The paper introduces VERSE, a Verified Self‑Evolving optimizer that enhances LLM agent harnesses by allowing the optimizer to test edits, replay failures, and perturb steps while tracking fixes and regressions. VERSE builds its own tools for failure analysis, verification, training audits, and workflow control, and uses this feedback to revise the harness’s prompts, skills, tools, hooks, and notes without changing model weights. In experiments across five executors and multiple languages, VERSE improves all evaluated harness optimizers, achieving higher accuracy on held‑out and out‑of‑distribution tasks compared to the strongest baselines.
By Zekai Wang, Yingqiang Ge, Zekun Wang, Hai Wang, Yuhui Xu, Joshua Frandsen, Shancong Fu, Ashia C. Wilson, Chandan K. Reddy
arXiv:2606. 17546v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-evolving LLM-based agents improve mainly by changing their agent harness: the structured execution layer around a base model, including prompts, memory, tools, middleware, runtime state, and the model-tool interaction loop.
By Congjie Zheng, Chuanyi Xue, Bin Liang, Jun Yang, Changshui Zhang
arXiv:2606. 20512v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based coding agents need higher-level operational knowledge about a repository (which files house which subsystems, how to run the test suite, which workflows have historically led to wrong fixes) that does not exist in the code itself.
By Asa Shepard, Jeannie Albrecht
arXiv:2610.16725v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Improving an LLM agent requires knowing what to change when it fails. Similar failures can require different fixes, and resolving one problem can expos...
By Wenfeng Wang, Jianrui Shi, Mingang Guo, Jiayuan Ma, Yuqi Lu, Jiajun Sun, Guojiang Zhao, Jing Li
arXiv:2610.17609v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Training-free self-improvement lets an agent use feedback to revise the response it is about to return and to update the harness state that shapes how...
By Tianyi Xu, Yaolun Zhang, Yiran Wu, Joe Nguyen, Shengyu Dai, Saba Moeinizade, Zhenwen Shao, Qingyun Wu, Huazheng Wang
The paper investigates how agent harness evolution supports recursive self‑improvement without changing model weights, assessing four methods across general and coding tasks. Repeated tests and component interventions show that all evolved agents acquire new tasks while losing some previously mastered ones, with reliability gains sometimes offset by higher deployment costs. The study highlights that the highest‑scoring agent does not always deliver the greatest mean improvement, and that stricter admission criteria can eliminate useful alternatives; it proposes preservation‑aware evaluation and a follow‑up tool, EvoAudit, to refine agent design.
By Xiaobo Wang, Zimu Wang, Siyu Ye, Jiaqi Li, Min Tang, Jun Bai, Yuling Shi, Ruobing Wang, Jingjing Zhang, Chaofan Wang, Kai Wu, Mengnan Qi, Kai Cai, Xiaodong Gu, Qi Liu, Zilong Zheng
The paper introduces BenchAgent, a framework for evaluating multi‑agent large language model (LLM) workflows against a single‑agent baseline, BenchAgent Core. Using GPT‑4.1 across ten reasoning, coding, and tool‑use benchmarks, the study compares six multi‑agent configurations, finding that EvoAgent achieves the highest mean pooled accuracy (79.70%) while other agents lag by 1.71–8.76 percentage points. The analysis also highlights trade‑offs in token consumption and accuracy, offering guidance for selecting and optimizing LLM multi‑agent workflows.
By Yuhang Fu, Ruishan Fang, Jiaqi Shao, Huiyu Zheng, Zhengtao Zhu, Bing Luo, Zhenyu Wen, Tao Lin
EMMA is a framework that treats the configuration of a multi‑agent system—controller routing, specialist prompts, and procedural skills—as structured episodic memory. It explicitly assigns ownership and limits updates through a reflector and backbone‑independent guards, ensuring edits are scoped, incremental, and bounded. Experiments on KramaBench, AppWorld, and BBEH show EMMA outperforms four baselines, achieving up to 32.5% higher performance and reducing training executions by 17–38%.
By Ruijia Niu, Kaiwen Liu, Rose Yu, Kristina Klinkner
arXiv:2610.16491v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Improving an agent through successive revisions requires balancing exploration and evaluation under a limited budget. A narrow search can miss useful...
By Xin Xu, Ke Cheng, Hao Wang, Yangru Huang, Yanghao Xiao, Zhichao Chen, Zhisheng Zhong, Xun Liu, Yi Li, Qian Li, Haibin Lv, Jun Zhang, Jie Jiang, Zhouchen Lin
arXiv:2606. 09498v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The performance of LLM-based agents is jointly shaped by their base models and the harnesses that mediate their interaction with the environment.
By Hangfan Zhang, Shao Zhang, Kangcong Li, Chen Zhang, Yang Chen, Yiqun Zhang, Lei Bai, Shuyue Hu
The paper introduces a benchmark of 400 synthetic healthcare workflow episodes to evaluate large language model (LLM) agents’ reliability in escalating care when evidence is missing or conflicting. It finds that while clean decision accuracy is high (0.97), models miss a large proportion of necessary escalations (32–97%) under uncertainty, and even the largest 9.7B model’s performance drops to 0.78 in conflict scenarios. A workflow-aware controller improves utility and reduces missed escalations, but its effectiveness is limited by lexical generalization failures.
By Zihao Zheng (Washington University in St. Louis), Junyi Yao (Washington University in St. Louis), Baichuan Li (Southern Methodist University), Jiayu Long (Washington University in St. Louis)
arXiv:2606. 14239v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are structured procedural packages that guide frozen LLM agents in specialized workflows.
By Haowen Gao, Haoran Chen, Can Wang, Shasha Guo, Liang Pang, Zhaoyang Liu, Huawei Shen, Xueqi Cheng