SETA: Scaling Environments for Terminal Agents
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Reinforcement learning for LLM agents
Abstract (arXiv)
Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly shifting toward agents that solve tasks through diverse interfaces, including web and graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Among these, the terminal command line provides a text-based, general-purpose interface, covering tasks from system operations to data science and machine learning. However, scaling terminal-agent training remains challenging, as it requires diverse and coherent task instructions, executable environments, and reliable verification, while lacking naturally grounded supervision data. In this work, we propose SETA, a scalable framework for generating verifiable terminal environments for reinforcement learning (RL). The framework consists of two pipelines sharing a unified verification mechanism: SETA-Synth converts diverse sources into standardized RL environments, and SETA-Evol further expands from existing environments with adaptive control of difficulty and diversity. Together, we construct and release SETA-Env, the largest open-source verifiable terminal RL dataset to date, containing over 4,500 environments. We evaluate our dataset by training Qwen3-8B with GRPO on SETA-Env, achieving 12% pass rate on Terminal-Bench 2.0, the best reported result for an RL-trained model at the 8B scale. We further observe gains on DeepSeek-V4-Flash under the same terminal agent harness, with pass@1 on Terminal-Bench 2.0 improving from 40% to 43% and pass@5 improving from 54% to 58%. These results demonstrate that SETA- Env provides high-quality training environments for terminal agents and serves as a valuable resource for advancing research on terminal-based agent learning.
Key facts. Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Reinforcement learning for LLM agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 30 of its 42 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 12 Jul 2026.
Builds on
30 of 42 references.
References · 30
- 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 9,379
- 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,695
- 2023SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?cited by 3,373
- 2025DAPO: An Open-Source LLM Reinforcement Learning System at Scalecited by 2,810
- 2022Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructionscited by 2,724
- 2023WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agentscited by 2,006
- 2024SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineeringcited by 1,737
- 2025Search-R1: Training LLMs to Reason and Leverage Search Engines with Reinforcement Learningcited by 1,444
- 2023CAMEL: Communicative Agents for "Mind" Exploration of Large Language Model Societycited by 1,395
- 2023AgentBench: Evaluating LLMs as Agentscited by 1,267
- 2024OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environmentscited by 1,195
- 2023WizardLM: Empowering large pre-trained language models to follow complex instructionscited by 1,125
18 more
- 2026DeepSeek-V4: Towards Highly Efficient Million-Token Context Intelligencecited by 1,040
- 2023WizardCoder: Empowering Code Large Language Models with Evol-Instructcited by 733
- 2026Terminal-Bench: Benchmarking Agents on Hard, Realistic Tasks in Command Line Interfacescited by 585
- 2024Training Software Engineering Agents and Verifiers with SWE-Gymcited by 336
- 2025SWE-smith: Scaling Data for Software Engineering Agentscited by 285
- 2025AReaL: A Large-Scale Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning System for Language Reasoningcited by 250
- 2023InterCode: Standardizing and Benchmarking Interactive Coding with Execution Feedbackcited by 238
- 2025R2E-Gym: Procedural Environments and Hybrid Verifiers for Scaling Open-Weights SWE Agentscited by 158
- 2025REASONING GYM: Reasoning Environments for Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewardscited by 130
- 2018NL2Bash: A Corpus and Semantic Parser for Natural Language Interface to the Linux Operating Systemcited by 98
- 2026Endless Terminals: Scaling RL Environments for Terminal Agentscited by 54
- 2025RLVE: Scaling Up Reinforcement Learning for Language Models with Adaptive Verifiable Environmentscited by 50
- 2026On Data Engineering for Scaling LLM Terminal Capabilitiescited by 43
- 2026Large-Scale Terminal Agentic Trajectory Generation from Dockerized Environmentscited by 33
- 2026ScaleEnv: Scaling Environment Synthesis from Scratch for Generalist Interactive Tool-Use Agent Trainingcited by 32
- 2026TermiGen: High-Fidelity Environment and Robust Trajectory Synthesis for Terminal Agentscited by 29
- 2024Automatic Instruction Evolving for Large Language Modelscited by 26
- 2025CRUST-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for C-to-safe-Rust Transpilationcited by 19
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 12.
12 papers.
- 2026CalibForge: Adversarial Solver Calibration for Scaling Learnable Terminal Taskscited by 8
- 2026Terminal Agents: A Survey of AI Agents in Command-Line Environmentscited by 1
- 2026Self-Supervised Scaling of Terminal Environments for Scientific Domainscited by 1
- 2026Atria Dawn: The Dawn of Agentic Superintelligencecited by 0
- 2026Rufus-Air: An Open LLM Post-Training Recipecited by 0
- 2026Can Terminal Agents Trust Their Own Verification? Diagnosing and Improving Self-Verificationcited by 0
- 2026Credit Where It Matters: Dependency-Aware Policy Optimization for Terminal Agentscited by 0
- 2026ThunderSyncRL: Lossless Acceleration of Agentic Reinforcement Learningcited by 0
- 2026AutoEnvScaling: Automating the Data Flywheel with Terminal Agentscited by 0
- 2026Scalable Weak-to-Strong Verifier Hardening for Agent Environmentscited by 0
- 2026ReTerm: Recovery Training for Self-Improving Terminal Agentscited by 0
- 2026Tev: Scaling Long-Horizon Agentic Environments with Dense Progress Rewardscited by 0
- 2026Tev: Scaling Long-Horizon Agentic Environments with Dense Progress Rewards13 Oct 2026
- 2026ReTerm: Recovery Training for Self-Improving Terminal Agents13 Oct 2026
- 2026Scalable Weak-to-Strong Verifier Hardening for Agent Environments11 Oct 2026
- 2026AutoEnvScaling: Automating the Data Flywheel with Terminal Agents9 Oct 2026
- 2026ThunderSyncRL: Lossless Acceleration of Agentic Reinforcement Learning5 Oct 2026
- 2026Credit Where It Matters: Dependency-Aware Policy Optimization for Terminal Agents2 Oct 2026
- 2026Self-Supervised Scaling of Terminal Environments for Scientific Domains2 Oct 2026
- 2026Can Terminal Agents Trust Their Own Verification? Diagnosing and Improving Self-Verification30 Sep 2026
- 2026Rufus-Air: An Open LLM Post-Training Recipe24 Sep 2026
- 2026Atria Dawn: The Dawn of Agentic Superintelligence14 Sep 2026
- 2026Terminal Agents: A Survey of AI Agents in Command-Line Environments20 Aug 2026
- 2026CalibForge: Adversarial Solver Calibration for Scaling Learnable Terminal Tasks6 Aug 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026Terminal-World: Scaling Terminal-Agent Environments via Agent Skills
- 2026Tmax: A simple recipe for terminal agents
- 2026LiteCoder-Terminal: Scaling Long-Horizon Terminal Environments for Learning Language Agents
- 2026Recursive Synthesis for Long-Horizon Terminal Tasks
- 2026Learning Generalizable Behaviors for Terminal Agents
- 2026Meta-Task: Turning Terminal Task Synthesis into a Terminal Task for Scalable Agent Training
- 2026T1: Terminal Agent Reinforcement Learning for Long-Horizon Tasks
- 2026CUA-Gym: Scaling Verifiable Training Environments and Tasks for Computer-Use Agents