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EnvGen: Generating and Adapting Environments via LLMs for Training Embodied Agents

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arxiv 2403.12014 v2 pith:2ICTSO67 submitted 2024-03-18 cs.CL cs.AIcs.LG

EnvGen: Generating and Adapting Environments via LLMs for Training Embodied Agents

classification cs.CL cs.AIcs.LG
keywords agentsenvironmentsenvgenagentllmslearningskillssmall
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Recent SOTA approaches for embodied learning via interaction directly employ large language models (LLMs) as agents to determine the next steps in an environment. Due to their world knowledge and reasoning capabilities, LLM agents achieve stronger performance than previous smaller agents based on reinforcement learning (RL); however, frequently calling LLMs is slow and expensive. Instead of directly employing LLMs as agents, can we use LLMs' reasoning capabilities to adaptively create training environments to help smaller RL agents learn useful skills that they are weak at? We propose EnvGen, a novel framework to address this question. We first prompt an LLM to generate training environments by giving it the task description and simulator objectives that the agents should learn and then asking it to generate a set of environment configurations (e.g., different terrains, items initially given to agents, etc.). Next, we train a small RL agent in a mixture of the original and LLM-generated environments. Then, we enable the LLM to continuously adapt the generated environments to progressively improve the skills that the agent is weak at, by providing feedback to the LLM in the form of the agent's performance. We demonstrate the usefulness of EnvGen with comprehensive experiments in Crafter and Heist environments. We find that a small RL agent trained with EnvGen can outperform SOTA methods, including a GPT-4 agent, and learns long-horizon tasks significantly faster. We also show that using an LLM to adapt environments dynamically outperforms curriculum learning approaches and how the environments are adapted to help improve RL agents' weaker skills over time. Additionally, EnvGen is substantially more efficient as it only uses a small number of LLM calls (e.g., 4 in total), whereas LLM agents require thousands of calls. Lastly, we present detailed ablation studies for EnvGen design choices.

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Forward citations

Cited by 7 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. SimWorld Studio: Automatic Environment Generation with Evolving Coding Agent for Embodied Agent Learning

    cs.AI 2026-05 accept novelty 8.0

    SimWorld Studio deploys an evolving coding agent to create adaptive 3D environments that co-evolve with embodied learners, delivering 18-point success-rate gains over fixed environments in navigation benchmarks.

  2. SimWorld Studio: Automatic Environment Generation with Evolving Coding Agent for Embodied Agent Learning

    cs.AI 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 8.0

    SimWorld Studio uses a self-evolving coding agent to generate adaptive 3D environments that improve embodied agent performance, with reported gains of 18 points over fixed environments in navigation tasks.

  3. Multi-SWE-bench: A Multilingual Benchmark for Issue Resolving

    cs.SE 2025-04 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Multi-SWE-bench provides 1,632 high-quality issue-resolving instances across Java, TypeScript, JavaScript, Go, Rust, C, and C++ for evaluating LLMs on codebase modifications.

  4. PhoneBuddy: Training Open Models for Agentic Phone Use

    cs.CL 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    PhoneBuddy combines real-app and mock-app RL after shared SFT, raising real-phone task success from 36.67% to 45.33% and AndroidWorld from 60.3% to 83.2%.

  5. PhoneWorld: Scaling Phone-Use Agent Environments

    cs.CL 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    PhoneWorld is a pipeline that converts real mobile trajectories into scalable controllable environments, yielding large gains on four benchmarks when used to supplement training data.

  6. Agent-World: Scaling Real-World Environment Synthesis for Evolving General Agent Intelligence

    cs.AI 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Agent-World autonomously synthesizes verifiable real-world tasks and uses continuous self-evolution to train 8B and 14B agents that outperform proprietary models on 23 benchmarks.

  7. Agentic Environment Engineering for Large Language Models: A Survey of Environment Modeling, Synthesis, Evaluation, and Application

    cs.CL 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    This survey categorizes agentic environments for LLMs by eight attributes and domains, introduces symbolic and neural synthesis paradigms with evaluation, and outlines four agent evolution pathways plus three environm...