Language-based Trial and Error Falls Behind in the Era of Experience

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2601.21754v2
• Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2026 11:31:41 GMT
• Title: Language-based Trial and Error Falls Behind in the Era of Experience
• Authors: Haoyu Wang, Guozheng Ma, Shugang Cui, Yilun Kong, Haotian Luo, Li Shen, Mengya Gao, Yichao Wu, Xiaogang Wang, Dacheng Tao,
• Abstract summary: Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in language-based agentic tasks, but their applicability to unseen, nonlinguistic environments remains limited.<n>In this work, we demonstrate the primary bottleneck is the prohibitive cost of exploration.<n>We propose SCOUT, a novel framework that decouples exploration from semantic exploitation.
• Score: 50.503828360874536
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in language-based agentic tasks, their applicability to unseen, nonlinguistic environments (e.g., symbolic or spatial tasks) remains limited. Previous work attributes this performance gap to the mismatch between the pretraining distribution and the testing distribution. In this work, we demonstrate the primary bottleneck is the prohibitive cost of exploration: mastering these tasks requires extensive trial-and-error, which is computationally unsustainable for parameter-heavy LLMs operating in a high dimensional semantic space. To address this, we propose SCOUT (Sub-Scale Collaboration On Unseen Tasks), a novel framework that decouples exploration from exploitation. We employ lightweight "scouts" (e.g., small MLPs) to probe environmental dynamics at a speed and scale far exceeding LLMs. The collected trajectories are utilized to bootstrap the LLM via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), followed by multi-turn Reinforcement Learning (RL) to activate its latent world knowledge. Empirically, SCOUT enables a Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct model to achieve an average score of 0.86, significantly outperforming proprietary models, including Gemini-2.5-Pro (0.60), while saving about 60% GPU hours consumption.

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