With the rapid advancement of LLM capabilities, expectations for AI agents are shifting from solving simple, single-turn tasks toward carrying out long-horizon tasks in the real world. We refer to such systems as long-horizon agents: agents that plan over extended horizons, interact with real-world environments, recover from their own mistakes, and adapt their strategies during execution. This capability is rapidly becoming the central bottleneck for practical agent intelligence. Despite this progress, the field still lacks a shared definition and taxonomy for long-horizon agents. Related concepts such as "self-evolving" or "autonomous" agents are often used interchangeably, none of which clearly captures what it means to build a long-horizon agent. This gap leaves the community without a principled way to attribute advances in long-horizon competence. This paper offers a unified landscape by framing long-horizon agency as the co-evolution of an externalized harness and an internalized optimization, and organizes the paper around six connected perspectives: Foundation, Evolution, Harness, Optimization, Application, and Frontier. We first formalize long-horizon agency as a harness-coupled decision process and distinguish it from neighboring concepts such as long-running execution, autonomy, and self-evolution. We then trace the field's evolution from prompt-level control to runtime agent systems, classifying existing work through the complementary lenses of externalized harnesses and internalized optimization. Building on this view, we organize five application forms of long-horizon agents by their interfaces, and review the corresponding benchmarks and resources. Finally, we discuss key challenges and frontier directions. Looking ahead, we hope this paper serves not only as a reference for existing work, but also as a foundation for building the next generation of capable, reliable long-horizon agents.
With the comprehensive research conducted on various face analysis tasks, there is a growing interest among researchers to develop a unified approach to face perception. Existing methods mainly discuss unified representation and training, which lack task extensibility and application efficiency. To tackle this issue, we focus on the unified model structure, exploring a face generalist model. As an intuitive design, Naive Faceptor enables tasks with the same output shape and granularity to share the structural design of the standardized output head, achieving improved task extensibility. Furthermore, Faceptor is proposed to adopt a well-designed single-encoder dual-decoder architecture, allowing task-specific queries to represent new-coming semantics. This design enhances the unification of model structure while improving application efficiency in terms of storage overhead. Additionally, we introduce Layer-Attention into Faceptor, enabling the model to adaptively select features from optimal layers to perform the desired tasks. Through joint training on 13 face perception datasets, Faceptor achieves exceptional performance in facial landmark localization, face parsing, age estimation, expression recognition, binary attribute classification, and face recognition, achieving or surpassing specialized methods in most tasks. Our training framework can also be applied to auxiliary supervised learning, significantly improving performance in data-sparse tasks such as age estimation and expression recognition. The code and models will be made publicly available at https://github.com/lxq1000/Faceptor.