Can LLM agents explore codebases and reason about code semantics without executing the code? We study this capability, which we call agentic code reasoning, and introduce semi-formal reasoning: a structured prompting methodology that requires agents to construct explicit premises, trace execution paths, and derive formal conclusions. Unlike unstructured chain-of-thought, semi-formal reasoning acts as a certificate: the agent cannot skip cases or make unsupported claims. We evaluate across three tasks (patch equivalence verification, fault localization, and code question answering) and show that semi-formal reasoning consistently improves accuracy on all of them. For patch equivalence, accuracy improves from 78% to 88% on curated examples and reaches 93% on real-world agent-generated patches, approaching the reliability needed for execution-free RL reward signals. For code question answering on RubberDuckBench Mohammad et al. (2026), semi-formal reasoning achieves 87% accuracy. For fault localization on Defects4J Just et al. (2014), semi-formal reasoning improves Top-5 accuracy by 5 percentage points over standard reasoning. These results demonstrate that structured agentic reasoning enables meaningful semantic code analysis without execution, opening practical applications in RL training pipelines, code review, and static program analysis.
AgenticRag-R1: Agentic Reinforcement Learning with Stack Memory for Multi-Step Reasoning, Retrieval and Memorizing
National Engineering Research Center of Software Engineering, Peking University（北京大学国家软件工程研究中心）；School of Computer Science, Peking University（北京大学计算机学院）
Reasoning RAG via System 1 or System 2: A Survey on Reasoning Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Industry Challenges
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；University of Georgia（佐治亚大学）；South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Technical University of Munich, University of Cologne（慕尼黑技术大学、科隆大学）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；Qingyuan Research Institute, Shanghai Jiaotong University（青原研究院，上海交通大学）
Octopus: Agentic Multimodal Reasoning with Six-Capability Orchestration
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
KnowCoder-A1: Incentivizing Agentic Reasoning Capability with Outcome Supervision for KBQA
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；State Key Laboratory of AI Safety（人工智能安全国家重点实验室）；School of Computer Science, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学计算机科学学院）
MAGMA: A Multi-Graph based Agentic Memory Architecture for AI Agents
Department of Computer Science, The University of Texas at Dallas（德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校计算机科学系）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Florida（佛罗里达大学电气与计算机工程系）
Scaling Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Tool-Integrated Reasoning in VLMs
Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工大学）；Emory University（埃默里大学）；KAUST（阿联酋卡塔尔大学）；Georgia Tech（佐治亚理工学院）；Cisco（思科系统）；TAMU（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；UT Southwestern Medical Center（德克萨斯西南医学中心）；Eigen AI
Compartmentalised Agentic Reasoning for Clinical NLI
Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, UK（曼彻斯特大学计算机科学系）；National Biomarker Centre, CRUK-MI, University of Manchester, UK（曼彻斯特大学国家生物标记中心）；Idiap Research Institute, Switzerland（日内瓦IDIAP研究所）；School of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, UK（谢菲尔德大学计算机科学系）；École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland（洛桑联邦理工学院（EPFL））
Cognitive Inception: Agentic Reasoning against Visual Deceptions by Injecting Skepticism
CFAR, Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore（科技研究局（A*STAR）认知智能研究所，新加坡）；IHPC, Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore（科技研究局（A*STAR）信息处理中心，新加坡）；ROSE Lab, School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学电子与电气工程学院ROSE实验室）
Optimizing Agentic Reasoning with Retrieval via Synthetic Semantic Information Gain Reward
Hong Kong JC STEM Lab of Smart City.（香港JC STEM实验室）；City University of Hong Kong.（香港城市大学）；Lingnan University（岭南大学）；Fudan University.（复旦大学）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology.（华中科技大学）
TMLR Group Department of Computer Science Hong Kong Baptist University（香港 Baptist 大学计算机科学系 TMLR 组）；RIKEN AIP；Cooperative Medianet Innovation Center Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学合作中立创新中心）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Sydney AI Centre The University of Sydney（悉尼大学悉尼AI中心）；The University of Tokyo（东京大学）
HyEvo: Self-Evolving Hybrid Agentic Workflows for Efficient Reasoning
East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Shanghai University of International Business and Economics（上海对外经贸大学）；Fudan University（复旦大学）
