IBM Research released ALTK‑Evolve, a method that adds a short playbook of learned guidelines to a basic ReAct customer‑service agent that runs on GPT‑4.1. The added rules raise the agent’s Pass⁴ score on the τ²‑bench retail task to 67.5%, the highest reported in the October 12 2026 leaderboard snapshot. No model weights are changed and no human labeling is required.
Why it matters
Retail companies can achieve top‑ranking, reliable automated support using only prompt tweaks rather than expensive model fine‑tuning.
