PRIME: Training Free Proactive Reasoning via Iterative Memory Evolution for User-Centric Agent
Organizations: Carnegie Mellon University
Abstract
The development of autonomous tool-use agents for complex, long-horizon tasks in collaboration with human users has become the frontier of agentic research. During multi-turn Human-AI interactions, the dynamic and uncertain nature of user demands poses a significant challenge; agents must not only invoke tools but also iteratively refine their understanding of user intent through effective communication. While recent advances in reinforcement learning offer a path to more capable tool-use agents, existing approaches require expensive training costs and struggle with turn-level credit assignment across extended interaction horizons. To this end, we introduce PRIME (Proactive Reasoning via Iterative Memory Evolution), a gradient-free learning framework that enables continuous agent evolvement through explicit experience accumulation rather than expensive parameter optimization. PRIME distills multi-turn interaction trajectories into structured, human-readable experiences organized across three semantic zones: successful strategies, failure patterns, and user preferences. These experiences evolve through meta-level operations and guide future agent behavior via retrieval-augmented generation. Our experiments across several diverse user-centric environments demonstrate that PRIME achieves competitive performance with gradient-based methods while offering cost-efficiency and interpretability. Together, PRIME presents a practical paradigm for building proactive, collaborative agents that learn from Human-AI interaction without the computational burden of gradient-based training.
Figures & tables
| Model | TravelGym | TurtleGym | FunctionGym | TauGym | PersuadeGym | IntentionGym | TelepathyGym | SearchGym |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Closed-Source LLM | ||||||||
| GPT-4o | 0.364 | 0.292 | 0.282 | 0.030 | 0.377 | 1.898 | 0.854 | 0.880 |
| GPT-4o-mini | 0.098 | 0.091 | 0.154 | 0.206 | 0.532 | 0.250 | 0.049 | 0.352 |
| Gemini-2.5-Pro | 0.347 | 0.274 | 0.410 | 0.194 | 0.425 | 1.590 | 0.902 | 0.928 |
| Gemini-2.5-Flash | 0.255 | 0.196 | 0.321 | 0.121 | 0.409 | 1.685 | 0.634 | 0.928 |
| Open-Source LLM | ||||||||
Appendix figures & tables9 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Parameter | Value | Description |
| Exploration | ||
| Episodes per env | 100 | Trajectories collected |
| Max turns | 16 | Episode horizon |
| Discount | 0.8 | Credit assignment decay |
| Distillation | ||
| Golden threshold | Success classification | |
| Parameter | Value | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Evolution iterations | 5 | Meta-optimization cycles |
| Mutation prob | 0.10 | Per-experience rate |
| Generalization prob | 0.05 | Abstraction rate |
| Crossover prob | 0.02 | Combination rate |
| Generalization threshold | 0.7 | Min success rate |
| Pruning interval | 2 iterations | Removal frequency |
Self-Improving Agents
Self-improving agents use experience and feedback to update their models, memories, skills, or workflows for better future task performance.
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