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Sample-Efficient Online Learning in LM Agents via Hindsight Trajectory Rewriting (arxiv.org)
2 points by djhu9 352 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: When an agent fails, it rewrites that attempt as a successful example for a smaller goal it did reach, then stores a short version of the lesson to reuse later. This beat plain agents by up to 80% on two text-based tasks.

Abstract

Language model (LM) agents deployed in novel environments often exhibit poor sample efficiency when learning from sequential interactions. This significantly hinders the usefulness of such agents in environments where interaction is costly (for example, when they interact with humans or reset physical systems). While a number of existing LM agent architectures incorporate various mechanisms for experience storage and reflection, they make limited use of LMs' abilities to directly generate or reason about full counterfactual trajectories. We introduce ECHO (Experience Consolidation via Hindsight Optimization), a prompting framework that adapts hindsight experience replay from reinforcement learning for language model agents. ECHO generates optimized trajectories for alternative goals that could have been achieved during failed attempts, effectively creating synthetic positive examples from unsuccessful interactions. Our approach consists of two components: a hindsight rule that uses the language model itself to identify relevant subgoals and generate optimized trajectories, and an update rule that maintains compressed trajectory representations in memory. We evaluate ECHO on stateful versions of XMiniGrid, a text-based navigation and planning benchmark, and PeopleJoinQA, a collaborative information-gathering enterprise simulation. Across both domains, ECHO outperforms vanilla language agent baselines by up to 80%; in XMiniGrid, it also outperforms a number of sophisticated agent architectures including Reflexion and AWM, demonstrating faster adaptation to novel environments through more effective utilization of past experiences.

Michael Y. Hu, Benjamin Van Durme, Jacob Andreas, Harsh Jhamtani
arXiv:2510.10304 · cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL · submitted Oct 11, 2025 · updated Jan 2, 2026
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