Asking for What Was Never Requested: Horizontal and Vertical Proactivity in Agents
An agent that uses tools typically responds to what the user explicitly asks, yet completing the task may require information the user never requested. Work on proactive agents mainly studies whether and when an agent should act on its own, not what information it should pursue. We study a distinct axis of proactivity: its content. Horizontal proactivity pursues unstated information that the current context already identifies, and vertical proactivity pursues needs that only earlier evidence reveals. A need graph, recovered from a benchmark's own decomposition, records which needs depend on which, so both forms, and whether the agent stops at the right time, can be scored from a transcrip...
| Authors | Ido Levy, Asaf Yehudai, Segev Shlomov et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 29 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 September 2026 |
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- dolev31/ProactiveInquirer-Qwen3-8B-MergedModel · cited by
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