Beyond Scaling: A Survey of Data-Efficient Learning for LLM Agents

Abstract

LLM-based agents perceive, reason, act, and adapt through interaction. While scaling remains important, agentic progress also depends on extracting more learning signal from limited experience, including demonstrations, feedback, reasoning traces, tool-use records, and interaction trajectories. This survey develops an agent-centric view of data-efficient learning. We formulate an agentic learning loop, define data efficiency as capability improvement without proportional increases in supervision or real-environment trial-and-error, and synthesize methods into experience augmentation, agent structural design, and learning paradigms. We also summarize representative application domains and open challenges in experience reuse and cost-aware evaluation. Overall, the agentic era requires smarter ways to acquire, structure, reuse, and learn from limited experience.