@inproceedings{qiu-etal-2026-tree,
    title = "Tree-Notebook: A Context-Aware Agent with Tree Search and Entropy-Aware Data Shadow for Interactive Data Science",
    author = "Qiu, Junkun  and
      Huang, Min  and
      Miao, Qinghai",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.783/",
    pages = "15957--15970",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "While LLM-based agents have emerged as a focal point for automating data science tasks, they continue to grapple with inefficient context management, ``silent failures'' (where code executes correctly but fails the task objectives), and error propagation inherent in sequential generation. In this paper, we propose Tree-Notebook, an agentic framework designed to mimic the iterative cognitive process of human data scientists. At its core, Tree-Notebook conceptualizes Jupyter Notebook cells as nodes within a tree structure, facilitating organized and efficient context retrieval. We formalize the task-solving process as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) over a dynamic tree, utilizing an entropy-based information gain function for path evaluation to enhance adaptability in real-world environments. Furthermore, we introduce the ``Data Shadow'' system, which resolves silent failures by performing real-time tracking of data distributions, provenance, and semantic constraints. Experimental results demonstrate that Tree-Notebook achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on both InfiAgent-DABench and DSBench. To further evaluate robustness, we introduce an augmented version of InfiAgent-DABench to simulate complex environments, where Tree-Notebook consistently maintains its SOTA standing. Code is available at: https://github.com/QJK-BUAA/Tree-Notebook"
}