizons in Coding Agents
- 2025Lessons Learned: A Multi-Agent Framework for Code LLMs to Learn and Improve
- 2026Socratic-SWE: Self-Evolving Coding Agents via Trace-Derived Agent Skills
- 2025Generalizable End-to-End Tool-Use RL with Synthetic CodeGym
- 2025MapCoder-Lite: Distilling Multi-Agent Coding into a Single Small LLM
- 2026SWE-Router: Routing in Multi-turn Agentic Software Engineering Tasks