ANNEAL: Adapting LLM Agents via Governed Symbolic Patch Learning

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 4 May 2026] ANNEAL: Adapting LLM Agents via Governed Symbolic Patch Learning Safayat Bin Hakim, Keyan Guo, Wenkai Tan, Alvaro Velasquez, Shouhuai Xu, Houbing Herbert Song LLM-based agents can recover from individual execution errors, yet they repeatedly fail on the same fault when the underlying process knowledge--operator schemas, preconditions, and constraints--remains unrepaired. Existing self-evolving approaches address this gap by updating prompts, memory, or model weights, but none directly repair the symbolic structures that encode how tasks are executed, and few provide the governance guarantees required for safe deployment. We introduce ANNEAL, a neuro-symbolic agent that converts recurring failures into governed symbolic edits of a process knowledge graph without modifying foundation model weights. Its core mechanism, Failure-Driven Knowledge Acquisition (FDKA), localizes the responsible operator, synthesizes a typed patch through constrained LLM generation, and validates the proposal via multi-dimensional scoring, symbolic guardrails, and canary testing before commit. Every accepted edit carries full provenance and deterministic rollback capability. Across four domains and 27 multi-seed runs, ANNEAL is the only evaluated system that commits persistent structural repairs--strong baselines such as ReAct and Reflexion achieve high episodic recovery yet retain 72-100% holdout failure rates on recurring faults, whereas ANNEAL reduces these to 0% in the tested recurring-failure settings. Ablation confirms that removing FDKA eliminates all structural repairs and drops success rate by up to 26.7 percentage points. These results suggest that governed symbolic repair offers a complementary paradigm to weight-level and prompt-level adaptation for persistent fault elimination. Comments: Code Implementation: this https URL Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG); Multiagent Systems (cs.MA) Cite as: arXiv:2605.16309 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2605.16309v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.16309 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Safayat Bin Hakim [view email] [v1] Mon, 4 May 2026 05:24:03 UTC (602 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs cs.LG cs.MA References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)