arXiv AI

Survival is the Only Reward: Sustainable Self-Training Through Environment-Mediated Selection

arXiv AI
2d ago

Co-Evolving Agents: Learning from Failures as Hard Negatives

The paper introduces a co‑evolving framework where a target agent improves by learning from its own failures, and a separate failure agent is trained to generate hard negative trajectories. These hard negatives, derived from plausible but incorrect attempts, help the target agent better distinguish successful behavior from subtle errors. Experiments on online shopping, scientific reasoning, and interactive SQL querying show a 5.7% average reward improvement over baseline methods.

By Yeonsung Jung, Trilok Padhi, Sina Shaham, Dipika Khullar, Joonhyun Jeong, Ninareh Mehrabi, Eunho Yang
arXiv AI
Aug 20

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."

By Bo Liu, Simon Yu, Yiding Jiang, Ao Qu, Andrew Zhao, Zichen Liu, Junsu Kim, Zijian Zhou, Seungone Kim, Tongzheng Ren, Mickel Liu, Hanfei Yu, Zhaorun Chen, Weiyan Shi, Paul Pu Liang, Luke Zettlemoyer, Yejin Choi, Natasha Jaques
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Environments as Scaffold: Enriching Feedback to Bootstrap Self-Evolving Agents in Long-Horizon Tasks

The paper introduces Feedback‑Enriched Environments (FEEs) as a new approach to training large language models as autonomous agents for long‑horizon tasks. By shifting from action guidance to observation enrichment during later stages of exploration, FEEs improve performance across SciWorld and BFCL benchmarks with various Qwen3 model scales and RL algorithms. The study shows that FEEs stabilize training, promote proactive exploration, embed environmental guidance into policy weights, and highlight intra‑group feedback consistency as key for stable optimization.

By Hongbang Yuan, Zhuoran Jin, Yixin Cao
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

Why Do LLM Agents Fail in Exploring New Environments? A World-Modeling Perspective

arXiv:2510.15047v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) as agents often fail to improve in new environments. We identify and characterize a failure mode we call explora...

By Shiqi Chen, Tongyao Zhu, Zian Wang, Jinghan Zhang, Kangrui Wang, Ruochen Zhou, Siyang Gao, Teng Xiao, Yee Whye Teh, Junxian He, Manling Li