Research·arXiv cs.CL·21h ago

Agents retain learned behaviors without replaying costly interactions

Researchers have identified a critical bottleneck in agent learning: in-context examples boost performance dramatically, but only while they remain in the model's active context window. This work bridges that gap through experience distillation, a technique that permanently encodes an agent's interaction history into model weights without requiring additional environment sampling. The approach was validated across 749 software-engineering tasks, suggesting a path toward agents that retain learned behaviors from costly real-world interactions without the memory overhead of traditional fine-tuning. For practitioners building autonomous systems, this addresses a fundamental efficiency problem in reinforcement learning from human feedback and environment exploration.

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Explainer

The critical insight here is that experience distillation permanently encodes learned behaviors into weights without requiring the agent to re-sample the environment. This is not just faster fine-tuning; it's a structural solution to the forgetting problem that occurs when in-context examples leave the context window.

This work sits alongside two concurrent findings on agent training efficiency. The GRPO reward collapse paper (late July) showed how optimizer design silently breaks agent training; this paper offers a complementary path forward by making learned experience persistent rather than ephemeral. Similarly, the multi-task learning study from the same week demonstrates that shared representations reduce computational overhead across related tasks. Together, these three papers suggest a shift from brute-force scaling toward architectural and training choices that preserve what agents learn without multiplying inference costs or memory overhead.

If the same distillation approach maintains performance gains when tested on out-of-distribution software engineering tasks (tasks not in the original 749), that confirms the method generalizes beyond memorization. If performance degrades sharply on held-out task families, the approach may only work within narrow domains, limiting practical deployment.

Coverage we drew on

The Dark Room in the Reward Channel: Dense Prediction Rewards Collapse GRPO-Trained LLM Agents -- and What Actually Works · arXiv cs.LG

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