Scaling Environments for Agents (SEA)

NeurIPS 2026 Workshop

Date: Dec 11/12, 2026   |   Location: TBD

An agent environment defines the interaction interface, state transitions, and feedback loop through which a large language model (LLM) learns agentic behavior via multi-turn reinforcement learning (RL). Unlike supervised fine-tuning on fixed, off-policy trajectories, environment-based RL allows agents to learn from their own interactions and outcomes. Recent advances in RL with verifiable rewards (RLVR) have shown that this paradigm can push agents beyond the capabilities captured by demonstration data and improve generalization to novel tasks. However, LLM-based agent training remains an emerging field, and scaling it requires more than simply moving from single-turn to multi-turn rollouts: it requires reliable large-scale interaction through concurrent tool execution, sandboxing, state management, and efficient rollout generation, as well as diverse environments with trustworthy verifiers and reward signals. These challenges motivate research on environment synthesis, automatic curricula, and self-evolving environments, while raising several central questions: How can environments scale across domains such as science, coding, office work, terminal and GUI interaction, embodied control, and multi-agent collaboration, while also supporting increasingly complex and long-horizon tasks? How can tasks, rewards, and verifiers be generated and adapted automatically? And how can reliable supervision be maintained while avoiding reward hacking, spurious shortcuts, and brittle evaluation protocols?

Topics of Interest Scaling Environments for Agents
1
Environment Design and Benchmarking Task and environment design, benchmark construction, curriculum design, reward and verifier development, and evaluation robustness.
2
Self-Evolving Environments, Harnesses, and Agents Agent–environment co-evolution; self-improving harnesses; open-ended learning; task and environment synthesis.
3
Environment and Rollout Infrastructure Scalable and reliable rollout generation, concurrent tool execution, sandboxing, state and context management, fault tolerance, observability, reproducibility, and integration with agent training systems.
4
Terminal and Software Engineering Environments Long-horizon environments for code generation, debugging, repository-level software engineering, terminal use, and system administration.
5
GUI, Multimodal, and Embodied Environments Browser, desktop, and mobile interaction; multimodal perception and action; robotics, simulation, and sim-to-real transfer.
6
Scientific Discovery and Autonomous Research Environments Environments for experimentation, hypothesis generation, scientific workflows, and autonomous discovery in domains such as biology, chemistry, and materials science.
7
Multi-Agent and Social Environments Shared environments for cooperation, competition, negotiation, coordination, population-based learning, and multi-agent training.
8
World Models and Learned Environments Learned environment dynamics and simulators for agent training, including fidelity, controllability, grounding, model bias, and transfer between learned, programmatic, and real environments.
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. We invite submissions to two tracks:

  • Short papers (up to 4 pages) — preliminary findings, position papers, benchmark analyses, infrastructure reports, and negative results that would benefit from community feedback.
  • Long papers (up to 9 pages) — mature, full-length contributions with more extensive technical development, experiments, or analysis.

Page limits exclude references and supplementary material.


Submission Guidelines

We will manage paper submissions through OpenReview. We are recruiting a Program Committee of 200+ reviewers, with each paper receiving three reviews and final acceptance decisions made by the organizing committee with clear conflict-of-interest enforcement. All accepted papers will be non-archival, consistent with NeurIPS workshop policy, and will be presented in poster sessions. We will additionally select 5–10 Spotlight papers and one Best Paper Award.


Important Dates Tentative

Jul 15, 2026  Call for Papers
Aug 29, 2026  Paper Submission Deadline
Sep 22, 2026  Reviews Due
Sep 29, 2026  Author Notification
Nov 10, 2026  Camera-ready + Video
Dec 11/12, 2026  Workshop at NeurIPS
Schedule Tentative Scaling Environments for Agents
Time Session
08:00Opening Remarks
08:15Invited Talk 1
09:00Invited Talk 2
09:45Morning Break
10:00Spotlight Talks (Session 1)
10:30Invited Talk 3
11:15Invited Talk 4
12:00Lunch Break
12:10Poster Session 1
13:10Spotlight Talks (Session 2)
13:30Invited Talk 5
14:15Invited Talk 6
15:00Afternoon Break
15:10Panel Discussion
15:50Poster Session 2
16:50Closing Remarks
Accepted Papers TBD Scaling Environments for Agents
Coming Soon Accepted papers will be listed here after the review process.
Advisory Board Scaling Environments for Agents
Coming Soon The advisory board for SEA 2026 will be announced soon.
Support Team Scaling Environments for Agents
  • Web Chair: Douglas Yueming Lai

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

Sponsors TBD Scaling Environments for Agents
Coming Soon Sponsorship information will be available soon. Interested in sponsoring? Contact us.