action

Definition

The unit of choice an agent makes at each step — the thing a policy outputs. In classic RL it is a discrete move or a continuous control signal; for LLM agents it is a tool call, a shell command, or a click. Two properties set the difficulty: how large the action space is, and whether actions can be undone, since irreversible ones make exploration expensive.

Explainers using this term

• Paper Deep Dive: From Evidence to Action: How Tool-Using Agents Fail — Reading the Failure Diagnostics and InterventionsFrom Evidence to Action: How Tool-Using Agents Fail
• SafeActBench explained (arXiv:2610.07753) — tool agents fail before executionFrom Evidence to Action: How Tool-Using Agents Fail
• Paper Walkthrough: PointWAM — Forecasting the Scene and the Hands as 3D Point Trajectories to Teach Robot Hands from Human VideoPointWAM: 3D World Action Modeling for Dexterous Robotic Manipulation