/AI14h ago

Northwestern's Manling Li introduces BAGEN, a framework showing frontier LLM agents consistently waste resources by overestimating their budgets

Task performance shows low correlation with actual budget awareness.

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Estelle Zhang@EstelleZJY

Proud to share our work on BAGEN: Are LLM Agents Budget-Aware?

As AI agents move from demos into real enterprise workflows, the question is no longer just whether an agent can finish a task. The harder question is whether it knows what it is spending along the way.

In electronic production, budget means cost, time, capacity, margin, supplier risk, and operational judgment. At O₂ AI, this is exactly the kind of problem we care about: building agents that can make decisions under real-world constraints, not just generate answers.

A production-ready enterprise agent should know when to continue, when to stop, when to escalate, and how to improve from every transaction.

That is why budget awareness matters.

Grateful to work with an incredible team of researchers and builders on this. Thanks @wzenus @ManlingLi_ and the whole team for making this work possible. Excited to keep pushing toward reliable, constraint-aware agents for real industrial decision-making!

1:57 PM · Jun 5, 2026 · 25.7K Views
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Positive users praise the BAGEN framework for treating budget as an active control in LLM agents to fix passive cost tracking bottlenecks.

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Maryam@Sci_Tech_Eng

@wzenus Worth it! ✨ Interesting work.

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RETWEETS5

Happy to share that BAGEN has been accepted to Midwest ML Symposium 2026 (https://midwest-ml.org/2026/) as Spotlight!

check out our paper at arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00198

🧵 Claude-Opus-4.8 takes you too much tokens - but is this issue general across agents? Do agents know how much they'll spend?

Introducing Budget-Aware Agents (BAGEN): We study budget awareness across 4 envs & 5 frontier agents, and find structured failures in most of them. 👇

1dViews 34.5KLikes 45Bookmarks 10
Hyper.AI@HyperAI_News

@wzenus We talk a lot about agent capabilities, but passive cost tracking after execution is a huge bottleneck. Treating budget as an active control signal via progressive interval estimation is a brilliant approach.

1dViews 27Likes 1
Estelle Zhang@EstelleZJY

Project Page: http://ragen-ai.github.io/bagen; Paper: http://ragen-ai.github.io/bagen/bagen.pdf; Code: http://github.com/mll-lab-nu/BAGEN; Data: http://huggingface.co/datasets/MLL-Lab/BAGEN

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Northwestern's Manling Li introduces BAGEN, a framework showing frontier LLM agents consistently waste resources by overestimating their budgets · Digg