mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

SEAL: Synergistic Co-Evolution of Agents and Learning Environments

arXiv 2605.24426 ↗First posted 23 May 2026cs.CLcited by 9

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks

Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly improved through interaction, yet most self-evolution methods adapt either the policy or the learning environment in isolation. We identify this structural gap as Agent-Environment Misalignment: the agent's capability frontier changes during training, while the environment that provides supervision remains static or only weakly coupled to the agent's revealed failures. We propose SEAL, a closed-loop co-evolution framework for interactive tool-use agents. SEAL collects on-policy trajectories under executable verification, diagnoses failed rollouts into turn-level failure labels, and uses these diagnoses as a shared signal for both environment-side adaptation and model-side policy optimization. The environment evolves its training-time learning interface by exposing clearer tool affordance cues, constraint information, and recovery-oriented feedback, while the policy is updated with diagnosis-guided advantage reweighting. Extensive experiments across in-distribution and out-of-distribution multi-turn tool-use evaluations show that SEAL improves low-resource agent learning: with only 400 training samples, it yields +8.25 to +26.25 average-point gains across three backbones and exhibits positive out-of-distribution transfer. These results demonstrate the value of jointly adapting the learner and its training-time learning substrate for robust self-improving LLM agents.

Key facts. Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 47 of its 56 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 23 May 2026.

Builds on

47 of 56 references.

Closest ancestors · 12

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026EvoTool: Self-Evolving Tool-Use Policy Optimization in LLM Agents via Blame-Aware Mutation and Diversity-Aware Selection5 Mar
  2. 2026Self-Consolidation for Self-Evolving Agents2 Feb
  3. 2026A Survey of Agentic Reasoning for Large Language Models: Towards Recursively Self-Improving and Collective Agents18 Jan
  4. 2025GenEnv: Difficulty-Aligned Co-Evolution Between LLM Agents and Environment Simulators22 Dec
  5. 2025AgentEvolver: Towards Efficient Self-Evolving Agent System13 Nov
  6. 2025SEAgent: Self-Evolving Computer Use Agent with Autonomous Learning from Experience6 Aug
  7. 2025SE-Agent: Self-Evolution Trajectory Optimization in Multi-Step Reasoning with LLM-Based Agents4 Aug
  8. 2025Agent-Environment Alignment via Automated Interface Generation27 May
  9. 2025Agent-R: Training Language Model Agents to Reflect via Iterative Self-Training20 Jan
  10. 2024AgentGen: Enhancing Planning Abilities for Large Language Model based Agent via Environment and Task Generation1 Aug
  11. 2024AgentGym: Evolving Large Language Model-based Agents across Diverse Environments6 Jun
  12. 2023AgentBench: Evaluating LLMs as Agents7 Aug

Other references · 35

  1. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
  2. 2025Qwen3 Technical Reportcited by 8,195
  3. 2024Qwen2.5 Technical Reportcited by 4,713
  4. 2024GPT-4o System Cardcited by 4,467
  5. 2023Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Toolscited by 4,072
  6. 2023Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learningcited by 4,064
  7. 2025Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilitiescited by 3,655
  8. 2023SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?cited by 3,193
  9. 2022Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructionscited by 2,674
  10. 2023Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Modelscited by 2,081
  11. 2023WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agentscited by 1,908
  12. 2020ALFWorld: Aligning Text and Embodied Environments for Interactive Learningcited by 1,143
23 more
  1. 2024OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environmentscited by 1,134
  2. 2023WizardLM: Empowering large pre-trained language models to follow complex instructionscited by 1,116
  3. 2023API-Bank: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Tool-Augmented LLMscited by 574
  4. 2025GEPA: Reflective Prompt Evolution Can Outperform Reinforcement Learningcited by 449
  5. 2025RAGEN: Understanding Self-Evolution in LLM Agents via Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learningcited by 357
  6. 2025ToolRL: Reward is All Tool Learning Needscited by 342
  7. 2023Large Language Models as Tool Makerscited by 293
  8. 2026SkillRL: Evolving Agents via Recursive Skill-Augmented Reinforcement Learningcited by 252
  9. 2025R-Zero: Self-Evolving Reasoning LLM from Zero Datacited by 210
  10. 2024ToolACE: Winning the Points of LLM Function Callingcited by 204
  11. 2017Teacher-Student Curriculum Learningcited by 197
  12. 2020Automatic Curriculum Learning For Deep RL: A Short Surveycited by 141
  13. 2023CRAFT: Customizing LLMs by Creating and Retrieving from Specialized Toolsetscited by 122
  14. 2023CREATOR: Tool Creation for Disentangling Abstract and Concrete Reasoning of Large Language Modelscited by 90
  15. 2025Self-Adapting Language Modelscited by 71
  16. 2025AutoEnv: Automated Environments for Measuring Cross-Environment Agent Learningcited by 18
  17. 2025Don't Just Fine-tune the Agent, Tune the Environmentcited by 17
  18. 2026CoEvolve: Training LLM Agents via Agent-Data Mutual Evolutioncited by 14
  19. 2026Dual Latent Memory for Visual Multi-agent Systemcited by 9
  20. 2026OmniVideo-R1: Reinforcing Audio-visual Reasoning with Query Intention and Modality Attentioncited by 9
  21. 2026From Failure to Mastery: Generating Hard Samples for Tool-use Agentscited by 8
  22. 2026AtlasVA: Self-Evolving Visual Skill Memory for Teacher-Free VLM Agentscited by 5
  23. 2026GLOVE: Global Verifier for LLM Memory-Environment Realignmentcited by 3

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 9.

9 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026HERA: Harness-Environment Co-Evolution for Reliable Agentic Abstention
  2. 2026EvoArena: Tracking Memory Evolution for Robust LLM Agents in Dynamic Environments
  3. 2026DemoEvolve: Overcoming Sparse Feedback in Agentic Harness Evolution with Demonstrations
  4. 2026Agent-World: Scaling Real-World Environment Synthesis for Evolving General Agent Intelligence
  5. 2026Learning What to Remember and What to Internalize in LLM Self-Evolution via Adaptive Memory-Parameter Coordination
  6. 2026Environment Evolution for Terminal Agents
  7. 2025Adaptation of Agentic AI: A Survey of Post-Training, Memory, and Skills
  8. 2025Test-Time Adaptation for LLM Agents via Environment Interaction