Can LLM Agents Automate Reinforcement Learning for Text-to-Speech?

Voice agents must call tools and hold multi-turn dialogue entirely through speech, yet the dominant paradigm trains them in text. Existing frameworks either cascade TTS and ASR around a proprietary voice API, where gradients cannot flow and per-call cost makes on-policy reinforcement learning prohibitive, or stay in text: they measure voice agents but cannot improve them. We present SpeechGym, an audio-native agentic environment in which two omni-modal models converse in native audio, with no external ASR or TTS and no API boundary, over the unmodified tasks, tools and success check of an established text agentic benchmark, so that the interaction modality is the only variable and the loop stays local and trainable end to end. Audio agentic capability does not follow from audio understanding. The failures speech introduces are perceptual rather than reasoning deficits: the agent picks the right tool and the right argument slot but fills it with a value misheard from the waveform, and that single error cascades into a failed call, a retry of the same call, and a wasted step budget. A second failure is behavioural: under an insistent caller the agent performs an unauthorised write and ends the episode believing it helped. Both are trainable, because the environment labels them for free: a call with a misheard argument fails against the database while a correct one succeeds. The obstacle is sparsity, not signal. Outcome-only GRPO is gradient-starved here, since almost every rollout group fails identically, while a per-turn process reward crediting each successful tool call restores variance to nearly every group. Trained this way, the agent transfers with no further tuning to an independently implemented voice benchmark, more than doubling task success and carrying an open-weights model from last place to second on that leaderboard, while using fewer turns and tokens than before training.

LLM agents often degrade over long episodes: as trajectories grow, they revisit explored states, repeat failed actions, and lose strategies that previously worked. Test-time training (TTT) offers a way to adapt model weights to the evolving task state, but existing LLM TTT methods largely adapt once to a fixed input. We study continuous TTT in multi-turn agent episodes, where each update changes the policy that generates later training text. This creates a self-training loop that helps when new trajectory information appears, but can amplify drift when the agent gets stuck and repeatedly trains on similar text. We find that update-text repetition distinguishes these regimes and introduce Agentic Test-Time Training (aTTT), a token-level reweighting method that downweights the loss on tokens appearing in repeated $n$-grams from prior updates while leaving novel tokens fully weighted. To run such updates inside live episodes, we build a concurrent serving system using vLLM's runtime LoRA API, limiting overhead to 1.9$\times$ the no-TTT cost. aTTT improves success by up to 5.0 points on ALFWorld and 4.9 points on SWE-bench Lite. The gains concentrate where models already have task competence but drift over long trajectories, suggesting that aTTT mainly preserves existing competence rather than teaching new abilities.

While existing text-to-speech (TTS) models exhibit high expressiveness, fine-grained control over composite instructions remains challenging due to the structural mismatch between discrete textual intents and continuous acoustic realizations. Inspired by human cognitive decoupling, we introduce AgentSteerTTS, a multi-agent closed-loop framework designed for intent-faithful expressive control of composite instructions. First, in our framework, an adversarial disentanglement agent mitigates speaker-emotion leakage by learning separable identity and emotion-prosody subspaces with leakage-suppressing regularization. Next, a Dual-Stream Anchoring Controller grounds abstract intents using a large-scale acoustic prototype library: a Retrieval Agent selects expressive anchors, while a Synthesis Agent fuses them into continuous control vectors via gated attention. Finally, a Fast-Slow Feedback Agent refines output intensity through latent gradient correction and resolves semantic-acoustic mismatches using high-level perceptual critique. Experiments on a composite-instruction benchmark and public test sets show that AgentSteerTTS yields consistent and significant improvements to the baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method.