Online Experiential Learning for Language Models

🤗 Upvotes: 39 | cs.CL

Authors:
Tianzhu Ye, Li Dong, Qingxiu Dong, Xun Wu, Shaohan Huang, Furu Wei

Title:
Online Experiential Learning for Language Models

Arxiv:
http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.16856v1

Abstract:
The prevailing paradigm for improving large language models relies on offline training with human annotations or simulated environments, leaving the rich experience accumulated during real-world deployment entirely unexploited. We propose Online Experiential Learning (OEL), a framework that enables language models to continuously improve from their own deployment experience. OEL operates in two stages: first, transferable experiential knowledge is extracted and accumulated from interaction trajectories collected on the user side; second, this knowledge is consolidated into model parameters via on-policy context distillation, requiring no access to the user-side environment. The two stages are iterated to form an online learning loop, where the improved model collects higher-quality trajectories that yield richer experiential knowledge for subsequent rounds. We evaluate OEL on text-based game environments across multiple model scales and both thinking and non-thinking variants. OEL achieves consistent improvements over successive iterations, enhancing both task accuracy and token efficiency while preserving out-of-distribution performance. Our analysis further shows that extracted experiential knowledge is significantly more effective than raw trajectories, and that on-policy consistency between the knowledge source and the policy model is critical for effective learning.

What is Daily Paper Cast?

We update every weekday to discuss highest-voted papers from Huggingface Daily Paper (https://huggingface.co/papers). Both the podcast scripts and audio are generated by AI. Feedback and suggestions are welcome! Email us: [e-mail]

Creator:
Jingwen Liang, 3D ML, https://www.linkedin.com/in/jingwen-liang/
Gengyu Wang, LLM ML, http://wanggengyu.com

Listen on:
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/21nrhmdaA8qoBiH8q03NXL
Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/daily-paper-cast/id1777620236

Cover Image by Kawen Kuang https://kawen.art