arXiv AI

Don't Forget What You Just Learned: Self-Directed Repair Turns Agent Mistakes Into Lasting Lessons

The paper introduces Self‑Direction, a method that lets agents learn from mistakes by reflecting on failed trajectories, distilling lessons into lightweight low‑rank adapters, and storing them for future use. These adapters add only about 0.02% of the base model’s parameters, keeping the original weights frozen and avoiding costly fine‑tuning. Experiments on Qwen‑based agents across research, tool‑use, and terminal tasks show 8.9–17.0 percentage‑point gains in success rates, reduced repeated errors, and transfer of lessons to new tasks.

arXiv AI
Oct 23

Learning What to Remember: Resource-Efficient Self-Improvement for Lifelong Agents

The paper introduces TokenWorth, a lightweight framework that learns the value of past experiences for self-improving agents operating under strict resource constraints. By using sparse execution feedback, TokenWorth guides both retrieval and memory management without updating the core model, enabling agents to adaptively reuse only the most beneficial experiences. Experiments on LifelongAgentBench show that TokenWorth outperforms existing lifelong-memory methods in task success while minimizing output tokens within the given budgets.

By Guannan Lai, Zi-Yang Bai, Jun-Peng Jiang, Han-Jia Ye
arXiv AI
Oct 21

More Memory, Worse Agents: Error Reproduction and Anti-Persistence in LLM Agents

The paper investigates how large language model (LLM) agents can improve performance by storing and reusing experience in external memory. It identifies a problem called error reproduction, where mistakes in stored abstractions propagate through cycles of abstraction, execution, and re-abstraction, leading to persistent errors. To mitigate this, the authors propose Anti-Persistence, a memory design that retains raw trajectories and outcomes but reconstructs task-specific guidance on demand, discarding it after use. Experiments across multiple benchmarks show that Anti-Persistence yields higher held‑out success rates and lower LLM‑call costs compared to other memory designs, supporting the idea of separating experience accumulation from abstraction persistence.

By Ruhan Wang, Kishan Panaganti, Dongruo Zhou
arXiv AI
Oct 5

Sentry: Learning to Recover from LLM Agent Failures at Test Time

Sentry is a failure‑management layer for large language model agents that learns from failures at test time. It retrieves relevant lessons from an external playbook when a failure occurs, verifies recovery without task rewards, and stores new lessons only if recovery succeeds, keeping the playbook out of the agent’s context. Across multiple benchmarks, Sentry outperforms both runtime‑intervention and context‑evolution baselines, and its lessons transfer to unseen tasks.

By Changxiu Ji, Amy Lu, Qizheng Zhang, Kunle Olukotun
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 28

Shockingly Simple Self-retrospection Improves Agentic Models Without RL

The paper explores Retrospection-Only Fine-Tuning (ROFT), a method where a language-model agent improves its behavior by generating and training on explanations of its own experiences, without external teachers or reward signals. In software‑engineering tasks with Qwen3.5‑4B, ROFT achieves comparable or better solve rates than GRPO while requiring fewer updates and training time, and can learn from failures alone. Behavioral analysis shows ROFT indirectly assigns credit to actions and can produce shorter, more direct solutions when prompted to focus on direct solutions.

arXiv AI
Sep 2

HarnessEvolve: Learning from Reference Trajectories for Reliable Agent Self-Evolution

HarnessEvolve is a self‑evolving framework that improves agent harnesses—prompts, skills, tools, and execution logic—by learning from reference trajectories. It separates execution, evaluation, optimization, and gating into independent modules, addressing credit assignment failure, shortcut learning, and catastrophic forgetting. The approach uses reference trajectories to extract error signals, applies quality and performance gates to candidate updates, and validates updates on held‑out data, consistently outperforming state‑of‑the‑art baselines across diverse benchmarks.

By Wen Jiang, Mingmin Chu, Yimeng Tian, Qianxin Zhang, Haofei Yang, Rui Yang, Yang Liu, Tao Lv, Fangming Li
arXiv AI
Jul 23

Knowledge-Centric Self-Improvement

arXiv:2607. 19592v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-improving AI systems typically treat the agent as the object that improves, by optimizing prompts, workflows, harnesses, or even the agent's own code.

By Xuefei Julie Wang, Lauren Hyoseo Yoon, Chengrui Qu, Amanda Zichang Wang, Atharva Sehgal, Eric Mazumdar, Yisong Yue