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    "story_id": "mp-2026-09-13-003",
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    "headline": "The Agent Studied Before It Knew the Exam",
    "slug": "the-agent-studied-before-it-knew-the-exam",
    "dek": "A meta-agent prepared reusable artifacts without task examples, then reduced the frozen solver’s test-time sampling on six benchmarks.",
    "summary": "A meta-agent prepared reusable artifacts without task examples, then reduced the frozen solver’s test-time sampling on six benchmarks.",
    "body_text": "Task-agnostic environment preprocessing lets an agent explore corpora and tools before it knows the downstream task distribution. Across six heterogeneous benchmarks, an archive-equipped meta-agent chose preparation artifacts and achieved the highest Avg@3 reward on five, while fixed corpus processing remained best on the largest corpus. Larger study budgets did not reliably improve reward, but the resulting artifacts reduced how many test-time samples were needed to reach a given score. The study shifts some computation from repeated attempts into reusable preparation without claiming one study strategy works everywhere.",
    "why_it_matters": "A meta-agent prepared reusable artifacts without task examples, then reduced the frozen solver’s test-time sampling on six benchmarks.",
    "limitations": [
      "Larger study budgets did not reliably improve reward, but the resulting artifacts reduced how many test-time samples were needed to reach a given score."
    ],
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    "first_published_at": "2026-09-13T09:00:00.000-04:00",
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        "text": "A meta-agent prepared reusable artifacts without task examples, then reduced the frozen solver’s test-time sampling on six benchmarks.",
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        "qualification": "Larger study budgets did not reliably improve reward, but the resulting artifacts reduced how many test-time samples were needed to reach a given score."
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    "source_ids": [
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    "tags": [
      "AI agents",
      "environment preprocessing",
      "test-time compute"
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    {
      "source_id": "source-2026-09-13-003",
      "title": "arXiv preprint 2609.10824",
      "publisher": "arXiv",
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.10824",
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      "source_type": "primary_research",
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      "published_at": null,
      "accessed_at": "2026-09-13T08:24:00.000-04:00",
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  "publisher": {
    "name": "The Machine Press",
    "url": "https://themachinepress.com",
    "description": "A daily newspaper for the age of artificial intelligence."
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  "cite_this_report": {
    "title": "The Agent Studied Before It Knew the Exam",
    "publisher": "The Machine Press",
    "published_at": "2026-09-13T09:00:00.000-04:00",
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