Learn Now, Use Next, Trust Later: Prequential Test-Time Learning for LLM Agents

arXiv:2609.35911v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Adapting large language model agents during deployment requires not only retaining past experience, but also turning new observations into timely guidance. Many test-time learning methods, however, acquire knowledge from completed episodes. Feedback from an ongoing interaction may therefore not be distilled into knowledge soon enough to help the next decision. Acquiring knowledge at the granularity of individual transitions could reduce this delay, but raises a separate challenge: a rule that is useful within one episode may not be reliable enough to guide future episodes. Waiting for validation can forfeit immediate benefits, whereas unrestricted reuse can propagate accidental or misattributed guidance. We introduce StepLearn, a nonparametric framework that separates immediate use from persistent trust. It turns informative transitions into hypotheses that can guide the next step, while requiring prospective validation before reuse across episodes. Their predicted effects are checked against subsequent observations outside the source episodes, and only sufficiently supported hypotheses become available for persistent guidance. This process updates external knowledge while keeping all model parameters fixed. Over five rounds on WebArena-Lite and ALFWorld, StepLearn achieves average success rates of 59.9% and 84.0% with GPT-5-mini, and 57.8% and 88.1% with Qwen3.5-35B-A3B, respectively. It outperforms EvoTest, the strongest baseline, by 2.2-12.7 percentage points across the four settings. Learning dynamics further shows that these gains are not restricted to the final repetition, with advantages already present on first task attempts in most settings.

Abstract:Adapting large language model agents during deployment requires not only retaining past experience, but also turning new observations into timely guidance. Many test-time learning methods, however, acquire knowledge from completed episodes. Feedback from an ongoing interaction may therefore not be distilled into knowledge soon enough to help the next decision. Acquiring knowledge at the granularity of individual transitions could reduce this delay, but raises a separate challenge: a rule that is useful within one episode may not be reliable enough to guide future episodes. Waiting for validation can forfeit immediate benefits, whereas unrestricted reuse can propagate accidental or misattributed guidance. We introduce StepLearn, a nonparametric framework that separates immediate use from persistent trust. It turns informative transitions into hypotheses that can guide the next step, while requiring prospective validation before reuse across episodes. Their predicted effects are checked against subsequent observations outside the source episodes, and only sufficiently supported hypotheses become available for persistent guidance. This process updates external knowledge while keeping all model parameters fixed. Over five rounds on WebArena-Lite and ALFWorld, StepLearn achieves average success rates of 59.9% and 84.0% with GPT-5-mini, and 57.8% and 88.1% with Qwen3.5-35B-A3B, respectively. It outperforms EvoTest, the strongest baseline, by 2.2-12.7 percentage points across the four settings. Learning dynamics further shows that these gains are not restricted to the final repetition, with advantages already present on first task attempts in most settings.

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2609.35911 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2609.35911v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.35911 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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Learn Now, Use Next, Trust Later: Prequential Test-Time Learning for LLM Agents

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