Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) have demonstrated significant potential in single-turn reasoning tasks. With the paradigm shift toward self-evolving agentic learning, models are increasingly expected to learn from trajectories by synthesizing tools or accumulating explicit experiences. However, prevailing methods typically rely on large-scale LLMs or multi-agent frameworks, which hinder their deployment in resource-constrained environments. The inherent sparsity of outcome-based rewards also poses a substantial challenge, as agents typically receive feedback only upon completion of tasks. To address these limitations, we introduce a Tool-Memory based self-evolving agentic framework SEARL. Unlike approaches that directly utilize interaction experiences, our method constructs a structured experience memory that integrates planning with execution. This provides a novel state abstraction that facilitates generalization across analogous contexts, such as tool reuse. Consequently, agents extract explicit knowledge from historical data while leveraging inter-trajectory correlations to densify reward signals. We evaluate our framework on knowledge reasoning and mathematics tasks, demonstrating its effectiveness in achieving more practical and efficient learning.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Limitations of existing paradigms. Monolithic tool synthesis overwhelms LLMs, necessitating a divide-and-conquer strategy, while current memory designs suffer from a lack of structural connectivity.
Figure 2: Overview of the proposed framework. The architecture consists of three components: (1) Agent-Environment Interaction (Bottom): decomposes tasks and generates structured trajectories via planning, retrieval, and execution. (2) Anchor-Action Step Grouping (Top-Left): leverages tool-based anchors to enable fine-grained, step-level advantage estimation. (3) Self-Evolving Tool-based Memory (Top-Right): A graph-structured memory TG that dynamically retrieves, clusters, and updates MCP tools based on trajectory dependencies.
Methods
Mathematical Reasoning
Multi-Hop QA
Avg Rank
GSM8K
MATH500
AIME24
HotpotQA
2wiki
Musique
Bamboogle
TIR Prompt
0.2259
0.0540
0.0000
0.2300
0.1250
0.0350
0.1200
5.29
GRPO
0.8870
0.7360
0.1333
0.2150
0.3450
0.0900
0.1600
2.43
DAPO
0.8059
0.5520
0.1333
0.3350
0.3500
0.0650
0.2480
3.00
Reinforce++
0.8658
0.6800
0.1000
0.1100
0.2600
0.0000
0.0080
4.57
ARPO
0.8241
0.6480
0.3333
0.1400
0.2200
0.0650
0.1760
3.57
Table 1: Performance comparison across mathematical reasoning and multi-hop QA benchmarks. Bold indicates the best performance, while underlined denotes the second best. The Avg Rank column represents the average ranking across all tasks (lower is better).
Figure 3: Comparison of training rewards and entropy between GRPO and SEARL.
Figure 4: Ablation study illustrating the impact of removing different components.
Figure 5: Comparison on constrained geometric sequence optimization. (Left) The baseline uses a monolithic tool causing O(n2) brute-force timeouts. (Right) Our method employs a modular tool chain to prune the search space, significantly improving efficiency and reusability.
Figure 6: Structural Growth of Tool Subgraphs from Single-Path Reuse to Multi-Branch Convergence.
Large Language Model (LLM) Agents, often trained with Reinforcement Learning (RL), are constrained by a dependency on human-curated data, limiting scalability and tethering AI to human knowledge. Existing self-evolution frameworks offer an alternative but are typically restricted by the model's inherent capabilities and single-round interactions, hindering the development of complex curricula involving tool use or dynamic reasoning. We introduce Agent0, a fully autonomous framework that evolves high-performing agents without external data through multi-step co-evolution and seamless tool integration. Agent0 establishes a symbiotic competition between two agents initialized from the same base LLM: a curriculum agent that proposes increasingly challenging frontier tasks, and an executor agent that learns to solve them. We integrate external tools to enhance the executor's problem-solving capacity; this improvement, in turn, pressures the curriculum agent to construct more complex, tool-aware tasks. Through this iterative process, Agent0 establishes a self-reinforcing cycle that continuously produces high-quality curricula. Empirically, Agent0 substantially boosts reasoning capabilities, improving the Qwen3-8B-Base model by 18% on mathematical reasoning and 24% on general reasoning benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/Agent0.
Peng Xia, Kaide Zeng, Jiaqi Liu +5
UNC-Chapel Hill · Salesforce Research · Stanford University
Large language models (LLMs) are becoming the foundation for autonomous agents that can use tools to solve complex tasks. Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a common approach for injecting such agentic capabilities, but typically under tightly controlled training setups. It often depends on carefully constructed task-solution pairs and substantial human supervision, which creates a fundamental obstacle to open-ended self-evolution toward superintelligent systems. In this paper, we propose Tool-R0 framework for training general purpose tool-calling agents from scratch with self-play RL, under a zero-data assumption. Initialized from the same base LLM, Tool-R0 co-evolves a Generator and a Solver with complementary rewards: one proposes targeted challenging tasks at the other's competence frontier and the other learns to solve them with real-world tool calls. This creates a self-evolving cycle that requires no pre-existing tasks or datasets. Evaluation on different tool-use benchmarks show that Tool-R0 yields 92.5 relative improvement over the base model and surpasses fully supervised tool-calling baselines under the same setting. Our work further provides empirical insights into self-play LLM agents by analyzing co-evolution, curriculum dynamics, and scaling behavior.
Large Language Model (LLM) agents have shown stunning results in complex tasks, yet they often operate in isolation, failing to learn from past experiences. Existing memory-based methods primarily store raw trajectories, which are often redundant and noise-heavy. This prevents agents from extracting high-level, reusable behavioral patterns that are essential for generalization. In this paper, we propose SkillRL, a framework that bridges the gap between raw experience and policy improvement through automatic skill discovery and recursive evolution. Our approach introduces an experience-based distillation mechanism to build a hierarchical skill library SkillBank, an adaptive retrieval strategy for general and task-specific heuristics, and a recursive evolution mechanism that allows the skill library to co-evolve with the agent's policy during reinforcement learning. These innovations significantly reduce the token footprint while enhancing reasoning utility. Experimental results on ALFWorld, WebShop and seven search-augmented tasks demonstrate that SkillRL achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming strong baselines over 15.3% and maintaining robustness as task complexity increases. Code is available at this https://github.com/aiming-lab/SkillRL.
Peng Xia, Jianwen Chen, Hanyang Wang +10
UNC-Chapel Hill · University of Chicago · University of California San Diego +3