ACE Agentic Context Engineering: Self-Learning AI (Stanford)

Abstract

The synergy between Early Experience and Agentic Context Engineering (ACE) creates a powerful, two-loop architecture for autonomous AI self-improvement. The Early Experience paradigm acts as the agent’s tactical sensory system, generating a continuous stream of raw, grounded learning signals by exploring alternative actions and observing their immediate, reward-free consequences.

This raw experiential data then feeds into the Agentic Context Engineering framework, which functions as the agent’s strategic cognitive brain. Here, a Reflector analyzes these experiences to distill high-level principles, and a Curator surgically integrates them into an evolving, detailed “playbook” - a permanent knowledge base of strategies and pitfalls that avoids the destructive traps of context collapse and brevity bias.

This creates a virtuous cycle: the structured wisdom of the ACE playbook makes the agent’s future explorations more intelligent and efficient, which in turn provides richer, more nuanced data to further refine the playbook, allowing an agent to evolve from simply reacting to its environment to strategically accumulating expertise.

All rights w/ authors: Agentic Context Engineering: Evolving Contexts for Self-Improving Language Models Qizheng Zhang 1, Changran Hu 2, Shubhangi Upasani 2, Boyuan Ma 2, Fenglu Hong 2, Vamsidhar Kamanuru 2, Jay Rainton 2, Chen Wu 2, Mengmeng Ji 2, Hanchen Li 3, Urmish Thakker 2, James Zou 1, Kunle Olukotun 1, from 1 Stanford University 2 SambaNova Systems, Inc. 3 UC Berkeley

Pre-print #2: “Agent Learning via Early Experience” Kai Zhang1,3,◦,⋆, Xiangchao Chen3,⋆, Bo Liu2,⋆, Tianci Xue3,⋆, Zeyi Liao3,⋆, Zhihan Liu1,⋆, Xiyao Wang1,⋆, Yuting Ning3,⋆, Zhaorun Chen1,⋆, Xiaohan Fu1, Jian Xie3, Yuxuan Sun3, Boyu Gou3, Qi Qi1, Zihang Meng1, Jianwei Yang1, Ning Zhang1, Xian Li2, Ashish Shah1, Dat Huynh1, Hengduo Li1, Zi Yang1, Sara Cao1, Lawrence Jang1, Shuyan Zhou1,⋆, Jiacheng Zhu1,⋆, Huan Sun3,⋆, Jason Weston2,⋆, Yu Su3,†, Yifan Wu1,† from 1 Meta Superintelligence Labs, 2 FAIR at Meta, 3 The Ohio State University