arXiv AI By Yuval Kansal, Karen Ullrich, Polina Kirichenko, Ilia Kulikov, Niraj K. Jha, Mohammad Pezeshki, Mark Ibrahim

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

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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.

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