Budget-Aware Tool Use Enables Effective Agent Scaling

Excerpt

arXiv:2511.17006v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scaling test-time computation has been extended from language model reasoning to tool-augmented agents, where scaling involves not only thinking in tokens but also acting via tool calls that directly constrain environmental interaction. However, we found that simply increasing the tool-call budget fails to improve performance, as agents lack "budget awareness" and quickly hit a performance ceiling. We study how to scale such agents effectively