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

Jun 29, 2026cs.AI

ManimAgent: Self-Evolving Multimodal Agents for Visual Education

Multi-round reflection lets agents built on large language models recover from failures within a single task, but each task remains an isolated episode: lessons learned across many reflection rounds on one task are discarded before the next begins. We study this gap on a code-generation task: from a scientific paper section, the agent writes Python in the open-source Manim library to render a mathematical animation. We present ManimAgent, a self-evolving multimodal agent that carries reflection experience across tasks through a dual-channel Episodic Memory Bank grown entirely from its own task stream, with no weight updates and no human seeds. After each animation converges, a vision-language model scores the rendered keyframes; the resulting signals populate a positive channel M+ that stores success rationales as soft Reference Examples, and a negative channel M- that stores validated failure patterns as hard Known Pitfalls. On a fixed-probe evaluation against no-memory, matched-budget retrieval-augmented generation, and shuffled-memory baselines, blind human Pass@1 rises and reflection rounds fall as memory size grows. We will release the code, frozen memory snapshots, and the task stream.

Wenjia Jiang, Zongyuan Cai, Yuanhang Shao +7

University of Alberta · Southeast University · Virginia Tech +2

Continual Learning for LLM Agents LLM Agent Self-Improvement Agentic Code Generation Multimodal Agents Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents

Jun 29, 2026cs.LG

EVAF: A Test-Retest Protocol for Selective Parametric Consolidation

Long-running language agents need mechanisms for deciding which experiences should persist after the working context is gone. Retrieval systems can reinsert past text, but they do not by themselves show that an experience has been selectively consolidated into the model's own behavior. We introduce EVAF, an Echo-Valence Attractor Field mechanism for gated LoRA consolidation, and a test-retest protocol for measuring selective parametric consolidation under controlled interference. Across GPT-2 and TinyLlama, EVAF preferentially consolidates high-valence, high-surprise experiences while preserving retrieval-accessible factual memory through a complementary routed memory path. Test-retest measurements show stronger post-interference behavioral persistence than frozen, retrieval-only, and ungated continual-update baselines, while keeping parameter drift and cross-persona contamination low. The results support a separation between memory access and memory depth: retrieving a fact and internalizing an experience are distinct computational operations.

Haoliang Han

Institute of Biomedical Strategy, China Pharmaceutical University

Agent Memory Continual Learning for LLM Agents Low-Rank Adaptation Memory Consolidation

Jun 27, 2026cs.AI

MedEvoEval: Evaluating Continual Evolution of Doctor Agents through Simulated Clinical Episodes

Doctor agents are moving beyond single-turn answer generation toward evolving clinical decision systems. Within an outpatient episode, they acquire evidence, use examination and consultation resources, and decide when to finalize a diagnosis and management plan. Across episodes, their behavior may change through memory, retrieval, reflection, or other update mechanisms. Current evaluations only partially cover this setting. Fixed-input medical QA benchmarks score final answers from complete inputs, whereas many interactive benchmarks still focus on individual encounters or fixed runs, providing limited support for evaluating how episode-level decisions interact with cross-episode experience. We introduce MedEvoEval, an executable longitudinal evaluation framework based on action-gated simulated outpatient episodes. Each source case is converted into role-specific patient, examination, and manager views; evidence is revealed only through valid actions; and each episode records a structured trace that links observations, actions, final outputs, manager scores, and optional experience write-back. We release a runnable E&D artifact with 700 processed episodes, provenance notes, schemas, an episode runner, scoring scripts, configurations, example logs, analysis code, and trajectory- and step-level derivatives. Experiments show that episode traces expose process costs hidden by final-answer scoring, show how MDT-style consultation reallocates resources, and support longitudinal analyses of memory maturation, held-out transfer, update-stage response, and backward retention. Together, these results show that MedEvoEval provides a concrete basis for evaluating whether doctor agents improve through experience, transfer useful behavior, and retain earlier capabilities over time.

Hui Zhang

Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT), China

Continual Learning for LLM Agents Long-Horizon Agent Evaluation Clinical Decision-Making AI Agent Benchmarks Automated Evaluation

Jun 25, 2026cs.CL

Supersede: Diagnosing and Training the Memory-Update Gap in LLM Agents

Large language model (LLM) agents operate over long, multi-session interactions in which facts change: a user moves, a price updates, a plan is revised. Acting correctly requires using the current value of a fact and discarding values that have been superseded. We isolate this ability on real conversational data and show that it is a distinct, unsolved failure. On the knowledge-update subset of LongMemEval, replacing an agent's full context with a bounded, self-maintained memory drops accuracy from 92% to 77% even on a frontier model (gpt-5.4), a gap that is statistically significant (paired McNemar p<0.005) and persists across model scale while full-context accuracy saturates near 92%. The bottleneck is therefore memory maintenance, not comprehension, and is not closed by a stronger model. We then ask whether this is merely an undersized memory, and find it is not: as the conversation grows 24x, accuracy falls further (from 68% to 28%), and granting the agent proportionally more memory yields no detectable recovery (28% to 28%, n=25). The failure scales with the length of the conversation, not the compression ratio. We release Supersede, an open reinforcement-learning environment (on the verifiers / prime-rl stack) that turns this measurement into a training signal: agents are rewarded for answering from the current value and penalized for stale ones. Finally, we close the loop and show the gap is trainable: GRPO fine-tuning a small open model (Qwen2.5-3B) on this environment nearly doubles its held-out supersession accuracy on real, unseen conversations (9.0% to 16.7%, a single run), along a monotonic checkpoint curve indicating the learned policy, not the harness, carries the gain. To our knowledge this is the first trainable environment whose reward targets temporal fact-currency, and the first evidence the supersession gap can be trained down, not only measured.

Vedant Patel

Vrin

Continual Learning for LLM Agents Knowledge Conflicts in Language Models LLM Agent Memory RL for LLM Agents

Jun 25, 2026cs.AI

Joint Learning of Experiential Rules and Policies for Large Language Model Agents

For LLM agents in multi-step interactive environments, a key challenge is to make effective use of accumulated interaction experience. Existing work has typically separated two uses of such experience: keeping it outside the model as natural-language rules for later prompting, or using trajectories and feedback to update the model parameters. The former is easy to interpret but can fall out of sync with the evolving policy; the latter improves the policy more broadly but provides only limited correction for local mistakes in sparse-reward settings. We present Joint Learning of Experiential Rules and Policies for LLM Agents (JERP), which updates a long-term experiential-rule pool and the policy from the same interaction trajectories. At decision time, JERP retrieves task-relevant rules and conditions the agent on them together with the interaction history. After each episode, it uses the collected trajectories both to optimize the policy and to revise the rule pool by comparing current rollouts with reference successful trajectories. This coupling keeps the rule pool aligned with the evolving policy while allowing stable and effective behaviors to be gradually absorbed into the model itself. Experiments on AlfWorld and WebShop show that JERP yields consistent gains in decision performance for complex interactive tasks.

Shicheng Ye, Chao Yu

Sun Yat-sen University

Continual Learning for LLM Agents LLM Agent Training Policy Learning RL for LLM Agents Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents

Jun 25, 2026cs.AI

Memory Depth, Not Memory Access: Selective Parametric Consolidation for Long-Running Language Agents

Long-running language agents need more than memory access. Retrieval systems can fetch past facts at query time, but they do not decide which experiences should continue to shape behavior after the working context is unloaded. We study this separate problem as memory depth: durable goal-conditioned tendencies written into a small parametric store. We introduce the loop-drift protocol, a controlled stress test in which the retrieval index remains intact while working context is unloaded and goal-conditioned behavior must persist under long-loop interference. We evaluate EVAF, a surprise- and valence-gated LoRA consolidation mechanism. Across GPT-2 and TinyLlama, retrieval is strongest on shallow factual recall (short-fact accuracy 0.956--0.973), while EVAF is strongest on goal persistence and post-unload recovery (0.812--0.904) with only 2--3 parametric writes per 200 events. Mechanism controls show that selective consolidation factorizes into two controllable dimensions: selection and actuation. Matched random gates isolate selection beyond sparse writing; fixed-inner controls across GPT-2, TinyLlama, and Mistral-7B show that inner-loop write strength is model-dependent; and a Mistral-7B matched-gate inversion reveals asymmetric selection-actuation coupling under miscalibrated actuation. Public Memora event streams serve as an external diagnostic, exposing stale-memory invalidation as an unresolved boundary. Within this probe, selective parametric consolidation supplies memory depth distinct from and complementary to retrieval access.

Haoliang Han

Institute of Biomedical Strategy, China Pharmaceutical University

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

Jun 23, 2026cs.LG

Forget to Improve: On-Device LLM-Agent Continual Learning via Budget-Curated Memory

On-device language-model agents improve by accumulating experience in retrieved memory rather than by updating weights. This memory is hard-bounded and exposed: it consumes RAM and energy, reaches peers through a thin uplink, and becomes an attack surface because it is writable by what the agent reads. Existing systems each cover one part of this problem: agentic memories grow without a budget, on-device methods keep entries by success alone, and poisoning is studied mainly as an attack rather than as a memory-governance problem. We propose \sys{}, a single net-value-per-byte score that governs an agent's experience-memory lifecycle. The main idea is to let the budget act as the curator: each entry is scored as value minus harm, per byte, so one ruler decides what to keep, share, and trust. \sys{} makes three decisions: (1) \textbf{KEEP} evicts low-value bytes under the RAM and energy budget; (2) \textbf{SHARE} sends an insight only when its value exceeds its uplink cost; and (3) \textbf{TRUST} gates a peer entry by provenance. On language-model-agent task-drift benchmarks and a real heterogeneous Jetson testbed with two robot-arm nodes and a hub, \sys{} reduces memory by

2.7\times

and uplink by

2.4\times

, drives injection success from 0.75 to zero, and raises accuracy on cases corrupted by poison or stale memory. Curating by net value reduces footprint, energy, uplink, and injection success together without reducing accuracy. In this setting, forgetting by net value improves the agent rather than weakening it.

Beining Wu, Zihao Ding, Jun Huang +1

Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, South Dakota State University, Brookings, SD 57007, USA · Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, USA

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

Jun 19, 2026cs.AI

Social World Model for Lifelong Social Intelligence

Social intelligence is a core competency for language agents, yet current research primarily focuses on static capability evaluation rather than how these skills are continuously shaped and accumulated. This gap calls for a shift toward sustainable learning paradigms. Currently, two methodological pain points exist: social interaction trajectories lack unified structured representations to form iterable learning signals, and capability improvement and retention are typically studied in isolation, hindering the assessment of continuous evolution. To bridge this gap, we propose the Social World Model. We decompose social interaction into five dimensions (scene setting, observation, mental state, action, and dialogue) to build a closed-loop learning framework. In this setup, agents collect interaction experiences, convert them into preference signals for model updating, and redeploy the updated policy for continued learning. Additionally, we provide a reusable data synthesis mechanism and a lifelong learning benchmark, transforming social capabilities from an "object of evaluation" into an "object of sustainable training". Validating our framework on the ASCENT-Bench, the interactively trained Qwen2.5-7B model outperforms its baseline across all five core metrics. Notably, it matches the closed-source Gemini 3 Flash in completion rate, exceeds it in pass rate, and achieves zero forgetting across three difficulty levels. Unlike prior works that merely report static comparisons or capability decay, this end-to-end approach provides a trainable, verifiable, and retainable pathway, demonstrating that small open-source models can sustainably acquire competitive social coordination capabilities.

Yu Luo

Central South University

Continual Learning for LLM Agents Lifelong Learning Agents

Jun 18, 2026cs.LG

Connect the Dots: Training LLMs for Long-Lifecycle Agents with Cross-Domain Generalization Via Reinforcement Learning

This work presents a general framework for training large language models (LLMs) to "Connect the Dots" (CoD), a meta-capability required by long-lifecycle agents: as an LLM-based AI agent gets deployed in an environment, it solves a long sequence of tasks while continuously exploring the environment, learning from its own experiences, and iteratively self-updating its context about the environment, thereby achieving progressively better performance on future tasks conditioned on the updated context. Major components of the CoD framework include: (1) algorithm design and infrastructure for end-to-end reinforcement learning (RL) with long rollout sequences interleaving solve-task and update-context episodes; (2) tasks and environments for incentivizing and eliciting the targeted meta-capability in LLMs during training, as well as for faithfully measuring progress during evaluation. We present proof-of-concept implementations of the CoD framework, including a GRPO-style RL algorithm with fine-grained credit assignment, as well as tasks and environments tailored to the targeted meta-capability (rather than domain-specific LLM capabilities or standard task-by-task RL). Empirical results with Qwen3-8B and Qwen3.6-27B validate the efficacy of end-to-end RL training in the CoD setting, and demonstrate the potential for out-of-distribution generalization -- within the training domains, across different domains, and from CoD to Ralph-loop settings -- of the elicited meta-capability. Our investigation of CoD connects several lines of prior work, and opens up new opportunities for advancing LLMs and AI agents. To facilitate further research and applications, we release our implementations at https://github.com/agentscope-ai/Trinity-RFT/tree/research/cod_v2/examples/research_cod.

Yanxi Chen, Weijie Shi, Boyi Hu +6

Alibaba Group · Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · The University of Hong Kong

Continual Learning for LLM Agents Cross-Domain Generalization LLM Agent Training Long-Horizon LLM Agents RL for LLM Agents

Jun 16, 2026cs.AI

Closing the Feedback Loop: From Experience Extraction to Insight Governance in Verbal Reinforcement Learning

Training-free verbal reinforcement learning enables LLM agents to learn from world feedback -- objective signals such as dynamic task outcomes, market returns, or demand forecasts -- by extracting verbal rules from experience and injecting them as context, updating the agent's behavior without parameter changes. However, in non-stationary environments these agents face a retention-forgetting dilemma: retaining stale insights causes negative transfer, while discarding them causes catastrophic forgetting when conditions recur. We identify four requirements for navigating this dilemma -- outcome-driven evaluation, persistent structured evidence, non-monotonic knowledge lifecycle, and compositional governance -- and show that existing methods invest heavily in experience extraction while underinvesting in insight governance. We propose a three-layer architecture -- rules, evidence, and skills -- connected by a feedback-driven curation loop that closes the governance gap. Rules capture distilled experience from world outcomes; evidence logs track each rule's reliability across episodes; skills govern which rules to apply, how to resolve conflicts, and when to abstain. On financial forecasting as a case study, where world feedback is naturally abundant, noisy, and non-stationary, we show that the same accumulated experience either degrades performance below the zero-shot baseline or dramatically improves accuracy and risk-adjusted returns, depending on whether the curation loop is present.

Yanwei Cui, Xing Zhang, Yulong Zhang +4

AWS Generative AI Innovation Center · Amazon Web Services (AWS) · BingX Group Limited.

Continual Learning for LLM Agents Non-Stationary RL Reinforcement Learning LLM Agent Memory RL for LLM Agents

Jun 15, 2026cs.CV

VisualClaw: A Real-Time, Personalized Agent for the Physical World

Vision language models are serving as general-purpose interfaces for complex multimodal tasks. However, deployment still faces three gaps: VLMs typically incur high latency and cost when processing dense video frames and long prompts, the agent scaffold remains static after deployment, and standard video-QA benchmarks do not test whether agents can use visual evidence inside tool-using workspaces. We present VisualClaw, a self-evolving multimodal agent built around two principles. First, hybrid encoding reduces deployment cost by filtering less informative streaming frames with a cascaded gate and compressing the text skill bank through hot/cold top-k injection. Second, skill evolution lets the agent learn from failures: retrieved memories condition an evolver as direct concatenated context or as guided evidence, producing skill-bank updates that help future questions. Across 4 video-QA benchmarks with 2 VLMs, VisualClaw cuts per-question API cost by an average -98% versus full-frame upload and by -25.9% over the offline uniform 8 frame baseline, while boosting accuracy in most settings, e.g., an average +3.85% and a peak +15.80% on EgoSchema with Gemini 3 Flash. To address the gap, we curate VisualClawArena, a 200-scenario multimodal agentic benchmark built through a strict five-stage pipeline; models must use video evidence, documents, dynamic updates, and executable checks inside a workspace. On VisualClawArena, the same framework with computer-use agent backends improves macro accuracy by +2.9% for Codex (GPT-5.5) and +3.2% for Claude Code (Sonnet 4.6) over no-evolution baselines, with a -9.5% cost reduction compared to the uniform-sampled baseline. These properties make VisualClaw a natural fit for edge applications, where the cascade reduces a 1-hour streaming session from ~3,600 API uploads down to only 5-20 calls and the self-evolution makes it a perfect personalized assistant.

Haoqin Tu, Jianwen Chen, Zijun Wang +14

1UC Santa Cruz · 2UNC-Chapel Hill · 3Google +1

Continual Learning for LLM Agents AI Agent Benchmarks Tool-Using Vision-Language Agents Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents VLM Inference

Jun 13, 2026cs.LG

LatentGym: A Testbed For Cross-Task Experiential Learning With Controllable Latent Structure

We envision continually learning agentic systems that become more useful over time: as they encounter sequences of related tasks, they should infer the hidden structure shared across those tasks and use it to improve future decisions. This cross-task experiential learning capability is pivotal in domains such as personalization and interactive assistance, but existing training/evaluation frameworks do not provide shared, controllable latent structures and cannot measure whether or why agents improve. We introduce LatentGym: a controllable suite in which each environment is organized around a ground-truth latent variable governing the structure across tasks. Our construction yields metrics that separate exploration (whether the agent's actions gather information about the latent) from exploitation (whether the agent uses what it has gathered). We demonstrate our suite on empirical studies addressing three questions: how and why frontier models fail to adapt across related tasks; whether post-training on related task sequences improves general cross-task adaptation, and where those gains come from; and how design choices such as inter-task feedback shape training dynamics and generalization. Together, these results establish a controlled foundation for studying how LLM agents learn from experience across tasks, and for designing agents that adapt more reliably in sequential, personalized, and interactive settings.

Daksh Mittal, Tommaso Castellani, Thomson Yen +7

1Columbia University · 2Oumi

Continual Learning for LLM Agents Lifelong Learning Agents Multi-Task Learning AI Agent Benchmarks LLM Agent Training

Jun 9, 2026cs.LG

EEVEE: Towards Test-time Prompt Learning in the Real World for Self-Improving Agents

In this paper, we propose EEVEE, the first multi-dataset test-time prompt learning framework for LLM agents, enabling test-time prompt learning under real-world task streams. Existing methods are largely designed for single-dataset settings, while real-world applications require models to handle heterogeneous input streams drawn from multiple datasets, domains, and task distributions, limiting their practical applicability. To mitigate cross-dataset interference, EEVEE introduces a router that partitions incoming inputs into task clusters and assigns them to suitable prompt configurations. This design is optimized via a router-prompt co-evolution strategy, which employs interleaved router and prompt learning phases to address their mutual dependency. Experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate that the framework improves robustness under heterogeneous data streams while maintaining single-benchmark learning capability and efficiency. Specifically, EEVEE improves average multi-benchmark scores by 10.38 and 24.32 points over Qwen3-4B-Instruct and DeepSeek-V3.2, surpassing SOTA methods GEPA and ACE by up to 37.2% and 48.2%.

Weixian Xu, Shilong Liu, Mengdi Wang

Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Princeton University

Continual Learning for LLM Agents LLM Agent Self-Improvement LLM Agent Training Test-Time Prompt Tuning

Jun 8, 2026cs.AI

Experience Makes Skillful: Enabling Generalizable Medical Agent Reasoning via Self-Evolving Skill Memory

Medical agent systems are increasingly expected to support interactive clinical decision making rather than only static question answering. In such settings, effective agents must reuse prior experience across evolving cases, yet existing memory mechanisms often retain raw historical traces that are redundant, noisy, and difficult to govern. More importantly, they rarely distinguish which memories are truly useful for future reasoning. This limits their ability to accumulate compact and reliable experience for long-horizon clinical reasoning. To close this gap, we propose SkeMex, a post-deployment self-evolution framework that improves medical agents through a skill-based memory without updating model weights. SkeMex distills informative interaction trajectories into structured skills that encode reusable procedural knowledge, and organizes them into a multi-branch repository spanning general, task-specific, and action-level experience. To determine which memories should be reused and retained, SkeMex estimates context-dependent utility from environment feedback and uses it to guide value-aware retrieval and repository governance. A closed-loop ``Read--Write--Assess--Govern" lifecycle further supports continual evolution by writing new skills, updating utilities, promoting useful memories, and removing harmful entries. Experiments across diverse clinical tasks show that SkeMex consistently outperforms representative memory-based agents in both offline and online settings. It also generalizes across model backbones and supports transferable skill memory. All data and code will be released publicly.

Haoran Sun, Wenjie Li, Yujie Zhang +8

1Fudan University · 2Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory · University of Science and Technology of China +1

Continual Learning for LLM Agents LLM Agent Memory LLM Agent Skill Learning LLM Agent Skill Retrieval Clinical Reasoning Self-Evolving Agents

Jun 7, 2026cs.LG

SkillHone: A Harness for Continual Agent Skill Evolution Through Persistent Decision History

Agent skills extend language-model agents with task-specific procedures, scripts, and references, but the tasks and environments they target continually change. Existing methods improve skills in bounded runs and retain only the final artifact, discarding the decision history that later agents need to interpret prior revisions, evaluations, and rejected alternatives. We introduce SkillHone, a harness for continual agent skill evolution grounded in persistent decision history. SkillHone pairs skill revisions with evaluation-side evidence that supplies practice feedback, recording structured histories of diagnoses, revisions, evidence, and outcomes. Role-separated subagents run candidate skills on practice probes with redacted reporting and propose revisions informed by prior decisions, enabling cross-session refinement without rediscovering past rationale. On deep-research benchmarks, SkillHone runs without a pre-integrated search stack and outperforms the commercially backed deep-research agent by 15.8 points on GAIA and 3.2 points on WebWalkerQA-EN, while also exceeding prior skill-evolution methods. We further deploy SkillHone on internal tool-mediated analysis scenarios, where it improves accuracy by an average of 18.8 points across seven settings.

Zhiwei Li, Yong Hu

WeChat AI, Tencent Inc., China · WeChat, Tencent Inc., China

Continual Learning for LLM Agents LLM Agent Skill Learning Memory-Augmented Agents Autonomous Research Agents

Jun 7, 2026cs.CL

From Player to Master: Enhancing Test-Time Learning of LLM Agents via Reinforcement Learning over Memory

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed in long-running settings where improving through experience at test time becomes important. A common approach is to update an explicit memory after each interaction to guide future decisions. However, most existing methods rely on hand-designed prompting rules, making it difficult to align memory updates with downstream objectives over multi-step horizons consistently. We propose MemoPilot, a plug-in memory copilot that explicitly trains the memory update process to improve a frozen LLM's performance across sequential interactions. We formulate memory updating as a multi-turn decision problem and optimize it end-to-end with multi-turn GRPO. Our training recipe introduces (i) a turn-wise reward signal and (ii) a context-independent, turn-level advantage estimation across rollouts, enabling finer-grained credit assignment and more stable training in multi-turn settings. We evaluate MemoPilot on two testbeds: multi-round Rock-Paper-Scissors (RPS) and Limit Texas Hold'em (LHE). Across both environments, MemoPilot substantially improves test-time learning of a frozen player over strong baselines, ranking first in Elo ratings on both games (1762 on LHE and 1590 on RPS) and outperforming all baseline memory methods and proprietary models, including DeepSeek-V3.2.

Yishuo Cai, Xingyu Guo, Xuancheng Huang +8

Peking University, Beijing, China · Central South University, Changsha, China · Zhipu AI, Beijing, China +3

Continual Learning for LLM Agents LLM Agent Memory Test-Time RL Test-Time Training RL for LLM Agents

Jun 5, 2026cs.CL

FinEvolveBench: A Benchmark for Self-Evolving Agents on Low-Repetition Tasks with Implicit Rewards

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external experience to continually adapt to changing environments without modifying their underlying models. Recent experience mechanisms have demonstrated promising results across diverse tasks. However, their effectiveness is typically evaluated within individual benchmark settings, and how experience mechanisms generalize across different scenarios remains insufficiently explored. In this work, we present a scenario-oriented analysis of experience mechanisms for LLM agents. We characterize existing evaluation scenarios along four dimensions: outcome observability, credit assignment complexity, environmental dynamics, and experience reusability. Our analysis shows that existing benchmarks often evaluate experience mechanisms under scenarios where at least one dimension is comparatively favorable, leaving more challenging combinations of scenario properties underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce \textsc{FinEvolveBench}, a reproducible benchmark built on a chronological stream of rich financial news and market data that enables systematic evaluation of experience-based self-evolution under challenging experience regimes characterized by noisy feedback, ambiguous credit assignment, environmental non-stationarity, and limited experience reusability. Experiments show that existing approaches exhibit substantially reduced or inconsistent gains in this setting, highlighting the scenario-dependent nature of experience mechanisms and the challenge of maintaining valid experience under changing environments.

Yining Zhu, Zihao Deng, Leiming Wang +5

Continual Learning for LLM Agents AI Agent Benchmarks Self-Evolving Agents

Jun 5, 2026cs.AI

AdMem: Advanced Memory for Task-solving Agents

Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise as tool-using agents but remain limited in long-horizon tasks that require remembering, organizing, and reusing knowledge. Prior memory approaches aim to resolve the situation, but mainly focus on storing factual information. Recent work on procedural memory improves task reuse, yet often reduces to replaying past successes without addressing failure cases or online scalability. We introduce a unified and automatic memory framework that integrates semantic, episodic, and procedural memory in a bi-level design combining short-term and long-term stores. A multi-agent architecture with actor, memory, and critic agents enables automatic memory generation, reward annotation, and adaptive retrieval. Long-term memory is managed through reward-based evaluation, merging, and pruning, ensuring scalability and continual improvement. Experiments across various environments show that our approach improves robustness and success on long multi-turn tasks compared to existing baselines. This work highlights the importance of comprehensive, adaptive memory for advancing LLM-based agents.

Runzhe Wang, Huilin Lu, Shengjie Liu +2

Princeton University · Amazon · Arm

Continual Learning for LLM Agents LLM Agent Memory Persistent Memory for Language Models Long-Horizon Agent Tasks Multi-Agent LLMs Agent Memory Management+1

Jun 4, 2026cs.AI

Continual Learning Bench: Evaluating Frontier AI Systems in Real-World Stateful Environments

Continual learning, the ability of AI systems to improve through sequential experience, has attracted substantial interest, but no high-quality benchmark exists to evaluate it. We introduce Continual Learning Bench (CL-Bench), the first difficult, expert-validated benchmark designed to measure whether LLM-based systems genuinely improve with experience. CL-Bench spans six diverse domains (software engineering, signal processing, disease outbreak forecasting, database querying, strategic game-playing, and demand forecasting), each validated by domain experts and designed so that tasks share a learnable latent structure (codebase layout, disease outbreak dynamics, opponent strategies) that a stateful system can discover online but a stateless one cannot. We evaluate frontier models across several agent architectures, from naive in-context learning (ICL) to dedicated memory systems, introducing a gain metric to isolate learning from prior capabilities. We find that these systems leave headroom for improved continual learning: agents frequently overfit to immediate observations or fail to reuse knowledge across instances, and dedicated memory systems do not fix this -- in fact, naive ICL outperforms systems dedicated to memory management. CL-Bench is the first benchmark to evaluate continual learning across diverse real-world domains with expert-validated tasks and isolate online learning from underlying model capability, showing a need for better continual learning systems.

Parth Asawa, Christopher M. Glaze, Gabriel Orlanski +7

UC Berkeley · Snorkel AI · University of Wisconsin-Madison +1

Continual Learning for LLM Agents Continual Learning for LLMs Continual Learning Online Continual Learning Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents

Jun 4, 2026cs.LG

CLaaS: Continual learning as a service for sample efficient online learning

Deployed large language model agents must adapt to distribution shift in dynamic environments. Ideally, adaptation can be performed from accumulated agent experiences and retain prior capabilities while transferring to future tasks. However, agent actions and environmental transitions can only be sampled once per scenario, as real-world environments cannot be trivially reset. To this end, we investigate an experiential and online continual learning setting in which agents learn from a stream of scenarios. We propose continual learning as-a-service (CLaaS), a system which enables agents to improve during deployment, abstracted behind a chat API. To increase sample efficiency, CLaaS stores rollouts in an experience replay buffer for gradient reuse during asynchronous training. We evaluate CLaaS on an adversarial task, demonstrating that parametric updates lead to superior forward transfer and less forgetting than in-context learning, with replay being a critical choice for sample efficiency.

Kion Fallah, Silen Naihin, Barak Widawsky +1

1Resolute Labs · 2South Park Commons · 3Incept Labs

Continual Learning for LLM Agents Continual Learning Replay-Based Continual Learning Online Continual Learning Data-Efficient Learning

Jun 3, 2026cs.CL

Rethinking Continual Experience Internalization for Self-Evolving LLM Agents

Experience internalization converts contextual experience from past interactions into reusable parametric capability, offering a promising path toward continual learning in large language models (LLMs). While prior work has predominantly focused on single-iteration transfer, we discover that under multi-iteration experience learning, existing methods suffer from a progressive capability collapse rather than compounding improvement. We systematically examine this failure through three vital dimensions of experience internalization: (1) Experience Granularity: We find that principle-level experience is more durable than instance-level experience, as it effectively abstracts transferable strategies away from trajectory-specific details. (2) Experience Injection Pattern: Our analysis reveals that step-wise injection significantly outperforms global injection by aligning experience with intermediate decision states, a property that is critical for long-horizon tool use. (3) Internalization Regime: We demonstrate that off-policy context-distillation on high-quality teacher trajectories provides a substantially more stable training signal than on-policy context-distillation, which is inherently limited by local corrections on student-induced flawed states. Together, these insights yield a simple yet robust recipe for stable and sustainable experience internalization, providing concrete guidance for engineering self-evolving and continually learning LLMs.

Jingwen Chen, Wenkai Yang, Shengda Fan +7

1Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China · School of Software, Beihang University · 3Meituan

Continual Learning for LLM Agents Continual Learning for LLMs Continual Learning Context Distillation

Jun 2, 2026cs.AI

RIZZ: Routing Interactions to Near Zero-Interference Zones for Continual Adaptation of Black-Box Agents

Large language models are increasingly deployed as long-lived agents that must adapt across users, tasks, domains, modalities, and feedback regimes without access to model weights. Existing black-box adaptation methods typically optimize a single prompt, maintain an undifferentiated memory, or rely on repeated rollout-heavy search. However, these designs struggle when streams of input are nonstationary, feedback is sparse, and failures from one task family can contaminate behavior on another. We introduce RIZZ (Routing Interactions to Near Zero-interference Zones), a continual adaptation framework for compound language-model systems that learns entirely through verifier-gated memory, routing, and prompt compilation. RIZZ organizes input streams into dynamically spawned memory branches. At inference time, either while online or offline, a context-aware router selects or creates a branch that retrieves branch-local, global, graph-structured, and working-memory context, which is compiled into a bounded prompt together with retrieved task evidence. After the model acts, task verifiers score the output, and only verified interactions can update memory, promote reusable rules, demote harmful rules, or create anti-patterns. This yields a black-box agent that improves through persistent natural-language feedback while explicitly controlling interference. RIZZ targets the regime where adaptation must occur online under context budgets. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework against state-of-the-art baselines on competitive benchmarks.

Sonali Goel, Pranav Vaidhyanathan, Lucas Schorling +2

Department of Engineering Science University of Oxford

Continual Learning for LLM Agents LLM Routing Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents

Jun 2, 2026cs.AI

DELTAMEM: Incremental Experience Memory for LLM Agents via Residual Trees

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents increasingly rely on memory to learn from experiences over continual interactions. However, storing experiences as independent, flat units leads to substantial redundancy and retrieval conflicts, as similar episodes repeat overlapping content and subtle scene variations cause retrieved memories to offer contradictory guidance. To address this, we introduce residual experience, positing that newly acquired experience is often an incremental variation of existing knowledge. We propose DeltaMem, a framework that organizes experience memory into two independent residual trees, one storing goal-conditioned task experience as reusable skills and another for scene-level environment knowledge. Each tree uses a root node for generalized base experiences and incremental delta nodes for subsequent variations, allowing related experiences to share a common foundation without duplication. For retrieval, a failure-penalized similarity scan locates the best match, reconstructing the full experience via root-to-match chain composition. An autonomous consolidation mechanism distills high-frequency paths into new root nodes, enabling the trees to self-organize from general heuristics to specialized variants. Experiments across diverse interactive environments show that DeltaMem consistently outperforms existing baselines. To facilitate future research, we release the code at https://github.com/import-myself/DeltaMem.

Haoran Tan, Zeyu Zhang, Zhicheng Cao +2

Gaoling School of Artificial, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China · Beijing Key Laboratory of Research on Large Models and Intelligent Governance · Engineering Research Center of Next-Generation Intelligent Search and Recommendation, MOE +1

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

Jun 1, 2026cs.AI

AgentCL: Toward Rigorous Evaluation of Continual Learning in Language Agents

Language agents spend substantial inference time solving individual tasks, yet the experience acquired in one episode is often underutilized in future episodes. Continual learning expects an agent to accumulate reusable experience across a stream of tasks, improve over time, and avoid interference from irrelevant experiences. Unfortunately, existing benchmarks struggle to evaluate continual learning in language agents rigorously. Most efforts focus on retrieval and reasoning over long-context conversations or documents, while recent lifelong-adaptation benchmarks often rely on naive task streams with limited analysis of cross-task relationships, making it difficult to understand what an agent learns and reuses over time. This paper presents an evaluation framework AgentCL for continual learning in agents, centered on controlled task streams and metrics for transfer gains. AgentCL constructs compositional streams where earlier sub-solutions, evidence, or workflows are intentionally reusable in later tasks, and contrasts them with naive streams where such reusability is not guaranteed. We use the benchmark to evaluate non-parametric memory designs for continual learning. To diagnose how memory design choices affect continual learning, we develop MemProbe, a probing method that stores interactions, insights, and skills, while filtering unreliable experiences during consolidation. Empirical analysis across coding, deep research, and language understanding/reasoning tasks shows that naive streams offer limited ability to distinguish memory designs, whereas controlled streams more clearly distinguish their plasticity. Meanwhile, naive and held-out settings often yield limited gains and can expose memory-induced degradation. These results highlight the need for stronger memory designs that balance plasticity and stable reuse.

Yiheng Shu, Bernal Jiménez Gutiérrez, Saisri Padmaja Jonnalagedda +3

The Ohio State University · Johns Hopkins University · Intuit AI Research

Continual Learning for LLM Agents AI Agent Evaluation Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents

Jun 1, 2026cs.CL

Unified Context Evolution for LLM Agents

LLM-based agents can solve multi-step interactive tasks by combining reasoning with environment feedback, yet each episode starts from the same fixed context and any useful strategy discovered along the way is lost once the task ends. Existing approaches either limit learning to the current task or pool all experience into a single untyped store, without distinguishing knowledge types, tracking quality through use, or balancing what the library still lacks. We introduce Unified Context Evolution (UCE), a gradient-free framework that externalizes agent experience into an evolving library of typed Evolvable Context Units (ECUs). UCE decomposes experience into four complementary types (Memory, Strategy, Workflow, and Skill), each generated from trajectories under type-specific conditions, retrieved at decision time, scored through repeated usage outcomes, and pruned when no longer valuable. A scheduling module allocates each cycle's generation budget toward the types where the library is weakest. Across two interactive benchmarks, UCE raises ALFWorld success from 75.4% to 96.3% and WebShop task score from 45.1% to 61.3%, and the accumulated library transfers to alternative actor backbones without retraining.

Zixuan Zhu, Yitong Hu, Yong Dai +4

Nanyang Technological University · Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications · Fudan University +4

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

Jun 1, 2026cs.CL

MMG2Skill: Can Agents Distill In-the-Wild Guides into Self-Evolving Skills?

Abundant procedural knowledge on the Web holds great potential for helping agents solve long-horizon tasks. However, such knowledge is often multimodal, heterogeneous, noisy, and implicitly assumes human executors, making it difficult to use directly as the skills required by agents. To bridge the gap between human-oriented guides and agent-executable skills, we formalize this problem as guide-to-skill learning: converting in-the-wild guides into executable skills and continuously improving them from trajectories observable to the agent. To evaluate the capability of existing agents on this task, we introduce MMG2Skill-Bench, the first benchmark designed for this problem. We further propose MMG2Skill, a closed-loop framework that compiles guides into editable skills, conditions a fixed vision-language model (VLM) agent on these skills during execution, and revises the skills from trajectory-level root-cause feedback without using benchmark scores. Across GUI control, open-ended gameplay, and strategic card play with six VLM backbones, MMG2Skill consistently outperforms vanilla baseline agents in every model-domain setting, achieving macro-average gains of +12.8 to +25.3 percentage points across backbones. Ablation studies show that directly prompting agents with raw guides can degrade performance, while both structured skill construction and trajectory-driven revision are necessary for the observed improvements. On success-inferable tasks, analyzer-based early stopping further prevents late-stage performance regressions and saves 25%-53% of attempts when the success signal is properly calibrated.

Xinyu Che, Junqi Xiong, Yunfei Ge +10

Nanjing University · Kuaishou Technology

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

Jun 1, 2026cs.LG

Adaptive Auto-Harness: Sustained Self-Improvement for Agentic System Deployment on Open-Ended Task Streams

Auto-harness systems such as A-Evolve, GEPA, and Meta-Harness improve LLM agents by optimizing prompts, skills, tools, memories, and supporting infrastructure from execution feedback, but they are typically evaluated on fixed offline benchmarks. Real deployments instead present open-ended task streams: histories grow without a fixed endpoint, heterogeneous tasks require different harnesses, and problem distributions shift over time. These challenges make a single repeatedly and densely updated harness brittle, causing performance degradation as accuracy peaks early and then declines. This motivates sustained harness construction with task-wise adaptation. We introduce Adaptive Auto-Harness, a framework and system for such streams. The framework decomposes the gap to an oracle harness into evolution loss and adaptation loss. The system addresses these losses with a stateful multi-agent evolver, a harness tree with solve-time routing, and human-steering hooks for cases where history lacks the needed signal. Across prediction-market, security-competition, and event-forecasting streams, Adaptive Auto-Harness outperforms five existing auto-harness baselines and ablations attribute gains to better construction, routing, or targeted human steering. Code is available in Link.

Zewen Liu, Zhan Shi, Yisi Sang +7

Emory University · Amazon · The Pennsylvania State University +2

Continual Learning for LLM Agents Agent Harness Optimization LLM Agent Self-Improvement LLM Agent Harnesses Self-Evolving Agents

May 29, 2026cs.CV

Task-Focused Memorization for Multimodal Agents

Long-term memory is essential for multimodal agents to build coherent experience, accumulate world knowledge, and achieve continual learning. However, constructing effective memory goes beyond memory module design and basic requirements such as accuracy and fidelity; the key challenge lies in determining what to memorize. Multimodal agents, such as embodied agents, continuously perceive, reason, and act in real or virtual environments, receiving an unbounded stream of multimodal observations. From this combinatorial explosion of information, an agent must selectively retain content that is relevant to its role in the environment and valuable for future tasks. To bridge this gap, we frame memory generation as a learnable memorization policy and introduce TaskMem (Task-focused Memorization Policy Learning), a reinforcement-learning-based framework that enables the policy to dynamically adjust its focus to the demands of real tasks encountered in the environment. TaskMem adopts a two-phase training paradigm: Phase One learns how to memorize by optimizing memory quality under fundamental fidelity requirements; Phase Two occurs after deployment, where the agent learns what to memorize by tuning an adapter on its base MLLM, using recent environment tasks to define a reward model that guides the memorization policy toward task-relevant content. To evaluate our approach, we reformulate VideoMME, EgoLife, and EgoTempo into streaming benchmarks that simulate a realistic setting in which an agent processes streaming observations and handles tasks arriving online. To isolate memory assessment, the questions must be answered using only the agent's memory, without access to raw video. Built on Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B, TaskMem improves VQA accuracy by 6.3%, 7.0%, and 5.3% on these benchmarks, respectively.

Tao Zou, Yichen He, Tian Qiu +2

ByteDance Seed · Fudan University

Continual Learning for LLM Agents Multimodal Memory Multimodal Agents RL for LLM Agents

May 29, 2026cs.LG

MetaEvo: A Meta-Optimization Framework for Experience-Driven Agent Evolution

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong reasoning capabilities, yet most LLM-based agents are statically deployed and unable to improve through task interactions. Existing experience-driven methods often rely on memory or heuristics without enhancing the model's ability to learn, treating it as a passive executor and leading to early performance plateaus and limited long-term improvement. To address this issue, we propose MetaEvo, a two-stage framework for continual agent evolution that focuses on improving how the model learns from tasks experience, rather than solely on what it stores. MetaEvo first applies preference-based optimization to enhance the model's ability of principle abstraction, then enables the accumulation and reuse of these principles within a modular agent architecture. Experimental results on diverse reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that MetaEvo consistently outperforms strong baselines, maintains reliable improvement across iterations. These findings validate the effectiveness of meta-optimization in enabling agents to learn from experience and continually enhance their reasoning capabilities.

Bowen Ren, Heyan Huang, Yinghao Li +1

School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China · Beijing Institute of Technology Southeast Academy of Information Technology, Putian, China

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

May 29, 2026cs.CL

ExpGraph: Model-Agnostic Experience Learning with Graph-Structured Memory for LLM Agents

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

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