Paper Detail

Escaping the Self-Confirmation Trap: An Execute-Distill-Verify Paradigm for Agentic Experience Learning

Shiding Zhu, Yudi Qi, Yajie Wang, Jiaze Li, Chao Song, Yaorui Shi, Yibo Miao, Hanqi Gao, Kai Zhang

huggingface Score 21.4

Published 2026-06-23 · First seen 2026-06-24

General AI

Abstract

Experience-driven self-evolution is critical for large language model (LLM) agents to improve through open-world interaction. However, existing experience learning methods mostly rely on single-agent loops, where the same agent executes tasks, summarizes outcomes, and determines memory content. This setup makes agents vulnerable to the Self-Confirmation Trap: wrong-but-self-consistent trajectories are misidentified as successful experience, leading to cumulative errors during retrieval and reuse. To address this issue, we propose EDV, an Execute-Distill-Verify framework for reliable experience learning. In the Execute stage, multiple heterogeneous agents explore the same task space in parallel to generate diverse candidate trajectories. In the Distill stage, a dedicated third-party agent comparatively analyzes these trajectories to produce candidate experiences, reducing executor-centric summarization bias. In the Verify stage, the execution group validates candidates via a consensus mechanism, and only approved experiences are written into shared or private memory. By decoupling the three stages, EDV transforms experience learning from isolated self-reflection into collaborative construction, filtering erroneous and noisy content before memory insertion. We evaluate EDV on three challenging long-horizon benchmarks: tau2-bench, Mind2Web and MMTB. Results show EDV consistently outperforms strong baselines, validating that reliable experience construction is essential for robust agent self-evolution. Our code is available at https://github.com/shidingz/EDV.

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BibTeX

@misc{zhu2026escaping,
  title = {Escaping the Self-Confirmation Trap: An Execute-Distill-Verify Paradigm for Agentic Experience Learning},
  author = {Shiding Zhu and Yudi Qi and Yajie Wang and Jiaze Li and Chao Song and Yaorui Shi and Yibo Miao and Hanqi Gao and Kai Zhang},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Experience-driven self-evolution is critical for large language model (LLM) agents to improve through open-world interaction. However, existing experience learning methods mostly rely on single-agent loops, where the same agent executes tasks, summarizes outcomes, and determines memory content. This setup makes agents vulnerable to the Self-Confirmation Trap: wrong-but-self-consistent trajectories are misidentified as successful experience, leading to cumulative errors during retrieval and reuse},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/papers/2606.24428},
  keywords = {large language model agents, self-confirmatory errors, execute-distill-verify, heterogeneous agents, collaborative construction, experience learning, memory insertion, long-horizon benchmarks, tau2-bench, Mind2Web, MMTB, huggingface daily},
  eprint = {2606.24428},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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