Learn-by-interact: A Data-Centric Framework for Self-Adaptive Agents in Realistic Environments

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Su, Hongjin, Sun, Ruoxi, Yoon, Jinsung, Yin, Pengcheng, Yu, Tao, Arık, Sercan Ö.
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Su, Hongjin
Sun, Ruoxi
Yoon, Jinsung
Yin, Pengcheng
Yu, Tao
Arık, Sercan Ö.
author_facet Su, Hongjin
Sun, Ruoxi
Yoon, Jinsung
Yin, Pengcheng
Yu, Tao
Arık, Sercan Ö.
contents Autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have the potential to enhance human capabilities, assisting with digital tasks from sending emails to performing data analysis. The abilities of existing LLMs at such tasks are often hindered by the lack of high-quality agent data from the corresponding environments they interact with. We propose Learn-by-interact, a data-centric framework to adapt LLM agents to any given environments without human annotations. Learn-by-interact synthesizes trajectories of agent-environment interactions based on documentations, and constructs instructions by summarizing or abstracting the interaction histories, a process called backward construction. We assess the quality of our synthetic data by using them in both training-based scenarios and training-free in-context learning (ICL), where we craft innovative retrieval approaches optimized for agents. Extensive experiments on SWE-bench, WebArena, OSWorld and Spider2-V spanning across realistic coding, web, and desktop environments show the effectiveness of Learn-by-interact in various downstream agentic tasks -- baseline results are improved by up to 12.2\% for ICL with Claude-3.5 and 19.5\% for training with Codestral-22B. We further demonstrate the critical role of backward construction, which provides up to 14.0\% improvement for training. Our ablation studies demonstrate the efficiency provided by our synthesized data in ICL and the superiority of our retrieval pipeline over alternative approaches like conventional retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). We expect that Learn-by-interact will serve as a foundation for agent data synthesis as LLMs are increasingly deployed at real-world environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_10893
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learn-by-interact: A Data-Centric Framework for Self-Adaptive Agents in Realistic Environments
Su, Hongjin
Sun, Ruoxi
Yoon, Jinsung
Yin, Pengcheng
Yu, Tao
Arık, Sercan Ö.
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have the potential to enhance human capabilities, assisting with digital tasks from sending emails to performing data analysis. The abilities of existing LLMs at such tasks are often hindered by the lack of high-quality agent data from the corresponding environments they interact with. We propose Learn-by-interact, a data-centric framework to adapt LLM agents to any given environments without human annotations. Learn-by-interact synthesizes trajectories of agent-environment interactions based on documentations, and constructs instructions by summarizing or abstracting the interaction histories, a process called backward construction. We assess the quality of our synthetic data by using them in both training-based scenarios and training-free in-context learning (ICL), where we craft innovative retrieval approaches optimized for agents. Extensive experiments on SWE-bench, WebArena, OSWorld and Spider2-V spanning across realistic coding, web, and desktop environments show the effectiveness of Learn-by-interact in various downstream agentic tasks -- baseline results are improved by up to 12.2\% for ICL with Claude-3.5 and 19.5\% for training with Codestral-22B. We further demonstrate the critical role of backward construction, which provides up to 14.0\% improvement for training. Our ablation studies demonstrate the efficiency provided by our synthesized data in ICL and the superiority of our retrieval pipeline over alternative approaches like conventional retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). We expect that Learn-by-interact will serve as a foundation for agent data synthesis as LLMs are increasingly deployed at real-world environments.
title Learn-by-interact: A Data-Centric Framework for Self-Adaptive Agents in Realistic Environments
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.10893