When History Fails to Become Experience: Action Calibration in Language Agents
Read the original on arXiv AI →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
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arXiv:2609.38334v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as agents for multi-step decision-making, yet transfer poorly to unseen environments. World-mode...
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 AMBER, an append‑only memory framework for language‑model agents that interact over long horizons. AMBER lets agents jointly learn to reason, act, and write free‑form memory, guaranteeing retention by construction and enabling end‑to‑end reinforcement learning without extensive curated data. Experiments on WebArena Lite show AMBER outperforms overwrite‑based memory by 4.09 percentage points in average success and improves task completion rates in repeated runs.
The paper introduces the Agent-Editing World Model (AEWM), a new approach that models how reasoning and actions influence future task progress instead of simulating tool responses. AEWM includes an Action Judge that classifies decisions as Critical, Exploratory, or Noisy, and a State Revision mechanism that edits noisy reasoning–action continuations from the same observed history. The integrated system, EditAct, directly updates the underlying state during real execution, leading to significant performance gains across multiple benchmarks and agent backbones.
LLM agents act in external environments where each action changes the state that later decisions condition on, and where a single wrong step can waste interaction budget or trigger irreversible side effects long before the final failure is observed. Reliable deployment therefore requires \emph{step-level confidence estimation}: a calibrated probability that each proposed action is productive, available \emph{before} the action is executed.
Long horizon language model agents continually accumulate reasoning history, increasing context length and inference cost even after earlier decisions have been executed and observed. Unlike static Chain of Thought compression, removing historical reasoning can change future actions and the resulting interaction trajectory.