SPADE: Self-Play in Adaptive Synthetic Executable Environments

SPADE (Self-Play in Adaptive Synthetic Executable Environments) is a reinforcement‑learning framework where a single large language model acts as both an Environment Designer—creating executable, long‑horizon training environments—and a Reasoning Agent—learning to act within those environments. The framework uses a regret signal based on the difference between rewarded performance with and without privileged hints to guide the Designer toward environments that are challenging yet solvable. Experiments show that, when scaled to 30‑billion‑parameter models, SPADE outperforms fixed‑environment baselines by significant margins across math, science, code, and reasoning benchmarks, and improves tool‑use performance on BFCL‑v4 and ACEBench‑Agent. whyItMatters":"By making environment design a learnable component, SPADE enables continuous self‑improvement and demonstrates that adaptive, self‑generated training environments can substantially boost language‑model performance across diverse tasks."