mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Do Proactive Agents Really Need an LLM to Decide When to Wake and What to Anchor?

arXiv 2605.30152 ↗First posted 28 May 2026cs.CL cs.AI cs.HCcited by 2

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

Abstract (arXiv)

Proactive assistants continuously decide when to intervene and what context should support the intervention. Large language model (LLM) pipelines repeatedly interpret activity histories to make these decisions, paying an inference cost even when the assistant remains silent. We show that a small graph model can handle both decisions and improve the language agents it controls. Our key insight is that user activity has a native graph structure: events involve persistent entities whose recurrence connects interactions over time. Triggering and context selection map directly to predictions on event and entity nodes. We introduce a temporal-graph-learning (TGL) controller that learns these predictions jointly and supplies both outputs in one forward pass. The downstream language agent generates suggestions on triggered events using the activity history and scored entities. At 11.13 ms per event on a GPU server, TGL achieves the highest AUCs among nine trigger architectures and gives approximately 4--7× trigger-stage speedups over the two single-forward LLM triggers. A shared TGL model improves F1 across all 14 downstream backbones by a mean of 16.7 points. The controller also runs at 13.99 ms on a consumer laptop with an approximately 220 MiB BF16 resident footprint, bringing effective proactive control to on-device deployment.

Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 45 of its 72 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 28 May 2026.

Builds on

45 of 72 references.

Closest ancestors · 8

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026ProAgentBench: Evaluating LLM Agents for Proactive Assistance with Real-World Data4 Feb
  2. 2025Training Proactive and Personalized LLM Agents4 Nov
  3. 2025ProactiveEval: A Unified Evaluation Framework for Proactive Dialogue Agents28 Aug
  4. 2024Proactive Agent: Shifting LLM Agents from Reactive Responses to Active Assistance16 Oct
  5. 2024Ask-before-Plan: Proactive Language Agents for Real-World Planning18 Jun
  6. 2023FireAct: Toward Language Agent Fine-tuning9 Oct
  7. 2023ProAgent: Building Proactive Cooperative Agents with Large Language Models22 Aug
  8. 2023ExpeL: LLM Agents Are Experiential Learners20 Aug

Other references · 37

  1. 2016Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networkscited by 11,282
  2. 2020Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Taskscited by 9,160
  3. 2017Graph Attention Networkscited by 8,854
  4. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
  5. 2023WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agentscited by 1,908
  6. 2017Modeling Relational Data with Graph Convolutional Networkscited by 1,684
  7. 2023Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Webcited by 1,210
  8. 2018Representation Learning on Graphs with Jumping Knowledge Networkscited by 875
  9. 2021How Attentive are Graph Attention Networks?cited by 818
  10. 2020Temporal Graph Networks for Deep Learning on Dynamic Graphscited by 521
  11. 2020Graph Neural Networks in Recommender Systems: A Surveycited by 493
  12. 2020Inductive Representation Learning on Temporal Graphscited by 454
25 more
  1. 2024AndroidWorld: A Dynamic Benchmarking Environment for Autonomous Agentscited by 450
  2. 2023LaMP: When Large Language Models Meet Personalizationcited by 425
  3. 2019Composition-based Multi-Relational Graph Convolutional Networkscited by 395
  4. 2025Zep: A Temporal Knowledge Graph Architecture for Agent Memorycited by 372
  5. 2018Session-based Recommendation with Graph Neural Networkscited by 312
  6. 2024OmniACT: A Dataset and Benchmark for Enabling Multimodal Generalist Autonomous Agents for Desktop and Webcited by 156
  7. 2017Know-Evolve: Deep Temporal Reasoning for Dynamic Knowledge Graphscited by 149
  8. 2024Hello Again! LLM-powered Personalized Agent for Long-term Dialoguecited by 121
  9. 2021Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning Based on Evolutional Representation Learningcited by 106
  10. 2024A Survey on Retrieval-Augmented Text Generation for Large Language Modelscited by 77
  11. 2024Towards Human-centered Proactive Conversational Agentscited by 48
  12. 2025ContextAgent: Context-Aware Proactive LLM Agents with Open-World Sensory Perceptionscited by 44
  13. 2024Need Help? Designing Proactive AI Assistants for Programmingcited by 42
  14. 2023Integrating Summarization and Retrieval for Enhanced Personalization via Large Language Modelscited by 40
  15. 2024KARMA: Augmenting Embodied AI Agents with Long-and-short Term Memory Systemscited by 38
  16. 2025PersonaX: A Recommendation Agent Oriented User Modeling Framework for Long Behavior Sequencecited by 33
  17. 2022Complex Evolutional Pattern Learning for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoningcited by 30
  18. 2025Proactive Assistant Dialogue Generation from Streaming Egocentric Videoscited by 22
  19. 2025FingerTip 20K: A Benchmark for Proactive and Personalized Mobile LLM Agentscited by 19
  20. 2025ProPerSim: Developing Proactive and Personalized AI Assistants through User-Assistant Simulationcited by 10
  21. 2026PASK: Toward Intent-Aware Proactive Agents with Long-Term Memorycited by 8
  22. 2025ProAgent: Harnessing On-Demand Sensory Contexts for Proactive LLM Agent Systems in the Wildcited by 7
  23. 2025AppAgent-Pro: A Proactive GUI Agent System for Multidomain Information Integration and User Assistancecited by 5
  24. 2026ProactiveMobile: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Boosting Proactive Intelligence on Mobile Devicescited by 5
  25. 2026ProActor: Timing-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Proactive Task Scheduling Agentscited by 3

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.

2 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026Foundations of Proactive Agents: Principles, Technical Layers, and Proactivity-Gym
  2. 2025Plan-Then-Execute: An Empirical Study of User Trust and Team Performance When Using LLM Agents As A Daily Assistant
  3. 2024StateAct: Enhancing LLM Base Agents via Self-prompting and State-tracking
  4. 2026Plans Don't Persist: Why Context Management Is Load Bearing for LLM Agents
  5. 2026Ask Now, Use Later: Benchmarking the Proactivity Gap in Long-Lived LLM Agents
  6. 2025Beyond Reactivity: Measuring Proactive Problem Solving in LLM Agents
  7. 2025Time to Talk: LLM Agents for Asynchronous Group Communication in Mafia Games
  8. 2026AgentAbstain: Do LLM Agents Know When Not to Act?