ReflexGrad: Within-Episode Failure Recovery in LLM Agents via Progress-Gated Dual-Process Routing

ArXi:2511.14584v3 Announce Type: replace-cross We present ReflexGrad, a dual-process architecture for within-episode failure recovery in LLM agents without nstrations. When agents commit to a wrong approach early and exhaust the step budget, the post-failure trajectory contains the information to escape -- but no published architecture acts on it within a single episode. ReflexGrad routes between a fast process (TextGrad-style continuous refinement every $k{=}3$ steps) and a slow process (Reflexion-style causal diagnosis when $m{=}5$ consecutive low-progress scores fire a routing gate.