GRADUS: Discovering and Recovering Agent Lessons from the Environment's Latent Syllabus

Qing Ping, Wei Yang, Panpan Xu, Johannes Kirmayr, Lukas Stappen +2

Training LLM agents for policy-constrained tool environments, such as an airline backend with booking, refund, and cancellation policies, requires tasks that exercise the environment's rules individually and in combination. Existing synthesis pipelines let a model propose tasks and retain only those it immediately solves, biasing training data toward easier behaviors. We introduce Gradus (Graded Rungs of Ascending Difficulty from an Underlying System), which decouples what a task should teach from the concrete task and solution used to teach it. Without seed tasks, Gradus treats a fixed environment as a latent syllabus, extracting guarded behavioral operators that capture how actions depend on current conditions and how their effects reshape subsequent decisions. It composes these operators into increasingly demanding tasks while using corpus-level feedback to target missing outcome combinations. Crucially, Gradus jointly calibrates tasks and solutions against the environment: execution feedback identifies which side to refine while preserving the intended behavioral requirements. Verification thus becomes a recovery signal rather than a terminal filter, coupling coverage-guided…