paper
arXiv cs.AI
November 11th, 2026 at 5:00 AM

When Should Agents Remember? Falsification-Gated Self-Evolution for LLM Agents

arXiv:2611.14326v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents increasingly operate in long-horizon, verifier-rich environments, but current self-improvement mechanisms often write episode-derived lessons directly into memory, making local success an unreliable signal for reusable and safe knowledge. This paper addresses the core question of when an experience-derived behavioral update should be admitted into persistent agent state. We propose Falsification-Gated Self-Evolution (FGSE), a verifier-grounded framework that represents each candidate lesson as a structured hypothesis with an explicit precondition, behavior change, expected effect, and verifier. FGSE applies the hypothesis only in a temporary state, tests it on target-transfer, falsification, and archived-regression probes, and then commits, refines, or rejects it according to measured gain and risk. Across web, app, tool-use, and long-term memory benchmarks, FGSE achieves strong task performance, including 39.8 WebArena success rate, 78.8 AppWorld average completion, and 0.724/0.487 Pass$^1$ on $\tau$-Retail/$\tau$-Airline, while reducing falsification failures to 5.0%, regression damage to 1.3%, and harmful committed updates to 3.6%. These results suggest that testing memory updates as hypotheses supports more reliable long-term adaptation.

#ai
#llm
#research

Get stories like this every Monday

The week's most important AI news in one email. Free, unsubscribe anytime.

Score: 3.15

Engagement proxy: 0

Canonical link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14326