FORGE: Self-Evolving Agent Memory With No Weight Updates via Population Broadcast
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2026
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| author | Bogdanov, Igor Lung, Chung-Horng Kunz, Thomas Gao, Jie Taylor, Adrian Zaman, Marzia |
| author_facet | Bogdanov, Igor Lung, Chung-Horng Kunz, Thomas Gao, Jie Taylor, Adrian Zaman, Marzia |
| contents | Can LLM agents improve decision-making through self-generated memory without gradient updates? We propose FORGE (Failure-Optimized Reflective Graduation and Evolution), a staged, population-based protocol that evolves prompt-injected natural-language memory for hierarchical ReAct agents. FORGE wraps a Reflexion-style inner loop, where a dedicated reflection agent (using the same underlying LLM, no distillation from a stronger model) converts failed trajectories into reusable knowledge artifacts: textual heuristics (Rules), few-shot demonstrations (Examples), or both (Mixed), with an outer loop that propagates the best-performing instance's memory to the population between stages and freezes converged instances via a graduation criterion. We evaluate on CybORG CAGE-2, a stochastic network-defense POMDP at a 30-step horizon against the B-line attacker, where all four tested LLM families (Gemini-2.5-Flash-Lite, Grok-4-Fast, Llama-4-Maverick, Qwen3-235B) exhibit strongly negative, heavy-tailed zero-shot rewards. Compared against both a zero-shot baseline and a Reflexion baseline (isolated single-stream learning), FORGE improves average evaluation return by 1.7-7.7$\times$ over zero-shot and by 29-72% over Reflexion in all 12 model-representation conditions, reducing major-failure rates (below $-100$) to as low as $\sim$1%. We find that (1) population broadcast is critical mechanism, with a no-graduation ablation confirming that broadcast carries the performance gains while graduation primarily saves compute; (2) Examples achieves the strongest returns for three of four models, Rules offers the best cost-reliability profile with $\sim$40% fewer tokens; and (3) weaker baseline models benefit disproportionately, suggesting FORGE may mitigate capability gaps rather than amplify strong models. All evidence is confined to CAGE-2 B-line; cross-family findings are directional evidence. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_16233 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | FORGE: Self-Evolving Agent Memory With No Weight Updates via Population Broadcast Bogdanov, Igor Lung, Chung-Horng Kunz, Thomas Gao, Jie Taylor, Adrian Zaman, Marzia Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language Machine Learning Multiagent Systems Systems and Control Can LLM agents improve decision-making through self-generated memory without gradient updates? We propose FORGE (Failure-Optimized Reflective Graduation and Evolution), a staged, population-based protocol that evolves prompt-injected natural-language memory for hierarchical ReAct agents. FORGE wraps a Reflexion-style inner loop, where a dedicated reflection agent (using the same underlying LLM, no distillation from a stronger model) converts failed trajectories into reusable knowledge artifacts: textual heuristics (Rules), few-shot demonstrations (Examples), or both (Mixed), with an outer loop that propagates the best-performing instance's memory to the population between stages and freezes converged instances via a graduation criterion. We evaluate on CybORG CAGE-2, a stochastic network-defense POMDP at a 30-step horizon against the B-line attacker, where all four tested LLM families (Gemini-2.5-Flash-Lite, Grok-4-Fast, Llama-4-Maverick, Qwen3-235B) exhibit strongly negative, heavy-tailed zero-shot rewards. Compared against both a zero-shot baseline and a Reflexion baseline (isolated single-stream learning), FORGE improves average evaluation return by 1.7-7.7$\times$ over zero-shot and by 29-72% over Reflexion in all 12 model-representation conditions, reducing major-failure rates (below $-100$) to as low as $\sim$1%. We find that (1) population broadcast is critical mechanism, with a no-graduation ablation confirming that broadcast carries the performance gains while graduation primarily saves compute; (2) Examples achieves the strongest returns for three of four models, Rules offers the best cost-reliability profile with $\sim$40% fewer tokens; and (3) weaker baseline models benefit disproportionately, suggesting FORGE may mitigate capability gaps rather than amplify strong models. All evidence is confined to CAGE-2 B-line; cross-family findings are directional evidence. |
| title | FORGE: Self-Evolving Agent Memory With No Weight Updates via Population Broadcast |
| topic | Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language Machine Learning Multiagent Systems Systems and Control |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.16233 |