First Things First: Teaching LLM-Based Agents to Prioritize Must-Haves before Nice-to-Haves

Abstract

Recent progress in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has fueled significant enthusiasm in their potential to act as autonomous agents for real-world tasks. However, scenarios requiring agents to fulfill users' complex, structured requirements remain largely underexplored. In this work, we examine reasoning tasks under three distinct requirement scenarios: (i) Must-have requirements uniquely determine a unique feasible solution; (ii) Multiple answers satisfy the must-have requirements and are prioritized via the nice-to-have requirements; and (iii) No candidate solution satisfies the must-have requirements, in which case the agent should abstain from generating a response. We evaluate state-of-the-art MLLMs on 3,649 carefully constructed problems that reflect realistic service scenarios, including e-commerce, booking, and map-based or ride-hailing. Our evaluation reveals that existing MLLMs exhibit catastrophic failures in all scenarios. They frequently misinterpret task requirements, violate must-have requirements, and produce invalid solutions. To address this critical gap, we propose First Things First Reinforcement Learning FTF-rl that explicitly optimizes reasoning over multi-priority user requirements. Experimental results show that our method substantially improves the task success rate compared to strong baselines. Moreover, FTF-rl yields general effectiveness on popular logical and mathematical reasoning tasks, including LogicVista, MathVision, and InfoQA. Our findings suggest that enhancing requirement-aware reasoning capability provides a simple yet effective pathway to improve generalization of MLLM agents. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/claire62/FTF-RL.