Continual Learning for LLM Agents

LLM: Large Language Model

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23 papers in the last four weeks, up 109% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

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Latest papers 123

Oct 7, 2026cs.AI

Learning Situation-Conditioned Thinking Policies for Long-Term LLM Agents

Long-running autonomous agents must reuse accumulated reasoning experience without allowing explicit historical memory and LLM context to grow indefinitely. However, existing memory mechanisms mainly retrieve, summarize, or compress past content and do not directly learn when particular kinds of thinking should be activated or discover new thinking knowledge from temporally dispersed experiences. This paper proposes a situation-conditioned thinking memory framework that transforms historical reasoning experience into a lightweight policy for predicting what should be thought about in the current situation, while leaving detailed reasoning to a large language model. Situations may represent temporal or spatiotemporal evolution rather than only current states. Temporary experiences are also periodically analyzed across multiple independent episodes to identify repeated long-range regularities, which are consolidated into new thinking knowledge and further internalized by the lightweight policy. Experiments show that the learned policy achieves 1.000 F1 on temporal-rule generalization, improves DeepSeek reasoning F1 from 0.789 to 0.868, reduces online processing time from 0.3636 ms to 0.0382 ms per query at 30,000 historical situations, and reaches 1.000 relation-discovery F1 and future-thinking accuracy after sufficient repeated cross-experience evidence.

Hong Su

School of Computer Science, Chengdu University of Information Technology, Chengdu, China

LLM Agent Memory Long-Horizon LLM Agents Policy Learning Continual Learning for LLM Agents Temporal Reasoning in Language Models

Oct 7, 2026cs.CV

SkillCycle: Co-Evolving Agent Policies and Skill Banks

Internalizing external skills changes a language agent's capabilities and, with them, the value of its remaining guidance: rules can become redundant, misleading, or insufficient for newly encountered decisions. This creates a coupled problem of learning from skills and adapting the skills that supervise further learning. We introduce SkillCycle, a framework for co-evolving agent policies and skill banks through a feedback loop between skill internalization and rule revision. Our central contribution is to give distillation feedback a second role: token-level contextual differences help locate rules for inspection, while interaction outcomes guide edits to their content and applicability. SkillCycle alternates between two phases: policy learning with a fixed skill bank and router, and rule revision with a frozen policy. Candidate edits undergo rule-level and whole-bank environment comparisons before they guide the next learning cycle. On WebShop, SkillCycle with a 3B model achieves a success rate of 74.74% and a score of 88.37 without inference-time skill inputs, representing relative improvements of 0.73% and 3.96% over the state-of-the-art (SOTA) model, respectively. In Cycle 3 ablations on ALFWorld and WebShop, SkillCycle's no-skill success rates improve by 10.18% and 18.11% relative to a static skill bank, and by 2.41% and 2.50% relative to a single bank update, respectively. These results show that continually revising skill guidance as the agent's capabilities change helps transform external skills into policy capabilities that require no skill inputs at inference. We will release code, configurations, skill banks, and evaluation protocols.

Ling Li, Qiuyu Shen, Zheng Jiang +3

Tsinghua University · Northwestern Polytechnical University

LLM Agent Skill Learning Self-Improving Agents Continual Learning for LLM Agents

Oct 6, 2026cs.LG

ServeLearnBench: How Well Can Agents Self-Improve from Serving Experience?

Large language model agents are increasingly deployed to perform complex tasks in real-world environments. However, the knowledge required for correct behavior in these environments is often implicit, undisclosed, and subject to change over time. Recent continual-learning harnesses seek to address this challenge by enabling agents to improve from serving experience. Yet the effectiveness and limitations of these methods are not yet well characterized. Existing benchmarks provide only partial coverage: some explicitly provide the target knowledge, others assume a static environment, and those that support continual adaptation remain limited in scale and knowledge diversity. To enable systematic evaluation, we formalize an evolving-environment streaming dataset (EESD), in which agents must infer, apply, and revise latent environment knowledge from interaction and outcome feedback as hidden policies evolve, and introduce ServeLearnBench, spanning retail support, banking, and sales-pitch generation with 53 environment windows and 7,718 tasks. We evaluate five learning harnesses (RAG, Mem0, SkillOpt, Continual Harness, and Prime) across six models (GPT-5.6 Terra, Opus 5, Kimi K3, GLM-5.3, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, and GLM-5.3 Flash), covering 28 model-harness pairs and 252 learning runs. Our evaluation reveals three main findings: a substantial gap remains between task capability and learning from experience; continual adaptation is costly and can degrade already-correct behavior; and insufficient exploration emerges as a key bottleneck to effective adaptation. Overall, ServeLearnBench provides a controlled testbed for diagnosing these limitations and tracking progress toward agents that continually and reliably improve through serving experience.

Haizhong Zheng, Yizhuo Di, Ranajoy Sadhukhan +2

Carnegie Mellon University · Amazon

Continual Learning for LLM Agents LLM Agent Evaluation LLM Agent Self-Improvement AI Agent Benchmarks

Oct 4, 2026cs.LG

ASCENT: Online Test-Time Training of Long-Horizon Agents via Self-Distillation of Verified Experience

A large language model (LLM) agent solves long-horizon tasks through many reasoning-action turns, with one verification signal at termination. Deployed agents face streams of related tasks, making their trajectories a natural resource for improvement. In-context adaptation agents store reflections, memories, or skills as text, so reuse depends on retrieving the right experience and on a frozen policy executing it. We study Online Agentic Test-Time Training (OaTTT), which trains the LLM's weights on its own execution trajectories during deployment. The agent executes each task once, in one pass over the stream, and the executed trajectory with its verification result is the only learning signal for weight updates that persist across tasks. Directly imitating or reinforcing the generated tokens of this single attempt destabilizes the policy. We introduce ASCENT (Agentic Self-distillation for Cross-task EvolutioN at Test-time), which instead self-distills verified experience. A stable version of the LLM, its frozen initial copy, receives the verified trajectory as privileged information and predicts next-token distributions along it with this hindsight. Distilling them into persistent LoRA fast weights updates the agent for later tasks, without an external reference solution or stronger teacher. By further removing invalid-action turns, ASCENT distills enhanced privileged experience for more efficient execution. We characterize its population target and the limits of sparse outcome selection. Across ALFWorld, WebShop, and AppWorld at varied model scales, ASCENT improves task success and interaction efficiency as experience accumulates, outperforms online adaptation methods, and transfers to held-out scenes, showing that an agent can consolidate verified experience into its weights without a separate training phase or memory retrieval. Project page: https://artificer-ai-lab.github.io/ASCENT

Haodong Lu, Dong Gong

University of New South Wales (UNSW Sydney)

Continual Learning for LLM Agents Test-Time Training LLM Agent Training Self-Distillation Long-Horizon LLM Agents

Oct 4, 2026cs.AI

EVISKILL: Grounding Skill Evolution in Replayable Evidence

Continual skill evolution enables LLM agents to accumulate and refine reusable procedural knowledge from interaction experience without updating model parameters. Its effectiveness depends on determining not only what to change, but also why a change is justified and when it should become persistent guidance. However, existing experience-driven methods can lose the behavioral evidence and task contexts supporting edits. Moreover, a global validation outcome provides an incomplete judgment of its constituent changes: locally supported corrections may be discarded with a rejected revision, while evidence may require further experience to inform useful updates. To this end, we introduce EVISKILL, an evidence-driven framework that organizes execution observations into Replayable Evidence Cards and synthesizes edits with explicit links to their supporting contexts. Targeted replay verifies these edits through re-execution and provides feedback for correction. Across epochs, EVISKILL preserves evidence and provisionally retains supported edits for further refinement, while global validation governs their incorporation into the final skill. Experiments on three interactive benchmarks across six LLM backbones demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach.

Yan Zhou, Yili Wang, Yiwei Dai +2

School of Artificial Intelligence, Jilin University, Changchun, China

Continual Learning for LLM Agents Experience Replay LLM Agent Skill Learning

Oct 2, 2026cs.AI

Decoupling Memory from Context: Structured Memory for Token-Efficient Test-Time Continual Learning

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in enterprise, scientific, and medical applications, where agents must incorporate domain-specific knowledge and adapt from experience. Context engineering offers a practical alternative to weight updates by improving model behavior through instructions, strategies, and evidence supplied at inference time. However, adapting context online typically requires a costly trial-and-error process, while queries are often processed independently, preventing useful experience from carrying forward. Memory systems address this limitation by retaining information across interactions, but approaches that continually append information to a shared context face increasing token costs, context-window limits, and performance degradation as the context expands. We introduce a unified formulation of context optimization and show that an agent memory system update can be interpreted as an optimization update procedure over the model's context. This perspective attempts to provide a principled framework for studying memory design and its efficiency. We then propose GraphMemory, a lightweight graph-based memory that accumulates, refines, organizes, and connects reusable strategies. For each query, GraphMemory retrieves only the relevant subgraph, enabling online context adaptation without exposing the model to the entire memory. Under bounded retrieval, the amount of retrieved memory remains constant as the number of processed examples grows. Experiments show that GraphMemory achieves competitive downstream performance while using approximately 81-85% fewer memory-construction tokens than our baselines.

Yehya Farhat, Michael Desmond, Anastasios Kyrillidis

Rice University, Department of Computer Science Houston, TX, USA · IBM Research Yorktown Heights, NY, USA

Continual Learning for LLM Agents Continual Learning for LLMs Graph-Based Agent Memory LLM Context Management Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents

Oct 1, 2026cs.CL

From Knowledge Access to Source Learning: Developing Source-Specific Competence

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on persistent external sources to solve sequences of knowledge-intensive tasks. Existing methods improve how source content is accessed and organized, while agent-memory systems preserve reusable knowledge from prior interactions, but repeated use of the same source is still largely treated as repeated access rather than an opportunity to progressively improve understanding of that source. We study source learning: developing reusable source-specific competence over a persistent authoritative source. We represent this competence with a persistent source model that captures reusable understanding of the source, including how its knowledge is structured, interpreted, and applied. To construct and progressively refine such models, we propose SourceLearn, which combines two complementary learning mechanisms. Self-Directed Source Learning identifies what remains incompletely understood and adaptively revisits the source, while Task-Guided Source Learning uses downstream experience to reveal local representational gaps and recurring needs in how source knowledge should be organized. In both cases, learning signals determine what should be reconsidered, while persistent updates are reconstructed from the authoritative source. Across five benchmarks and three LLM backends, SourceLearn achieves the best performance in 13 of 15 settings, with gains of up to 22.6 points over Hybrid RAG and substantial overall improvements over static source representations and experience-based memory baselines.

Lucheng Fu, Kejing Xia, Yiyang Wang +10

Georgia Institute of Technology · University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign · University of California, Los Angeles

Continual Learning for LLM Agents Knowledge Augmentation for Language Models Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents

Oct 1, 2026cs.AI

Not All Experience Belongs in the Weights: Component Routing for Self-Improving GUI Agents

Self-improving GUI agents keep the trajectories they produce and return them to the agent, by fine-tuning or by retrieval into the prompt, and studies that compare the two destinations disagree. We attribute this to the unit of experience: a trajectory bundles items with different properties, so a conclusion about the bundle depends on its mix. To address this, (i) we introduce component routing, which splits the experience into locators, procedures, state facts and lessons and sends each component to the context or to the weights, compared on the same items across three backbone families, two environments and three seeds. One pool has two destinations: locators and lessons win in the weights, procedures and state facts in the context. (ii) We fit a rule in two properties measured before any training, recurrence and state-conditionality; it recovers the destination of a held-out backbone family in 24 of 24 cells, two interventions move a component toward the boundary, and routing by the rule beats every whole-trajectory baseline and, by +3.5 points on average, the better single destination of each backbone. (iii) We identify how training and producer-consumer differences change the value of the two destinations: note readout decreases after the same component is written into the weights, most for the items that recur most, context gains increase with the information gap, and weights gains decrease with the policy gap. Code and data will be released.

Beining Wu, Zihao Ding, Jun Huang

Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, South Dakota State University

Continual Learning for LLM Agents GUI Agents Self-Improving Agents Memory-Augmented Agents

Sep 30, 2026cs.AI

ReLiveGym: Evaluating Long-Lived Agents over Weeks of Replayed Reality

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

Xisen Jin, Jingheng Li, Zhenglun Chen +2

Sahara AI · University of Southern California

Continual Learning for LLM Agents Long-Horizon Agent Evaluation AI Agent Benchmarks LLM Agent Harnesses

Sep 30, 2026cs.AI

OverForge: Reasoning Through Strategies and Tactics Helps Cooperative Lifelong Adaptation

Cooperative language-model agents must coordinate over long horizons and adapt to changing environments and to partners with unfamiliar conventions, yet existing agents map observations to actions without separating persistent coordination strategies from their tactical execution. We introduce OverForge, a training-free hierarchical architecture that separates strategic reasoning over roles and divisions of labour from tactical reasoning over actions within each agent's private, partner-conditioned world model. A metacognitive Prefrontal Cortex Module couples the two levels by forming strategy-action branches, imagining their consequences with a forward model, and committing when confident. In OvercookedV2, OverForge delivers 7 soups in a connected kitchen versus 3 for each flat LLM baseline, retains agreed roles, and adopts roles proposed by unfamiliar partners. Ablations and a fixed-strategy probe show that persistent strategies guide tactical adaptation while each reasoning level contributes to coordination. Memory restarts show that cross-episode partner knowledge supports task performance and partner prediction, linking the hierarchy to continual adaptation.

Oana Madalina Fron, Ojas Shirekar, Chirag Raman

Tapri Lab, Department of Pattern Recognition and Bioinformatics, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

Continual Learning for LLM Agents Multi-Agent LLM Systems Multi-Agent Coordination Long-Horizon LLM Agents LLM Reasoning

Sep 29, 2026cs.AI

Self-Evolving Harness on Multiple Tasks with the Agent as Its Own Optimizer

A harness is the code around a language-model agent that organizes prompts, calls tools, manages context, and controls execution. As models grow stronger, recent work has begun to let agents improve their own harnesses, a line of work known as self-evolving harnesses. In most existing methods, a separate proposer running on a human-designed harness modifies the solver's harness, and a separate harness is evolved for each benchmark. Real-world tasks come from many domains, so both the evolution and the evaluation of a harness should cover a diverse range of tasks. We propose a framework close to recursive self-improvement: the same frozen model, on the same version of the harness, first solves tasks as the solver and then, as the proposer, reads the complete run records and directly edits the harness that runs it. Each evolution batch draws tasks from five benchmarks in different domains. To measure generalization, training and held-out tasks are strictly separated, and we additionally evaluate on five out-of-distribution benchmarks never used during evolution. We frame the evolution process as deep-learning training with two stages, multi-task pretraining and continual training. Starting from a 49-line seed harness, the harness obtained at the end of the first stage improves the average score by 4.48 points on the in-distribution benchmarks and by 12.64 points on the out-of-distribution benchmarks, surpassing Codex on the former and matching it on the latter. In the second stage, continued evolution on Claw-Eval, one of the out-of-distribution benchmarks, further raises the score on that benchmark from 66.17 to 68.06, exceeding Codex. We also provide an in-depth analysis of the mechanisms that emerged during evolution, including output truncation, history compaction, and independent review.

Qiankai Xu

Nanjing University

Continual Learning for LLM Agents AI Agent Evaluation Agent Harness Optimization LLM Agent Workflow Optimization LLM Agent Self-Improvement

Sep 29, 2026cs.AI

Semantic Projection for Continual Self-Evolution of Language Agents

Language-model agents increasingly rely on persistent natural-language skills to adapt beyond their frozen model parameters. When a shared skill is repeatedly revised from a non-stationary, heterogeneous task stream, however, improvements for new tasks can overwrite procedures needed for earlier ones. In continual learning, Orthogonal Gradient Descent (OGD) addresses analogous interference by projecting a new-task gradient onto a subspace that locally preserves prior predictions. Natural-language skill revisions, however, have neither gradients nor a canonical vector space in which such a projection can be performed. We introduce \emph{Semantic-Scope Projected Evolution} (SSPE), which transfers the functional principle of gradient projection from parameter space to behavior space. SSPE treats an unconstrained skill revision as a proposed update, identifies acquired capabilities with which it may interfere, and uses the observed gains and regressions to construct a compatible revision rather than merely rejecting the update. This enables one shared skill to evolve across latent and recurring task contexts without exposing semantic domain identities to the evolution model. Across controlled synthetic streams and heterogeneous real-agent benchmarks, SSPE improves final cross-domain competence and mitigates forgetting relative to strong skill-evolution baselines. The evolved skill also retains the strongest average performance after transfer to a different executor model. These results establish semantic projection as a promising principle for stable and adaptive self evolution of language agents.

Ziyu Liu, Jun Chen, Lixu Wang

University of Pennsylvania · Hark · The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen

Continual Learning for LLM Agents LLM Agent Skill Learning Self-Evolving Agents Catastrophic Forgetting

Sep 28, 2026cs.LG

Learn Now, Use Next, Trust Later: Prequential Test-Time Learning for LLM Agents

Adapting large language model agents during deployment requires not only retaining past experience, but also turning new observations into timely guidance. Many test-time learning methods, however, acquire knowledge from completed episodes. Feedback from an ongoing interaction may therefore not be distilled into knowledge soon enough to help the next decision. Acquiring knowledge at the granularity of individual transitions could reduce this delay, but raises a separate challenge: a rule that is useful within one episode may not be reliable enough to guide future episodes. Waiting for validation can forfeit immediate benefits, whereas unrestricted reuse can propagate accidental or misattributed guidance. We introduce StepLearn, a nonparametric framework that separates immediate use from persistent trust. It turns informative transitions into hypotheses that can guide the next step, while requiring prospective validation before reuse across episodes. Their predicted effects are checked against subsequent observations outside the source episodes, and only sufficiently supported hypotheses become available for persistent guidance. This process updates external knowledge while keeping all model parameters fixed. Over five rounds on WebArena-Lite and ALFWorld, StepLearn achieves average success rates of 59.9% and 84.0% with GPT-5-mini, and 57.8% and 88.1% with Qwen3.5-35B-A3B, respectively. It outperforms EvoTest, the strongest baseline, by 2.2-12.7 percentage points across the four settings. Learning dynamics further shows that these gains are not restricted to the final repetition, with advantages already present on first task attempts in most settings.

Tong Zhao, Reed Li, Yuyang Hu +5

Renmin University of China · Tencent

Continual Learning for LLM Agents Test-Time Training LLM Agent Reliability

Sep 28, 2026cs.AI

Self-Evolving Agents via Likelihood-Guided Tool-Space Optimization

Self-evolving agents can continually improve their behavior, while tools define the executable action space through which they interact with the environment. However, exposing the full tool library to model introduces substantial irrelevant context and can impair tool-use decisions. We study tool-space self-evolution, where each recurring task type maintains a persistent tool space which is constructed from accumulated output experience. We identify three limitations of existing methods: (1) output-unaware selection: they rely primarily on tool descriptions or model priors rather than observed tool outputs; (2) statelessness across request: they select tools independently for each request without consolidating prior output experience into persistent task-specific state; (3) inference cost: they repeatedly search, rank, or reason over candidate tools for subsequent requests of the same task. We address these limitations through output-aware tool scoring, persistent task-specific tool spaces, amortized tool selection, and reusable configurations across models. We introduce LOTS (Likelihood-Only Tool Scoring), which evolves an agent's tool space from accumulated output experience while keeping model parameters fixed. After each request, LOTS holds the model's generated answer and estimates each tool's contribution by measuring how much the answer likelihood changes when its observed output is removed. These contributions are aggregated within each recurring task to rank tools and update its persistent space. Across three benchmarks, LOTS improves task performance while substantially reducing tool context. More importantly, sequential experiments demonstrate that task-specific spaces persist and continue to improve over time, while cross-model experiments show that learned configurations transfer across different models.

Xuanqi Zhang, Ruinan Jin, Running Yang +4

University of British Columbia · Vector Institute · Columbia University

Continual Learning for LLM Agents LLM Agent Self-Improvement LLM Tool Use Self-Evolving Agents

Sep 27, 2026cs.CL

NLPG: Natural-Language Policy Gradients for Self-Evolving Language Agents

Large language model agents increasingly rely on compound programs for retrieval, tool use, reasoning, and verification, yet their failures often arise from local procedural decisions. Existing reinforcement-learning and prompt-optimization approaches typically rely on scalar rewards or repeatedly modify entire prompts, making it difficult to capture and reuse procedural improvements while preserving a frozen agent. To address this problem, We propose Natural-Language Policy Gradients (NLPG), an external policy-memory method for improving a fixed agent without changing its model parameters or program structure. NLPG diagnoses execution traces, propagates downstream feedback backward through the module graph, and converts recurring failures into route-local natural-language corrections that are aggregated into bounded policy updates for subsequent executions. Across six benchmarks covering memory, reasoning, instruction following, and evidence verification, NLPG also outperforms the strongest listed baseline for each benchmark by 8.71 percentage points on average. These results provide evidence that evaluated procedural experience can be transformed into local and interpretable policy updates, enabling continual improvement of frozen agents.

Xu Liu, WenZhang Wei, Jun Cao +4

School of Electronic Information, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, China · School of Remote Sensing and Information Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, China · State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, China

Continual Learning for LLM Agents Policy Optimization Language Model Self-Improvement Policy Learning Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents

Sep 26, 2026cs.AI

SCLATE: a Substrate for Continual-Learning Agent Training and Evaluation

Continual-learning agents are systems of models, harnesses, and memory operating over long multi-session horizons. Evaluating and training them requires interleaving tasks with agent-side events such as session stop and start, crons, and memory consolidation. Yet existing benchmarks and training frameworks schedule only the benchmark's own events, leaving each benchmark and agent pair to build a custom scheduling loop. We present SCLATE, an execution substrate where benchmarks and unmodified agents each add their events to one open event scheduler through an adapter. A hybrid simulated clock runs these events on a shared timeline, flowing in real time while the agent works and skipping idle gaps, which compresses a month-long scenario into hours. SCLATE also serves as a rollout engine that runs any agent's harness and memory unmodified, recording the tokens and log probabilities of every model call through an in-container proxy. We port seven benchmarks to SCLATE and compare ten unmodified harness and memory configurations head to head on ten models. The comparison shows that an added memory system does not reliably beat the harness's native memory and that models differ widely in how they use the same harness and memory. We then post-train Qwen3.5-4B through unmodified harnesses and memory systems. The model learns to use both, reading 6.8x fewer file lines with a 16.7-point higher SWE-bench Verified pass rate, and writing richer memory records, while its held-out MetaClaw accuracy rises by up to 11.8 points.

Youngmok Jung, Sirajul Salekin, Henry Tran +3

Apple

Continual Learning for LLM Agents Long-Horizon Agent Evaluation LLM Agent Training Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents

Sep 24, 2026cs.AI

Scope Before You Persist: Preventing Cross-Family Interference in Agent Memory

Persistent memory lets language-model agents improve prompts and skills without updating model weights. We show that matching retrieval scope to certification scope enables these edits to support reliable repeated adaptation across recurring task families. We study frozen-model agents on ProcStream-RSI, a 12-round code-repair stream, using Orthogonal Regression Control (ORC), an execution-grounded gate for persistent skill edits. In an intervention that holds proposals and gate decisions fixed, retrieving each accepted skill only for its originating family raises mean hidden trajectory utility from 0.713 under global memory to 0.816 and changes harmful deployments from six of eight to none. In 27 paired randomized-order streams, Scoped-ORC improves mean trajectory utility by 0.063 [0.037, 0.094] over Global-ORC, accepts 63 rather than 12 updates, and produces multiple accepted updates in 19/27 streams, with 0/63 harmful acceptances. The global control reaches 0.713, below the static agent's 0.775, because locally valid edits can interfere with unrelated families. These results establish scope matching as a complementary control for persistent agent memory: certification determines whether an edit is supported, while retrieval scope determines where that evidence authorizes its use.

Yezhou Cheng, Runjia Du, Zeming Liu +5

Independent · Northwestern University · Pinterest, Inc.

Agent Memory Continual Learning for LLM Agents LLM Agent Skill Learning Agent Memory Management

Sep 22, 2026cs.AI

CliffCompaction: Cost-Efficient Compaction for Long-Horizon Coding Agents

Agents often work on complex problems that require millions of tokens of context, which necessitates compacting across sessions due to limited context windows. We develop CliffCompaction, an autocompaction technique that reduces cost by up to 50% under a bounded context while maintaining or improving performance on Terminal-Bench and achieving new levels of efficiency for test-time scaling and state-of-the-art results on KernelBench. The per-rollout savings of CliffCompaction make the performance--cost trade-off of test-time scaling more efficient, adding over 10 percentage points on Terminal-Bench for less than the cost of two full-context runs. Under parallel test-time scaling, CliffCompaction lets Kimi K2.6 match Opus 4.7, and exceed Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.3 Codex at lower cost. The key to CliffCompaction's effectiveness is that it keeps compacted information faithful by only truncating or dropping content, never rephrasing or rewriting it. We never compact a compaction---each pass operates only on original content, and prior compacted output is discarded, preventing context drift from accumulating. These properties sustain continual learning over sessions exceeding a million tokens: on KernelBench, CliffCompaction reaches CUDA kernel speedups of

2.23\times

after 200 steps and

3.58\times

after 400 steps, surpassing specialized search algorithms and trained agents despite being a general-purpose compaction technique. We open-source a scaffold-agnostic API-proxy implementation of CliffCompaction usable with Claude Code, Codex and other harnesses.

Trang Nguyen, Eulrang Cho, Bingqing Chen +1

Carnegie Mellon University · Bosch Center for AI

Continual Learning for LLM Agents Test-Time Scaling Long-Horizon LLM Agents Context Compression

Sep 20, 2026cs.CL

RPMem: Learning Long-Term Recurrent Parametric Memory Across Sessions for LLM Agents

Long-running LLM agents require memory that persists and evolves across sessions. Text-based memory retrieves and reconstructs past interactions at every query, making long-horizon performance increasingly dependent on retrieval quality and contextual reasoning as histories grow. Parametric memory encodes experience directly into model computation, but existing approaches provide limited support for cross-session memory evolution. Their coupling to a specific backbone further restricts memory reuse after model replacement. We introduce RPMem, a two-stage architecture that compiles each session into a model-independent latent memory through forward computation and selectively integrates it with retained memory via a task-trained recurrent gate. The consolidated memory is then mapped to backbone-specific low-rank adaptation (LoRA) parameters, allowing the encoding capability to transfer when the backbone is replaced. Evaluation across three long-term memory benchmarks and five diverse backbones demonstrates broad generalization with near-constant update cost and memory footprint. With Qwen3-8B on PERMA, RPMem reaches 85.52%, outperforming the strongest parametric and text-based baselines by 5.32 and 12.98 percentage points, respectively. Ablations validate the complementary roles of session compilation and cross-session consolidation, while dynamics analyses reveal that the gate acquires task-specific memory integration strategies. These results establish RPMem as a lifecycle-independent parametric memory framework that maintains evolving cross-session memory that remains reusable across backbone replacements. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/Quark-Medical/rpmem/tree/main.

Fanyu Zhao, Ruike Cao, Liang Dong +6

Fudan University · Qwen Business Unit of Alibaba

Continual Learning for LLM Agents LLM Agent Memory Persistent Memory for Language Models

Sep 17, 2026cs.AI

An Architecture for Long-Horizon Agents: Levels, Ticks and Cascaded Intelligence

Language-model agents are increasingly asked to carry out work spanning days or weeks, such as an operations remediation or a research programme. Such a task outlives any context window, any process and any interval at which a person can attend. In this paper, we argue that a long-horizon agent must run continually without forgetting before it can learn continually. This ability lies in the harness around the model rather than in the model itself. We derive seven bottlenecks from the long-horizon setting and answer them with a hierarchical architecture of three parts: (i) levels indexed by time scale, each keeping a bounded file summarising the level below; (ii) a clocked tick as the unit of autonomous action; and (iii) cascaded intelligence, where work is escalated to a more capable model only after failing review. We report on a ten-day campaign in which an agent built on this architecture reproduced a published reinforcement-learning result with a human attending once a day, and show (1) the agent kept the thread across every context reset and session boundary of the campaign, (2) operating knowledge written early changed later behaviour with no change to model weights, and (3) where learned components would enter such a system. Overall, our experience suggests continual learning for these agents needs a substrate outliving every context and process, and the checks the harness already runs are where a learner belongs.

Erik Nijkamp, Anurag Koul, Egor Pakhomov +1

Salesforce AI Research

Cognitive Architectures for AI Agents Continual Learning for LLM Agents Long-Horizon Agent Tasks Long-Horizon LLM Agents Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents

Sep 16, 2026cs.AI

CERA-MoA: Co-Evolving Routing Mechanisms with Continually Learning LLM Agents

Current Mixture-of-Agents (MoA) paradigms generally treat query routing and agent fine-tuning as separate processes, limiting their ability to respond to evolving agent capabilities. This disconnect prevents routing strategies from adapting to evolving agent capabilities during post-training and prevents agents from achieving synergistic data-driven specialization. To resolve this, we introduce CERA-MoA (Co-Evolving Router with continually learning Agents for Mixture-of-Agents), an iterative reinforcement learning framework where the dynamic router and independent agent policies co-evolve. We design a predictive familiarity estimator that leverages mid-layer hidden states to evaluate semantic competence among agents, avoiding the overhead of full rollouts. Based on these familiarity scores, a cumulative-threshold adaptive routing mechanism dynamically activates a tailored minimal agent subset, achieving a trade-off between task performance and efficiency. By proactively allocating targeted training samples to agents based on their evolving competence, CERA-MoA promotes capability differentiation. Extensive experiments across various domains demonstrate that CERA-MoA outperforms state-of-the-art static-agent routing and fix-workflow fine-tuning baselines.

Jiaxuan Jiang, Liyuan He, Zhixuan Fang

IIIS, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China · Shanghai Qi Zhi Institute, Shanghai, China · School of Artificial Intelligence, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

Continual Learning for LLM Agents Multi-Agent Systems RL Post-Training RL for LLM Agents LLM Agent Routing

Sep 15, 2026cs.AI

ScienceBuddy: Recursive-in-Recursive Self-Improvement for Interactive Scientific Agents

We introduce and release ScienceBuddy, an interactive scientific research workspace that brings continually improving scientific agents into researchers' everyday workflows. ScienceBuddy supports researchers in carrying out scientific tasks while transforming their requests, feedback, and execution evidence into tasks and evaluation rubrics for continual learning. At its core is recursive-in-recursive self-improvement, a paradigm that couples harness evolution with model reinforcement learning: the inner recursion improves the harness with the model fixed, while the outer recursion trains the model under the improved harness. Harness evolution shapes training experience, and model learning creates new opportunities for harness adaptation. We present case studies of researcher interaction, harness refinement, and model learning, with the benchmark cases spanning four scientific task families. By releasing ScienceBuddy as a research product, we make this paradigm available to the scientific community and take a step toward discovery intelligence: scientific AI that advances through sustained collaboration with researchers and evolves alongside the research it supports. Website: http://science-buddy.io

Shuhan Xue, Jianyuan Zhong, Ziyuan Nan +10

Continual Learning for LLM Agents AI-Assisted Scientific Research LLM Agent Self-Improvement Recursive Self-Improvement RL for LLM Agents Autonomous Research Agents

Sep 14, 2026cs.CL

EMR: Self-Evolving Medical Multi-Agent System via Experience Mining and Reuse

Large language model (LLM) driven multi-agent systems have shown promise in complex clinical reasoning, yet existing approaches rely on static strategies and lack persistent clinical memory, preventing self-evolving from prior diagnostic successes and failures. We present EMR, a self-evolving medical multi-agent system via Experience Mining and Reuse. EMR introduces a hierarchical clinical experience library that organizes accumulated knowledge into three levels: clinical principles, diagnostic patterns, and representative cases. During inference, EMR emulates multidisciplinary consultation: a planner agent coordinates domain-specific department agents for specialized reasoning, while a summary agent synthesizes their analyses into a final decision. Critically, EMR automatically extracts correct diagnostic insights and failure-related warnings from multi-agent reasoning trajectories, incrementally updating the experience library to guide future cases. Experiments on medical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that EMR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art medical multi-agent baselines. Further analysis reveals that the hierarchical experience enables cross-specialty generalization and transfer across diverse LLM backbones, offering a scalable and in

Dongsheng Shi, Yue Li, Xin Yi +1

East China Normal University · City University of Hong Kong

Continual Learning for LLM Agents Multi-Agent LLM Systems LLM Agent Self-Improvement Clinical Reasoning Medical LLMs Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents

Sep 14, 2026cs.CL

LifeMem: Enabling Lifelong Experience Reuse for LLM 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

Continual Learning for LLM Agents LLM Agent Skill Learning Transfer Learning Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents

Sep 12, 2026cs.IR

When Synthetic Data Hurts: On Catastrophic Forgetting in Skill Retrieval for LLM Agents

LLM agents increasingly rely on external skills retrieved at runtime, making skill selection from large repositories a critical challenge. We present a production skill router over 34,396 skills and a large-scale study of skill retrieval using limited real supervision and synthetic data. We found that the synthetic-data fine-tuning improves in-distribution retrieval but it causes catastrophic forgetting on real and out-of-distribution (OOD) data. We evaluate several forgetting mitigation fine-tuning approaches inspired by continual learning, including embedding-anchor regularization, Learning without Forgetting (LwF), Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC), and L2-initialization. The results show that these approaches not only retain the performance on OOD skills retrieval but also improve the retrieval on synthetic in-distribution skills by 13.98% for 0.6B Qwen retriever and reranker. Our results provide a practical benchmark and a robust fine-tuning recipe for scarce, multi-positive supervision.

Syed Shariyar Murtaza, Yifan Nie, Utkarsh Soni +2

Manulife, 200 Bloor St E, Toronto, ON M4W 1E5, Canada

Continual Learning for LLM Agents Fine-Tuning LLM Agent Skill Retrieval Catastrophic Forgetting

Sep 8, 2026cs.CL

Experience Funnel: A State-Policy Alternating Loop for Self-Evolving Agents

Autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs) continuously accumulate experience through interaction, creating an opportunity to improve future behavior through self-evolution. A fundamental challenge is how to transform abundant, task-specific interaction experience into reusable model competence without sacrificing the ability to adapt rapidly to newly observed evidence. Explicit textual states, such as skills and agent harnesses, provide fast, human-readable and editable adaptation, but incur persistent dependence on external context; parametric policies provide compact and reusable competence, but are substantially slower to update. We present \textit{Experience Funnel}, a self-evolving framework that couples fast state adaptation with slow policy consolidation in an alternating loop. Interaction trajectories are first distilled into an explicit textual state, where newly acquired experience can be rapidly incorporated and validated. The framework then selectively identifies state-enabled behavior that remains useful across state revisions and consolidates it into the policy through transition-aware distillation. The updated state--policy pair subsequently generates new rollouts, providing fresh evidence for the next round of state adaptation and policy consolidation. Experiments across diverse agent benchmarks show that \textit{Experience Funnel} consistently improves agent capability over state-only evolution and policy-internalization approaches, while progressively converting useful explicit experience into autonomous policy competence.

Wenbo Gao, Zhaomou Song, Zhiyuan Ji +7

1The Hong Kong Polytechnic University · 2Huawei · 3Renmin University of China

Continual Learning for LLM Agents Agent Skill Learning Policy Distillation Self-Evolving Agents

Sep 2, 2026cs.AI

SkillGLoW: Procedural-Family Skill Consolidation for Self-Improving Agents on Long-Horizon Task Streams

LLM agents increasingly self-improve by writing and reusing textual skills, kept either as one global document or as a flat pool of per-task entries, though most of the evidence comes from domains with structurally similar tasks. On long-horizon workloads where each task demands a different solution, the two forms fail in opposite ways: the document collapses into generic discipline, while the pool inflates and its entries stay bound to the instance that wrote them. We argue the missing unit of reuse is the solving procedure shared by a cluster of related tasks, and build SkillGLoW (Global-Local Weave) around it: the local skills a task writes from its own execution are aggregated into procedural families and compressed into de-instantiated global priors, while the instance detail they hold is regenerated per task rather than stored; a commit gate admits a prior only when real execution shows it does not degrade the deployed library. Across four benchmarks (mathematical reasoning, terminal automation, software repair, and embodied control) and three models, the priors gain 17.2 points (hard) over the no-skill baseline on average, with positive gains in all 12 continual-improvement runs, and 18.0 with local regeneration, while the library holds one prior per procedural family, 3.6x more compact than the per-task pool. Under the same protocol GLoW leads a published single-document optimizer on 15 of 21 cells. Unmodified, the library lifts success on unseen ALFWorld tasks from 73.9% to 83.9%, evidence that what transfers is procedure rather than task memory.

Ao Yan, Xin Zhang, Jiawei Du +1

National University of Singapore, Singapore · Institute of Advanced Intelligence and Computing (IAIC), Singapore

LLM Agent Skill Learning Continual Learning for LLM Agents Agent Memory Management Transfer Learning

Aug 31, 2026cs.LG

PRACTICE: From Experience to Expertise in Self-Evolving Embodied Agents

Recent studies have shown that multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can serve as embodied agents, translating language instructions and visual observations into executable plans. However, building agents that can continually improve through interaction and rapidly adapt to their environments remains challenging. Summing up experience from past interaction trajectories provides a promising solution, but existing experience-based methods often rely on manually designed prompting workflows to extract and update skills. Such fixed procedures may struggle to learn updated skills from new and diverse experiences. We introduce PRACTICE, which trains a skill learner to discover and maintain a persistent skill library from past interaction trajectories while keeping the task executor frozen. Given the historical accumulated skills and incoming trajectories, the skill learner produces structured batch-edits that add, refine, merge, or remove skills, and then hierarchical consolidate all collected edits into a consistent updated skill library. We train the learner with a two-stage curriculum. First, it learns basic skill generation and library maintenance from oracle trajectories. Then, by contrasting successful and failed trajectories from heterogeneous executors on the same tasks, it learn to identify invalid action patterns and recovery strategies. Finally, we apply online skill-edit distillation to align the skill learner with a stronger teacher on its current edit distribution to further improves the policy. Experiments demonstrate that a compact skill learner delivers consistent performance improvements across successive library-update rounds for multiple frozen executors. On EB-ALFRED and EB-Habitat, PRACTICE further outperforms the strongest experience-based baselines. Project resources are publicly available at: https://baai-agents.github.io/PRACTICE

Ziyi Bai, Siqi Li, Tinglei Huang +1

Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) · Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

Continual Learning for LLM Agents Robot Skill Learning LLM Agent Skill Learning Embodied AI Self-Evolving Agents

Aug 23, 2026cs.CL

Dual-Layer Agentic Memory with Fast Write Routing and Slow Consolidation

Large language model (LLM) agents operate in dynamic environments where knowledge continuously evolves. Existing memory systems typically treat external memory as a monotonically growing repository, inevitably leading to retrieval degradation and increasing computational costs over time. We argue that the core challenge is not retrieval alone, but managing the knowledge lifecycle: deciding what to externalize, update, or ultimately internalize. Inspired by Complementary Learning Systems (CLS) theory in neuroscience, we propose Dual-Layer Agentic Memory, a framework that shifts memory management to the write phase through cost-aware epistemic routing and periodic parametric consolidation. Incoming information is categorized as non-write, write-new, or write-update, and routed through a small-to-large model cascade that minimizes routing overhead while filtering redundant memories. A subsequent write-back phase selectively consolidates high-value external memories into model parameters via supervised fine-tuning. Experiments demonstrate the dual efficiency of our approach: a 1.7B/8B cascade prunes up to 68% of redundant external memory while escalating fewer than 50% of inputs, yet retains over 98% of the downstream QA Exact Match (EM) achieved by an exhaustive retention baseline. We further show that periodic consolidation successfully internalizes external knowledge, allowing the router to adaptively suppress redundant writes as the model's epistemic boundaries evolve. Overall, our framework presents a unified paradigm for agent memory: selective externalization followed by selective internalization. Code and dataset will be released upon acceptance.

Wenzhi Li, Dong Nie, Rui Lan +7

Zhejiang University · Indepedent Researcher · Xiaohongshu +2

Continual Learning for LLM Agents Continual Learning Agent Memory Management Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents

Aug 19, 2026cs.LG

Harness Continual Learning: Continual Adaptation Beyond Model Parameters

Continual learning has largely been model-centric, treating model parameters as the state that changes with sequential experience. Modern agents can also adapt through a harness of prompts, memories, tools, skills, and routing rules. Because these contents jointly shape later execution, a harness update can disrupt previously reliable behavior even when the model is frozen. This raises a new question: how can an agent continually improve its state outside the model while retaining behavior acquired earlier? We formulate Harness Continual Learning (HCL), a new continual learning paradigm in which the harness evolves around a frozen foundation model, and define the resulting loss of earlier behavior as harness-level forgetting. We instantiate HCL with four execution-facing components: the Task Interface, Experience Memory, Capability Map, and Adaptive Router. We further introduce guarded harness evolution to separate update generation from state commitment. A Continual Optimizer proposes candidate harnesses from post-execution feedback, and a Continual Evaluator commits the resulting candidate harness only after checking current improvement, historical retention, and validity. Experiments on textual reasoning, multimodal perception, and open-world interaction demonstrate capability accumulation and failure recovery, with relative gains exceeding 10% over corresponding baselines in multiple settings. Component ablations assess the contribution of each harness component, while controlled retention sweeps reveal measurable harness-level forgetting and show that the stability--plasticity trade-off can be explicitly adjusted.

Borui Kang, Jinrui Gu, Junhan Lv +3

State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, China · University of Wollongong, Australia

Continual Learning for LLM Agents Continual Learning Agent Harness Optimization