Learning to Wait: Synchronizing Agents with the Physical World

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2512.16262v1
• Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2025 07:24:44 GMT
• Title: Learning to Wait: Synchronizing Agents with the Physical World
• Authors: Yifei She, Ping Zhang, He Liu, Yanmin Jia, Yang Jing, Zijun Liu, Peng Sun, Xiangbin Li, Xiaohe Hu,
• Abstract summary: Real-world agentic tasks often involve non-blocking actions with variable latencies, creating a fundamental textitTemporal Gap between action initiation and completion.<n>Existing environment-side solutions, such as blocking wrappers or frequent polling, either limit scalability or dilute the agent's context window with redundant observations.<n>We propose an textbfAgent-side Approach that empowers Large Language Models to actively align their textitCognitive Timeline with the physical world.
• Score: 16.592968251465475
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Real-world agentic tasks, unlike synchronous Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), often involve non-blocking actions with variable latencies, creating a fundamental \textit{Temporal Gap} between action initiation and completion. Existing environment-side solutions, such as blocking wrappers or frequent polling, either limit scalability or dilute the agent's context window with redundant observations. In this work, we propose an \textbf{Agent-side Approach} that empowers Large Language Models (LLMs) to actively align their \textit{Cognitive Timeline} with the physical world. By extending the Code-as-Action paradigm to the temporal domain, agents utilize semantic priors and In-Context Learning (ICL) to predict precise waiting durations (\texttt{time.sleep(t)}), effectively synchronizing with asynchronous environment without exhaustive checking. Experiments in a simulated Kubernetes cluster demonstrate that agents can precisely calibrate their internal clocks to minimize both query overhead and execution latency, validating that temporal awareness is a learnable capability essential for autonomous evolution in open-ended environments.

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