EdgeBench: Unveiling Scaling Laws of Learning from Real-World Environments
2026-07-06 • Computation and Language
Computation and LanguageMachine Learning
AI summaryⓘ
The authors studied how computer agents learn by interacting with real-world tasks after they are deployed, analyzing a large dataset of about 38,000 hours across 134 tasks. They discovered that agent performance grows in a predictable pattern described by a log-sigmoid curve with very high accuracy. They also found that the speed at which agents learn is roughly doubling every three months. Their work is based on EdgeBench, a diverse set of real-world tasks requiring continuous operation and complex feedback, and they have shared part of this benchmark publicly to help others study real-world agent learning.
pretraining scaling lawslog-sigmoid scalingagent learningreal-world tasksEdgeBenchcontinuous operationmultilevel feedbackbenchmarkinglearning speed
Authors
Deyao Zhu, Xin Zhou, Shengling Qin, Xuekai Zhu, Hangliang Ding, Shu Zhong, Zixin Wen, Zhonglin Xie, Chenhui Gou, Linxuan Ren, Yueyang Wang, Junfeng Zhong, Rui Liu, Tian Gao, Yangguang Lin, Jingyuan Zhang, Maojia Song, Xuan Qi, Jinhong Wu, Chenyang Zhang, Yinzhu Piao, Ziru Niu, Hongbin Lin, Lingxiang Meng, Peng Tang, Chengyao Tang, Shanyu Wu, Huanyu Zheng, Yu Liu, Liya Zhu, He Wang, Ming Ding, Ziyu Wan, Hao Liu, Sibo Wang, Haotian Zhu, Xintian Zhang, Nan Chai, Yipeng Liu, Panhao Lai, Sihang Yuan, Zixin Su, Ge Zhang, Wangchunshu Zhou, Yantao Du, Wenhao Huang, Guang Shi
Abstract
Pretraining scaling laws reveal that model capability improves predictably with data and compute. But learning from real world environments after deployment remains far less understood. Analyzing roughly 38,000 hours of agent interaction with the environment across 134 real world tasks, we find, to the best of our knowledge, the first evidence that overall performance during environment learning follows a log-sigmoid scaling law with remarkably high precision, reaching R^2 = 0.998. Across model generations, we also find that agent learning speed roughly doubles every three months. This discovery stems from EdgeBench, a suite of 134 real world tasks with ultra-long horizons, spanning scientific discovery, software engineering, combinatorial optimization, professional knowledge work, formal mathematics, and interactive games. Each task sustains at least 12 hours of continuous agent operation under rich, multilevel feedback, and is built through substantial expert effort. We publicly release 51 tasks and our full evaluation framework to accelerate the study of how agents learn from real world experience.