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:2609.38372v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: A harness is the code around a language-model agent that organizes prompts, calls tools, manages context, and controls execution. As models grow st...
By Qiankai Xu
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
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:2608.01822v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Training LLM-based search agents requires high-quality search data: tasks that demand genuine multi-hop retrieval and trajectories that use search...
By Wentao Tan, Qiong Cao, Jiaqi Wang, Nan Duan
arXiv:2610.14224v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: LLM agents' capabilities depend not only on their underlying models but also on their execution harnesses. Recursive self-improvement (RSI) offers a pr...
By Ruiyao Xu, Yanfei Chen, Zhongying CuiZhu, Bhavana Dalvi Mishra, Yifei Ming, Han Yu, Rujun Han, Chen-Yu Lee, Tomas Pfister
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:2610.35434v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Recursive self-improvement (RSI), in which a system also improves the way it improves, is a long-standing aspiration on the path to AGI. Language agent...
By Wangcheng Tao, Zhanglu Yan, Han Wu, Weng-Fai Wong
Flex‑RSI is a new benchmark that evaluates how agents can recursively improve their own harness—prompts, tools, memory, and control loop—while solving vision and robotics tasks under a fixed budget. Each round alternates between an executor that refines the task solution and an improver that revises the harness, with only higher‑scoring solutions retained for the next iteration. The benchmark tests both closed‑source and open‑weight models across perception, reasoning, robot action, 3D reconstruction, visual creation, and infrastructure tasks, revealing that self‑improvement is most effective when agents build their own solutions, that simple success/failure feedback limits open‑weight models, and that harness editing itself contributes significantly to performance gains.
By Jingdong Zhang, Jionghao Wang, Zhengming Yu, Yancheng Cai, Wei Chow, Chris Choy, Zhiyang Dou, Hang Hua, Jiachen Li, Zhixuan Liu, Chen Wang, Songlin Wei, Siyuan Yang, Yu Yuan, Xiaohang Zhan, Yucheng Zhang, Shuhong Zheng, Xin Li, Lingjie Liu, Wojciech Matusik, Zhengzhong Tu, Wenping Wang
EvalResearchBench (ERB) is a benchmark that tests whether AI agents can autonomously design evaluation tasks for recursive self‑improvement. In ERB, a researcher agent selects or synthesizes tasks, builds graders, and refines them through pilot tests before producing a final evaluator that runs within fixed time and API budgets. Experiments with nine researchers and thirteen candidate models show that the best automated evaluators achieve about 75% concordance with target benchmarks, below the 91% ceiling set by target disagreements, and that human‑designed task samples still outperform many automated approaches.
By Yaolun Zhang, Tianyi Xu, Yujie Zhao, Jishen Zhao, Qingyun Wu, Huazheng Wang
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