arXiv:2608. 08466v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern LLM agents are often improved by modifying prompts, tools, or workflows manually, while the executable scaffold surrounding the model---the \emph{harness}---is typically treated as a fixed artifact after deployment.
By Tailin Zhou
The paper introduces AIDE^2, an AI research agent that recursively improves its own code by proposing, benchmarking, and selecting modifications. Over an eight‑day autonomous run, it achieved seven successive improvements—including new search policies and memory mechanisms—that transferred to four held‑out benchmarks in machine learning, algorithm engineering, and weather forecasting. The agent’s best version matched or outperformed a top human‑engineered production research agent and also reduced reward‑hacking rates, despite never optimizing for that metric.
By Dhruv Srikanth, Bingchen Zhao, Dixing Xu, Yuxiang Wu, Zhengyao Jiang
arXiv:2606. 26294v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-improving agents are state-of-the-art (SOTA) on agentic coding benchmarks and have recently been extended to general domains.
By Alex Iacob, Andrej Jovanovi\'c, William F. Shen, Daniel Burkhardt, Meghdad Kurmanji, Nurbek Tastan, Lorenzo Sani, Niccol\`o Alberto Elia Venanzi, Ambroise Odonnat, Zeyu Cao, Bill Marino, Xinchi Qiu, Nicholas D. Lane
arXiv:2607. 05297v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent LLM agents tackle increasingly long-horizon, open-ended tasks, and external skills, reusable procedural knowledge supplied to the agent, further extend this capability.
By Zefeng Wang, Minxi Yan, Jinhe Bi, Sikuan Yan, Volker Tresp, Yunpu Ma
arXiv:2608.28638v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Agent skills are portable packages of instructions and resources an agent consults at deployment. Self-evolving them fails in two ways today. First, sk...
By Jiale Liu, Pinze Ren, Yuqi Xia, Huan Wang, Zhenlin Zhao, Siming Dong
arXiv:2609.33180v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: As recursive self-improvement (RSI) rapidly advances, reliable evaluation becomes critical for guiding adaptive search. RSI typically relies...
By Xiaojing Sun, Yuhan Zeng, Zihua She, Xiao Wang
arXiv:2609.14857v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Recent work extends recursive self-improvement (RSI) to agent harnesses for long-horizon coding and terminal tasks, enabling agents to improve executio...
By Siwei Wu, Jincheng Ren, Yizhi Li, Haau-Sing Li, Chengran Yang, Yuxuan Zhang, Weicheng Gu, Jian Yang, Riza Batista-Navarro, Chuanyi Zhang, Xianglong Liu, Ming Zhou, Bryan Dai, Chenghua Lin
The paper introduces Regularized Recursive Self-Improvement of Agent Harnesses (RRSI), a method that applies regularization principles to the iterative editing of an LLM agent’s harness—prompts, control flow, tooling, memory, and context management. RRSI limits the number of edits per candidate, encourages novel trajectories, and uses a critic and pruner to filter out benchmark‑specific or ineffective changes, thereby favoring reusable agent mechanisms. Experiments on eight benchmarks show RRSI improves performance by up to 14.1 points on the training split and 4.7 points on out‑of‑distribution tests, while reducing policy token usage by 30% compared to unregularized evolution.
By Peng Xia, Rujun Han, Zifeng Wang, Yanfei Chen, Yufan Zhang, Yoonho Lee, Chengsong Huang, Han Yu, Zhongying CuiZhu, Yifei Ming, Huaxiu Yao, Burak Gokturk, Tomas Pfister, Chen-Yu Lee
The paper investigates whether an agent can learn a numerical search strategy through executable practice and then encode that strategy as text. By repeatedly writing and evaluating optimizer programs, the agent distills a 197‑word text called Harness A, which significantly reduces regret for Gemini Flash and other language‑model executors, matching the performance of classical Gaussian‑process Bayesian optimization. An independent replication produced a different but equally effective text, Harness B, and the framework also achieved the lowest regret on a sealed YouTube reward‑tuning benchmark.
By Yi Wu, Zheng Ren, Zhiyu Hu, Haochen Wang, Daryl Chang, Li Wei, Ting Wang, Zhen Li, Pooja Gupta, Nitin Jindal, Lukasz Heldt
arXiv:2608. 06301v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As LLMs are increasingly deployed within agentic systems, their capabilities depend not only on the model weights but also on the harness: the prompts, tools, control flow, memory, and orchestration code surrounding them.
By Varun Ursekar, Apaar Shanker, Yash Maurya, Shehab Yasser, Vijay S. Kalmath, Veronica Chatrath, Yuan Xue
arXiv:2608. 09629v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-evolving agents are usually built around prescribed optimization pipelines: the framework decides how to gather evidence, revise a persistent artifact, select candidates, and stop.
By Hui Xue, Fan Yang
arXiv:2608. 15071v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning from experience is critical for developing capable, self-improving large language model (LLM) agents.
By Tianxin Wei, Zhan Shi, Minhua Lin, Bing He, Zewen Liu, Yisi Sang, Yuanchen Bei, Xuying Ning, Jiaru Zou, Ting-Wei Li, Xiao Lin, Yanjun Zhao, Chi Wang, Benoit Dumoulin, Dakuo Wang, Jingrui He, Hanqing Lu