Rethinking Continual Experience Internalization for Self-Evolving LLM Agents

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.04703v1
• Date: Wed, 03 Jun 2026 10:30:09 GMT
• Title: Rethinking Continual Experience Internalization for Self-Evolving LLM Agents
• Abstract summary: We find that principle-level experience is more durable than instance-level experience.<n>Step-wise injection significantly outperforms global injection by aligning experience with intermediate decision states.<n>Off-policy context-distillation on high-quality teacher trajectories provides a substantially more stable training signal than on-policy context-distillation.
• Score: 36.80404778289742
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: 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.

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