LIMI: Less is More for Agency

Yang Xiao; Mohan Jiang; Jie Sun; Keyu Li; Jifan Lin; Yumin Zhuang; Ji Zeng; Shijie Xia; Qishuo Hua; Xuefeng Li; Xiaojie Cai; Tongyu Wang; Yue Zhang; Liming Liu; Xia Wu; Jinlong Hou; Yuan Cheng; Wenjie Li; Xiang Wang; Dequan Wang; Pengfei Liu

arXiv · 2509.17567

LIMI: Less is More for Agency

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Abstract

We define Agency as the emergent capacity of AI systems to function as autonomous agents actively discovering problems, formulating hypotheses, and executing solutions through self-directed engagement with environments and tools. This fundamental capability marks the dawn of the Age of AI Agency, driven by a critical industry shift: the urgent need for AI systems that don't just think, but work. While current AI excels at reasoning and generating responses, industries demand autonomous agents that can execute tasks, operate tools, and drive real-world outcomes. As agentic intelligence becomes the defining characteristic separating cognitive systems from productive workers, efficiently cultivating machine autonomy becomes paramount. Current approaches assume that more data yields better agency, following traditional scaling laws from language modeling. We fundamentally challenge this paradigm. LIMI (Less Is More for Intelligent Agency) demonstrates that agency follows radically different development principles. Through strategic focus on collaborative software development and scientific research workflows, we show that sophisticated agentic intelligence can emerge from minimal but strategically curated demonstrations of autonomous behavior. Using only 78 carefully designed training samples, LIMI achieves 73.5% on comprehensive agency benchmarks, dramatically outperforming state-of-the-art models: Kimi-K2-Instruct (24.1%), DeepSeek-V3.1 (11.9%), Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct (27.5%), and GLM-4.5 (45.1%). Most strikingly, LIMI demonstrates 53.7% improvement over models trained on 10,000 samples-achieving superior agentic intelligence with 128 times fewer samples. Our findings establish the Agency Efficiency Principle: machine autonomy emerges not from data abundance but from strategic curation of high-quality agentic demonstrations.

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Yang Xiao, Mohan Jiang, Jie Sun, Keyu Li, Jifan Lin, Yumin Zhuang, Ji Zeng, Shijie Xia, Qishuo Hua, Xuefeng Li, Xiaojie Cai, Tongyu Wang, Yue Zhang, Liming Liu, Xia Wu, Jinlong Hou, Yuan Cheng, Wenjie Li, Xiang Wang, Dequan Wang, Pengfei Liu. 2025-09-25. LIMI: Less is More for Agency. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17567

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