agency

Definition

The capacity to act on one's own initiative — setting subgoals, choosing means, and revising the plan as conditions change — rather than executing a fixed instruction. In agent research it marks the axis separating a model that returns one response from a system that calls tools and drives a long horizon by itself. It is a statement about who decides the next step, not about raw capability, and papers use it when autonomy itself is the property being measured.

Explainers using this term

• Paper Walkthrough — UrbanGround: Where MLLM Agents Break Down on a Real StreetUrbanGround: From Local Perception to Spatial Agency in a Real-Scale City