XferAgent: Cross-Agent Experience Transfer for Self-Improving LLM Agents
Authors: Weihao Li, Jun Bai, Shijie Chen, Qincheng Lu, Xinyu Wang, Ziyang Song
Organizations: McCormick School of Engineering, Northwestern University · School of Computer Science, McGill University · Mila – Quebec AI Institute · School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Ohio University
Large language model (LLM) agents can reuse experience from prior task executions to improve performance on subsequent tasks. Although existing methods enable cross-agent experience sharing, differences in agents' execution histories and task requirements make shared experiences difficult to reuse effectively. We propose XferAgent, a framework for cross-agent experience transfer that organizes reusable experience in local and shared experience graphs. XferAgent reconciles compatible contributions from heterogeneous agents while avoiding unreliable merges. For each new task, it selects shared experiences and integrates them with the target agent's local experience to support task execution. Experiments across diverse task domains show improvements over representative memory-based methods and effective experience transfer between heterogeneous agent frameworks. Cumulative task success also increases over successive task passes as agents update and reuse their experiences.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Overview of XferAgent. Agents construct local experience graphs by extracting experiences from successful and failed task executions. Cross-Agent Experience Reconciliation incorporates contributed experiences into a shared experience graph. Task-Conditioned Experience Routing selects task-relevant anchors and constructs a routed experience subgraph. Local–Shared Experience Integration combines local and shared candidates into a temporary fused graph and ranks experiences for task execution, followed by evaluation-based experience updates.
GAIA
ALFWorld
MBPP
Method
Qwen3-Next-80B A3B-Instruct
GPT-5.6 Luna
Qwen3.8-27B
Llama-3.1-8B Instruct
No Memory
27.57
48.17
84.7
50.0
AgentKB
28.90
46.51
88.3
50.0
ReasoningBank
26.91
46.18
85.0
46.7
ExpGraph
27.24
47.51
88.3
48.3
Mem0
25.91
44.85
84.7
45.0
Table 1: Overall performance across GAIA, ALFWorld, and MBPP (%). Metrics are accuracy, task success rate, and program pass rate, respectively. ALFWorld and MBPP follow benchmark-specific single-run protocols (Appendix C ). Bold indicates the best result in each column.
Figure 2: Cumulative task performance through experience evolution on GAIA validation (165 tasks). Passes 1–3 report cumulative task success across repeated executions. The independent No Memory baseline is connected to Pass 1 by dashed segments for visual comparison. Overall accuracy is computed over all 165 tasks.
Figure 3: Cross-framework experience transfer with 2, 4, and 8 agents on 60 held-out GAIA validation questions. Gray bars represent the 2-agent baseline, while light and dark red segments indicate accuracy gains from 2 to 4 and 4 to 8 agents, respectively. Average denotes the unweighted mean of accuracy across the three difficulty levels.
Variant
Overall (%)
Δ (pp)
XferAgent (Full)
52.16
–
Local Experience Only
46.84
-5.32
Shared Experience Only
50.83
-1.33
w/o Outcome-Based Ranking
48.17
-3.99
w/o Connectivity Constraint
46.84
-5.32
Table 2: Ablation study of XferAgent on GAIA (301 test tasks) using GPT-5.6 Luna. Overall accuracy is reported in percentages, and Δ denotes the change relative to the full system in percentage points.
Parameter
Value
Overall (%)
Δ (pp)
B
8
51.11
-6.67
24 (default)
57.78
–
40
46.67
-11.11
K
1
51.11
-6.67
3 (default)
57.78
–
5
62.22
+4.44
Table 3: Parameter sensitivity of XferAgent on 45 held-out GAIA validation tasks using GPT-5.6 Luna. One parameter is varied at a time, with others fixed at their default values. Δ denotes the accuracy change relative to the default in percentage points.
Appendix figures & tables5 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct
Method
Overall
L1
L2
L3
No Memory
27.57
41.94
26.42
4.08
AgentKB
28.90
49.46
22.64
10.20
ReasoningBank
26.91
43.01
23.27
8.16
ExpGraph
27.24
44.09
24.53
4.08
Mem0
25.91
41.94
23.27
4.08
Appendix
Table 4: GAIA Test accuracy (%) by difficulty. Bold marks the best score in each column within each model block, including ties.
Setting
ALFWorld
MBPP
Cross-framework GAIA
Backbone
Qwen3.8-27B (Tinker)
Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct
GPT-5.6 Luna
Construction data
90 training trajectories
265 cached training trajectories
20 questions per agent from a 105-question source pool
Evaluation cohort
274 tasks: 140 Seen, 134 Unseen
60 development tasks
60 tasks: 18 / 29 / 13 at Levels 1–3
Agent arrangement
Three logical agents
Three logical agents
Nested 2 / 4 / 8 contributors; one fixed receiver
Shared budget B / final limit K
8 / 10
8 / 10
24 / 3
Memory allowance
2,400 tokens
2,400 tokens (character estimate)
12,000 tokens
Appendix
Table 5: Settings for the additional evaluations. Memory content and outcome statistics are frozen during evaluation. Memory allowances specify the token limits for retrieved context.
Method
Benchmark-specific adaptation
AgentKB
Flat workflow entries; bounded local and cross-client similarity retrieval.
ReasoningBank
Dense retrieval over cached training experiences.
ExpGraph
Graph retrieval over cached training experiences, frozen during evaluation.
Mem0
Source-preserving procedural-memory updates in a persistent store.
LightMem
Short-term grouping and offline consolidation with source text retained.
Appendix
Table 6: Memory adapters used for MBPP.
Setting
Value
Shared node budget / final limit
8 / 10
Memory allowance (tokens)
2,400
Experience-text limit (characters)
5,000
Reconciliation threshold / margin
0.92 / 0
Structural-overlap threshold
0.50
Anchor limit / task-match threshold
10 / 0.08
Appendix
Table 7: Key settings of the ALFWorld XferAgent adapter.
Agents
SmolAgents
OWL
Total instances
2
1
1
40
4
2
2
80
8
4
4
160
Appendix
Table 8: Nested contributor groups for cross-framework transfer. Each contributor builds memory from 20 source questions. Totals count agent–question instances; questions may overlap across agents.
Large language model agents are expected to continuously adapt to new tasks and environments over their lifetime by reusing past experience. However, existing memory-based agents struggle to transfer reusable experience across environments and suffer from catastrophic forgetting as experience accumulated. To address these challenges, we propose LifeMem, a lifelong learning framework that enables agents to transfer knowledge across multiple environments. During learning, LifeMem clusters accumulated interaction trajectories based on underlying workflows to extract reusable skills. When solving a new task at inference time, the agent recalls relevant skills and trajectories to guide actions. To validate our method, we conduct experiments across 10 environments and over 13k tasks with 2k newly annotated interaction trajectories. Results show that LifeMem enables effective experience reuse in lifelong learning, achieving both reduced forgetting on learned tasks and superior cross-task transfer. Further analysis reveals that task streaming impacts learning, while consolidating structurally similar trajectories within memory boosts performance.
Yuli Qiu, Yutong Li, Wei Su +5
School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology · School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University · Research Center for Social Computing and Interactive Robotics, Harbin Institute of Technology +1
Large language model (LLM) agents have shown strong capabilities in reasoning, tool use, and multi-step interaction, but they often solve tasks from scratch and fail to reuse successful strategies or failure lessons from prior experience. Fine-tuning on collected experience can improve reuse, but it is inflexible when stronger or more suitable executors emerge. We propose ExpGraph, a model-agnostic experience learning framework that enables frozen and replaceable LLM executors to improve through external experience reuse without parameter updates. ExpGraph summarizes historical trajectories into reusable skills and failure lessons, organizes them as nodes in a self-evolving experience graph, and retrieves useful experiences through graph diffusion and utility-aware ranking. A lightweight retrieval copilot is trained with reinforcement learning using feedback that compares executor performance with and without retrieved experiences, while the graph is updated online from downstream task outcomes. We evaluate ExpGraph on ExpSuite, covering question answering, mathematical reasoning, code generation, and multi-step agentic environments including ALFWorld and AppWorld. ExpGraph improves over the strongest baseline by 12.2% and 4.7% on static tasks with smaller and larger executors, and by 21.4% and 12.7% in agentic environments, while reducing average interaction steps by 12.7% and 21.6%. Ablations show that graph-structured experience, utility-aware ranking, and adaptive retrieval jointly enable effective experience reuse across diverse tasks and executor models.
Tao Feng, Chongrui Ye, Tianyang Luo +8
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · 2Nanyang Technological University · 3Meta Monetization AI
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled the development of autonomous agents capable of complex reasoning and multi-step problem solving. However, these agents struggle to adapt to specialized environments and do not leverage past interactions, approaching each new task from scratch regardless of their accumulated experience. We introduce Experiential Reflective Learning (ERL), a simple self-improvement framework that enables rapid environment adaptation through experiential learning. ERL reflects on task trajectories and outcomes to generate heuristics, capturing actionable lessons that transfer across tasks. At test time, relevant heuristics are retrieved based on the current task and injected into the agent's context to guide execution. On the Gaia2 benchmark, ERL improves success rate by 7.8% over a ReAct baseline, with large gains in task completion reliability, and outperforms prior experiential learning methods. Through systematic ablations, we find that selective retrieval is essential and that heuristics provide more transferable abstractions than few-shot trajectory prompting. These results demonstrate that reflecting on single-attempt experiences to extract transferable heuristics enables effective agent self-improvement.
Marc-Antoine Allard, Arnaud Teinturier, Victor Xing +1