Papers
arxiv:2610.16523

EAU: Environment-Agent-User Co-evolution for Training User-Centric Agents

Published on Oct 12
· Submitted by
Min Cai
on Oct 21
Authors:
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Abstract

EAU is a meta-agent framework that co-evolves the user simulator, environment, and reinforcement learning setup alongside the policy to improve multi-turn LLM agent training.

Training LLM agents to interact with users over multiple turns is challenging because the learning signal depends not only on the agent, but also on the user simulator and environment, which jointly shape the agent's experience. Simulated users can be stochastic or inconsistent, while environments may contain unreliable tools, incomplete state coverage, and incorrect verifiers. Prior work mainly addresses the resulting instability through reward shaping or denser supervision, while treating these components as fixed. We instead introduce EAU, a meta-agent framework for environment--agent--user co-evolution. During training, EAU monitors trajectories, tool traces, rewards, and training statistics; diagnoses failures and uninformative interactions; and proposes targeted modifications to the user simulator, environment, reward design, and RL configuration. Validated changes are hot-swapped into the ongoing run, allowing the training setup to evolve together with the policy. These adaptations also persist across runs, so later training can build on previously discovered improvements rather than restarting from a fixed setup. We enable this process through an editable symbolic representation of user and environment dynamics, while the agent remains a neural LLM optimized with RL. Across three interactive-agent benchmarks and two backbone models, EAU consistently outperforms prior RL methods, improving the overall score over the strongest baseline by 14.7--15.0% and increasing successful task completion on ColBench by up to 36.7%, showing that co-evolving the training system with the policy can substantially improve multi-turn RL.

Community

Wanna train your own agent automatically? Check out our latest work, in which we let coding agents act as meta-agents to evolve the environment, the agent, and the user all at once, with on-the-fly modifications hot-swapped into the training process.

We find that by asking a coding agent to

  1. manage the agent training and the world (i.e., env and user) it interacts with, and to
  2. make modifications whenever necessary during training,
    the resulting system surpasses algorithms designed by human experts.

Group 35

Training an agent on interactive user-centric tasks involves three components: agent RL training, environments and reward design, and user simulators. Coordinating them is non-trivial.

Our solution: Let a meta agent take over the training and jointly evolve all the components.

P.S.: We also adjust the components so that the meta agent can better manage and evolve them. For example, we introduce a rule-based symbolic user simulator.

Group 30

More concretely, the meta agent can propose and apply modifications before training ends. We adjust the training framework so that modifications can be applied without terminating training.

The meta agent is required to examine trajectories and logs every n minutes or every n steps, and determine which component to modify and how.

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We use PPO as the default RL algorithm. On almost every task and in almost every domain, EAU improves performance and outperforms algorithms designed by human experts.

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eau also helps when combined with different RL algorithms. This indicates that for tasks with complex interactions, designing a better algorithm may not be the first thing to try

In addition, switching from Claude Code (Opus 5 medium) to Codex (GPT-5.6-Sol medium) leads to a slight drop in performance.

Group 33

Compared with a naive meta agent that can only modify limited components before each run, EAU is more effective at finding ways to improve performance.

Group 34

Try out our skill for your own RL training! The skill is at https://github.com/StringNLPLAB/meta-agent

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