Self-evolving agents convert interaction feedback into persistent artifacts, such as memories or skills, which in turn guide subsequent decisions. As these artifacts are iteratively updated throughout...
EVOHARNESSBENCH is a new benchmark that tests how LLM-based agents handle changes in their tool, skill, and agent harnesses over time. It includes 17 deterministic harness streams with 802 tasks, 520 tools, 42 skills, and 62 agents, and evaluates agents in two settings: deployment evaluation and self‑evolving adaptation evaluation. The study finds that harness expansion can cause forgetting, adaptation gains are inconsistent, and preserving old competence does not always aid new capability adaptation, highlighting harness evolution as a distinct challenge for agent development.
By Zixuan Ke, Vaidehi Patil, Haizhou Shi, Yang Li, Ye Liu, Sarath Shekkizhar, Anurag Koul, Jiayu Wang, Xuan Phi Nguyen, Semih Yavuz, Mohit Bansal, Shafiq Joty
arXiv:2607. 05202v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent self-evolution in long-horizon LLM systems is largely procedural: useful experience is not merely stored information, but reusable procedures for searching, debugging, and verification.
By Xingze Gao, Chuanrui Hu, Hongda Chen, Pengfei Yao, Zhao Wang, Yi Bai, Zhengwei Wu, Yunyun Han, Xiaofeng Cong, Jie Gui, Yafeng Deng, Teng Li
arXiv:2609.04280v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Modern LLM-based agents operate through a harness of tools, reusable skills, and specialist agents that shapes what they observe and what the...
By Zixuan Ke, Vaidehi Patil, Haizhou Shi, Yang Li, Ye Liu, Sarath Shekkizhar, Anurag Koul, Jiayu Wang, Xuan Phi Nguyen, Semih Yavuz, Mohit Bansal, Shafiq Joty
Agent self-evolution in long-horizon LLM systems is largely procedural: useful experience is not merely stored information, but reusable procedures for searching, debugging, and verification. Yet current evaluations do not isolate this form of transfer.
The paper introduces ASPIRE, a benchmark that challenges language model agents to self‑evolve from vague, natural‑language goals without explicit evaluation metrics. In ASPIRE, agents must interpret the goal, select data and update strategies, and decide when to evaluate, all while the downstream tasks remain hidden. Experiments show that while agents can complete training loops, weight‑level improvements are sparse and unstable, and the best evolved harness still falls short of a strong engineered baseline.
By Yuhao Wu, Jingyuan Zhang, Jiajun Shi, Yuxuan Zhang, Xinping Lei, Junting Zhou, Zexuan Wang, Yuchen Wu, Huan Zhou, Duo Wang, Yinzhu Piao, Yongchang Peng, Yunfeng Shi, Jin Chen, Zuo Wang, Jinkai Liu, Jiaheng Liu, Wenxuan Zhang, Shen Yan, Wenhao Huang, Ge Zhang
Many important forms of human learning begin with a vague goal, such as "become a better physicist" or "improve at research." Learners must interpret the goal, identify capability gaps, decide how to...
arXiv:2606. 01314v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent self-evolving agents have shown that skills can be discovered, refined, and accumulated through execution.
By Yangbo Wei, Zhen Huang, Shaoqiang Lu, Junhong Qian, Qifan Wang, Chen Wu, Lei He
Evolver is an experience-driven framework that converts agent exploration into persistent, reusable capabilities without updating foundation model parameters. It uses structured Gene assets to acquire, retrieve, and evolve experience, enabling experience-conditioned execution across existing agent harnesses. In evaluations with Claude Code and Codex on several benchmarks, Evolver increased task success from 83.13% to 87.50% and reduced token consumption by up to 24.24%, showing both effectiveness and efficiency gains.
By Haoyang Zhang, Qumeng Sun, Xiao Zhang, Xiang Liu, Zhidong Fan, Junjie Wang
arXiv:2609.35596v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Self-evolving LLM agents have gained prominence for their ability to improve after deployment by modifying their harness, including their con...
By Saswat Das, Parvati Viswanathan, Daniel Donnelly, Chang Huang, Sahar Abdelnabi, Ferdinando Fioretto
arXiv:2608. 16544v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agents increasingly rely on reusable skills to encode task knowledge, tool-use procedures, and validation rules.
By Jianming Chen, Xuanbin Ye, Yawen Wang, Junjie Wang, Qing Wang, Fanjiang XU
arXiv:2608. 07545v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: An LLM agent's capability depends not only on model weights but on its harness: prompts, tools, skills, and control flow.
By Yifan Zhang, Yutong Dai, Juntao Tan, Luyu Yang, Rishi Mullur, Thai Hoang, Zhiyuan Hu, James Zhu, Phil Mui, Silvio Savarese, Ran Xu, Zeyuan Chen