{"id":1150871,"date":"2025-09-30T05:38:29","date_gmt":"2025-09-30T12:38:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-research-item&p=1150871"},"modified":"2026-07-23T08:11:36","modified_gmt":"2026-07-23T15:11:36","slug":"improving-language-agents-through-brew","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/improving-language-agents-through-brew\/","title":{"rendered":"Improving Language Agents through BREW: Bootstrapping expeRientially-learned Environmental knoWledge"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents are increasingly capable of complex, multi-step tasks such as GUI automation, tool use, and data manipulation, yet they cannot learn from experience: each new session rediscovers solutions from scratch. We introduce BREW (Bootstrapping expeRientially-learned Environmental knoWledge), a framework that distills an agent’s past interaction trajectories into a structured, retrievable knowledge base (KB) of natural-language recipes, concept-level procedural documents that capture what to do, when it applies, and what to watch out for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Drawing on the principle of library learning from program synthesis, BREW decomposes agent memory into modular, concept-localized documents and formalizes KB construction as a state-space search problem. To navigate this space, we introduce Expand-and-Gather Monte Carlo Tree Search (EG-MCTS), a reward-guided algorithm that jointly optimizes recipe accuracy and retrievability across parallel, per-concept search trees. We further adapt hindsight relabeling to convert near-miss trajectories into positive demonstrations, surfacing latent agent competencies as reusable knowledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On three domain-grounded benchmarks, OSWorld, tau^2-Bench, and SpreadSheetBench, BREW achieves 10-20% gains in task success and 10-15% fewer execution steps over base agents, while consistently outperforming existing memory-augmented baselines that can degrade below memoryless performance. The resulting KB is inspectable, modular, and extensible, providing a transparent and controllable substrate for agent optimization.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents are increasingly capable of complex, multi-step tasks such as GUI automation, tool use, and data manipulation, yet they cannot learn from experience: each new session rediscovers solutions from scratch. We introduce BREW (Bootstrapping expeRientially-learned Environmental knoWledge), a framework that distills an agent’s past interaction trajectories into a structured, retrievable knowledge […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":true,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"text","value":"Shashank Kirtania","user_id":0},{"type":"text","value":"Param Biyani","user_id":0},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Priyanshu Gupta","user_id":"42237"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Yasharth Bajpai","user_id":"42228"},{"type":"text","value":"Roshni Iyer","user_id":0},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Sumit Gulwani","user_id":"33755"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Gustavo 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