Papers
arxiv:2511.04898

Real-Time Reasoning Agents in Evolving Environments

Published on Nov 7
· Submitted by Hao Zhu on Nov 10
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Abstract

Real-Time Reasoning Gym demonstrates the challenges of deploying language models in dynamic environments, introducing AgileThinker to balance reasoning depth and response latency.

AI-generated summary

Agents in the real world must make not only logical but also timely judgments. This requires continuous awareness of the dynamic environment: hazards emerge, opportunities arise, and other agents act, while the agent's reasoning is still unfolding. Despite advances in language model reasoning, existing approaches fail to account for this dynamic nature. We introduce real-time reasoning as a new problem formulation for agents in evolving environments and build Real-Time Reasoning Gym to demonstrate it. We study two paradigms for deploying language models in agents: (1) reactive agents, which employ language models with bounded reasoning computation for rapid responses, and (2) planning agents, which allow extended reasoning computation for complex problems. Our experiments show that even state-of-the-art models struggle with making logical and timely judgments in either paradigm. To address this limitation, we propose AgileThinker, which simultaneously engages both reasoning paradigms. AgileThinker consistently outperforms agents engaging only one reasoning paradigm as the task difficulty and time pressure rise, effectively balancing reasoning depth and response latency. Our work establishes real-time reasoning as a critical testbed for developing practical agents and provides a foundation for research in temporally constrained AI systems, highlighting a path toward real-time capable agents.

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Paper submitter

🎮 RealtimeGym: Agent Thinking while Acting

Current AI agent loop is not enough for real-world applications. Reasoning models take too much time to plan, while non-reasoning models cannot see far enough. In the real world, we want the agent to be both smart and reactive enough to deal with emergent hazards, opportunities, or coordinate with partners.

🚀 What We've Built

🎯 3 Dynamic Games – Freeway, Snake, and Overcooked
⚡ Time Pressure – More reaction is needed for higher time pressure
🧠 Cognitive Load – More planning is needed for heavier cognitive load

💡AgileThinker

Traditional AI agents think step-by-step. AgileThinker thinks in parallel:

  • ✅ Reasons while acting
  • ✅ Adapts to time pressure
  • ✅ Switches strategies on the fly
  • ✅ Doesn't freeze when the clock is ticking

🎪 Try It Live

👉 Interactive Demo – Watch agents compete in real-time
📄 Read the Paper
💻 Benchmark other models or agents?
📦 Access the Dataset – full reasoning trajectories


Built by Stanford SALT Lab | https://realtimegym.saltlab.stanford.edu/

Because the real world doesn't wait for AI to finish thinking. ⏱️


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