Never Stop Thinking: Continuous-Time Language Agents· 连续时间语言代理
Voice agents built on LLMs follow a rigid listen-think-speak loop that inserts seconds of dead air before every reply. We show that continuous-time cognition (thinking while listening and thinking while speaking) emerges from an unmodified text model under a lightweight interrupt-and-resume orchestrator, cutting live-pipeline latency by 19% overall and by half in the regime the mechanism targets. To measure whether continuous-time thinking improves what agents accomplish, we introduce ReactiveBench: 120 interactive scenarios scored against pre-registered binary requirements, plus a verifiable streaming track scored by exact correctness. ReactiveBench exposes a pitfall with broad consequences: LLM judges reward visible reasoning; a large judged "advantage" of continuous-time thinking revers