ARTIS: Agentic Risk-Aware Test-Time Scaling via Iterative Simulation

Abstract: Current test-time scaling (TTS) techniques enhance LLM performance by allocating additional computation at inference time, yet they remain insufficient for agentic settings, where actions directly interact with external environments and their effects can be irreversible and costly. We propose \emph{\name}, \emph{\underline{A}gentic \underline{R}isk-Aware \underline{T}est-Time Scaling via \underline{I}terative \underline{S}imulation}, a framework that decouples exploration from commitment by enabling test-time exploration through simulated interactions prior to real-world execution. This design allows extending inference-time computation to improve action-level reliability and robustness without incurring environmental risk. We further show that naive LLM-based simulators struggle to capture rare but high-impact failure modes, substantially limiting their effectiveness for agentic decision making. To address this limitation, we introduce a \emph{risk-aware tool simulator} that emphasizes fidelity on failure-inducing actions via targeted data generation and rebalanced training. Experiments on multi-turn and multi-step agentic benchmarks demonstrate that iterative simulation substantially improves agent reliability, and that risk-aware simulation is essential for consistently realizing these gains across models and tasks.