@inproceedings{su-etal-2026-mistake,
    title = "Mistake Notebook Learning: Batch-Clustered Failures for Training-Free Agent Adaptation",
    author = "Su, Xuanbo  and
      Zhang, Yingfang  and
      Luo, Hao  and
      Liu, Xiaoteng  and
      Huang, Leo",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.719/",
    pages = "14629--14645",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "With the growing adoption of Large Language Model (LLM) agents in persistent, real-world roles, they naturally encounter continuous streams of tasks and inevitable failures. A key limitation, however, is their inability to systematically learn from these mistakes, forcing them to repeat identical errors in similar contexts. Unlike prior training-free methods that primarily store raw instance-level experience or focus on retrieving successful trajectories, we propose Mistake Notebook Learning (MNL), a novel memory framework that enables agents to self-curate generalizable guidance from batch-clustered failures. This mechanism allows agents to distill shared error patterns into structured ``mistake notes'', updating an external memory only when batch performance improves to ensure stability. To further amplify adaptability, we integrate MNL with test-time scaling, leveraging aggregated failure patterns to actively steer the search process away from known pitfalls. Experiments on mathematical reasoning, Text-to-SQL, and interactive agent benchmarks show that MNL achieves competitive performance compared to existing memory mechanisms in both effectiveness and efficiency. These findings position structured mistake abstraction as a critical lever for robust agent evolution, enabling continuous improvement without the cost of parameter updates."
}