Experience Learning for LLM Agents

LLM: Large Language Model

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28 papers9 papers in the last four weeks, against 1 the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

Oct 25, 2026

Continual Learning Exam: Benchmarking Long-Horizon RSI and Experiential Learning in LLM Agents

Continual learning is the ability of LLM agents to improve over time by acquiring, refining, and applying knowledge from experience while retaining useful prior knowledge. It is essential for agents learning over long time horizons, yet current evaluations largely assess individual task performance rather than improvement through accumulated experience. We introduce Continual Learning Exam (CLE), a large-scale benchmark developed by 50+ domain experts to measure experience-driven improvement in realistic professional workflows. CLE comprises 120 human-authored tasks, each organised as a five-level ladder, yielding 600 levels spanning 89 professional roles across 12 occupational domains. Agents must pass each level to unlock the next, with later levels building on experience accumulated during earlier assignments. An evaluation agent assesses each submission against human-authored rubrics. We compare a single-submission setting with one that provides diagnostic feedback after failure and allows one revision. Across 17 harness-model configurations using frontier LLMs, feedback and revision yield a median completion gain of 5.3 percentage points. Yet the best-performing system clears only 47.7% of levels and completes all five levels in just 23.3% of tasks, highlighting the difficulty of sustained learning from experience for existing frontier LLMs. As such, the dataset can also be used to post-train LLMs to strengthen their continual learning capabilities.

Haoyu Zhao, Sitian Tu, Yuxuan Huang +16

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

Oct 24, 2026

ReGE: Stronger Agents through Experience Synthesis

Repeated attempts at interactive tasks uncover facts, useful operations, and failures that can inform subsequent execution. We introduce ReGE, a framework for turning this recorded experience into guidance for a fresh attempt. Its main implementation, ReGE-Syn, uses a single coach call to jointly synthesize bounded execution records and available artifacts into self-contained guidance, connecting task-specific findings with proposed actions and relevant pitfalls. A student starts from the task's initial environment state and adapts this guidance to current observations. Source generation, synthesis, and student execution use the same base model, without parameter updates or a stronger teacher. Across four benchmarks, ReGE improves accuracy by an average of 9.9 percentage points for GPT and 8.8 percentage points for Claude compared with unguided execution. On matched BrowseComp-Plus subsets, ReGE-Syn reduces guidance-construction tokens by 98.2% on GPT and 95.5% on Claude relative to adapted AggAgent, with observed success. Combined construction and execution tokens decrease by 15.7% and 35.4%, respectively, counting input plus output and excluding source generation. BrowseComp-Plus ablations further associate access to process information with fewer student steps and show that joint synthesis produces substantially shorter guidance than Direct history or Independent summaries, with observed success. These results demonstrate how agents can use their own recorded experience to improve subsequent task completion, and suggest a low-cost way to consolidate the execution records of parallel agent systems such as agent swarms.

Jiarong Liang, Yubo Wang, Zijie Liu +3

University of Waterloo · University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill · University of British Columbia

Experience Learning for LLM Agents LLM Agent Self-Improvement LLM Agent Trajectory Synthesis LLM Agent Efficiency

Oct 19, 2026

REM: What to Store, When to Recall, What to Forget in Experience Memory for Coding Agents

Large language model (LLM) agents now autonomously complete long-horizon tasks, such as repository-level coding, through hundreds of think-act steps, yet the experience each run produces is rarely reused on the next. Prior memory systems concentrate on retrieval, finding the most relevant past trajectory. Retrieval cannot observe the running agent, so it cannot decide whether the agent needs an experience, at which point, or for how long. We introduce REM (Reusable Experience Memory), a framework that manages the memory lifecycle from inside the agent's think-act loop through three explicit decisions. What to store: each completed trajectory is consolidated into a phase-structured document, two orders of magnitude smaller than the trajectory. When to recall: the document is injected at the start of the task; the costlier implementation record is withheld until an in-loop gate detects the agent struggling. What to forget: the record is evicted after a single exposure. On repository-level bug fixing (SWE-ContextBench Lite), REM retrieves the related trajectory more accurately than every state-of-the-art memory system (68.7% vs. 55.6% match@1) and improves, in every replicate, end-task resolution (27.6% vs. 24.9%) at 17% lower cost. Injecting the same experience as a summary or raw trajectory, even when oracle-retrieved, does not. Ablating any of the three decisions reduces resolution. Altogether, these results demonstrate that the bottleneck in experience reuse is not retrieval fidelity but how experience is stored and governed across its lifecycle, opening a control-theoretic perspective on agent memory.

Xinyi Lisa Chen, Pedro Herrero-Vidal, Xiaohan Chen +6

Yale University · Amazon

Memory Management for LLM Agents Agent Memory Experience Learning for LLM Agents Software Engineering

Oct 15, 2026

MetaExp: Learning to Self-Improve through Experience via Verifiable Cross-Task Environment Scaling

Language-model agents can accumulate interaction feedback, but reliably turning that feedback into reusable experience remains challenging. Existing methods either optimize external experience scaffolds or train experience-related behavior on specific task distributions, leaving open whether experience learning itself can become a transferable model capability. Training such a capability calls for supervision beyond isolated tasks, which mainly support in-episode problem solving rather than revealing what knowledge remains useful across episodes. In this work, we introduce MetaExp, a scalable framework that trains this capability through verifiable task families with controlled cross-task structure. Each family preserves a reusable factor while varying task-specific realizations, enabling transfer without direct solution reuse. We propose two complementary designs: Shared-Tool families keep black-box tools fixed across tasks to elicit operational experience, while Shared-Workflow families preserve latent procedures across changing realizations to elicit procedural experience. We scale environments under both designs, collect and filter sequential interaction trajectories, and fine-tune Qwen3.5-122B-A10B on 4,956 trajectories from 1,000 task families. With parameters frozen during downstream evolution, MetaExp improves by +8.5 points on SpreadsheetBench, peaks at +2.3 on APEX-Agents, and improves by +14.8 on AutomationBench. The gains persist under domain-excluded training, supporting experience learning as a transferable capability for continued non-parametric improvement after deployment.

Renhao Li, Xinjie Shen, Yang Su +4

University of Macau · Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences · Georgia Institute of Technology +1

Experience Learning for LLM Agents LLM Agent Self-Improvement LLM Agents LLM Agent Training LLM Agent Skill Learning

Oct 14, 2026

XferAgent: Cross-Agent Experience Transfer for Self-Improving LLM Agents

Large language model (LLM) agents can reuse experience from prior task executions to improve performance on subsequent tasks. Although existing methods enable cross-agent experience sharing, differences in agents' execution histories and task requirements make shared experiences difficult to reuse effectively. We propose XferAgent, a framework for cross-agent experience transfer that organizes reusable experience in local and shared experience graphs. XferAgent reconciles compatible contributions from heterogeneous agents while avoiding unreliable merges. For each new task, it selects shared experiences and integrates them with the target agent's local experience to support task execution. Experiments across diverse task domains show improvements over representative memory-based methods and effective experience transfer between heterogeneous agent frameworks. Cumulative task success also increases over successive task passes as agents update and reuse their experiences.

Weihao Li, Jun Bai, Shijie Chen +3

McCormick School of Engineering, Northwestern University · School of Computer Science, McGill University · Mila – Quebec AI Institute +1

LLM Agent Self-Improvement Experience Learning for LLM Agents Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents Graph-Based Agent Memory Transfer Learning Continual Learning for LLM Agents

Oct 10, 2026

Beyond Outcome Feedback: Trajectory-Quality-Guided Experience-based Learning

Experience-based learning enables large language model (LLM) agents to improve over time by reusing knowledge from past executions. However, existing methods typically rely on final task outcomes as feedback for experience learning, overlooking the execution process and limiting their ability to evaluate and optimize experience based on trajectory quality. To address this limitation, we propose TQG-Exp, a trajectory-quality-guided experience-based learning framework that introduces process feedback. Specifically, we introduce Trajectory Quality Loss (TQL), which jointly considers task completion and process quality to provide a learning signal beyond final task outcomes. Based on this signal, we employ paired rollouts with and without retrieved experience to guide experience optimization. Representative trajectories are selected based on their outcomes and trajectory quality to extract task-level and task-type-level experiences. Meanwhile, differences in trajectory quality between the paired groups are used to estimate the contribution of retrieved experience and update its utility. The learned utility is then combined with semantic relevance to guide subsequent experience retrieval. Experiments on ALFWorld, WebShop, and ScienceWorld with two backbone LLMs show that TQG-Exp outperforms existing experience-based methods, improving Avg.@3 over the strongest baseline by 4.50 and 8.55 percentage points on DeepSeek-V4-Flash and Qwen3.5-Flash, respectively.

Bingjie Zhang, Yibo Yang, Qiantong Liu +3

School of Artificial Intelligence, Jilin University · School of Artificial Intelligence, Shanghai Jiao Tong University · King Abdullah University of Science and Technology

Experience Learning for LLM Agents LLM Agent Training Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents

Oct 6, 2026

Learn2Play Bench: How Well Do LLM Agents Learn from Experience in Unfamiliar Environments?

Learning from experience is essential for LLM agents to adapt to unfamiliar and dynmaic environments. Evaluating this ability is therefore important for understanding how effectively agents acquire and use new knowledge. Existing benchmarks have sought to evaluate this ability, but they primarily evaluate tasks whose rules are provided in the instructions or already familiar to pretrained models, making it difficult to distinguish learning from interactions from reasoning with existing knowledge. To address this, we introduce Learn2Play Bench, a benchmark of newly designed text-based games, whose rules are novel or counterintuitive, requiring agents to acquire knowledge through interaction rather than rely solely on pretrained knowledge. These games provide reproducible feedback and automatic scoring, enabling controlled evaluation of learning across repeated attempts. We also vary game instances to test whether agents can apply what they have learned to new situations. Therefore, we evaluate how backbone models, self-evolving methods, and agent harnesses affect agents' learning ability, revealing three findings: (1) Experience retention: Retaining complete records of actions and feedback can support more effective learning than summarizing these experiences into rules or strategies. (2) Human agent gap: Top-performing human players achieve higher peak scores than the evaluated agents. Human explore more varied strategies, and repeat actions less. (3) Harness matters: With the backbone fixed, changing the harness can improve performance while reducing estimated inference cost. Together, these findings provide insights into how LLM agents learn from experience and suggest directions for future work to improve their learning ability. Project website: https://liushiliushi.github.io/learn2play-bench-website/

Yibo Li, Jinhang Qiu, Zhi Zheng +4

National University of Singapore

Experience Learning for LLM Agents LLM Agent Evaluation AI Agent Benchmarks Continual Learning for LLM Agents Game-Playing Agents LLM Agent Harnesses

Oct 4, 2026

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 Experience Learning for LLM Agents

Sep 28, 2026

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 Experience Learning for LLM Agents

Sep 14, 2026

Learning to Coach for Experiential Learning

Language models can learn from experience, but raw solution trajectories are often too long and noisy to provide effective guidance. In this work, we propose Learning to Coach (L2C), a framework that trains a dedicated LLM-as-a-Coach to extract actionable experiential knowledge from an actor model's previous trajectory. The actor remains frozen, while the LLM-as-a-Coach is trained to maximize a reward given by the correctness of the actor's guided response. We study two such rewards: a same-instance reward, which improves subsequent responses on the original problem, and a cross-instance reward, which elicits knowledge that transfers to other instances. Across mathematical reasoning and interactive text-games, L2C consistently outperforms self-refinement and an untrained LLM-as-a-Coach. Running experiential learning for more iterations further improves accuracy and uses additional inference compute more effectively than enlarging the actor's decoding budget. The trained LLM-as-a-Coach also transfers to out-of-distribution tasks and adapts its guidance to the specific actor it coaches.

Guanheng Chen, Tianzhu Ye, Li Dong +3

Microsoft Research

RL for Language Models RL for Language Model Reasoning Experience Learning for LLM Agents

Aug 20, 2026

Break It Down, Pass It On: Cross-Task Skill Transfer in LLM Agents

Large language model (LLM) agents can induce skills from completed tasks and reuse them later to grow more capable with experience. In practice, induced skills may transfer unreliably and can even harm the agent that retrieves them. When agent-induced skills transfer reliably across tasks remains an open question. We conduct a comprehensive and controlled study of how the way skills are induced shapes their transfer across tasks. Specifically, we compare task-level with subtask-level skill induction and text with code skill formats, the two axes along which existing methods differ. Task-level skills mostly reduce the agent's performance below its no-memory baseline while subtask-level skills raise it above on average, and text skills transfer better than code skills. To further understand our findings, we examine two complementary properties of the induced skills: specificity, which measures how closely a skill matches real tasks, and abstractness, which measures how evenly its relevance spreads across tasks. Neither property alone predicts task success, but their combined effect does, which we propose as a skill utility score. The score correlates consistently with task success when skills are transferred, and subtask-level and text skills score higher. Computing skill utility only needs the skills and task descriptions, so our score serves as a lightweight diagnostic of a skill memory for practitioners.

Yiyang Feng, Biddut Sarker Bijoy, Niranjan Balasubramanian +1

Computer Science Department, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, USA

LLM Agent Skill Learning Experience Learning for LLM Agents LLM Agent Skill Evaluation Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents Transfer Learning Negative Transfer

Aug 4, 2026

Towards Improving Sequential Decision-Making in LLM Agents via Experience Memory

Large language models have improved substantially on single-shot reasoning tasks, but their performance in sequential decision-making is less well understood. We study this on fully-observable two-player zero-sum games, which provide ground-truth evaluation: outcomes are determined by the rules, and optimality of individual moves can be computed or approximated, without relying on a judge model. Across model tiers, LLMs play suboptimally in simple games such as tic-tac-toe or Connect Four, and lose to MCTS opponents. Obfuscations that preserve the game tree but rewrite its surface form leave performance largely unchanged, indicating the gap is not fully explained by recall of memorized strategies. Motivated by this performance gap, we introduce an agentic framework enhanced with an experience memory designed for the sequential setting and addressing common challenges of sequential decision-making such as credit assignment. We show that post-game reflection and rule extraction yield measurable improvements on tic-tac-toe without modifying the model weights.

Jakub Rada, Viliam Lisý

AI Center, Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague · AI Center, Department of Computer Science, FEE, Czech Technical University in Prague

Game-Playing Agents LLM Agents Experience Learning for LLM Agents Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents

Jul 23, 2026

Sample-Efficient Learning from Agent Experience

Real-world agent learning is often constrained by costly environment interactions, such as running time-consuming experiments or obtaining human feedback. In-context learning offers a highly sample-efficient way for agents to learn from their own interaction histories, but its gains disappear once that experience is removed from the context. Separately, context distillation provides a mechanism for internalizing contextual information into model weights. However, applying it to agents' interaction histories without sacrificing environment sample efficiency remains underexplored. We term this problem Experience Distillation and develop an implementation that requires no further environment interaction beyond the collected experience. Experiments on 749 curated software-engineering tasks and six text-adventure games show that it retains at least 64.8% of the gains from in-context learning across both domains, whereas direct supervised fine-tuning on the collected experience recovers only 3.8%. Compared with classical reinforcement-learning baselines, in-context learning from trial-and-error experience followed by Experience Distillation matches their performance with at least

9.6\times

fewer environment samples.

Chenhui Gou, Haoqin Tu, Yunhao Fang +2

Monash University · ByteDance Seed

In-Context RL Language Model Distillation Context Distillation Sample-Efficient RL RL for LLM Agents Experience Learning for LLM Agents

Jun 28, 2026

Hierarchical Experimentalist Agents

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to act in the real world and augment human decision-making, yet most systems rely on parametric knowledge acquired through imitation, optionally improved by post-training, retrieval, or search over fixed data. This paradigm struggles in novel domains or on complex queries that require information unavailable from prior knowledge alone; knowing the laws of physics, for example, does not by itself enable reliable reasoning or long-horizon actions in a complex physical system. We argue that agents need active experimentation: the ability to gather targeted query-specific evidence, discover general principles of unseen environments, and convert interaction experience into reusable skills. We introduce Hierarchical Experimentalist Agents (HExA), an in-context, experiment-centric self-improvement framework that (1) iteratively designs and refines query-relevant experiments, (2) incrementally distills experience into reusable and composable skills that accelerate experimentation within and across tasks, and (3) integrates experimental evidence to act or answer queries. HExA can work with any LLM including frontier black-box models, and requires no external supervision, oracle solutions, or offline data. We evaluate HExA on multi-step reasoning, interactive partially observable games, and physics law discovery tasks. To further evaluate when active experimentation is necessary, we introduce Interphyre, a set of hard procedural physics tasks where we enable tool-calling and intervention APIs. Current frontier LLMs including GPT-6 Astra fail in these settings: on the most challenging Interphyre tasks, we show that HExA can enable such models to near 100% success. Moreover, HExA improves token efficiency compared to naive agentic and memory baselines and enables generalization via hierarchical skill transfer from easier to harder tasks.

Abhranil Chandra, Utsav Dhanuka, Varun Gandhi +2

University of Massachusetts Amherst

LLM Agent Skill Learning AI Agent Benchmarks Self-Improving Agents Long-Horizon LLM Agents Experience Learning for LLM Agents

Jun 23, 2026

Escaping the Self-Confirmation Trap: An Execute-Distill-Verify Paradigm for Agentic Experience Learning

Experience-driven self-evolution is critical for large language model (LLM) agents to improve through open-world interaction. However, existing experience learning methods mostly rely on single-agent loops, where the same agent executes tasks, summarizes outcomes, and determines memory content. This setup makes agents vulnerable to the Self-Confirmation Trap: wrong-but-self-consistent trajectories are misidentified as successful experience, leading to cumulative errors during retrieval and reuse. To address this issue, we propose EDV, an Execute-Distill-Verify framework for reliable experience learning. In the Execute stage, multiple heterogeneous agents explore the same task space in parallel to generate diverse candidate trajectories. In the Distill stage, a dedicated third-party agent comparatively analyzes these trajectories to produce candidate experiences, reducing executor-centric summarization bias. In the Verify stage, the execution group validates candidates via a consensus mechanism, and only approved experiences are written into shared or private memory. By decoupling the three stages, EDV transforms experience learning from isolated self-reflection into collaborative construction, filtering erroneous and noisy content before memory insertion. We evaluate EDV on three challenging long-horizon benchmarks: tau2-bench, Mind2Web and MMTB. Results show EDV consistently outperforms strong baselines, validating that reliable experience construction is essential for robust agent self-evolution. Our code is available at https://github.com/shidingz/EDV.

Shiding Zhu, Yudi Qi, Yajie Wang +6

Zhejiang University · Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University · Independent Researcher +3

LLM Agents Experience Learning for LLM Agents Self-Evolving Agents Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents

Jun 13, 2026

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 Experience Learning for LLM Agents

Jun 2, 2026

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 Experience Learning for LLM Agents

May 31, 2026

ExpWeaver: LLM Agents Learn from Experience via Latent RAG

Experience learning has achieved promising results in enhancing LLM agent planning and reasoning by integrating past interactions as reusable knowledge. However, existing methods remain confined to explicit text space, retrieving experiences via semantic similarity and concatenating them into the context window, leading to substantial token overhead and a decoupled architecture that separates retrieval from generation. To address these limitations, we propose ExpWeaver, a framework that enables LLM agents to learn from experience via latent retrieval-augmented generation, without requiring a separate RAG module. ExpWeaver encodes experiences using the LLM's own hidden states, retrieves relevant experiences directly in latent space at each decoding step, and integrates them through cross-attention aggregation and gated residual mechanisms. The entire pipeline is optimized end-to-end with reinforcement learning, supporting both generative and ranking tasks. We evaluate ExpWeaver on 13 diverse tasks spanning question answering, reasoning, coding, scientific prediction, and recommendation. Results demonstrate that ExpWeaver achieves state-of-the-art performance on 12 out of 13 tasks, outperforming the strongest baseline by over 6.8%; maintains token efficiency comparable to non-retrieval baselines while text-based retrieval methods require 1.5 to 2 times more tokens; and exhibits superior cross-domain generalization, outperforming the strongest baseline by 16.32% under zero-shot transfer and 15.21% under few-shot transfer. Our code for ExpWeaver is released at https://github.com/ulab-uiuc/ExpWeaver.

Tao Feng, Tianyang Luo, Jingjun Xu +5

Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA · Meta Monetization AI, USA

Retrieval-Augmented Generation Agentic RAG LLM Agents Experience Learning for LLM Agents Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents

May 29, 2026

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 Experience Learning for LLM Agents

Apr 17, 2026

Experience Compression Spectrum: Unifying Memory, Skills, and Rules in LLM Agents

As LLM agents scale to long-horizon, multi-session deployments, efficiently managing accumulated experience becomes a critical bottleneck. Agent memory systems and agent skill discovery both address this challenge, extracting reusable knowledge from interaction traces, yet a citation analysis of 1{,}136 references across 22 primary papers reveals a cross-community citation rate below 1%. We propose the Experience Compression Spectrum, a unifying framework that positions memory, skills, and rules as points along a single axis of increasing compression (5--20

\times

for episodic memory, 50--500

\times

for procedural skills, 1{,}000

\times

+ for declarative rules), directly reducing context consumption, retrieval latency, and compute overhead. Mapping 20+ systems onto this spectrum reveals that every system operates at a fixed, predetermined compression level: none supports adaptive cross-level compression, a gap we term the missing diagonal. We further show that specialization alone is insufficient (both communities independently solve shared sub-problems without exchanging solutions), that evaluation methods are tightly coupled to compression levels, that transferability increases with compression at the cost of specificity, and that knowledge lifecycle management remains largely neglected. We articulate open problems and design principles for scalable, full-spectrum agent learning systems.

Xing Zhang, Guanghui Wang, Yanwei Cui +4

AWS Generative AI Innovation Center · HSBC Holdings Plc., HSBC Technology Center, China.

LLM Agent Memory LLM Agent Skill Learning Long-Horizon LLM Agents Agent Memory Management Experience Learning for LLM Agents

Apr 6, 2026

SkillX: Automatically Constructing Skill Knowledge Bases for Agents

Learning from experience is critical for building capable large language model (LLM) agents, yet prevailing self-evolving paradigms remain inefficient: agents learn in isolation, repeatedly rediscover similar behaviors from limited experience, resulting in redundant exploration and poor generalization. To address this problem, we propose SkillX, a fully automated framework for constructing a plug-and-play skill knowledge base that can be reused across agents and environments. SkillX operates through a fully automated pipeline built on three synergistic innovations: (i) Multi-Level Skills Design, which distills raw trajectories into three-tiered hierarchy of strategic plans, functional skills, and atomic skills; (ii) Iterative Skills Refinement, which automatically revises skills based on execution feedback to continuously improve library quality; and (iii) Exploratory Skills Expansion, which proactively generates and validates novel skills to expand coverage beyond seed training data. Using a strong backbone agent (GLM-4.6), we automatically build a reusable skill library and evaluate its transferability on challenging long-horizon, user-interactive benchmarks, including AppWorld, BFCL-v3, and

τ^2

-Bench. Experiments show that SkillKB consistently improves task success and execution efficiency when plugged into weaker base agents, highlighting the importance of structured, hierarchical experience representations for generalizable agent learning. Our code will be publicly available soon at https://github.com/zjunlp/SkillX.

Chenxi Wang, Zhuoyun Yu, Xin Xie +8

1Zhejiang University · 2Ant Digital Technologies, Ant Group.

LLM Agent Skill Learning LLM Agents Experience Learning for LLM Agents Long-Horizon LLM Agents

Apr 6, 2026

Decocted Experience Improves Test-Time Inference in LLM Agents

There is growing interest in improving LLMs without updating model parameters. One well-established direction is test-time scaling, where increased inference-time computation (e.g., longer reasoning, sampling, or search) is used to improve performance. However, for complex reasoning and agentic tasks, naively scaling test-time compute can substantially increase cost and still lead to wasted budget on suboptimal exploration. In this paper, we explore context as a complementary scaling axis for improving LLM performance, and systematically study how to construct better inputs that guide reasoning through experience. We show that effective context construction critically depends on decocted experience. We present a detailed analysis of experience-augmented agents, studying how to derive context from experience, how performance scales with accumulated experience, what characterizes good context, and which data structures best support context construction. We identify decocted experience as a key mechanism for effective context construction: extracting essence from experience, organizing it coherently, and retrieving salient information to build effective context. We validate our findings across reasoning and agentic tasks, including math reasoning, web browsing, and software engineering.

Maohao Shen, Kaiwen Zha, Zexue He +6

Massachusetts Institute of Technology · Stanford University · MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab +2

Experience Learning for LLM Agents LLM Context Management Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents In-Context Learning Test-Time Scaling

Mar 26, 2026

Trace2Skill: Distill Trajectory-Local Lessons into Transferable Agent Skills

Large Language Model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on domain-specific skills, yet manually authoring such skills does not scale, and skills generated purely from parametric knowledge often miss critical operational pitfalls. We introduce Trace2Skill, a framework that consolidates broad execution trajectories in parallel into a unified skill directory through inductive reasoning over agent experience. Trace2Skill supports both deepening existing human-written skills and creating useful skills from weak LLM-generated drafts. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of Trace2Skill across diverse domains, including office workflows, math reasoning, and vision QA. Importantly, the evolved skills are not merely memorized artifacts of the trajectories used to create them: they often transfer across model scales, across model families, and to out-of-distribution settings. For example, skills evolved from Qwen3.5-35B trajectories improve a Qwen3.5-122B agent by up to

57.65

percentage points on WikiTableQuestions. Further analyses show that Trace2Skill outperforms sequential skill editing and ReasoningBank-style retrieval memories, compresses recurring failures and workarounds into standard operating procedures (SoPs), and yields portable skills that can be reused without parameter updates or test-time retrieval.

Jingwei Ni, Yihao Liu, Xinpeng Liu +7

ETH Zürich · University of Zurich · Peking University +2

LLM Agent Skill Learning Experience Learning for LLM Agents LLM Agent Self-Improvement

Mar 25, 2026

Experiential Reflective Learning for Self-Improving LLM Agents

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled the development of autonomous agents capable of complex reasoning and multi-step problem solving. However, these agents struggle to adapt to specialized environments and do not leverage past interactions, approaching each new task from scratch regardless of their accumulated experience. We introduce Experiential Reflective Learning (ERL), a simple self-improvement framework that enables rapid environment adaptation through experiential learning. ERL reflects on task trajectories and outcomes to generate heuristics, capturing actionable lessons that transfer across tasks. At test time, relevant heuristics are retrieved based on the current task and injected into the agent's context to guide execution. On the Gaia2 benchmark, ERL improves success rate by 7.8% over a ReAct baseline, with large gains in task completion reliability, and outperforms prior experiential learning methods. Through systematic ablations, we find that selective retrieval is essential and that heuristics provide more transferable abstractions than few-shot trajectory prompting. These results demonstrate that reflecting on single-attempt experiences to extract transferable heuristics enables effective agent self-improvement.

Marc-Antoine Allard, Arnaud Teinturier, Victor Xing +1

Illuin Technology

Experience Learning for LLM Agents Self-Improving Agents LLM Agent Training Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents

Mar 22, 2026

AgentHER: Hindsight Experience Replay for LLM Agent Trajectory Relabeling

LLM-agent training pipelines routinely discard failed trajectories even though GPT-4o achieves only 14-20% on WebArena and below 55% pass@1 on ToolBench; even specialised systems at 50-65% leave the majority of trajectories unused. We introduce AgentHER, which recovers this lost signal by adapting Hindsight Experience Replay (HER) to natural-language agent trajectories: a trajectory that fails goal A is often a correct demonstration for an achievable alternative goal B. AgentHER realises this through a four-stage pipeline (failure classification, outcome extraction, LLM-guided relabeling with confidence gating, and data packaging) that converts discarded failures into SFT, DPO, and ShareGPT training data. On WebArena and ToolBench under a strict task-disjoint held-out protocol, AgentHER improves over success-only SFT by +7.6-11.4% across four model families (GPT-4o, Qwen2.5-72B/7B, LLaMA-3.1-8B), achieves 2x sample efficiency, and beats the strongest experience-centric baseline (Agent Workflow Memory) by +3.0-6.2%. Two robustness mechanisms, failure-severity weighting and cross-model multi-judge verification (gpt-4o-mini paired with Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct), reduce label noise from 5.9% to 2.9% and raise human-rated relabeling precision to 97.1% on WebArena and 96.0% on ToolBench. A full system-cost audit shows the entire relabeling pipeline costs 2.98 and 26 wall-clock minutes for 3,000 trajectories, i.e. 1.4 x 10^-3 per accepted pair. Code: https://github.com/alphadl/AgentHER

Liang Ding

The University of Sydney

Hindsight Experience Replay LLM Agent Training Experience Learning for LLM Agents Experience Replay LLM Agent Trajectory Synthesis

Mar 19, 2026

Memento-Skills: Let Agents Design Agents

We introduce Memento-Skills, a generalist, continually-learnable LLM agent system that functions as an agent-designing agent: it autonomously constructs, adapts, and improves task-specific agents through experience. The system is built on a memory-based reinforcement learning framework with stateful prompts, where reusable skills (stored as structured markdown files) serve as persistent, evolving memory. These skills encode both behaviour and context, enabling the agent to carry forward knowledge across interactions. Starting from simple elementary skills (like Web search and terminal operations), the agent continually improves via the Read--Write Reflective Learning mechanism introduced in Memento~2~\cite{wang2025memento2}. In the read phase, a behaviour-trainable skill router selects the most relevant skill conditioned on the current stateful prompt; in the write phase, the agent updates and expands its skill library based on new experience. This closed-loop design enables continual learning without updating LLM parameters, as all adaptation is realised through the evolution of externalised skills and prompts. Unlike prior approaches that rely on human-designed agents, Memento-Skills enables a generalist agent to design agents end-to-end for new tasks. Through iterative skill generation and refinement, the system progressively improves its own capabilities. Experiments on the General AI Assistants benchmark and Humanity's Last Exam demonstrate sustained gains, achieving 26.2% and 116.2% relative improvements in overall accuracy, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/Memento-Teams/Memento-Skills.

Huichi Zhou, Siyuan Guo, Anjie Liu +14

Agentic AI LLM Agent Skill Learning Experience Learning for LLM Agents Continual Learning for LLM Agents Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents RL for LLM Agents+1

Mar 18, 2026

Retrieval-Augmented LLM Agents: Learning to Learn from Experience

While large language models (LLMs) have advanced the development of general-purpose agents, robust generalization to unseen tasks remains challenging. Two common approaches are supervised fine-tuning and training-free memory-augmented generation using retrieved experience; yet both have limitations: fine-tuning often fails to extrapolate to new tasks, while experience retrieval often underperforms compared to supervised baselines. In this work, we combine these approaches and study how retrieval-augmented LLM agents can learn to use retrieved trajectories in-context. First, we establish a strong LoRA fine-tuning baseline that outperforms several state-of-the-art agent training pipelines. Second, we analyze key design choices for experience retrieval, including storage, querying, and trajectory selection. We then integrate experience retrieval directly into the fine-tuning process, finding that this substantially improves generalization to unseen tasks. Finally, we show that these gains often persist with imperfect experience and, even when agents reuse their own failed attempts without test-time parameter updates. Overall, our results establish simple episodic retrieval as a strong foundation for agent memory and retrieval-aware fine-tuning as a practical and effective framework for building agents that learn to learn from experience.

Thomas Palmeira Ferraz, Romain Deffayet, Vassilina Nikoulina +2

NAVER LABS Europe, Meylan, France

Fine-Tuning LLM Agent Training Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents Experience Learning for LLM Agents

Mar 17, 2026

Internalizing Agency from Reflective Experience

Large language models are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents that must plan, act, and recover from mistakes through long-horizon interaction with environments that provide rich feedback. However, prevailing outcome-driven post-training methods (e.g., RL with verifiable rewards) primarily optimize final success signals, leaving rich environment feedback underutilized. Consequently, they often lead to distribution sharpening: the policy becomes better at reproducing a narrow set of already-successful behaviors, while failing to improve the feedback-grounded agency needed to expand problem-solving capacity (e.g., Pass@k) in long-horizon settings. To address this, we propose LEAFE (Learning Feedback-Grounded Agency from Reflective Experience), a framework that internalizes recovery agency from reflective experience. Specifically, during exploration, the agent summarizes environment feedback into actionable experience, backtracks to earlier decision points, and explores alternative branches with revised actions. We then distill these experience-guided corrections into the model through supervised fine-tuning, enabling the policy to recover more effectively in future interactions. Across a diverse set of interactive coding and agentic tasks under fixed interaction budgets, LEAFE consistently improves Pass@1 over the base model and achieves higher Pass@k than outcome-driven baselines (GRPO) and experience-based methods such as Early Experience, with gains of up to 14% on Pass@128.

Rui Ge, Yichao Fu, Yuyang Qian +4

University of California San Diego · Shanghai Jiao Tong Univsersity · Nanjing University

Experience Learning for LLM Agents LLM Agent Training Self-Improving Agents