mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Sensi: Learn One Thing at a Time -- Curriculum-Based Test-Time Learning for LLM Game Agents

arXiv 2603.17683 ↗First posted 18 Mar 2026cs.AI cs.LGcited by 1

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Reinforcement learning for LLM agents

Abstract (arXiv)

Large language model (LLM) agents deployed in unknown environments must learn task structure at test time, but current approaches require thousands of interactions to form useful hypotheses. We present Sensi, an LLM agent architecture for the ARC-AGI-3 game-playing challenge that introduces structured test-time learning through three mechanisms: (1) a two-player architecture separating perception from action, (2) a curriculum-based learning system managed by an external state machine, and (3) a database-as-control-plane that makes the agents context window programmatically steerable. We further introduce an LLM-as-judge component with dynamically generated evaluation rubrics to determine when the agent has learned enough about one topic to advance to the next. We report results across two iterations: Sensi v1 solves 2 game levels using the two-player architecture alone, while Sensi v2 adds curriculum learning and solves 0 levels - but completes its entire learning curriculum in approximately 32 action attempts, achieving 50-94x greater sample efficiency than comparable systems that require 1600-3000 attempts. We precisely diagnose the failure mode as a self-consistent hallucination cascade originating in the perception layer, demonstrating that the architectural bottleneck has shifted from learning efficiency to perceptual grounding - a more tractable problem.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Reinforcement learning for LLM agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 14 of its 29 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 18 Mar 2026.

Builds on

14 of 29 references.

Closest ancestors · 2

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2023Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Models25 May
  2. 2023Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning20 Mar

Other references · 12

  1. 2022Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 12,302
  2. 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,393
  3. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
  4. 2022Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Modelscited by 5,601
  5. 2023Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedbackcited by 3,317
  6. 2017Curiosity-driven Exploration by Self-supervised Predictioncited by 1,173
  7. 2023DSPy: Compiling Declarative Language Model Calls into Self-Improving Pipelinescited by 803
  8. 2024Learning to (Learn at Test Time): RNNs with Expressive Hidden Statescited by 329
  9. 2020Automatic Curriculum Learning For Deep RL: A Short Surveycited by 141
  10. 2026Learning to Discover at Test Timecited by 94
  11. 2025EvoTest: Evolutionary Test-Time Learning for Self-Improving Agentic Systemscited by 34
  12. 2023SPRING: Studying the Paper and Reasoning to Play Gamescited by 11

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.

1 paper.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2024A Survey on Large Language Model-Based Game Agents
  2. 2024Large Language Models as Agents in Two-Player Games
  3. 2026SkillX: Automatically Constructing Skill Knowledge Bases for Agents
  4. 2024BALROG: Benchmarking Agentic LLM and VLM Reasoning On Games
  5. 2026Towards Improving Sequential Decision-Making in LLM Agents via Experience Memory
  6. 2024clembench-2024: A Challenging, Dynamic, Complementary, Multilingual Benchmark and Underlying Flexible Framework for LLMs as Multi-Action Agents
  7. 2026Learn2Play Bench: How Well Do LLM Agents Learn from Experience in Unfamiliar Environments?
  8. 2025Orak: A Foundational Benchmark for Training and Evaluating LLM Agents on Diverse Video Games