# Experiential Co-Learning of Software-Developing Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.17025 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17025/

## Key facts

- Cited by 57 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 43 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Dec 2023.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/agents/general-llm-agent-frameworks-and-benchmarks/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11366/) (2023)
- [Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04761/) (2023)
- [Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10560/) (2022)
- [Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12712/) (2023)
- [WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13854/) (2023)
- [Shortcut Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07780/) (2020)
- [ToolLLM: Facilitating Large Language Models to Master 16000+ Real-world APIs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16789/) (2023)
- [Rethinking the Role of Demonstrations: What Makes In-Context Learning Work?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12837/) (2022)
- [CAMEL: Communicative Agents for "Mind" Exploration of Large Language Model Society](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17760/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models are not Fair Evaluators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17926/) (2023)
- [ChatDev: Communicative Agents for Software Development](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07924/) (2023)
- [ExpeL: LLM Agents Are Experiential Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10144/) (2023)
- [ChatEval: Towards Better LLM-based Evaluators through Multi-Agent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07201/) (2023)
- [Learning To Retrieve Prompts for In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08633/) (2021)
- [AgentVerse: Facilitating Multi-Agent Collaboration and Exploring Emergent Behaviors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10848/) (2023)
- [Dynamic Prompt Learning via Policy Gradient for Semi-structured Mathematical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14610/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models are Effective Text Rankers with Pairwise Ranking Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17563/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models as Tool Makers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17126/) (2023)
- [Role-Play with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16367/) (2023)
- [Ghost in the Minecraft: Generally Capable Agents for Open-World Environments via Large Language Models with Text-based Knowledge and Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17144/) (2023)
- [GPT4Tools: Teaching Large Language Model to Use Tools via Self-instruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18752/) (2023)
- [PromptAgent: Strategic Planning with Language Models Enables Expert-level Prompt Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16427/) (2023)
- [Can large language models provide useful feedback on research papers? A large-scale empirical analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01783/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 57)

- [Agent Laboratory: Using LLM Agents as Research Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04227/) (2025)
- [Towards Large Reasoning Models: A Survey of Reinforced Reasoning with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09686/) (2025)
- [Scaling Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07155/) (2024)
- [Large Language Model-Based Agents for Software Engineering: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02977/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Self-Evolving Agents: What, When, How, and Where to Evolve on the Path to Artificial Super Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21046/) (2025)
- [LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems for Software Engineering: Literature Review, Vision and the Road Ahead](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04834/) (2024)
- [Advances and Challenges in Foundation Agents: From Brain-Inspired Intelligence to Evolutionary, Collaborative, and Safe Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01990/) (2025)
- [Small LLMs Are Weak Tool Learners: A Multi-LLM Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07324/) (2024)
- [Internet of Agents: Weaving a Web of Heterogeneous Agents for Collaborative Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07061/) (2024)
- [From Individual to Society: A Survey on Social Simulation Driven by Large Language Model-based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03563/) (2024)
- [AgentRxiv: Towards Collaborative Autonomous Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18102/) (2025)
- [Unveiling the Truth and Facilitating Change: Towards Agent-based Large-scale Social Movement Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16333/) (2024)
- [SWE-Exp: Experience-Driven Software Issue Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23361/) (2025)
- [Learning to Use Tools via Cooperative and Interactive Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03031/) (2024)
- [A Survey on the Optimization of Large Language Model-based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12434/) (2025)
- [Prompting Large Language Models to Tackle the Full Software Development Lifecycle: A Case Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08604/) (2024)
- [Optima: Optimizing Effectiveness and Efficiency for LLM-Based Multi-Agent System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08115/) (2024)
- [TxGemma: Efficient and Agentic LLMs for Therapeutics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06196/) (2025)
- [VillagerAgent: A Graph-Based Multi-Agent Framework for Coordinating Complex Task Dependencies in Minecraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05720/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking Data Science Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17168/) (2024)
- [Multi-Agent Collaboration via Cross-Team Orchestration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08979/) (2024)
- [LAMBDA: A Large Model Based Data Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17535/) (2024)
- [MDTeamGPT: A Self-Evolving LLM-based Multi-Agent Framework for Multi-Disciplinary Team Medical Consultation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13856/) (2025)
- [Hierarchical Auto-Organizing System for Open-Ended Multi-Agent Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08282/) (2024)
- [Reinforcement Learning from Multi-role Debates as Feedback for Bias Mitigation in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10160/) (2024)
- [Improving Code Localization with Repository Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01003/) (2025)
- [Do We Really Need a Complex Agent System? Distill Embodied Agent into a Single Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04619/) (2024)
- [Coarse-to-Fine Grounded Memory for LLM Agent Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15305/) (2025)
- [Attack the Messages, Not the Agents: A Multi-round Adaptive Stealthy Tampering Framework for LLM-MAS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03125/) (2025)
- [Iterative Experience Refinement of Software-Developing Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04219/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have brought significant changes to various domains, especially through LLM-driven autonomous agents. A representative scenario is in software development, where LLM agents demonstrate efficient collaboration, task division, and assurance of software quality, markedly reducing the need for manual involvement. However, these agents frequently perform a variety of tasks independently, without benefiting from past experiences, which leads to repeated mistakes and inefficient attempts in multi-step task execution. To this end, we introduce Experiential Co-Learning, a novel LLM-agent learning framework in which instructor and assistant agents gather shortcut-oriented experiences from their historical trajectories and use these past experiences for future task execution. The extensive experiments demonstrate that the framework enables agents to tackle unseen software-developing tasks more effectively. We anticipate that our insights will guide LLM agents towards enhanced autonomy and contribute to their evolutionary growth in cooperative learning. The code and data are available at https://github.com/OpenBMB/ChatDev.