# Closing the Consistency Gap: Self-Evolving Agents That Learn to Stay on Course

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08832 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.08832/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (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 16 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/agents/general-llm-agent-frameworks-and-benchmarks/)
- Synthetic data and self-improvement for LLMs / [Self-evolving LLM agents](https://mlsanity.com/synth/self-evolving-llm-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [Scaling LLM Test-Time Compute Optimally can be More Effective than Scaling Model Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03314/) (2024)
- [MemGPT: Towards LLMs as Operating Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08560/) (2023)
- [A-MEM: Agentic Memory for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12110/) (2025)
- [A Survey on the Memory Mechanism of Large Language Model based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13501/) (2024)
- [Agentic Context Engineering: Evolving Contexts for Self-Improving Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04618/) (2025)
- [Memento: Fine-tuning LLM Agents without Fine-tuning LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16153/) (2025)
- [How Memory Management Impacts LLM Agents: An Empirical Study of Experience-Following Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16067/) (2025)
- [Towards a Science of AI Agent Reliability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.16666/) (2026)
- [Trajectory-Informed Memory Generation for Self-Improving Agent Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.10600/) (2026)
- [TrajAD: Trajectory Anomaly Detection for Trustworthy LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06443/) (2026)
- [Beyond Black-Box Benchmarking: Observability, Analytics, and Optimization of Agentic Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06745/) (2025)
- [Agentic AI Process Observability: Discovering Behavioral Variability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20127/) (2025)
- [AgentStepper: Interactive Debugging of Software Development Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06593/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language model (LLM)-powered agents can be accurate on average yet unreliable in production, a discrepancy that has been observed but remains largely unaddressed. When given the same task five times, a ReAct agent on the AppWorld benchmark using GPT-4.1 succeeds in all five runs only 53% of the time, even though its per-run pass rate averages 77%. We call this 24-point shortfall the consistency gap, and we argue that addressing it is a precondition for trustworthy AI agent deployment. We present a self-evolving agent framework that reduces this gap by identifying unstable, low-consistency steps in agent trajectories and converting them into episodic memory the agent can draw on in future runs. At its core is a Consistency Analyzer that pinpoints where and why a trajectory is likely to flip across executions, and a Guideline Generator that converts the diagnosis into targeted guidelines, committed to memory and injected into future agent executions on similar tasks. On AppWorld with ReAct/GPT-4.1, our framework raises the fraction of tasks that succeed in all five runs by +16 points on same-task evaluation and +13 points on similar-task generalization.