Xinhe Wang


2026

Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities as task-solving agents across interactive domains. However, in complex environments, these agents may need to rely on auxiliary guidance to reduce the search space or make up for limited domain-specific knowledge. Such guidance includes human-provided manuals and demonstrations, retrieved examples from memory or external tools, high-level heuristics, and agent-acquired knowledge from prior interactions. However, this guidance may be imperfect. For example, due to changes in the environment, ambiguous or simplified language, or retrieval errors from external sources, guidance can be incomplete, outdated, or contextually mismatched, potentially causing errors or failures during task execution. To address this, we introduce MIRAGE, a benchmark for MeasurIng Robustness of LLM Agents under Imperfect GuidancE. MIRAGE includes procedurally generated environments in navigation, cooking, and gaming, where both the environment and the auxiliary guidance vary in fidelity and relevance. We further extend MIRAGE to realistic web tasks via WebArena, using noisy or underspecified instructions extracted from demonstrations. Our findings reveal critical failure modes in current LLM agents and motivate future work on improving their robustness under imperfect guidance.

2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong abilities in common-sense reasoning and interactive decision-making, but often struggle with complex, long-horizon planning tasks. Recent techniques have sought to structure LLM outputs using control flow and code to improve planning performance. However, code-based approaches can be error-prone and insufficient for handling ambiguous or unstructured data. To address these challenges, we propose REPL-Plan, an LLM planning approach that is fully code-expressive (it can utilize all the benefits of code) while also being dynamic (it can flexibly adapt from errors and use the LLM for soft reasoning). In REPL-Plan, an LLM solves tasks by interacting with a Read-Eval-Print Loop (REPL), which iteratively executes and evaluates code, similar to language shells or interactive code notebooks, allowing the model to flexibly correct errors and handle tasks dynamically. We demonstrate that REPL-Plan achieves strong results across various planning domains compared to previous methods.