EnvLunch: The Environment as a Free Lunch for Learning to Interact
Organizations: King’s College London · Chongqing University · The Alan Turing Institute
Abstract
For agentic data analysis, language-model agents often require a large number of annotated tasks to learn how to interact effectively with executable environments (i.e., databases). While high-quality annotated tasks require heavy manual effort, an executable environment already provides rich interaction structure and verifiable outcomes. In this sense, the environment itself offers a free lunch, an additional set of verifiable tasks that require no human annotation. We propose EnvLunch, a warm-up stage that turns this environmental signal into agent training without human-written or model-generated task descriptions, before downstream agentic reinforcement learning. EnvLunch samples valid action trajectories, executes them to obtain final observations, and trains an agent to recover a functionally equivalent trajectory given only its final observation. This label-free warm-up enables the model to outperform the baseline by over 9 points on average across all downstream training budgets, and with few labels, the baseline needs 8 to 32 times as many annotated examples to match the accuracy that the EnvLunch model reaches at its smallest training budget. Letting the environment alone define the task yields a larger gain than having the model write its own tasks over the same environments, and this warm-up also improves fine-tuning on benchmarks beyond data analysis. EnvLunch therefore saves annotated tasks and provides a better starting point for fine-tuning agentic models when such tasks are limited.
Figures & tables
| 9B | 4B | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Benchmark | Data substrate | EnvLunch | Baseline | Match | EnvLunch | Baseline | Match | ||
| ConvFinQA | Table + text | 32 | 8 | ||||||
| TAT-QA | Table + text | 8 | 8 | ||||||
| MultiHiertt | Table + text | 32 | 16 | ||||||
| TableBench | Table | 8 | 16 | ||||||
| DSEval | DataFrame | never | never | ||||||
LLM Agent Training
Large language model agent training teaches models to plan, use tools, and learn from multi-step interaction with environments.
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