Siyi Cao
2025
Runaway is Ashamed, But Helpful: On the Early-Exit Behavior of Large Language Model-based Agents in Embodied Environments
Qingyu Lu
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Liang Ding
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Siyi Cao
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Xuebo Liu
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Kanjian Zhang
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Jinxia Zhang
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Dacheng Tao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong planning and decision-making capabilities in complex embodied environments. However, such agents often suffer from inefficiencies in multi-turn interactions, frequently trapped in repetitive loops or issuing ineffective commands, leading to redundant computational overhead. Instead of relying solely on learning from trajectories, we take a first step toward exploring the early-exit behavior for LLM-based agents. We propose two complementary approaches, 1. an **intrinsic** method that injects exit instructions during generation, and 2. an **extrinsic** method that verifies task completion to determine when to halt an agent’s trial. To evaluate early-exit mechanisms, we introduce two metrics: one measures the reduction of **redundant steps** as a positive effect, and the other evaluates **progress degradation** as a negative effect. Experiments with 4 different LLMs across 5 embodied environments show significant efficiency improvements, with only minor drops in agent performance. We also validate a practical strategy where a stronger agent assists after an early-exit agent, achieving better performance with the same total steps. We will release our code to support further research.
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- Liang Ding 1
- Xuebo Liu 1
- Qingyu Lu 1
- Dacheng Tao 1
- Kanjian Zhang 1
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