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Under review as a conference paper at ICLR 2027

Terminal-Universe: Turning Agent Trajectories into Scalable Terminal Environments

Abstract

As terminal-based code agents become increasingly prevalent, the corresponding agent trajectories have accumulated at scale, while realistic, executable environments remain scarce. However, environments are what agent post-training actually requires: each one can be re-queried into many verifiable tasks and provides the execution feedback, whereas a trajectory is a single frozen demonstration. Rather than generating environments from scratch, we observe that the tool-execution history in the existing agent trajectories exposes the structure and contents of the environments in which they ran, making it possible to reconstruct those environments from the trajectories themselves. Thus, we introduce Terminal-Universe, a framework which turns each trajectory into a reusable environment and explores it for synthesizing new tasks and continued interactions. Specifically, Terminal-Universe replays the file operations recorded in a trajectory to restore each file before the agent modified it, yielding a partial workspace; a completion agent then supplies the missing files and dependencies. On this recovered workspace, we both reconstruct the original intent task and synthesize entirely new ones. Besides, we also scale the tasks for the corresponding environment along two complementary axes: breadth and depth, to reproduce a routine pattern of real engineering practice. For breadth, we mine directional dependency relations between related environments and synthesize cross-workspace queries spanning multiple codebases, as developers routinely do in real-world development. For depth, we extend the initial single-turn query into a multi-round session that captures iterative user feedback and requirement refinement via a user agent. Applied to publicly available terminal agent trajectories, Terminal-Universe produces 37.3k task-sufficient environments. Supervised fine-tuning of Qwen3.5-27B on this corpus improves single-round performance on Terminal-Bench 2.1 by 11.9 points and multi-round performance on EvoCode-Bench v2 MT@4 by 13.8 points.

open until 14 Dec 2026

est. 32% chance this paper gets accepted at ICLR 2027.

Reject 68%Accept 32%

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