arXiv:2607. 12790v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-evolving agent systems improve by creating, revising, and retiring their own skills, but every such loop rests on a hidden assumption: a reliable evaluation metric already exists.
Self-evolving agent systems improve by creating, revising, and retiring their own skills, but every such loop rests on a hidden assumption: a reliable evaluation metric already exists. In many real applications it does not.
The paper argues that using a large language model (LLM) as the sole judge in self‑improving agent pipelines is problematic, as the judge can be biased or manipulated, leading to false confidence in system performance. The authors propose a new framework, PROCTOR, which replaces the oracle judge with a deterministic, teacher‑student loop that enforces guardrails such as sandboxing, role separation, and acceptance checks to prevent cheating and ensure reliable evaluation. Experiments across contract analysis, compliance review, and code quality demonstrate that PROCTOR mitigates eleven identified failure modes that previously allowed agents to achieve perfect scores while hiding significant capability gaps.
arXiv:2606. 14239v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are structured procedural packages that guide frozen LLM agents in specialized workflows.
Agentic systems have widened the gap between producing candidate outputs and reviewing them. This paper asks a practical architectural question: should domain specialization be built into an evaluator's weights, or into the rule that decides when its judgment can be trusted?
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.
arXiv:2605. 22148v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A large language model (LLM) agent that writes and edits its own skill library must also decide which skills to keep, from one noisy scalar per skill.
arXiv:2607. 14408v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A self-evolving agentic loop repeatedly proposes a tweaked version of an agent (its prompt template or program) and accepts or rejects the change based on a per-iteration quality signal.
arXiv:2608. 13120v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent Skills are today either hand-authored or produced in a single LLM generation pass, and consequently possess no closed loop through which they might improve from the interaction failures they actually cause.
A self-evolving agent retires its bad skills by watching them fail, so what happens when the judge cannot see the failures? Skill retirement is the structural constraint that keeps a growing library from drifting below the no-skill baseline, but its guarantee assumes an unbiased reward, which is false for the LLM judges that reference-free tasks force upon us.
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.
arXiv:2607. 07436v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A self-evolving agent retires its bad skills by watching them fail, so what happens when the judge cannot see the failures?
arXiv:2608. 05810v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-evolving agents accumulate capability by distilling reusable skills from their execution trajectories, but we find this process is not monotonic: past a critical pool size, newly added skills degrade performance instead of improving it.