Learning Stateful Predictive Knowledge From Experience
arXiv:2607.28638v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As large language model (LLM) agents increasingly learn from experience, they primarily rely on trajectory-level reflection to extract insights. Viewed through the lens of predictive knowledge, we argue that this approach operates on episodic hindsight rather than predictive foresight, yielding brittle, path-dependent heuristics. To address this, we propose Stateful Knowledge Learning (SKL). SKL shifts the agent's focus from trajectory-level summarization to maintaining Stateful Knowledge: explicit, declarative predictive assessments anchored to state. We first demonstrate a motivating example showing how stateful knowledge provides granularity, enhances generalization, and enables knowledge bootstrapping. To further scale up the idea, we introduce two algorithms via self-distillation (SKL-SD) and reinforcement learning (SKL-RL), training agents to autonomously extract state-grounded predictive knowledge from experience and learn to leverage it for policy making. Experiments on interactive environments (WebShop, ScienceWorld) and a complex reasoning task (ChessPuzzles) demonstrate that equipping models with the inherent ability to learn stateful predictive knowledge significantly outpaces current reflection-based training paradigms.
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[Submitted on 19 May 2026]
Title:Learning Stateful Predictive Knowledge From Experience
View a PDF of the paper titled Learning Stateful Predictive Knowledge From Experience, by Yan Song and 9 other authors
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Abstract:As large language model (LLM) agents increasingly learn from experience, they primarily rely on trajectory-level reflection to extract insights. Viewed through the lens of predictive knowledge, we argue that this approach operates on episodic hindsight rather than predictive foresight, yielding brittle, path-dependent heuristics. To address this, we propose Stateful Knowledge Learning (SKL). SKL shifts the agent's focus from trajectory-level summarization to maintaining Stateful Knowledge: explicit, declarative predictive assessments anchored to state. We first demonstrate a motivating example showing how stateful knowledge provides granularity, enhances generalization, and enables knowledge bootstrapping. To further scale up the idea, we introduce two algorithms via self-distillation (SKL-SD) and reinforcement learning (SKL-RL), training agents to autonomously extract state-grounded predictive knowledge from experience and learn to leverage it for policy making. Experiments on interactive environments (WebShop, ScienceWorld) and a complex reasoning task (ChessPuzzles) demonstrate that equipping models with the inherent ability to learn stateful predictive knowledge significantly outpaces current reflection-based training paradigms.
Subjects:
Computation and Language (cs.CL); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
Cite as: arXiv:2607.28638 [cs.CL]
(or arXiv:2607.28638v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.28638
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
Submission history
From: Yan Song [view email] [v1] Tue, 19 May 2026 17:09:32 UTC (962 KB)
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