Title: Beyond Manuals and Tasks: Instance-Level Context Learning for LLM Agents
Primary area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs
Keywords: Context Learning, AutoContext, LLM Agents, Embodied AI, Interactive Environments

Abstract: LLM agents typically receive two kinds of context: (i) environment-level manuals that define interaction interfaces and global rules, and (ii) task-level guidance or demonstrations tied to specific goals. In this work, we identify a crucial but overlooked third type of context, instance-level context, which consists of verifiable and reusable facts tied to a specific environment instance, such as object locations, crafting recipes, or local rules. We argue that the absence of instance-level context is a common source of failure for LLM agents in complex tasks, as success often depends not only on reasoning over global rules or task prompts but also on making decisions based on precise, persistent facts. Acquiring such context requires more than memorization: the challenge lies in efficiently exploring, validating, and formatting these facts under tight interaction budgets. We formalize this problem as Instance-Level Context Learning (ILCL) and introduce AutoContext, our task-agnostic method to solve it. AutoContext performs a guided exploration, using a compact TODO forest to intelligently prioritize its next actions and a lightweight plan–act–extract loop to execute them. This process automatically produces a high-precision context document that is reusable across many downstream tasks and agents, thereby amortizing the initial exploration cost. Experiments across TextWorld, ALFWorld, and Crafter demonstrate consistent gains in both success and efficiency: for instance, ReAct’s mean success rate in TextWorld rises from 37% to 95%, while IGE improves from 81% to 95%. By transforming one-off exploration into persistent, reusable knowledge, AutoContext complements existing contexts to enable more reliable and efficient LLM agents.

TL;DR: This paper studies environment exploration and generates reusable environment instance contexts for LLM-based methods.