Scaling Environments for Agents (SEA)

NeurIPS 2025 Workshop

Date: Sat Dec 6th   |   Location: San Diego Convention Center, San Diego, USA

The development of intelligent agents – particularly those powered by large language models (LLMs) – has emphasized the critical role of environments in shaping agent behavior and capabilities, especially for achieving end-to-end autonomy. Environments are not merely testing grounds; they are dynamic, interactive contexts that serve as the essential "data" for agents to learn adaptive behavior, complex reasoning, and long-term decision-making skills. Just as scaling the model size, dataset size, and training computation has led to emergent capabilities in LLMs, scaling the structure, fidelity, and diversity of environments is one of the crucial dimensions in advancing agent intelligence. Moreover, recent advances in end-to-end reinforcement learning (RL), particularly when paired with LLM-based agents, have made it increasingly viable to train agents through sustained interaction. These agents can now acquire skills, strategies, and planning abilities through environmental feedback, rather than relying solely on imitation learning or static prompt engineering. As we move toward more autonomous, general-purpose agents, the need for scalable, richly interactive, and diverse environments has become both urgent and foundational.

Topics of Interest Scaling Environments for Agents
1
Environment Infrastructure Design Task formulation, action-space design, environment generation, compositionality, and agent integration.
2
Benchmarks and Evaluation Multi-step interaction metrics, generalization testing, open-ended benchmarks, curriculum scaling, and human-in-the-loop assessments.
3
LLMs in Interactive Environments Reinforcement learning, policy learning, reward modeling, hybrid training, and fine-tuning through interaction.
4
Tool-Use and Software Environments Workforce, Agents as programmers, API orchestration, tool design, software manipulation, and web navigation.
5
Multi-Agent Systems and Simulation Environments Scaling agent populations, emergent behaviors, communication, coordination, competition, and role dynamics.
6
Embodiment and Grounding Perception-action loops, physical simulation, spatial reasoning, robotics integration, and simulation-to-physical grounding.
7
Sim2Real and Deployment Domain adaptation, real-world API integration, robustness under scale, safety, and large-scale deployment.
Call for Papers Scaling Environments for Agents

Submission Tracks

We invite contributions in Topics of Interest that are central to the theme of the workshop. However, we emphasize that the topic list is not exhaustive and welcome submissions in related areas.


Submission Guidelines

We manage paper submissions through OpenReview. The review process is double‑blind, so submissions must be anonymized. We welcome work that is (1) original and unpublished, (2) recently published, or (3) work‑in‑progress. By default, submissions will not have archival proceedings. However, if you would like your paper to be indexed, please inform us upon acceptance.

Please use the NeurIPS 2025 LaTeX style file; it includes a preprint option for non‑anonymous preprints posted online (see additional formatting details here). Submissions should be PDFs of ≤ 9 pages (excluding references and appendices).

We will select outstanding papers for lightning talks. The award for best paper will be announced at the workshop.


Important Dates (Anywhere on Earth)

Paper Submission Deadline
Notification of Acceptance
Camera‑ready Paper Submission
Workshop at NeurIPS
Schedule (Tentative) Scaling Environments for Agents
Time Session Duration
08:15 - 08:30 Opening Remarks 15 min
08:30 - 09:00 Invited Talk 1 25 min + 5 min Q&A
09:00 - 09:30 Invited Talk 2 25 min + 5 min Q&A
09:30 - 10:00 Morning Break 30 min
10:00 - 10:30 Invited Talk 3 25 min + 5 min Q&A
10:30 - 11:00 Lightning Oral (6 talks) 30 min (3 min + 2 min Q&A per talk)
11:00 - 11:30 Invited Talk 4 25 min + 5 min Q&A
11:30 - 12:00 Invited Talk 5 25 min + 5 min Q&A
12:00 - 13:30 Lunch Break 90 min
12:30 - 13:30 Poster Session 1 60 min
13:30 - 13:50 Lightning Oral (4 talks) 20 min (3 min + 2 min Q&A per talk)
13:50 - 14:20 Invited Talk 6 25 min + 5 min Q&A
14:20 - 14:50 Invited Talk 7 25 min + 5 min Q&A
14:50 - 15:10 Afternoon Break 20 min
15:10 - 15:40 Invited Talk 8 25 min + 5 min Q&A
15:40 - 16:25 Panel Discussion 45 min
16:25 - 16:35 Closing Remarks 10 min
16:35 - 17:30 Poster Session 2 55 min
Support Team Scaling Environments for Agents
  • Web Chair: Douglas Yueming Lai
  • Logistics Coordinators: Additional members will be announced soon.

We thank our support team for their dedication and behind-the-scenes work that made this workshop possible.