Industrial advertising agents must continually adapt their decision knowledge to changing product offerings, traffic patterns, and operating policies. We present KARMA (Knowledge-Atomic, Regression-Gated Modular Adaptation), a training-free framework that evolves six typed knowledge modules while keeping model weights and executable harness code frozen. During our evolution, a deterministic Trace Verifier maps observed errors to candidate modules, and a Critic compares successful and failed trajectories to guide a tool-constrained Evolver. The Evolver applies atomic knowledge edits, which a fixed validation gate retains only when their measured gain reaches a threshold; otherwise, the previous knowledge state is restored. We evaluate KARMA with three LLM families on cases sampled from a corpus of approximately half a million real-world operation logs across six e-commerce domains. Across 18 domain--model settings, KARMA raises the average hold-out score from 30.19 to 39.15 (+8.96 points, +29.7%). Ablations show that removing either successful or failed trajectories more than halves the average hold-out gain. Evolved knowledge also transfers across domains without further adaptation, yielding an average hold-out gain of 8.54 points across all source--target pairs. By linking retained patches to their diagnostic evidence and validation outcomes, KARMA supports inspectable, reversible knowledge adaptation for agents in Web marketplaces.
Figures & tables
Figure 1. Motivation. Whole-prompt rewriting obscures individual changes; broad harness editing complicates validation and rollback. KARMA freezes weights and code, derives atomic knowledge edits from successes and failures, and retains only patches whose validation gain reaches θ . Three panels. The left panel shows a monolithic system prompt containing role, domain, and constraints, with the warning that opaque rewrites hinder attribution and risk regressions. The middle panel shows an agent harness containing code, tools, and orchestration, with the warning that broad code changes complicate validation and rollback. The right panel shows KARMA: six typed knowledge modules, atomic knowledge edits derived from failures and successes, and a validation step that accepts an update if gains are at least theta and otherwise rolls it back.
Figure 2. KARMA overview. The frozen inner agent collects evidence and emits structured decisions. The outer loop converts verified trajectories into atomic knowledge edits through the Critic and Evolver, then validates or rolls back each patch. The hold-out set is excluded from evolution. The top half shows advertising operation logs of verified merchants split into training batches, a hold-out set used for final performance, and a validation set. The inner decision agent renders six typed knowledge modules into the context and response schema, runs a two-stage loop of tool calling and structured output with LLMs, emits budget, bid, or item decisions, and scores them by action, direction, and total. The bottom half shows the outer evolution loop: a Trace Verifier clusters failures and successes with deterministic attribution; a Critic performs multi-perspective reflection over missing knowledge, conflicting rules, protocol timing, and ambiguous wording to produce edit proposals; an Evolver uses create, read, update, and delete tools to produce mutations; and a Patch Validator compares current and candidate knowledge on the validation set, accepting if the average score gain is at least theta and otherwise rejecting and rolling back.
Module
Responsibility
role
Agent identity, objective, and communication stance
domain
Advertising products and operating semantics
experience
Reusable decision heuristics with stable rule IDs
constraints
Evidence, comparison, and safety requirements
output_protocol
Analysis termination and structured submission rules
action_descriptions
Field-level schema and local-tool descriptions
Table 1. Typed knowledge modules and their intended responsibilities.
Domain
Symbol
Share (%)
Home & Living
H
24.8
Automotive
A
15.3
Electronics & Office
E
14.7
Fashion & Apparel
F
19.1
Beauty & Health
B
8.2
Long-tail/Others
L
17.9
Table 2. Corpus statistics and domain symbols. Each run uses 800 cases: 480 for training, 160 for validation, and 160 for hold-out evaluation.
LLMs
Domains
Validation set V
Hold-out set H
Base
KARMA
Gain
Rel. (%)
Base
KARMA
Gain
Rel. (%)
Qwen3.8-Max
H
33.13
50.63
+17.50
+52.8
32.81
48.75
+15.94
+48.6
A
39.06
41.25
+2.19
+5.6
35.63
36.25
+0.63
+1.8
E
34.38
48.75
+14.38
+41.8
33.13
43.44
+10.31
+31.1
F
34.69
43.75
+9.06
+26.1
26.88
38.44
+11.56
+43.0
B
35.31
50.00
+14.69
+41.6
29.06
47.19
+18.13
+62.4
Table 3. Main results on 160 cases per set (scores ×100 ). Base: K0 ; KARMA: KT ; Gain: absolute points; Rel.: percentage gain over Base. Bold marks the higher score. Avg. averages six domains before rounding; symbols follow Table 2 .
Domains
Variants
Validation set V
Hold-out set H
Score
Gain
Rel. (%)
Score
Gain
Rel. (%)
H
Base
33.13
–
–
32.81
–
–
w/o success
39.69
+6.56
+19.8
43.75
+10.94
+33.3
w/o failure
38.44
+5.31
+16.0
35.63
+2.81
+8.6
KARMA
50.63
+17.50
+52.8
48.75
+15.94
+48.6
B
Base
35.31
–
–
29.06
–
–
Table 4. Evidence ablation with Qwen3.8-Max. Bold marks the best score per domain and set.
Method
Validation set V
Hold-out set H
Cost
H
B
H
B
Tokens
Hours
GEPA
+11.25
+1.56
+9.06
− 1.88
42.15M
4.58
AHE
+11.56
+5.94
+8.75
+6.56
40.74M
3.40
Self-Harness
+3.75
+3.13
− 2.50
+2.50
40.72M
3.60
KARMA
+17.50
+14.69
+15.94
+18.13
41.48M
4.53
Table 5. Evolution engines with Qwen3.8-Max. Tokens: mean total LLM tokens per cycle, including agent inference. Hours: runtime per cycle.
Source
Target domain
H
A
E
F
B
L
H
–
− 0.63
+7.81
+17.50
+12.19
+19.38
A
− 5.00
–
− 4.06
− 5.94
− 1.88
− 5.94
E
+10.63
+9.38
–
+13.44
+15.31
+10.00
F
+5.94
− 3.44
+8.75
–
+10.00
+13.44
B
+10.63
+7.19
+6.88
+11.88
–
+15.94
Table 6. Cross-domain hold-out gains with Qwen3.8-Max, relative to each target’s main-run Base. Bold marks gains exceeding the target’s in-domain gain.
Figure 3. Hold-out score changes on A by reference operation (ADD/DEL: add/delete offer; BUD/PRI: update budget/price). Bars sum to each model’s gain in Table 3 , up to rounding.
Figure 4. Cached validation scores during evolution (scores ×100 ; Init: K0 ). Filled markers denote accepted patches; hollow markers denote rejection, which preserves the active knowledge and cached score.
Appendix figures & tables4 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Observed error
Candidate modules
Missing decision
Output protocol, role
Wrong action type
Domain, experience
Wrong direction
Experience, constraints
Appendix
Table 7. Default routing of semantic failures. Protocol codes can add candidate modules to these assignments.
Seed
Validation set V
Hold-out set H
Base
KARMA
Gain
Base
KARMA
Gain
42 †
34.38
48.75
+14.38
33.13
43.44
+10.31
43
35.31
44.38
+9.06
32.19
43.44
+11.25
44
30.63
35.31
+4.69
31.56
32.50
+0.94
45
30.00
38.44
+8.44
29.38
32.81
+3.44
46
30.63
40.94
+10.31
35.00
39.38
+4.38
Appendix
Table 8. Data-seed variation for Qwen3.8-Max on E (scores ×100 ). Seed 42 † is the main run in Table 3 . Means are computed before rounding.
Domain
Validation set V
Hold-out set H
0.005
0.01
0.02
0.005
0.01
0.02
H
+17.50
+17.50
+17.50
+15.94
+15.94
+15.94
B
+14.69
+14.69
+14.69
+18.13
+18.13
+18.13
L
+13.13
+13.13
+10.00
+15.94
+15.94
+12.50
Appendix
Table 9. Gate-threshold sensitivity with Qwen3.8-Max.
Figure 5. Contrasting evolution cycles on E : (a) Qwen3.8-Max’s largest accepted validation gain (+11.88) and (b) Kimi-K3’s largest rejected loss ( − 6.88). Each panel follows diagnosis, proposals, mutations, validation against the cached baseline, and hold-out behavior. Final hold-out gains reflect all retained edits. Aggregate scores use the 0–100 scale; sample scores use 0–1; θ=1 point. Rule texts translate the Chinese originals; FM/SM denote batch failure/success clusters. ADD/DEL/BUD/PRI denote the four reference operations.
LLM agents can evolve by learning from accumulated experience. Existing approaches extract reusable external knowledge, such as skills and memories, from experience to guide subsequent task solving, with some further internalizing this knowledge through model training. However, different ways of analyzing and transforming the same experience can yield knowledge with substantially different utility, even when the resulting guidance appears reasonable. Inspired by consistency regularization, we identify consistent utility gains across different ways of analyzing the same experience, rather than relying on any single way of analyzing it. We introduce SPLICE, a framework for consistency-regularized knowledge-model co-evolution. It constructs evolution views by perturbing how the same experience is analyzed, producing different knowledge candidates. Knowledge updates are then guided by common gain, which accounts for utility gains and their consistency across views. During model evolution, self-distillation internalizes the evolved knowledge alongside reinforcement learning, using knowledge associated with consistent utility degradation as a contrastive reference. The two processes interleave, with model updates driving further knowledge evolution. Experiments across diverse domains show that SPLICE outperforms knowledge evolution and model training baselines by up to 7.1 and 4.6 points in average accuracy, while its evolved knowledge reduces output tokens per correct solution by up to 44% and transfers across model sizes and families.
Sirui Chen, Zhining Liu, Chao Zhang +2
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · Georgia Institute of Technology · Amazon
Instruction-tuned models are deployed into environments where domains are heterogeneous and evolve, yet adding new domains or data typically requires costly retraining. We present AutoAdapt, a modular framework that incorporates new domains and data via targeted single-adapter training without modifying other adapters. The framework automatically discovers latent domains, uses them to train per-domain Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) adapters independently in parallel and performs parameter-free routing. Across 14 domain-specific benchmarks and GPT-4o pairwise judgements, AutoAdapt achieves parity with a LoRA adapter trained on all domains without requiring full-model retraining. We also find evidence of specialisation effect convergence across independent discovery methods. Overall, training each adapter on its own domain prevents domain interference by construction, thus enabling modular, taxonomy-free domain specialisation without aggregate performance loss or full model retraining.
Autonomous agents are increasingly deployed across sequences of related tasks, yet they often fail to retain and improve their knowledge over time. Existing approaches convert interaction trajectories into memories or reusable skills, but experience is not automatically reliable knowledge. Automatically collected skills and memories can propagate errors, mislead, and corrupt useful knowledge. To address this gap, we introduce Knowledge Evolution from Expertise and Lessons (KEEL), an agent-agnostic framework that uses verifier evidence to transform successful behavior into reusable skills and failures into corrective lessons. As new evidence accumulates, individual skill claims can be supported, contradicted, replaced, or retired. On SkillFlow benchmark, KEEL improves task success by 4.2 to 21.7 percentage points over the no-knowledge baseline, compared with gains of 2.4 to 9.6 points from SkillFlow's default method. Ablations show that skills and lessons are complementary. These results show that reliable continual agent learning depends not simply on accumulating experience, but on continually validating and evolving the knowledge derived from it. Our code is available at: https://github.com/microsoft/KEEL-TTCL26.
Wenzhe Fan, Benjamin Steenhoek, Gaurav Mittal +1
University of Illinois Chicago, IL, USA · Microsoft, Redmond, WA, USA