Toward LLM Self-Play Under Data Scarcity: Effectiveness, Generalizability, and Trustworthiness

Zhiyin Yu, Yuchen Mou, Bingzhe Wu, Zhonghai Wu, Shiyang Feng +1

The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has been driven largely by scaling model size and human-curated training data, yet this paradigm is increasingly constrained by data scarcity and diminishing returns from human supervision. Self-play offers a promising pathway for autonomous data generation and improvement, but current frameworks remain unsatisfactory due to a lack of a data-centric perspective, limited cross-domain generalization, and growing trustworthiness and security concerns. In this paper, we argue that real-world LLM self-play systems should achieve effectiveness, generalizability, and trustworthiness under data scarcity. To address these challenges, we outline three blue-sky research directions for future self-play systems: (1) data-centric self-play for effective experience generation, (2) generalizable self-play for open-world and unverifiable tasks, and (3) trustworthy self-play for reliable self-evolution. We further discuss research opportunities and solutions within each direction. This paradigm shift will establish a sustainable and safe AI ecosystem by transforming finite human knowledge into inexhaustible high-quality experience through…