From Reflection to Co-Evolution: Self-Evolving Agents with Locally Verified Memory

arXiv:2611.10382v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents have made impressive progress in coding and mathematical reasoning, motivating growing interest in learning from long-horizon interaction. Memory supports this process, but plausible lessons can be redundant or reinforce inappropriate actions. Can a memory's source decision provide a practical test for whether to retain it? We localize consequential trajectory steps, extract candidate memories, and replay each source decision with and without its candidate under the same context. This reveals two properties: most candidates barely shift the probed distribution, and both successful and failed source actions can be reinforced or suppressed. These observations motivate Anchor, which tests shift magnitude and source-role alignment before retention. Admitted memories guide later trajectories, enabling experience-driven improvement under a frozen policy. On held-out ALFWorld and WebShop tasks, Anchor improves success rate and mean score by up to 19.9% and 17.2%, respectively, relative to the strongest baseline for each backbone. With Qwen3.5-27B, it retains 41% fewer ALFWorld cards than unfiltered retention and outperforms all four WebShop cost-comparison baselines while using fewer tokens.