Marathoner: Ultra-Long-Horizon Autonomous Intelligence
Not on the map. Why?
Abstract (arXiv)
Humans naturally possess the ability to work persistently toward long-term goals. Given a challenging task, humans can continuously work for months or even years to accomplish a specific objective. In this paper, we propose Marathoner, an autonomous agentic model possessing the ability of ultra-long-horizon execution. Specifically, we propose a comprehensive post-training pipeline to instill this critical capability into base model. For Ultra-Long-Horizon Task Synthesis, we leverage major release PRs containing 1000+ lines of new code from diverse GitHub repositories as the primary source for synthesizing challenging task-level data. Additionally, we introduce Multi-Task Chaining, which chains multiple generated tasks into a single more challenging task, enabling the synthesis of tasks with frontier-level difficulty. For rejection sampling finetuning, we combine strong teacher model with diverse harnesses to generate trajectories on our synthesized tasks and conduct supervised finetuning on base model with rejection sampled trajectories. For reinforcement learning, cold-started model performs real-world execution through harnesses in independent sandboxes during rollout process, effectively facilitating the acquisition of genuine ultra-long-horizon execution capability. We further propose a novel reward strategy, Later Stage Bonus Reward, which explicitly encourages model to perform meaningful maneuvers during later stages of execution. Through extensive evaluation on 5 benchmarks containing ultra-long-horizon tasks, Marathoner achieves consistent and substantial performance improvements over base model and even surpasses performance of strong proprietary model. Further analysis shows that Marathoner can consistently work for 10+ hours and conduct 1000+ tool calls on highly challenging tasks.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 23 of its 32 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 28 Sep 2026.
Builds on
23 of 32 references.
References · 23
- 2023GPT-4 Technical Reportcited by 18,396
- 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 9,379
- 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,695
- 2025OpenAI GPT-5 System Cardcited by 989
- 2026Terminal-Bench: Benchmarking Agents on Hard, Realistic Tasks in Command Line Interfacescited by 585
- 2025AReaL: A Large-Scale Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning System for Language Reasoningcited by 250
- 2024Large Language Model-Based Agents for Software Engineering: A Surveycited by 178
- 2025Process Reward Models That Thinkcited by 118
- 2025A Survey on Code Generation with LLM-based Agentscited by 106
- 2025PRMBench: A Fine-grained and Challenging Benchmark for Process-Level Reward Modelscited by 99
- 2025GenPRM: Scaling Test-Time Compute of Process Reward Models via Generative Reasoningcited by 97
- 2023The Programmer's Assistant: Conversational Interaction with a Large Language Model for Software Developmentcited by 96
11 more
- 2024Process Reward Model with Q-Value Rankingscited by 80
- 2025NL2Repo-Bench: Towards Long-Horizon Repository Generation Evaluation of Coding Agentscited by 65
- 2024Need Help? Designing Proactive AI Assistants for Programmingcited by 43
- 2025A Survey of Process Reward Models: From Outcome Signals to Process Supervisions for Large Language Modelscited by 38
- 2025AI Agentic Programming: A Survey of Techniques, Challenges, and Opportunitiescited by 28
- 2024Unlocking Reasoning Potential in Large Langauge Models by Scaling Code-form Planningcited by 25
- 2026Why Reasoning Fails to Plan: A Planning-Centric Analysis of Long-Horizon Decision Making in LLM Agentscited by 23
- 2026SWE-Marathon: Can Agents Autonomously Complete Ultra-Long-Horizon Software Work?cited by 23
- 2025DreamPRM: Domain-Reweighted Process Reward Model for Multimodal Reasoningcited by 15
- 2025Repurposing Synthetic Data for Fine-grained Search Agent Supervisioncited by 11
- 2026Aligning Agents via Planning: A Benchmark for Trajectory-Level Reward Modelingcited by 8
Built on by
Not cited yet.
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026Tev: Scaling Long-Horizon Agentic Environments with Dense Progress Rewards
- 2026Toward Ultra-Long-Horizon Agentic Science: Cognitive Accumulation for Machine Learning Engineering
- 2025UltraHorizon: Benchmarking Agent Capabilities in Ultra Long-Horizon Scenarios
- 2026OS-Marathon: Benchmarking Computer-Use Agents on Vast-Horizon, Repetitive Tasks
- 2026An Architecture for Long-Horizon Agents: Levels, Ticks and Cascaded Intelligence
- 2026KLong: Training LLM Agent for Extremely Long-horizon Tasks
- 2026Long-Horizon-Terminal-Bench 2.0: Automating Diverse Task Construction and Measuring Sustained Agent Progress
- 2026SKILL.state: Scalable Long-Horizon Agent Skills