Don’t Just Fine-tune The Agent, Tune The Environment | Awesome LLM Papers Add your paper to Awesome LLM Papers

Don't Just Fine-tune The Agent, Tune The Environment

Siyuan Lu, Zechuan Wang, Hongxuan Zhang, Qintong Wu, Leilei Gan, Chenyi Zhuang, Jinjie Gu, Tao Lin . No Venue 2025

[Paper]   Search on Google Scholar   Search on Semantic Scholar
Agentic Compositional Generalization Datasets Evaluation Fine Tuning Reinforcement Learning Training Techniques

Large Language Model (LLM) agents show great promise for complex, multi-turn tool-use tasks, but their development is often hampered by the extreme scarcity of high-quality training data. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on synthetic data leads to overfitting, whereas standard reinforcement learning (RL) struggles with a critical cold-start problem and training instability. To address these challenges, we introduce Environment Tuning, a novel training paradigm that enables agents to learn complex behaviors directly from problem instances without relying on pre-collected expert trajectories. Environment Tuning orchestrates this learning process through a structured curriculum, actionable environment augmentation that provides corrective feedback, and fine-grained progress rewards to ensure stable and efficient exploration. Using only 400 problem instances from Berkeley Function-Calling Leaderboard (BFCL) benchmark, our method not only achieves competitive in-distribution performance against strong baselines but also demonstrates superior out-of-distribution generalization, overcoming the performance collapse common to SFT-based approaches. Our work presents a paradigm shift from supervised fine-tuning on static trajectories to dynamic, environment-based exploration, paving the way for training more robust and data-efficient agents.

Similar Work