Towards Robust Long-Lived Agents: Benchmarking Experience Lifecycles in Evolving Environments

Lifelong LLM agents increasingly adapt through external learning states that store past interactions as retrievable memories or reusable skills, yet existing benchmarks rarely account for how the path of accumulated experience shapes what agents transfer and retain. In this work, we establish PATH-Bench, a benchmark for path-dependent evaluation of lifelong agents. PATH-Bench estimates directed task relationships via multi-model in-context learning, constructs probe-centered sequences with controlled helpful and interfering histories, and repeatedly evaluates probe tasks to measure average performance, forward transfer, backward transfer, and forgetting. We evaluate eight representative agents on single-turn code generation and multi-turn tool-use tasks under positive- and negative-dominant histories. Benchmark results show that experience utility depends jointly on how experience is represented and on the task's interaction structure, that strong transfer does not ensure retention, and that later experience can reshape gains acquired earlier in the learning path. Based on these findings, we propose Selective Experience Use (SEU), an agent harness that regulates how path-accumulated experience influences each new task, admitting helpful items while filtering out potential interference. SEU consistently reduces forgetting while improving forward transfer in the majority of settings. The PATH-Bench provides both a controlled evaluation framework and actionable guidance for designing more selective and robust lifelong 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.

As large language model (LLM) agents become widely adopted, they are increasingly deployed for tasks that require persistent monitoring or recurring actions (e.g., market analysis). These agents are expected to operate unattended for days or weeks, act at the right timing, and adapt to the dynamic environment over time. These challenges are not fully captured in the existing long-horizon agent work, as they often consider a static environment that is not temporally changing. We introduce ReLiveGym, a diagnostic evaluation environment of long-lived tasks in which agents act sparsely over simulated weeks of chronologically replayed real-world news, market, and social-media streams. The tasks span diverse levels of time sensitivity, reasoning intensity, and recurrence. Across eight base language models, we investigate how model choice and harness design affect agent performance on such long-lived tasks. Our results show that how agents determine when to act arises as an important harness-design axis for long-lived tasks; and that the optimal design varies across tasks and sometimes model choices as well. We also evaluate how continuous learning from hindsight feedback affects performance and addresses failure modes observed in these long-lived tasks. These findings indicate model choice, action timing mechanism, and use of feedback as important considerations in the design of long-lived agents. Code: https://github.com/SaharaLabsAI/ReLiveGym