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arXiv · 2511.01015

What's the next frontier for Data-centric AI? Data Savvy Agents

Nabeel Seedat·Jiashuo Liu·Mihaela van der Schaar
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Abstract

The recent surge in AI agents that autonomously communicate, collaborate with humans and use diverse tools has unlocked promising opportunities in various real-world settings. However, a vital aspect remains underexplored: how agents handle data. Scalable autonomy demands agents that continuously acquire, process, and evolve their data. In this paper, we argue that data-savvy capabilities should be a top priority in the design of agentic systems to ensure reliable real-world deployment. Specifically, we propose four key capabilities to realize this vision: (1) Proactive data acquisition: enabling agents to autonomously gather task-critical knowledge or solicit human input to address data gaps; (2) Sophisticated data processing: requiring context-aware and flexible handling of diverse data challenges and inputs; (3) Interactive test data synthesis: shifting from static benchmarks to dynamically generated interactive test data for agent evaluation; and (4) Continual adaptation: empowering agents to iteratively refine their data and background knowledge to adapt to shifting environments. While current agent research predominantly emphasizes reasoning, we hope to inspire a reflection on the role of data-savvy agents as the next frontier in data-centric AI.

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Nabeel Seedat, Jiashuo Liu, Mihaela van der Schaar. 2025-11-02. What's the next frontier for Data-centric AI? Data Savvy Agents. https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01015

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