TACT: Mitigating Overthinking and Overacting in Coding Agents via Activation Steering
Researchers introduce TACT, a technique using activation steering to detect and correct 'agent drift' in language model coding agents, where models either repeatedly reason over known information or issue tool calls without proper reasoning. The method improves task resolution rates by 4.8-5.8 percentage points across multiple benchmarks while reducing steps needed to complete tasks by up to 26%.