# PREPING: Zero-Task Agent Memory Construction via Self-Practice

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13880 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13880/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04761/) (2023)
- [ToolLLM: Facilitating Large Language Models to Master 16000+ Real-world APIs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16789/) (2023)
- [MemGPT: Towards LLMs as Operating Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08560/) (2023)
- [Gorilla: Large Language Model Connected with Massive APIs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15334/) (2023)
- [ExpeL: LLM Agents Are Experiential Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10144/) (2023)
- [DeepSeek-V3.2: Pushing the Frontier of Open Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02556/) (2025)
- [Terminal-Bench: Benchmarking Agents on Hard, Realistic Tasks in Command Line Interfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.11868/) (2026)
- [Decomposed Prompting: A Modular Approach for Solving Complex Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02406/) (2022)
- [MemoryBank: Enhancing Large Language Models with Long-Term Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10250/) (2023)
- [AppWorld: A Controllable World of Apps and People for Benchmarking Interactive Coding Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18901/) (2024)
- [Agentic Context Engineering: Evolving Contexts for Self-Improving Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04618/) (2025)
- [Agent Workflow Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07429/) (2024)
- [ReasoningBank: Scaling Agent Self-Evolving with Reasoning Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25140/) (2025)
- [R-Zero: Self-Evolving Reasoning LLM from Zero Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05004/) (2025)
- [Synapse: Trajectory-as-Exemplar Prompting with Memory for Computer Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07863/) (2023)
- [Dynamic Cheatsheet: Test-Time Learning with Adaptive Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07952/) (2025)
- [Memento: Fine-tuning LLM Agents without Fine-tuning LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16153/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Context Engineering for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13334/) (2025)
- [G-Memory: Tracing Hierarchical Memory for Multi-Agent Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07398/) (2025)
- [MCP-Universe: Benchmarking Large Language Models with Real-World Model Context Protocol Servers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14704/) (2025)
- [CLIN: A Continually Learning Language Agent for Rapid Task Adaptation and Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10134/) (2023)
- [MemEvolve: Meta-Evolution of Agent Memory Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18746/) (2025)
- [AgentEvolver: Towards Efficient Self-Evolving Agent System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10395/) (2025)
- [SPICE: Self-Play In Corpus Environments Improves Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24684/) (2025)
- [Agent0: Unleashing Self-Evolving Agents from Zero Data via Tool-Integrated Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16043/) (2025)
- [OfficeBench: Benchmarking Language Agents across Multiple Applications for Office Automation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19056/) (2024)
- [Self-Challenging Language Model Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01716/) (2025)
- [Dr. Zero: Self-Evolving Search Agents without Training Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07055/) (2026)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Mid-Harness: Scaling Actions Between Model and Harness for Terminal Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39982/) (2026)
- [Studying Without a Syllabus: Task-Agnostic Environment Preprocessing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.10824/) (2026)
- [DAEDALUS: Bootstrapping Agent Memory from Self-Generated Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.08048/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Agent memory is typically constructed either offline from curated demonstrations or online from post-deployment interactions. However, regardless of how it is built, an agent faces a cold-start gap when first introduced to a new environment without any task-specific experience available. In this paper, we study pre-task memory construction: whether an agent can build procedural memory before observing any target-environment tasks, using only self-generated synthetic practice. Yet, synthetic interaction alone is insufficient, as without controlling what to practice and what to store, synthetic tasks become redundant, infeasible, and ultimately uninformative, and memory further degrades quickly due to unfiltered trajectories. To overcome this, we present Preping, a proposer-guided memory construction framework. At its core is proposer memory, a structured control state that shapes future practice. A Proposer generates synthetic tasks conditioned on this state, a Solver executes them, and a Validator determines which trajectories are eligible for memory insertion while also providing feedback to guide future proposals. Experiments on AppWorld, BFCL v3, and MCP-Universe show that Preping substantially improves over a no-memory baseline and achieves performance competitive with strong playbook-based methods built from offline or online experience, with deployment cost 2.99× lower on AppWorld and 2.23× lower on BFCL v3 than online memory construction. Further analyses reveal that the main benefit does not come from synthetic volume alone, but from proposer-side control over feasibility, redundancy, and coverage, combined with selective memory updates.