Agent Mentor: Framing Agent Knowledge through Semantic Trajectory Analysis

arXiv cs.AI / 4/14/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper proposes an “Agent Mentor” analytics pipeline that monitors and adaptively updates an agent’s internal system prompts to reduce performance variability caused by ambiguous or imprecise prompting.
  • It improves agent behavior by analyzing execution logs to extract semantic features tied to undesired actions, then injecting corrective instructions into the agent’s knowledge.
  • Experiments across three exemplar agent setups and benchmark tasks using repeated runs show consistent, measurable accuracy gains, especially when tasks involve specification ambiguity.
  • The authors released the pipeline code as open source under the Agent Mentor library to support reproducibility and future governance-oriented agent mentoring frameworks.

Abstract

AI agent development relies heavily on natural language prompting to define agents' tasks, knowledge, and goals. These prompts are interpreted by Large Language Models (LLMs), which govern agent behavior. Consequently, agentic performance is susceptible to variability arising from imprecise or ambiguous prompt formulations. Identifying and correcting such issues requires examining not only the agent's code, but also the internal system prompts generated throughout its execution lifecycle, as reflected in execution logs. In this work, we introduce an analytics pipeline implemented as part of the Agent Mentor open-source library that monitors and incrementally adapts the system prompts defining another agent's behavior. The pipeline improves performance by systematically injecting corrective instructions into the agent's knowledge. We describe its underlying mechanism, with particular emphasis on identifying semantic features associated with undesired behaviors and using them to derive corrective statements. We evaluate the proposed pipeline across three exemplar agent configurations and benchmark tasks using repeated execution runs to assess effectiveness. These experiments provide an initial exploration of automating such a mentoring pipeline within future agentic governance frameworks. Overall, the approach demonstrates consistent and measurable accuracy improvements across diverse configurations, particularly in settings dominated by specification ambiguity. For reproducibility, we released our code as open source under the Agent Mentor library.