Building Self-Evolving Agents via Experience-Driven Lifelong Learning: A Framework and Benchmark

As AI advances toward general intelligence, the focus is shifting from systems optimized for static tasks to creating open-ended agents that learn continuously. In this paper, we introduce Experience-driven Lifelong Learning (ELL), a framework for building self-evolving agents capable of continuous growth through real-world interaction. The framework is built on four core principles: (1) Experience Exploration: Agents learn through continuous, self-motivated interaction with dynamic environments, navigating interdependent tasks and generating rich experiential trajectories. (2) Long-term Memory: Agents preserve and structure historical knowledge, including personal experiences, domain expertise, and commonsense reasoning, into a persistent memory system. (3) Skill Learning: Agents autonomously improve by abstracting recurring patterns from experience into reusable skills, which are actively refined and validated for application in new tasks. (4) Knowledge Internalization: Agents internalize explicit and discrete experiences into implicit and intuitive capabilities as "second nature". We also introduce StuLife, a benchmark dataset for ELL that simulates a student's holistic college journey, from enrollment to academic and personal development, across three core phases and ten detailed sub-scenarios. StuLife is designed around three key paradigm shifts: From Passive to Proactive, From Context to Memory, and From Imitation to Learning. In this dynamic environment, agents must acquire and distill practical skills and maintain persistent memory to make decisions based on evolving state variables. StuLife provides a comprehensive platform for evaluating lifelong learning capabilities, including memory retention, skill transfer, and self-motivated behavior. Beyond evaluating SOTA LLMs on the StuLife benchmark, we also explore the role of context engineering in advancing AGI.

Reinforced Interactive Continual Learning via Real-time Noisy Human Feedback

This paper introduces an interactive continual learning paradigm where AI models dynamically learn new skills from real-time human feedback while retaining prior knowledge. This paradigm distinctively addresses two major limitations of traditional continual learning: (1) dynamic model updates using streaming, real-time human-annotated data, rather than static datasets with fixed labels, and (2) the assumption of clean labels, by explicitly handling the noisy feedback common in real-world interactions. To tackle these problems, we propose RiCL, a Reinforced interactive Continual Learning framework leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to learn new skills effectively from dynamic feedback. RiCL incorporates three key components: a temporal consistency-aware purifier to automatically discern clean from noisy samples in data streams; an interaction-aware direct preference optimization strategy to align model behavior with human intent by reconciling AI-generated and human-provided feedback; and a noise-resistant contrastive learning module that captures robust representations by exploiting inherent data relationships, thus avoiding reliance on potentially unreliable labels. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets (FewRel and TACRED), contaminated with realistic noise patterns, demonstrate that our RiCL approach substantially outperforms existing combinations of state-of-the-art online continual learning and noisy-label learning methods.

Recent Advances of Foundation Language Models-based Continual Learning: A Survey

Recently, foundation language models (LMs) have marked significant achievements in the domains of natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV). Unlike traditional neural network models, foundation LMs obtain a great ability for transfer learning by acquiring rich commonsense knowledge through pre-training on extensive unsupervised datasets with a vast number of parameters. However, they still can not emulate human-like continuous learning due to catastrophic forgetting. Consequently, various continual learning (CL)-based methodologies have been developed to refine LMs, enabling them to adapt to new tasks without forgetting previous knowledge. However, a systematic taxonomy of existing approaches and a comparison of their performance are still lacking, which is the gap that our survey aims to fill. We delve into a comprehensive review, summarization, and classification of the existing literature on CL-based approaches applied to foundation language models, such as pre-trained language models (PLMs), large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs). We divide these studies into offline CL and online CL, which consist of traditional methods, parameter-efficient-based methods, instruction tuning-based methods and continual pre-training methods. Offline CL encompasses domain-incremental learning, task-incremental learning, and class-incremental learning, while online CL is subdivided into hard task boundary and blurry task boundary settings. Additionally, we outline the typical datasets and metrics employed in CL research and provide a detailed analysis of the challenges and future work for LMs-based continual learning.