The paper introduces EDV, an Execute‑Distill‑Verify framework that constructs offline experience for large language model agents without updating model parameters. In EDV, multiple heterogeneous agents execute tasks, a distiller extracts candidate lessons from their trajectories and feedback, and executors review these lessons, keeping only those unanimously approved. Experiments on τ²‑bench, Mind2Web, and MMTB demonstrate improved performance on revisited tasks and within‑domain transfer, while a Retail subset evaluation shows EDV cuts the Self‑Confirmation Trap Rate from 11.0% to 5.0%.
Experience-driven self-evolution is critical for large language model (LLM) agents to improve through open-world interaction. However, existing experience learning methods mostly rely on single-agent loops, where the same agent executes tasks, summarizes outcomes, and determines memory content.
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.
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.
The paper introduces On-Policy Reminder Distillation (OPRD), a method that enhances long-horizon coding agents by combining multi-scope reminder supervision with outcome-based routing. OPRD uses successful rollouts as autoregressive self-imitation targets and failed rollouts for reminder-conditioned reverse-KL supervision from a teacher that re-evaluates student prefixes. The approach improves task resolution rates by 11.3 points and cuts error events by 50.2% on several SWE-bench benchmarks.
AHEAD is a step‑aware framework that augments reinforcement learning for multi‑turn LLM agents by matching different supervision sources to different step types. The teacher receives environment feedback on all steps and LLM‑generated corrective hints only on error steps, providing finer‑grained guidance than uniform trajectory‑level rewards. Across ALFWorld, WebShop, and Search‑based QA, AHEAD improves task success by 13.3 points on ALFWorld and 11.0 on WebShop at 7B, reaches target success rates faster, and solves tasks within tighter interaction budgets compared to outcome‑only RL and prior self‑distillation baselines.
The paper introduces Boundary-Aware Skill Memory (BASM), a method that enriches skill memories for large language model agents with explicit boundary fields such as applicability conditions, risk cues, avoidance rules, and recovery notes. This approach transforms retrieved skills from unconditional templates into state‑conditioned guidance, preventing the Skill Imitation Trap where more skills lead to incorrect tool usage. Experiments on three agent benchmarks and four model scales show that BASM improves task success rates, accuracy, and reduces attack success while cutting average steps compared to memory‑free baselines.
ChipMEM introduces a verification‑grounded memory layer for electronic design automation agents that combines cross‑task procedural memory with within‑trajectory statistical guidance. The procedural component stores a skill only after it passes synthesis, simulation, or formal checks, while a Bayesian component ranks recovery strategies based on tool‑call outcomes. Experiments on RTLRewriter‑Bench and CVDP tasks show that ChipMEM improves equivalence‑passing outputs and area metrics compared to agents without memory.
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.
arXiv:2610.07792v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model agents are increasingly deployed to perform complex tasks in real-world environments. However, the knowledge required for correc...
CAST is a critique‑aware training framework that transforms sparse task outcomes into action‑level supervision for both critique learning and policy optimization. By analyzing agent trajectories, CAST synthesizes structured rationales that explain action validity under partial observability, enabling the creation of richer training data. Fine‑tuned Qwen3‑family models trained with CAST show significant reliability gains, outperforming GPT‑OSS‑120B by over 10% on Retail tasks and improving Telehealth performance by 9% in an out‑of‑domain setting.
arXiv:2607. 17558v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) offers a promising approach for training large language models without relying on a separate teacher model.
arXiv:2609.36608v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) trains multi-turn language agents with dense teacher supervision on student-generated responses. However, standard think-t...