Early Experience for Language Agent Improvement

10/10/2025 16 min

Listen "Early Experience for Language Agent Improvement"

Episode Synopsis

This October 10, 2025 joint collaboration between Meta Superintelligence Labs, FAIR at Meta, and The Ohio State University academic paper proposes and evaluates a training paradigm called **"early experience"** for language agents to bridge the gap between **Imitation Learning (IL)** and **Reinforcement Learning (RL)**, especially in environments lacking reliable rewards. The core idea is to generate **scalable supervision** from the agent's own exploratory actions through two methods: **Implicit World Modeling (IWM)**, which trains the agent to predict the next state after an action, and **Self-Reflection (SR)**, where the agent generates reasoning to explain why an expert action is better than its alternatives. Experiments across eight environments—including web navigation and multi-turn tool-use—show that early experience consistently **outperforms pure imitation learning** and provides a **stronger initialization** for subsequent RL training, even using less expert data and across different model scales. This method improves both in-domain performance and **out-of-domain generalization**, offering a practical path toward developing agents that learn effectively from their own interactions without external reward signals.Source:https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.08558