On the Clock: Towards Punctual and Productive Time-Budgeted AI Agents

arXiv:2610.10833v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study whether small LLM agents can operate effectively under explicit wall-clock time budgets by both respecting the allocated runtime and using available time productively. We evaluate Qwen3.6-27B on five competitions from MLE-Bench Lite and Qwen3-4B on Zork I (Jericho), two agentic benchmarks where additional computational time can meaningfully…