让智能体通过早期自行动作积累经验,无需奖励信号也能提升性能。
Agent Learning via Early Experience
- 用智能体自身交互产生的状态作为监督信号,替代传统奖励机制。
- 在8个环境中均提升任务完成率,且跨领域泛化能力更强。
- 适合想减少人工标注、追求自主学习的AI研发者参考。
语言智能体长期目标是通过自身经验持续学习并超越人类在复杂现实任务中的表现。然而,在缺乏可验证奖励(如网页)或需长时间滚动执行(如多轮工具使用)的环境中,基于强化学习的经验训练仍面临挑战。当前多数智能体依赖专家数据的监督微调,但其难以扩展且泛化性差,根源在于专家示范覆盖场景有限、环境多样性不足。本文提出一种中间路径——早期经验:利用智能体自身动作产生的交互数据,以未来状态作为无奖励的监督信号。在此框架下,研究两种策略:(1) 隐式世界建模,用收集的状态锚定策略与环境动态;(2) 自我反思,从次优行为中学习改进推理与决策。在八个不同环境及多个模型家族上的评估表明,该方法持续提升有效性与跨域泛化能力,凸显早期经验价值。此外,在具备可验证奖励的环境中,结果提示早期经验为后续强化学习奠定良好基础,成为模仿学习与完全经验驱动智能体之间的实用桥梁。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
A long-term goal of language agents is to learn and improve through their own experience, ultimately outperforming humans in complex, real-world tasks. However, training agents from experience data with reinforcement learning remains difficult in many environments, which either lack verifiable rewards (e.g., websites) or require inefficient long-horizon rollouts (e.g., multi-turn tool use). As a result, most current agents rely on supervised fine-tuning on expert data, which is challenging to scale and generalizes poorly. This limitation stems from the nature of expert demonstrations: they capture only a narrow range of scenarios, and expose the agent to limited environment diversity. We address this limitation with a middle-ground paradigm we call early experience: interaction data generated by the agent's own actions, where the resulting future states serve as supervision without reward signals. Within this paradigm, we study two strategies of using such data: (1) implicit world modeling, which uses collected states to ground the policy in environment dynamics; and (2) self-reflection, where the agent learns from its suboptimal actions to improve reasoning and decision-making. Evaluation across eight diverse environments and multiple model families shows that our approaches consistently improve effectiveness and out-of-domain generalization, highlighting the value of early experience. Moreover, in environments with verifiable rewards, our results provide promising signals that early experience offers a strong foundation for subsequent reinforcement learning, making it a practical bridge between imitation learning and fully experience-driven agents.
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