arXiv Computation and Language

Strategist: Evolving Reasoning with Agents

Strategist is a meta‑agent that automatically evolves inference strategies for AI agents, turning model calls into responses. It stores reusable strategy blueprints in a library, retrieves relevant ones for new tasks, generates and tests candidate strategies, and refines them based on results. Across 30 benchmarks, Strategist outperforms the strongest baseline on 24 tasks, matches its average accuracy while cutting inference cost by 39%, and its strategies transfer to unseen tasks and models without additional search.

arXiv AI
Oct 28

EvoIn: Bridging Evolution and Internalization for Agent Fine-Tuning

EvoIn is a fine‑tuning framework that improves agent decision‑making by evolving new procedures from execution traces, validating them in the harness, and then rewriting the traces to internalize the logic into the model. The approach removes reliance on the evolved harness at inference time, enabling stronger decision‑making that generalizes to unseen tasks. Experiments show consistent gains, raising in‑domain pass rates by 10.9 points and out‑of‑domain by 9.2 points, and the method works across different model families.

By Shihan Dou, Shaofan Liu, Zhonghang Lu, Jiahang Lin, Shichun Liu, Binghai Wang, Jiajie Jin, Guanting Dong, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
arXiv AI
Oct 21

Evolving Agent Interfaces

The paper introduces Agent S4, an autonomous system that learns to design and refine user interfaces for computer‑use agents by observing task execution without explicit success labels. By evolving a repository of interfaces through population‑based selection on unseen validation tasks, Agent S4 achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on OSWorld V2 and significant gains on ScienceBoard, outperforming large commercial models at lower cost. The work demonstrates that interface design can be treated as an agent capability, enabling continuous improvement beyond fixed, hand‑crafted interfaces.

By Saaket Agashe, Yuzhe Yang, Gonzalo Gonzalez-Pumariega, Bhuvan Chandra Koduru, Chih-Lun Li, Jiachen Yang, Ang Li, Xin Eric Wang
arXiv AI
Oct 12

Meta-Reflective Evolution Effectively Improves Production AI Systems

Meta-Reflective Evolution Effectively Improves Production AI Systems describes CoCoEvolve, an evolutionary optimizer that uses meta-reflection to retrieve evidence from the entire evolutionary history and probe live systems before proposing mutations. The approach is applied to data agents, LLM-powered data pipelines, and data engineering workflows, achieving state‑of‑the‑art results on DABStep, multiple LLM pipeline workloads, and data-eng-bench. Ablation studies confirm that each component of CoCoEvolve contributes to its performance gains.

By Seung Won Wilson Yoo, Chang Zeng, Aditi Somayajula, Sahithi Ankireddy, Rohan Kosalge, Avishree Khare, John Mitchell, Aditya G. Parameswaran, Rajhans Samdani, Anupam Datta
arXiv AI
Jul 9

Cost-Effective Agent Harnesses for Abstract Reasoning and Generalization on ARC-AGI-1

arXiv:2607. 06764v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent progress on ARC-AGI-1 from disclosed architectures has come broadly from two regimes: heavy test-time compute over frontier models (evolutionary search, exhaustive sampling, extended chain-of-thought), or benchmark-specific training in which small models are fine-tuned on ARC data, often with task-specialized architectures.

By Kabir Moghe, Peter Chin
arXiv AI
Oct 23

Forging More Tasks into Better Harnesses: Agentic Harness Evolution via Successive Scale Racing

The paper introduces Successive Scale Racing (SSR), a framework that improves agentic harness evolution by adaptively selecting optimal evidence combinations during each evolution round. SSR constructs diverse evidence sets based on task quality and coverage, then efficiently races candidate harnesses under a limited compute budget. Across three benchmarks, SSR outperforms baselines, steadily raising pass rates as the task pool expands from 40 to 200 while cutting validation executions by 60%.

By Jingzhe Liu, Jiliang Tang, Tong Zhao, Neil Shah, Clark Mingxuan Ju
arXiv AI
Oct 26

RSI-Opt: Recursive Self-Improvement Optimizer Agents For Model Training

RSI-Opt introduces Recursive Self-Improvement Optimizer Agents that evolve their own training policies by accumulating knowledge from previous runs, including prompts, playbooks, optimizer code, and decision cadences. A meta‑agent rewrites and archives these policies, enabling reusable procedures and code that adapt to new tasks. Across multiple generations and tasks, RSI‑Opt improves optimizer performance, achieving higher z‑scores on evolution suites, better cross‑model transfer, and significant error reductions on PDE benchmarks compared to fixed‑prompt baselines.

By Binghang Lu, Yige Sun, Guang Lin
arXiv AI
Oct 1

Self-Evolving Harness on Multiple Tasks with the Agent as Its Own Optimizer

The paper introduces a self‑evolving harness framework where a frozen language‑model agent first solves tasks and then edits its own harness based on run records. Using a 49‑line seed harness, the evolved harness improves average scores on in‑distribution benchmarks by 4.48 points and on out‑of‑distribution benchmarks by 12.64 points, surpassing Codex on the former and matching it on the latter. Continued evolution on a specific out‑of‑distribution benchmark further raises performance, and the study analyzes emergent mechanisms such as output truncation and history compaction.

By Qiankai Xu
arXiv AI
Aug 28

Don't Overthink, Don't Underthink: Toward Adaptive Reasoning in Agentic AI

The paper argues that large language models need adaptive reasoning rather than fixed reasoning budgets. It shows that over‑reasoning leads to high computational cost without accuracy gains, while under‑reasoning results in incorrect or incomplete solutions. The authors evaluate these failure modes on MATH‑500 and the GAIA benchmark, highlighting the need for dynamic reasoning allocation in agentic AI systems.

By Md Jueal Mia, M. Hadi Amini