Share your thoughts, 1 month free Claude Pro on usSee more
WorkDL logo mark

From Trainee to Trainer: LLM-Designed Training Environment for RL with Multi-Agent Reasoning

About

Reinforcement learning pipelines for Large Language Model (LLM) training often rely on manually redesigned environments between stages, requiring practitioners to heuristically infer which configuration will best improve the current policy. To automate this process, we propose the LLM-as-Environment-Engineer framework in which the current policy model analyzes failure trajectories together with contextual information and proposes modifications to the next-stage training environment configuration. We also introduce MAPF-FrozenLake, a controllable testbed whose generator exposes multi-dimensional environment configurations, making it suitable for studying and benchmarking environment redesign. On this testbed, we condition the environment engineer on structured summaries of policy behavior, failure cases, and environment statistics, from which it produces the configuration for the next training stage. With Qwen3-4B as the backbone, our framework achieves the strongest aggregate performance on our benchmarks, outperforming larger proprietary LLMs (e.g., GPT, Gemini) and fixed-environment training baselines. We further analyze which forms of context are most effective, finding that successful environment updates rely on failure evidence and preserve configurations that already work. Interestingly, the current RL checkpoint serves as a better environment engineer than the original base model, suggesting that policy learning improves the model's ability to diagnose its remaining weaknesses.

Chao Chen, Chengzu Li, Zhiwei Li, Yinhong Liu, Zhijiang Guo• 2026

Related benchmarks

TaskDatasetResultRank
Multi-Agent Path FindingMAPF-FrozenLake 4-agent 4x4
Valid Rate49.33
7
Multi-Agent Path FindingMAPF-FrozenLake 4-agent 5x5
Valid Rate37.33
7
Multi-Agent Path Finding4-agent MAPF-FrozenLake 6x6
Valid Rate36.67
7
Multi-Agent Path FindingMAPF-FrozenLake 4-agent 7x7
Valid Rate33.33
7
Multi-Agent Path FindingMAPF-FrozenLake 4-agent 8x8
Valid Rate31.33
7
Multi-Agent Path FindingMAPF-FrozenLake 4-agent (9x9)
Valid Rate25.33
7
Multi-Agent Path FindingMAPF-FrozenLake 4-agent 10x10
Valid Rate18.67
7
Multi-Agent Path FindingMAPF-FrozenLake 4-agent Sum
Valid Rate33.14
7
Multi-Agent Path Finding3-agent evaluation set (3x3)
Valid Rate68.67
7
Multi-Agent Path Finding3-agent 4x4 (test)
Valid Rate64.67
7
Showing 10 of 24 rows

Other info

GitHub

Follow for update