Self-Evolving Agents through Privileged Retrospective Distillation

Overview & Synopsis

Self-evolving agents aim to improve from their own experience rather than remain fixed after deployment, but naturally collected trajectories often lack ground-truth solutions or verifier-derived rewards. We introduce Retrospective Self-Distillation (RSD), a multi-round framework that turns such experience into dense supervision using privileged retrospective context. For each on-policy trajectory, the same underlying model acts as both student and teacher: the teacher re-scores the student's realized actions while conditioning on cross-task precedents and lessons, together with turn-level reflection and future hindsight from the completed trajectory. The resulting teacher distribution is distilled back into the policy through on-policy self-distillation. Across rounds, the experience bank grows and the retrospective context is refreshed, allowing the model, its data, and its supervision to co-evolve. We further introduce frontier-guided context-policy evolution, where a stronger frontier model proposes constrained edits to how privileged context is constructed. Across ALFWorld, ScienceWorld, and SearchQA with Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-14B, RSD improves performance by up to 59.7% relative to the base model, while frontier-guided context-policy evolution adds up to a further 44.7% relative improvement over a fixed context policy. These results show that naturally accumulated experience can be converted into persistent model capability without ground-truth trajectories or verifier-derived rewards for the core policy update.