Towards Robust Long-Lived Agents: Benchmarking Experience Lifecycles in Evolving Environments

arXiv:2611.05450v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As agents become more capable, they are moving beyond one-off tasks toward sustained assistance across successive user goals. Such assistance requires agents to discover how unfamiliar environments work, reuse what they learn across tasks, and keep that experience current as environments evolve. Existing benchmarks increasingly study experience reuse and adaptation, but provide limited insight into which parts of accumulated experience agents revise, retain, or lose. To address this gap, we introduce ReScopeBench, a benchmark for the experience lifecycle across 18 interactive environments. It distinguishes structural experience about how an environment is organized and accessed from rule experience about reusable principles and constraints that guide decisions across tasks. To study how experience is acquired, reused, and revised, we propose an experience-first construction approach. It builds task streams around shared experience and introduces silent environmental changes. We evaluate task performance and track changes in saved experience throughout each stream. Across 20 models, we find that retained experience improves task performance, but agents struggle to keep it current as environments change. Even when the required experience is correctly recorded, agents do not always complete tasks successfully. These findings identify selective maintenance and effective use as complementary challenges for long-lived agents.